Poetry review: Alexis Sears' Out of Order

Sears, Alexis. Out of Order. Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2022

Alexis Sears, as those in formalist poetry circles are no doubt aware, has just published her first volume, Out of Order, having won the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize for the manuscript. A narrative emerges of a woman in her mid-twenties, her life indelibly marked by a father's suicide and suffering from depression herself. She is conflicted over the importance that she, in compliance with society's dictates, grants to her own appearance and her bi-racial background. Men come and go, while friendships, mostly with other women, remain. If there is one overall theme, it is how identity is shaped by suffering and our ambivalence towards this universal process.    

More than half of the poems in Out of Order are written in form, that is, using rhyme and metre in often challenging schemes, from the ubiquitous sonnet to terza rima, sestina, villanelle, canzone—and some of the most unheroic couplets I have ever read. One of the marvellous things about form in poetry is its ability to create a distance between the poet and speaker, and even between the speaker and her own speech. Sears' language is colloquial, i.e. informal—perhaps to an unprecedented extent for so self-consciously formal a poet—while as a counterweight to this predominantly chatty tone, the demands of form create a self-imposed discipline, a method for working through the often traumatic events described in her poems.

Schopenhauer wrote of poetic form:

Metre and rhyme are a fetter, but also a veil which the poet casts round himself, and under which he is permitted to speak as otherwise he would not dare to do; and this is what delights us. Thus, he is only responsible for half of what he says; metre and rhyme must answer for the other half.[1]

From this perspective, metre and rhyme are liberatory: far from form being 'closed' or restrictive, they suggest virtually infinite possibilities while subtly freeing us from identification with the quotidian self, the speaker of every day. 

Schopenhauer (who was, incidentally, like Sears’ poetic speaker a child of paternal suicide) made the claim for art in general that it objectified the ultimate metaphysical reality of the Will, subsuming life’s particular situations and actors under their Platonic Ideas. Well, the speaker of Sears’ poems is very much a particular individual, one who spiritedly resists being reduced to generality, even as those around her, often with the best of intentions (and sometimes without that excuse) attempt to subsume her under social categories, those Platonic Ideas of our over-mediated condition. In this context, the use of poetic artifice is always in tension with the particular authenticity of what she has to say, just as—in a frequent motif of this collection—a woman’s natural appearance is in tension with the artifice of grooming and makeup. In Out of Order, poetic forms are strained to express a train of thought that seems almost incredulous to find itself the subject matter of poetry, just as the speaker seems continually surprised to find herself an object of desire and admiration (‘I’d say that, overall, I’m pretty plain’)—whether for her body, her mind or for what someone else supposes her to represent.

The poem ‘Seven’ is an entertaining anecdote infused with profound ruminations on identity and appearance:

“So tell me, on a scale of one to ten,

What would you rate your life?” Somehow, again,

I've found myself inside a stranded bar

with made-up drag queens, doughy bankers. Far

away, the girls I came with flirt with men

in navy cargo pants and boat shoes. When

was that in fashion?

Note the heavy use of enjambment and variations to her iambic pentameter. One trick Sears uses to enhance a naturalistic speech rhythm is to drop the tenth syllable; another that often goes along with it is to leave an end-rhyme unstressed. The naturalistic conversation, the attempted pickup and the speaker's aversion to the man's intrusive questioning are all conveyed. The line 'me. He looks at me not with disgust' is an extreme example of Sears’ liberties with form, producing an effect not only of casual speech, but of awkwardness and suppressed aggression, the speaker's sense of insult and frustrated desire to retaliate, the poem an attempt at setting to rights after the fact—what she should have said, how things should have gone.

Another tool of verse that is ably wielded by Sears is the way in which a single line can be both a unit of meaning unto itself and also part of a larger semantic whole. From the same poem

Yes, when I got my master of fine arts

I chose to lie face-down all day. A child,

I simply checked a box...

 

The speaker here describes her indignance at the man's thoughtless advice to 'make better decisions', etc. Her tone is, of course, sarcastic: she did not 'check a box' and sign up for the lot she has endured, but the beauty of line two is that the reader cannot help imagining her a grown-up child, playing dead rather than face the world. Sears' use of figurative language is minimal but sensitive, often requiring just such reading between the lines. 

***

A rich source of inspiration for Sears is the unintentionally obnoxious comments people make that touch off traumatic memories and identity crises. Few subjects could be more contemporary, more in tune with the zeitgeist of identity politics; and yet she never lapses into political posturing. Some in our polarised age may find it problematic that Sears is not more partisan, but there are, hopefully, those who can appreciate the self-reflexivity and negative capability that colour (no pun intended!) Sears’ approach to questions of sex, gender, race and so forth. In Hair Sestina, a bus driver remarks:

 

“You’re ‘black’   

In name, but you will never really know

Their struggles.” Their. It sticks. I’m left without

A comeback (since I know it’s true).

 

She ‘know[s] it’s true’ that a stranger’s assessment of her life’s degree of difficulty can be read from her skin colour—how exactly? This, of course, is the ironic point. On average, indeed, skin colour is correlated with disadvantage in America and throughout much of the world. What the bus driver doesn’t know (although by this point in the collection, the reader does), is that the speaker has experienced hardships of a kind most people of any race have not; has engaged unwillingly in ‘struggles’ that cannot be adequately symbolised by her own dream of possessing the ‘cornrows, braids’ that would bespeak her full membership of the oppressed group.   

The speaker fantasises that her black father, had he lived, might have ‘helped me to know/ My hair, my blackness, self’; and yet, ironically, we can see that so much of who she is as an individual is predicated on the experience of this father’s absence and the emergent narrative of loss. At the same time, the cultural narrative that denies individual identity to people of colour as the price of acknowledging their collective history is brought into question here—or more succinctly in ‘My Hair: An Epic’, via the lines:

 

I had issues to work

through: father’s death, his life, a racial crisis—

you know, the issues everybody has’.

The claim that ‘everybody has’ such a crisis can be read as only half ironic, given the centrality of race in public discourse today.

Of course, the problem of the one and the many is especially pointed when it comes to the problems and pains that, we imagine, define us: 'Once, drunk, a friend confessed she was afraid to lose / The pain. It was all she knew’. The paradox here relates to the fact that actual pain, in the moment, is ineffable. It is the pain of the suicide who leaves his or her friends and family permanently disquieted, unable to follow or fully understand. Pain that can be expressed, on the other hand, and crafted into self-commiserating autofiction, is mediated by language and therefore false to itself, betraying the truth of its origin by willing its own perpetuation. The same insight, Sears seems to imply, bears application to the historical pain of marginalised and oppressed people, whose stories are increasingly prominent in public discourse and personal identity construction today. Thus, in Hair Sestina, we encounter the prima facie strangeness of a girl who might pass for merely ‘ethnic’ or even ‘white’ (and whose story, in an earlier time, might have more resembled the protagonist of Nella Larsen’s novel Passing) wanting to establish contact with a black identity that remains as tantalisingly out of reach as her black father and the reasons for his suicide.   

Such is the dialectical opposition that gives rise to the synthesis of some of Sears’ finest poetry. When we outgrow our past suffering, we become unrecognisable to ourselves and others, discovering a new and higher kind of pain:

 

After not speaking for ages, I saw her

last year at the supermarket. She

smiled, but I could tell

she didn’t recognise me. I wouldn’t either.

(‘Daughters’)

 

***

Sears' approach to imagery is essentially conservative. Cliches and colloquialisms are not eschewed but used intelligently, resuscitated and re-imbued with meaning that remains earth-bound. No surrealism or visionary excess from a speaker who remarks,

 

[There] is still so little that I know of God

or sex or death, how my bare legs compare

to those of other girls my age.

 

Take, for example the following description of a group of women meeting at a dog park to socialise (‘Hoop Earrings, Bare Legs’); a passage that comes just before the one previously quoted:

 

Strawberry balm 

(for lips) we pass among us, reaches broad

as cityscapes. Our firsts. Casual "bombs"

about our fucked up families

 

One imagines the business district shrunken in perspective from the park bench, situated perhaps on a hill. The reader is right there among these women. Perfectly balanced feelings of detachment and fellowship flow from an image that comes, like dawn, after yet another sinister nightclub scenario in which the speaker fails to stand up for a 

 

…frankly smokin' hot

girl at a nightclub wearing double-digit

sizes, dabs her eyes amidst cheap shots 

that catapault from strangers' mouths   

 

On display here are a number of Sears' most effective strategies. Besides the halting yet graceful music of the verse, there is the use of colloquialisms ('bombs', 'smokin' hot' and 'cheap shots'), each endowed by the context with more than its customary meaning. As William Empson writes,

All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, But English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison. [3]

No doubt contemporary English is crammed with metaphors not yet fully decomposed into its soil and without which it is impossible to communicate without archaism or obvious idiosyncracy—a problem for poets of Sears' generation (and all of us) to ponder. 

The solution cannot be the complete avoidance of cliche, but its conscious manipulation. See how the 'casual bombs' (here, socially inappropriate confessions), coming in the wake of the alter-ego's nightclub ordeal, heighten the image through a juxtaposition that evokes only to negate the violent connotation: Here the speaker is among friends; there she was on enemy territory. 'Cheap shots' and 'catapault' reinforce this semantic link, (the former, of course, a pun). 

Other figures are more overtly striking. In the poem ‘Hunger’, about the speaker’s conflicted relationship with food and the intersections between physical and emotional hungers. Here a girlfriend’s face is likened to ‘a fresh-opened Sunkist’—an image in which the way beauty and human interest are used and generated to sell products is inverted, the soft drink in turn working to sell, so to speak, the enviously tinged admiration for this ‘woman to invite hunger’. Or how about this for a doozy of fast food imagery: A balding man with donut eyes (sweet, glazed) smiles / over at us’. The moral? ‘It doesn’t matter, nothing does’. When she wants to, Sears can certainly craft a stand-alone image.

***

The world of formal poetry in English a small one, and Alexis Sears has made a strong debut in it, as well as a noteworthy contribution to contemporary verse in general. One feels that the challenge for her going forward will be to expand her range beyond the memoirs of adolescence and young adulthood that comprise the majority of poems in Out of Order. It is a collection with a powerful chronological momentum, albeit not an entirely linear narrative. One wonders what will happen in the sequel.    

---

[1]Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 2, tr. EFJ Payne. London: Dover, 1958 (p. 345).

[2] It feels pedantic to refer to a ‘speaker’ as distinct from the author when Sears poetry is so clearly located within a confessional tradition that tends to obviate the distinction—and yet, out of propriety, I will do so.  

[3] Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Penguin, 1960 (p. 48).

Review: David Lohrey's Bluff City

 

Lohrey, David. Bluff City. Terror House, Budapest, 2020

Bluff City is a collection of over 40 poems, stories and dramatic pieces, followed, for good measure, by an interview with the author. The main difference between the poems and the other pieces is that the former are more intensely ironic, so that it is harder to identify the authorial voice. And in a time when confessional poetry (often shot through with less compelling versions of surrealism than Lohrey's) reigns almost unchallenged, how welcome this is. In poetry, prose and drama alike, Lohrey has a talent for letting his subject matter speak for itself, for entertaining a myriad voices and points of view without endorsement or apology.

To speak of the poems first: these are no earnest explorations of the psyche, but truculent, absurdist divagations into social mores and public discourse, of contemporary American life, and life in this ever more American world. How much and how many of the lives on display, from Los Angeles to Saudi Arabia, are Lohrey's, cannot be readily discerned, though this is a question the reader cannot help but ask.  

The defining trope of Lohrey's verse is parataxis--that, and non-sequitur. If the speaker's thoughts seem disconnected, at once fantastical and banal, it is because the adhesive of the lyric 'I' is lacking, having been replaced by the metastatic logic of media representation and cultural reverberation. The characters who appear in the emergent narratives are often political and media figures, the likes of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Kanye West. In this, Lohrey's collection is very much of its time, which is the other thing that makes good satire hard to achieve--besides the fact that what has sometimes been dubbed our 'clown world' culture comes already self-satirising, with super-size absurdity built in, while its prominent figures come and go with such rapidity, being consumed and, as it were, shat out in the space of a single Presidential term, if not less. As such, reading Bluff City a year into the Biden Presidency produces a quaint effect in places, even though the themes still resonate where the toupee-sporting subject-matter is yesterday's man. 

There are terrible shades of Bill Clinton in Obama's dream of life

after the White House: "I want a private jet and I want a valet."

He wants a man to hold his underwear. What you really need, 

my coach said, is an attitude adjustment,

'bend over.' There was a time Polyanna had it right.

The paratactic statements, delivered like deadpan one-liners, pile up in their polysemy. What is the allusion to Polyanna? The knowing leer of the Cheshire cat is everywhere. 

One idea leads on to another without any constant theme, unless it be cultural decline. When inhabiting the persona of the sentimental baby boomer, Lohrey likes to insinuate that it was better in the old days; but then, he also says '[Cher] is my moral compass'. One never knows what is ironic and what, if anything, is earnest. Much of what he writes about political celebrities sounds as if it might have been written by a hack biographer and then hacked up into verse paragraphs. It is an absurdist, a dadaist aesthetic of deliberate ugliness conveyed in a tone of jocular masochism: 'There's an enormous dog turd in my garden, / but I'm required by law to love it.' Given such a funny idea of love, a paean like the following is a little hard to process: 

  

Donald J Trump is often very good. What he is great at is being Donald--

the only one we will ever have. When he dies, any outpouring of affection

will come about because the American people feel he remains in some

indefinable way close to them, one of a kind but one of their own--a regular

guy who at heart just wants to be rich.

Wordsworth had 'visionary dreariness'; Lohrey has a sublime banality that borders on and frequently tips over into hideousness. But the writing is journalistically breezy, its texture loose and vague. The appeal lies not in details but in overall, cumulative impressions. The absurd and the banal mingle line after line to create an open structure based as much on discontinuity as its opposite across the terrain of America's advanced cultural dementia. 

                          [...]Let's face it: having dogs has made me

Into a canine. They made me feel compassion and I've lost

My sense of identity. I no longer feel superior. When I meet

A fluffy mutt I no longer want to run; I want to fuck it.

A loss of culture understood as that which separates us from the animals would seem to be the subject here. The word 'compassion' stands out in the above passage from a poem in which the speaker complains that his liberties do not include the right to kick his dog in the stomach, because, as he explains, 'The Geneva Convention' requires him to clean up after his dog, to the point of '[wiping] his ass'. We are over-civilised, over-socialised with caring, liberal values. Compassion over justice, empathic cooperation over competition. There is no contradiction here: the dog is a domesticated animal, and we are all to become fluffy, neoliberal, consumerist lap dogs. 

And yet Lohrey is willing to entertain the idea that the state is not capable of indefinitely ameliorating every aspect of life and death. Horrible things will always happen from time to time, even in America, although we have come to expect that evil should appear only as a historical curiosity, as something with which to smear our enemies, the conservatives, the sympathisers with the bad old days of patriarchal violence. This is gospel of the 'Regime of Glad Tidings', as it is called in the title of the poem just quoted. When violence and evil do, inevitably crop back up, we simply do not know how to process them. The result is the black comedy of a concerned citizen writing a letter to the editor in outrage at a chief of police who has not been able to instantly solve a murder case. The hysterical correspondent perorates: 

Chief MacDonough, answer our questions!

President Trump, tell us what happened! 

Mr Putin, have you no decency?

Prime Minister, have you no conscience?

The logic of the poem is as unarguable as it is unpalatable. We have come to expect that life should be free of tragedy. How did it come to this?  And how many people readers will have the stomach to grasp Lohrey's point without making asinine accusations about excusing violence against women in a day and age when such crimes are so routinely politicised?   

Now for the stories.

'Daylight Savings Time' is a long short story about a young 'gopher' in Hollywood, a male ingenue working for an attorney in an ill defined client-liaison role in which he is able to see ever more degraded and deranged layers of the city's upper-middle class subculture. Although it is written in the style of a memoir (something the piece shares with many of the other stories in Bluff City), the absurd humour, the grotesquerie, is dialed up to ten. Take this encounter between the narrator's country-bumpkin cousin and a tofu-eating Elvis impersonator whom he takes, for some reason, for Mighty Mouse:

It was a great honor [my cousin] said, to meet a famous mouse. Could he have his autograph, could he try his tofu, could he sip from his cup? Yes, he would be thrilled to join him for dinner. "Can I get a menu?" What's it like to be famous? "I just love Saturday Night Live." When I finish kissing your ass, would you care to have your balls licked? 

 

The writing is expressive in ways one does not often encounter. The use of rhyme and near-rhyme within a passage of prose, for instance, creates a distancing, alienating effect predicated on the deliberate blunting of meaning. Here we have a purposive delimitation of reference, an interchangeable use of synonyms such as one finds often enough in colloquial speech. The effect is humourous and self-ironising:

Shunning is an act of cunning. It is brutal and above all, cold. I must have done awful, something very wrong, to be ignored. [...] 

Shunning is not withdrawing, it is not an act of defense. It is an attack, it is offensive. She expected me to disappear. But we had been friends, there had been kisses. Like sister and brother, united and connected. I knew her mother, I knew her brother.  

If these lines were arranged into free verse stanzas the passage would read like the lyrics of a pop song that might be translated into and out of any language in the world. 

'Thrown Together: A Memoir' is a text in a different genre, realistic through and through, albeit absurd in ways those who have had similar experiences will find compelling. Lohrey tells the tale of his early teaching career in a ghetto school in one of America's great cities. It is a tale of bureaucracy versus the good natured cynicism of those who actually do the impossible job of teaching chronically disengaged young people how to read and write. 

Another student was a kooky Mexican-American boy named Zeus. I loved his name. He was rather happy-go-lucky in his manner, not at all full of urban rage. He did and said little, but he loved to eat pencils. [...] Then he'd cackle loudly, "LOW-REEEEEEEEEEEE!" 

Yes, there are many laugh-out-loud moments in Bluff City.  

It would be remiss not to mention the third genre represented in this anthology of Lohrey's diverse oeuvre, namely drama. A one-act play entitled 'One, Two, Three' explores the idea that, as one of the characters has it, 'What happens between a man and a woman gets mirrored in the world'--and vice-versa. Two college co-eds are coached by sexual archetypes, the Marlboro Man and a Cover Girl respectively, on how to conduct themselves on a date. The complication is that, while able to assume these masculine and feminine roles with fluency, they are unable to quite believe their own act. It is Hamlet and Ophelia, in a way, each sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Once again, Lohrey explores his favourite theme of the over-mediation of human nature and relationships, the intersection of ideologies and animality in our lives. The pessimism that comes across as the moral of all these stories is that there does not seem to be much else to the human experience as Lohrey depicts it. But then, the greatest writers have often taken a limited view of humanity and developed it into profound insight. 

***

I cannot say that Bluff City is an attractively produced volume, although the cover art is perfect. Aesthetically, I must protest at the way the poems are printed one after another without leaving a gap in between. Also, the text margins are too narrow. This 160-page book should really have been at least 300, I feel. That said, Terror House has put out some attractive volumes in the few years they have been publishing, and I suspect that what has happened here is that they had a hard time accommodating the long lines of Lohrey's verse, which then resulted in some very wide paragraphs in the prose sections. My recommendation would be to buy Bluff City in e-book format. 

 

 

 

Omar Sakr's 'Love Under Capitalism': a close reading

Series introduction: From time to time on this blog I review an individual poem by a celebrated contemporary poet that I believe is overrated and explain why. Call it a guilty pleasure.


Above: Not many poets are featured as such on prime time TV.

Omar Sakr's novels sell in KMart and Big W: as a novelist he is a big name in mainstream Australian letters, a vocally bisexual and Muslim Tim Winton. He is also a widely published poet. The poem below was published in Cordite in 2019.

 

Love Under Capitalism

 

The new joint around the corner keeps

changing its name. I get it. I am afraid

of growing old. I can’t afford this face

for long, this place for long. I still invite

people in. The barista wants to know

me. I want to trust his intentions, his sup

as I sip at what he just made and feel

a little more alive. I shiver at the usual

delivered by so many smiles. His dimples.

Large cap? Desire hissing. Four forty five.

It feels wrong to say don’t ask me

to be human. This is a transaction only.

I need to preside over when I am more

than money moving between machines.

That’s what all of this comes down to:

this is not my first coffee of the day &

won’t be my last. I rub my hand over

the silver band of my fade and imagine

it as his, as a distance closed, as a tug

at my trackies. He needs to be talking.

To be more than a service. A silence.

The cost of this moment is greater

than either of us knows or cares to

think about for the other. The radio

squawks: there’s been another attack.

A crack tears through the small café.

I take what I have ordered and leave

with what I need: no expectation

of a return.

