STEALING THE DAYLIGHT

. . .

Summer. Let's see what we can steal from our sleep.

. . .

Daylight, white fugue, my face is shadow. My name, my name.

. . .

It Is Daylight, selected by Louise Gluck for the 2008 Yale Younger Poets prize, and published in 2009, is filled with poems of strange, lucid elasticity. Not quite confessional, not quite associative in its sensibilities, Arda Collins' first book smacks of both. