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Number
285
May June 2000
Oddly
Familiar
RUSTY MORRISON
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
VOICE-OVER, poems by Elaine Equi, Coffee
House Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, December 1998,
96 pages, $13.95 paper.Winner of The Poetry Center
Book Award, selected by Thom Gunn.
DARK SKY QUESTION, by Larissa Szporluk,
Beacon Press, Boston, 1998, 73 pages, $12.00
paper.
Here are two poets who, through remarkably
different means, invite us to risk examining the
ways in which we make meaning from experience. Many
a disturbing anomaly can be discerned and then
mined for its potential insight. A heightened
awareness of the perceiving self's intractable
nature can be gained from such perusal. What is
lost is the ease of obliviously trafficking in the
known.
Elaine Equi, one of the central figures in the
experimental poetry movement of the mid-eighties in
Chicago, is the author of several books of poetry,
including Surface Tension and Decoy.
In this, her latest book, Equi's methods of craft
include a short line, a voice that can turn on a
word from exuberant to wryly ironic, and a
diction---in some cases not unlike that of New York
School's Frank O'Hara---that seems conversational
at first glance. But a closer appraisal will prove
that these poems are meticulously constructed.
Larissa Szporluk has been published widely in
journals such as Grand Street, Georgia Review,
Virginia Quarterly Review, and featured in
Take Three 1: AGNI New Poets Series. But
this is her first book of poems, which won her the
'97 Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Unlike Equi's
bone-bare, well-honed speech, Szporluk presses
metaphor against metaphor so close that there's
hardly room, nor desire, to breathe---so caught up
are we in this, our new element.
But as different as these two poets might be in
terms of craft, each brings us to the same
questions: How do we confront, or ignore, the
breach between experience and our understanding of
it? How do we begin to speak the confusions we face
when we can't even trust what we know about the
voice we'll use, or where exactly that voice will
be coming from?
Equi's first poem in Voice-Over
begins:
Where do we reside---
in our beer commercials
or somewhere outside of them?
Culture's mirrors
are all one way,
but if the soul
were photographed
would it really be
so predictably vague
and out of focus?
(from "Spirit Photography")
The banality of beer commercials mixed with
unabashedly direct questions about the soul's
imminent availability is classic Equi. Also in
keeping with her style, Equi wisely chooses not to
answer such questions, but rather to unlayer the
asking of them, refreshing such history-laden
inquiries through her use of a wry, airily humorous
tone. This poem ends:
Look, there is the ghost
of a hand.
a family of shadows
stepping out of the sea.
Romantics---
where there is only smoke
we all find someone we know.
Yet the clearly visible
is more mysterious by far.
Our own breasts, arms,
legs, mouths---
unrecognizable
bodies
we can no longer see.
Equi's ability to charge insight with a bit of
ironic humor is appreciable here---first in chiding
the "Romantics" who offer "only smoke," then in
exposing a bit of the strangeness, the
disconnectedness that we live with daily and yet
complacently ignore. Paradoxically, for Equi, the
more aware we become of our daily selves as
"unrecognizable," the more easily we can accept and
appreciate, even enjoy, the "clearly visible" as it
takes on its true characteristics of being "more
mysterious by far."
Take, for example, these lines from "Self
Portrait As You," a poem in which Equi cunningly
withholds any simple, limiting definition of the
poem's "you":
Always receding
you are
what I come out
to see.
You
"multi-you"
who shuffles the cards,
who never comes forward
but simply appears
on a roller coaster
or looking at the waves---
the static poses
in which I multiply myself.
In a sense you are
what happens to me,
speaking through events
or when you choose
through aura's last residue
of touch---
the product that says "buy me,"
the object that glows.
Equi's lyric power comes through time and again in
this collection---as in the luminously beautiful
lines "through aura's last residue / of touch,"
which express the liminal, transcendent nature of
human-to-human contact. Yet Equi has the savvy to
follow such a graceful insight with the
surprisingly accurate, almost crass revelation of
the next couplet, lines which clarify an equally
powerful desire in us: to reach for "the product
that says 'buy me,' / the object that glows."
Poems like this exemplify Equi's ability to take
on the most difficult metaphysical questions---in
this case: Who or what is self? a question only
further compounded by each attempted answer. She
makes such concerns all the more compelling by
expressing their relationship to important
sociopolitical issues, such as the lure of
advertisements and our addiction to purchasing.
Equi's vision of self as a "multi-you" could
also be seen as an updated version of Walt
Whitman's expansively contained multitudes. For
Equi, her "multi-you" is "always
receding"---obviously, at the end of the twentieth
century, it's no longer so easy to hold onto one's
many contradictory selves. What she has instead are
just their "static poses," each offering only the
next snapshot-style glimpse of a you "who never
comes forward / but simply appears." Though Equi's
ways "in which I multiply myself" are more in
keeping with our destabilized, overly reproduced,
postmodern times, her "multi-you" is as deeply
grounded in experience as Whitman's "I." Equi sees
that "you are / what happens to me, / speaking
through events."
Yet all such complexities are presented in a
diction that often remains as simple and forthright
as in these next lines, which continue the
poem:
When I understand
I see
and when I am tired
or confused, I have
nothing to show
that sliver of the whole
that is just you being you---
a new moon which grows the old
again and again, but different
each time.…
This three-page poem eventually ends:
the answer enfolded,
enveloped somewhere out there
in the head-over-heels blue.
What is the sky anyway,
but a reply to the earth.
One cannot help but admire Equi's light-hearted,
but nonetheless poised and canny replies to life's
most serious questions. No surprise that Lorine
Niedecker's name appears in this collection.
Niedecker's self-effacingly simple diction---which
forms a poem-surface barely able to contain the
subject matter's enormous yearnings---certainly is
called to mind by Equi's craft. Equi's "From
Lorine" is a collage of lines or phrases from
Niedecker's letters. Here, as in many of Equi's
poems, her choices suggest a proclivity for heeding
the most subtle shades of difference, and for
discerning revelatory beauty in the commonplace
details of daily life. Her deep appreciation for
the quotidian never feels disingenuous.
Last night
it rained here. Everything
has decided to live.
Luffly
little dellycut moments
strings of geese
going over
and spiders
starting to crawl.
(excerpt "From
Lorine")
As should be apparent, given a title like
Voice-Over, the unlayering of our
conceptions of voice is an important theme in
Equi's collection. The poem that shares the
collection's title is a six part montage of
voices---each expressing some instance of our
struggle to communicate, to understand, as well as
instances of our attempts to fool others, fools
ourselves. As in other poems, Equi deftly links our
spiritual hunger, our desire to be in communion
with something larger than ourselves, with the
manipulations we experience as consumers.
This narrow world,
a silent movie,
longs for those voices
on high to float down
…
Disembodied
the voice
conveys
intimacy
(even personality)
but at a distance.
Thus we are
less judgmental,
more willing
to listen,
and eager to buy.
(from "Voice-Over")
Literary references include the Biblical Babel and
a nod to Keat's Grecian urn. And, in typical
iconoclastic fashion, Equi has juxtaposed lines
from as gloriously disparate sources as: The
Psychic Readers Network, The Faith and Values
Network, an ad for Royal Caribbean Cruise Ships,
and André Breton's Manifestoes of
Surrealism. Here is the last section:
6.
Scripted,
it is not natural.
It only appears that way
to sell the Grecian urn
or Grecian Formula 44---
the death in the family
like a used car.
And yet
we do hear them.
these voices.
Like St. Joan
have grown used to them.
Inside and out.
Diaphanous as scarves.
Drawn closer.
Sometimes, we even answer.
Glad we're not alone.
It is in such candid appraisals of our situation
that we find Equi at her best. She uncompromisingly
expresses our diminished expectations. No salvific
explanation for the disconnected multiplicity of
our lives appears on these pages---no redemptive
epiphanies, and certainly no guaranteed answers.
What Equi offers instead is only a voice, voices,
that we are tempted to simply want to "answer. /
Glad we're not alone."
'Alone' is a state I will never experience in
the same way again, having read Larissa Szporluk.
"The sky is just a phantom now / brushing through
the trees…" (page 48). Through her eyes, we
see plainly "the dream thicken and rise / like the
old foundation, the pieces of life / that were
good, …a waste as effaced as the sky…"
(page 3) But Szporluk's heightened awareness of the
insubstantial quality of our world is not the least
of our worries. Even more alarming is this poet's
ability to express an emptiness at the core of our
own being. "But who would you be? asks the
universe. / Not this. Not this body." (page
49) Despite all of its emptiness and negation,
Dark Sky Question is nonetheless a
substantial, and unified, first collection. It is
also relentlessly demanding, both for the breadth
of its vision, and for the arresting juxtapositions
of its imagery. These poems are most satisfying
when they are most disturbing, when Szporluk draws
us in close, making us see the rifts and disunities
in our world, even in the midst of our most
intimate communions.
The air yellows
with the energy of grief.
He touches her eyes, almost humming.
What are those depths
to which we all disappear?
Seas advance and recede.
Ebb and flow. Mountains are lifted
and leveled. Ebb and flow.
A mosaic of tiny bones
shifts a bit in the heat.
There are two kinds of time, side by side;
tears bind them.
His finger rests on her lips, then goes in.
Extinction sucks the tip,
softly biting.
(from
"Crocodilia")
Kant's assertion---that the 'sublime' can only be
glimpsed by pressing through fear's boundary,
beyond one's previous conceptions of the
beautiful---comes to mind. There's been much recent
discussion as to whether or not 'beauty' has been
unfairly maligned by the development of this idea
in subsequent artistic movements. But whatever
aesthetic one subscribes to---whether one calls
such boundary crossing an unprecedented engagement
with astonishing, life-renewing beauty, or a
manifestation of the sublime apprehension of all
that is unapprehendable---Szporluk's poems will
more than meet your requirements.
Reading these poems means directly experiencing
in our responses to her language's fearsome
strangeness a glimmer of the kind of awareness
jolts that the speaker in a Szporluk poem
describes. As her descriptions blow open our
previous ideas of description, the risky,
disturbing opportunity to open further to other
possibilities outside our usual comfort zone comes
rushing right in to meet us---ready or not. In
Szporluk's universe, even closing one's eyes offers
no escape; "an eye that won't open" cannot avoid
pressing interior limits as it "…grows long
out of nowhere to look," "…becomes its own
place, / falling through blindness, / like a beam
from the time of stars / whose death meant
arrival.…" ("Eel")
The first section of Szporluk's book begins with
this quote from Anton Boisen:
And it seemed that a lot of new worlds
were forming. There was
music everywhere and rhythm and beauty. But the
plans were
always thwarted.
Szporluk's voice bravely draws us on to see exactly
where and how "the plans were always thwarted," to
see beyond whatever veneer we have constructed out
of fear or complacency, to see the rifts which are
already forming in our limiting preconceptions. The
first poem, "Flight of the Mice," begins as a
meditation on the unintended destruction of these
small creatures' home, but soon expresses an
enlarging circumference of loss:
It was a small dream, like our
dream,
built on the small wish to be home
once the home had been broken,
leveled by misunderstanding, by dodging,
by the loud brunt of dark, and it broke
all the plans and the ferns and soft earth
they had known, so they ran for the end
of the grasses, as you ran out of threats,
your voice a torn wire fence without land
to enclose, a disobeying boundary,
shaking to remember where it had owned.…
Voice, as with Equi, is one of Szporluk's central
concerns. For both, it is voice aware of---and
therefore able to express---its own subversions,
understanding them to be inevitable in the act of
speech. Interestly, despite Equi's craft of short
lines and taut, direct images, many of her poems
are expansive; she fluently explores the many
layers of voiced self, which she shows to be myriad
in their mystery. In contrast is Szporluk's craft,
which is imagistically rich, sensually packed in
its dense lyricism. Yet her focus is more upon the
emptiness at experience's core---as if language as
rich as hers is paradoxically driven to attempt to
speak the unspeakable, the void, beneath the layers
of perception. We are lucky to have both of these
fine poets, each offering us her side of the same
coin. Here again is Szporluk's side:
Menace of the Skies
It's a golden prison. The light on my
hair
cries for memory, for anything
to weigh it down. All this time
I've been hanging, the secret tides
of my body staying high. I remember
I am childless. I would have given it
a hunter's name, Orion, because that's where
we end up, up here, in these wisps.
We didn't do right by the Earth.
It kept giving us pictures, big frantic
snow,
midnight fires in the willows.
We should have walked somewhere like Jesus,
sowing equilibrium, slow to consume.
We should have fought to know him,
to trap and spawn his grace.
But maybe we'd already met, and he saw,
and this is the scar of that encounter.
Here, as in many of her poems, Szporluk's technique
unnerves; using these rich images she nonetheless
reveals a vision of experience that is emptied of
substance as we know it. The instances of such
"encounters(s)" with the unknown are often
expressed through some aspect of wounding---be it
"scar" or "bruise":
she is made of
crying, crows caught
in the sky, a duct
of her odd world;
in your rush to get in,
you bruise the shape
of your being.
(from
"Koan")
Because of her ability to articulate what she finds
at the boundaries of perception, Szporluk is also
able to express another kind of emptiness: she
describes seeing through an experience to the ways
in which language fails to contain it. "There was
no more moon, only space / in the waves, like a vow
unmade, / or a cage whose interior flew." ("Secrets
of Jove") Through Szporluk's handiwork,
representations reflect the emptiness at the core
of representation, and allude to language's
inability to "cage" its subject, the "hunted thing"
which is never caught and only dimly perceived in
the "pale light" of our awareness. Her ability to
invoke these many levels of emptiness is,
paradoxically, one of the underlying strengths of
these poems, and unifying agents of this
collection.
The world could only be a ship,
a hunted thing to the pale light,
a swerving single body,
broken in the act and in the echo
of suggestion.…
(from
"Mauvaises Terres")
Szporluk also demonstrates an uncanny ability to
lure us into the treacherous undertow just below
the surface of sexuality. The depth that she can
draw us down to gives chills:
You never know when somebody will
stick a little knife
in your heart and walk away---
and the handle that smells of his hand
vibrates by your breast
as he ducks through the trees
and minutes later blows like a shirt pin
across the frozen lake.
And you're all wet, and he's in love
with what he's done.
And because of the cut,
the distance of your life pours out…
(from "Under
the Bridge")
Albeit through remarkably different means, both
Szporluk and Equi pursue the breach just beyond our
accepted understanding of experience. Traveling
through and beyond with either of these poets is as
amazing as following Alice into the Looking Glass,
Dorothy up to Oz. And just as in those fine
adventures, the strangeness of what's to be found
is all the more amazing if one realizes how
familiar it is there, after all.
Rusty Morrison is an MFA graduate of the
Creative Writing Program at Saint Mary's College,
Moraga, California. Her poems and other writings
have appeared in Nimrod, Fourteen
Hills, and many other literary magazines; she
has a poem forthcoming in VOLT.
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