Here is a fine example of that I term the fallacy of presupposed narrative in poetry. This error, as I characterise it (and have recently discussed its occurence in a poem by Evelyn Araluen), involves the culturally conditioned and conditioning assumption that an implicit narrative is applicable to the dramatic situation. It is the gratuitous intrusion of ideological baggage without any attempt to make it imaginatively compelling. 

Poets like Sakr, who belong to an identitarian leftist subculture in which every situation in life is fraught with microaggressions and problematic assumptions about race, gender and sexuality are particularly prone to employ presupposed narrative. And as long as their poetry circulates only in like-minded circles (which, of course, it generally does), the mismatch between presupposition and dramatic situation, between obsession and reality, is not remarked. 

The new joint around the corner keeps

changing its name. I get it. I am afraid

of growing old. I can’t afford this face

for long, this place for long. I still invite

people in. The barista wants to know

me. I want to trust his intentions, his sup

as I sip at what he just made and feel

a little more alive. I shiver at the usual

delivered by so many smiles. His dimples.

Thus far we have a thematic concern with growing old, entering middle age without having left behind the things of youth. The encounter between inner preoccupation and external situation is, obviously, nothing objection-worthy, but the stuff of consciousness itself--so long as the preoccupation is understandable in view of information given. And here all we need to know is stated: the speaker 'cannot afford this face' (cheeky? flirtatious?) for long; he is, frankly, 'afraid of growing old'. In fact, if there is an objection to be made at this stage in the poem's exposition, it is that the concerns are too baldly stated when they might have been 'shown, not told'. 

Large cap? Desire hissing. Four forty five.

Preoccupation intensifies. The speaker is sexually interested in the barista so that 'large cap' becomes a double-entendre. This, of course, is amusing and still readily comprehensible.

It feels wrong to say don’t ask me

to be human. This is a transaction only.

I need to preside over when I am more

than money moving between machines.

The dehumanisation of life under capitalism: a time-worn and not unworthy theme, albeit one not explored with any excess of imagination here. The speaker might at least have extended the money symbolism by saying that he feels 'short-changed' by the impersonality of the barista's interest.

That’s what all of this comes down to:

this is not my first coffee of the day &

won’t be my last.

Surely now the transaction is being asked to carry more human interest than it really possesses, however attractive the barista. (Are cups of coffee a tenable vehicle for the profit motive?) The customer implies that he will frequent this coffeeshop throughout the day just to see the barista and fantasise about an erotic connection with him. Are we intended to envisage the speaker as a stalker, then? How many people have the time and disposable income to spend all day in a coffee shop, or, as I suppose the case may be, to wander in and out of different coffee shops just to enjoy a series of imaginary frissons with the staff? This does not resemble a day in the life of most people 'under capitalism', as the title invites us to conceive. 

Writing about an atypical person's daily routine is fine in itself; the only objection to be made prima facie is that the speaker seems rather obnoxious, someone free of what most of the world would regard as 'real problems' but who tries to pass off complaints about his bourgeois lifestyle as a lament on behalf of the masses toiling and consuming 'under capitalism'. 

We have still not got to the main objection as mentioned at the start, namely presupposed narrative, and I cannot help registering one more criticism of Sakr's exposition before broaching it. 

I rub my hand over

the silver band of my fade and imagine

it as his, as a distance closed, as a tug

at my trackies.

Here the sensation of one's own hand on one's head is imagined as that of another's hand--very well. But then it is further conceived 'as (italics mine) a tug at my trackies'. How to parse this? By some odd physiological mechanism, the speaker's scalp is connected to his loins--not in the sense of cause and effect (a caress leading to an erection) but in a manner more direct, such that pressure in one place is felt 'as' a sensation in another part of the body. Alternatively, the speaker fantasises about the barista tugging at his trackies; imagines him reaching down with the other hand to access his genitals. The trouble with this reading is of course the same: touch at one place can scarcely be felt 'as' touch at another place, unless the subject is somehow perceptually confused.

He needs to be talking.

To be more than a service. A silence.

The cost of this moment is greater

than either of us knows or cares to

think about for the other. The radio

squawks: there’s been another attack.

A crack tears through the small café.

Here the presupposed narrative makes its appearance. What is this 'attack' of which there have been others before, and recently? As far as I can see, it must be a terrorist attack. The following assumptions are now automatically in play: 

1. Muslims are perceived as terrorists in Western societies and vilified, scapegoated in Western societies as a result. 

2. The speaker is a Muslim, or is taken for one.

3. The assumption that he is a Muslim is readily made, despite his anonymity in the coffee shop and the fact that he is wearing casual, secular attire.

4. Sensing that the speaker is a Muslim, everyone looks askance at him, wondering if he is about to attack them, or if he might be a terrorist sympathiser. 

Now, 1. in either of its variant forms is surely true enough, though less so than, say, twenty years ago. Assumption 2. is, however, an unwarranted presupposition. Nothing in the poem, except the name of the poet, justifies it. (Sakr, apparently, makes little of the distinction between author and speaker in poetry.) Assumption 3. is also tendentious. A man of Sakr's complexion could be taken for Italian or Greek, or for a Coptic Christian. But we are expected to assume 4.; that everyone in cosmopolitan Sydney (or wherever the poem is set), late in the second decade of the 21st century, is hyper-vigilant around anyone who might possibly be a Muslim. 

