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).