Parenthetically, we might look into the historical moment Sakr so vaguely evokes, to see whether his narrative makes much sense in light of it. There were a couple of attacks in Australia in 2018: one in February and one in December, the first since the more highly publicised Brighton siege in June of the previous year. Presumably Sakr is evoking one of these. The public reaction was mostly a shrug, as I recall; no popular anti-Muslim backlash would eventuate, nor had there been any to observe since the Cronulla Riots of 2005.

Finally, there is the unsubstantiated assumption, implicit in the poem's title, that prejudice against Muslims has something to do with capitalism per se, not just particular capitalist societies at particular points in their history, in response to contingent events. I am sure that this incompatibility between Islam and capitalism would be disputed by business elites in countries such as Saudi Arabia, for example. But whatever the rights and wrongs of Sakr's worldview, the point here is that it has no business obtruding into a dramatic situation that evidently has nothing to do with it. In ordinary life, one thing often follows another without any thematic coherence, but we are entitled to expect greater coherence in artistic representations of this world. Love 'under capitalism' and terror under capitalism may be linked in any number of ways, but no link is evident in Sakr's telling.  

I take what I have ordered and leave

with what I need: no expectation

of a return.

 

Now, if the speaker is indeed a regular, surely there would be the 'expectation of a return' on both sides. Here is a forced attempt at wordplay that vitiates the narrative--not the presupposed one, but the explicit one of a lonely cafe patron ogling a hospitality worker.  Another problem lies in Sakr's use of the indefinite article in the final line. The common expression is simply 'expectation of return', with no article. By introducing the article, Sakr hopes to play on the contextual narrative implications of 'return', as in 'I do not expect to return to this cafe, nor am I expected to do so by the spunky barista, who, after all, does not know me from Adam'. At the same time, of course, he is trying to make a statement about the ubiquity of the principle of quid pro quo 'under capitalism', as per the poem's title. The speaker does not expect the barista to return his feelings (because, presumably, it is only under capitalism that the young and attractive are disinterested in ageing and less attractive admirers, or that people are expected to pay for their drinks in respectable establishments without expecting sexual favours from the staff). It is a lot of weight for an article to carry, and, unsurprisingly, the poor little 'a' cannot bear it. 

'Love Under Capitalism' is not only a blatant example of presupposed narrative, it also demonstrates a lack of thematic unity. One can imagine the writer protesting: 'But this really happened in my life; it's a slice of life and therefore true!'--A view of art that, of course, need only to be stated to be refuted.

Ocean Vuong's 'Essay on Craft': a close reading

Series introduction: From time to time on this blog I review an individual poem by a celebrated contemporary poet that I believe is overrated and explain why. Call it a guilty pleasure.

  

This poem by the celebrated Ocean Vuong is an ars poetica that stands, I feel, for many poets writing in the same idiom, one which might be described as the dominant one today--especially at Poetry Magazine and its confreres. Vuong's artistic forbears are the confessionals and the surrealists, although my contention is that he and poets like him are very much their bastard offspring. 

At its best, confessionalism stood for genuine self-interrogation, analogous to the old and today seldom-practiced psychoanalytic talk therapy. Now, in an age of pills and arbitrarily rewritten DSMs, poets too lack such self-understanding and seldom try to achieve it; what they aim at instead is unfiltered self-expression, the expression of a self that is taken for granted as authentic but is actually constructed by ascriptive identities embraced with uncritical fervour by unpteen 'gay, bi, trans, latinx, bla(c)k...etc.' poets. For such writers the line between a poem and a social media post is often blurred. 

So much for Vuong et al's confesionalism. As for their surrealism, it is little more than a box of dusty Christmas ornaments taken out year after year, a type of moribund poetic diction intended to mark their work as 'inspired' and non-traditional. It might even be taken as a defensive maneuver: If I don't even try to make sense I cannot be accused of failing to do so. The imagery is surreal in the sense that it is illogical; images are not developed into conceits that develop the subject according to some immanent logic. There is no intellectual component to such imagery such that one image could be said to 'work' while another does not. Such images are not intended to repay close reading but to frustrate it with a hackneyed claim to vatic authenticity. 

On display in what follows is the use of surrealist imagery paired with some extremely trite content that it functions to thinly obscure. I contend that nonsense and cliche are frequently found together in contemporary poetry for this very reason.   

Essay on Craft

Because the butterfly’s yellow wing

flickering in black mud

was a word

stranded by its language.

Because no one else

was coming — & I ran

out of reasons.

So I gathered fistfuls

of  ash, dark as ink,

hammered them

into marrow, into

a skull thick

enough to keep

the gentle curse

of  dreams. Yes, I aimed

for mercy — 

but came only close

as building a cage

around the heart. Shutters

over the eyes. Yes,

I gave it hands

despite knowing

that to stretch that clay slab

into five blades of light,

I would go

too far. Because I, too,

needed a place

to hold me. So I dipped

my fingers back

into the fire, pried open

the lower face

until the wound widened

into a throat,

until every leaf shook silver

with that god

-awful scream

& I was done.

& it was human.

 

In the imagery of the opening lines, 'ash' stands for loss and 'ink' for writing. Hardly original. But next, as though in compensation, comes the surrealism. Taking these 'fistfuls/ of ash, dark as ink', the poet

hammered them

into marrow, into

a skull thick

enough to keep

the gentle curse

of  dreams. Yes, I aimed

for mercy — 

 A paradox is employed here to set off the ostentatious violence of a hard-to-picture image that has already dissolved into another abstract cliche: that dreams are a 'curse' because they lead to disappointment, pictured tritely as 'a cage around the heart

 

So I dipped

my fingers back

into the fire, pried open

the lower face

until the wound widened

into a throat,

 

Another obvious image--a cliche this time not hedged with self-conscious bizzareity: The mouth the poet speaks from is a 'wound', the idea being that authentic art comes from trauma and presents that trauma as immediately as possible, without trying to make sense of it. Art is the 'spontanous overflow of powerful feelings' as Wordsworth summarised (although in fairness to the great romantic, he also called it 'emotion recollected in tranquility', suggesting that perhaps some editing, some critical thought might be in order before one rushes to publication!). Such is the naive romantic poetic that would, in the extremely stylised and degenerate form represented by Vuong, continue hegemonic down to our own day.   

until every leaf shook silver

with that god

-awful scream

& I was done.

& it was human.

The imagery continues in the same vein: a kind of primal ritual is enacted, elemental substances worked into not a representation but a presentation of the 'human'. But what does Vuong actually say about his own (or, to be merely pendantic) his speaker's humanity? That it is 'messy' would seem to be about all--just another cliche: humanity, art emotions--these things are messy, irrational, beyond definition or criticism. The poem's message is an evasion, a refusal to think about what one is saying that results in failure to move beyond the culturally enshrined cliche. The line break 'god-/awful' even suggests, gauchely enough, that the primal scream is itself a god, as indeed it surely is--the false god of Vuong's brand cut-price romantic brand. Blood, marrow and butterflies, bird cages and 'blades of light' are the objective correlate for the formulaic sturm und drang of Vuong's sensitive soul, and the hive-soul of cultural products like him. 

Review: Oyster Mountain by Jalal El-Kadali

 

El-Kadali, Jalal. Oyster Mountain. Nine-Banded Books: Charlston, WV, 2020

El-Kadali’s debut poetry collection makes a strong impression. To begin with, the cover, by talented photographer and writer New Juche, juxtaposes a marble bust with the jaws of a dying whale in an indication of the dominant surrealist mode that will be found between the book’s covers. The back cover, in lieu of any synopsis or endorsements, features a prose poem that situates the text in the current era of lockdown-mad safetyism: ‘Follow the science into the panic room whose walls are the fear of death…' There is little in the main body of the text, the the poems themselves, that speaks directly to this theme, however, or to current events in general. One of a couple of exceptions to this rule, the third in a sequence under the group title 'There Are No Statues in the Unconscious', is an absurdist narrative that evokes the Black Lives Matter phenomenon of the same year:

The statue in the strobe lighting afforded 

By flares moved slowly frame by frame

Kneeling down before the phalanx

Of riot police to offer them a dove

Like a Benin bronze but made of human clay

But did not bring one for each of them

And so in punishment for this faux pas

Despite having gone viral

She was beaten to death

Unusually, the author has seen fit to write a long-ish introduction to his own collection. This rambling text is a polemic against everything from formal verse (why?) to neo-Darwinism and, in its peremptory, madcap style, reads as if it were written by a tag-team consisting of Andre Breton and Ezra Pound. It is doubtful whether any reader's appreciation of Oyster Mountain will be enhanced by first reading these remarks, unless they happen to share Kadali's idiosyncratic enthusiasms and bugbears. 

Perhaps the most impressive poem in the collection is the first: The Lifeboat Except—a kind of phantasmagoric family history in which the speaker describes

[…] all at once shaken out

Of the alayavijnana

My father, my grandfather and I

Joining hands as brothers

 

(The alayavijnana is a kind of universal consciousness posited in the variously-named vijnanavadin, or idealist schools of Buddhism.) Thence the speaker proceeds on his strange journey past several surrealist tableaus that are rather difficult to interpret:

Pillars of sand, anthills in fact

[…] twenty feet high, topped with the shell

Of a univalve curled up for the night

 

and

 

A sign in the form of a black bird

Emerging from a hollow leaf like a spider, its beak

Auto-vampirically buried in its own breast

One wing indicating the unfolding landscape

With Caesarian grandeur, as if to say, ‘Come on and see

What else there is to see around here

 

The juxtaposition of ‘Caesarian grandeur’ with the last line and a half produces the sort of bathetic falling off that, among poets of this surrealist-cum-postmodernist stripe, one associates with John Ashbery.

Here, still in the initial poem, we see for the first and by no means last time that Kadali is not embarrassed to express the most antisocial sentiments. This, it occurs to me, is unusual in contemporary verse, where the distinction between the poet and the speaker is typically non-existent or insignificant, and the censorious primness of literary cliques has passed all bounds. Kadali may well be writing about his own dreams, fantasies and neurotic symptoms (how could he not?), but he does not go out of his way to endear his himself, or his speaker, to the reader by the usual means of presenting himself as a victim:  

 

Bury me with a full-scale mode of the world

Carved in protoplasm

And vivified by something

Like galvanism, only state-of-the-art

No two articles the same

But none admitting the least imperfection

[…]

Then put it all to the sword to serve me in the next life

 

Despite voicing such grotesque extremes of pharaonic egotism, Kadali, as an authentic surrealist, is actually more interested in the id than the ego--except insofar as the latter tries and fails to rationalise the sexual and aggressive drives within the former. The latter dynamic is with great originality exploited in 'Poison Grass', a short narrative positing telepathic thought-transference between the speaker and some kind of psychotic, mass-impaling, Hitler-quoting doppelganger:

A man-shaped figure woke me not ungently

And let me in the morning twilight to that park

Where grass had grown into bamboo

To impale the picnickers transversally

So that they were now atoning for their crimes

Though by more humane means, my guide opined

Than the vertical alternative

It is one of the stranger poems I have ever read. The only point of reference I can come up with would be the Michaux or Kafka. 

Unlike most contemporary poets, one learns very little about Kadali's social identity from his work. Is he really Arab or Persian, or is his nom de plume a whimsical but deliberate red herring, a slap in the face to those who mistake ascriptive identities for the true self, if such a thing exists, and then make accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ against those who would dare to find multitudes within? Not that there is any orientalism in Oyster Mountain, that I can discern. 

Another striking poem in Oyster Mountain is Barbarity Blues, which seems to have been written to prove Adorno right that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Rather than this famous aphorism, though, the epigraph is the lesser-known statement of Adorno’s that ‘nothing is more ruinous: the scentless bouquet, the institutionalised remembrance kills what lingers by the very act of preserving it’—words the poem goes on to explicate with its bizarre and seemingly (but, I trust, not ultimately) irreverent depictions of not only the Holocaust but of many other outbreaks of barbarism:

 

And two-week old paschal calves dumped into

A flaming hole that never filled up

The third, the little one that was ‘just right’

While others were taken for experiments

And subsequently dumped in fields

[…]

Yet soon this place was utterly demolished

Except for a herm at each of its four corners

Beneath a cerulean sky

 

The humour comes from twisting an image into a conceit; forcing the ‘facts’ narrated to fit the literary typology (thus, for example, the holocaust of a cattle sacrifice is paired into a single image with the sacrifice of the paschal lamb). But could humour ever be appropriate to the subject matter, and what are we to make of this strange approach? Perhaps it is a gesture towards the unrepresentability of such matter. To attempt to represent the Holocaust reverently, appropriately or tastefully is to betray the truth by creating the illusion that we who have not lived them (and even perhaps those of us who have) can communicate their meaning. This, Kadali seems to suggest, is a greater irreverence. 

Oyster Mountain—what is it? A prehistoric shell midden? The mons veneris? A plate of Rocky Mountain oysters? Sexual subject matter and imagery abounds in this collection, often of the most surreal kind.

They walk on, and train their feet to stand

For hands, neotenous dildo hilt for head

Carved and painted with the same feet

The make the source of a woman’s weakness

The sign of her ascendency

                                           ('Perfect Cleavage')

The book’s themes, sexual, megalomaniacal and historical come together in the penultimate poem, one of three truly ambitious pieces in the collection. As best I can the tell, the synopsis of this baffling narrative is as follows:

A supernatural being modelled on Lautreamont’s Maldoror is transported to Australia as a convict for stealing a handkerchief ‘as a pretext’. Once there he seduces or rapes a girl, one ‘Emilia or Amelia / with her lace fringed parasol’ in order to impregnate her with his ‘sacred seed’. This deed reveals him to be a time traveller gone back in time in order ‘that democracy / fulfil its promise’ which he defines as ‘a sacred monarchy premised / on absolute equality’ to be enforced by his ‘followers’ known by their uniform ‘the colour of Xmas beetles’’. There then unfolds an alternative history in which the French-speaking Australians are conquered by the Japanese in World War Two, a timeline that emerges in the context of a story about a young couple on honeymoon at a former penal colony turned into a cross between the historical site at Port Arthur and some sort of theme park out of Kafka:

Here they show visitors the amputation saw

The Judas cradle crafted from huon pine

[…]

Here where Fenians with pikes were pitted against

Poachers and robbers with small arms

[…]

Then came revolutionaries, traitors to la patrie;

Here among the sandstone cottages

With rose gardens, interiors with art nouveau wallpaper

The commandant’s now a restaurant (no Lotteria

This one, but a classy joint serving whale sashimi

                                                                                                    (Sperm Donor) 

The hapless young husband ends up locked in the same solitary confinement cell from which the spirit of the narrator has emerged after untold centuries to take over the latter's life, who will perhaps in time and through suffering himself mature into a supernatural being of similar potency. 

Kadali has a way with what, in the preface, he terms 'pseudo narrative', and Sperm Donor is perhaps the most impressive example of this in the collection. The story begins in the middle--as we are told all good stories should--but then, in true avant garde style, provides no closure, no clear beginning or end.

There is much to praise in the poet's imaginative range of the poet's often thrilling imagery, full of hints at undeveloped semantic possibilities--but, as with all literature of this type, the reading experience is mixed with frustration: What exactly is he trying to say? Why this image here and not another, or not there? Does the fact that Kadali has dreamt these weird up these weird vignettes so vividly make them meaningful to others? We may feel that we 'get' something out of one poem and not another. Well, 'no accounting for taste'--but is this always true? A premise of this blog is that at least to an extent, taste can be accounted for. Once we know the end in mind we can judge the means. Does it reach the goal or not?  With a little more aesthetic discipline, many of the poems in this volume might have been great, and the best ones, insofar as I am able to judge, are those that achieve a unity of purpose and effect, a concentration uncompromised by surrealist affectation.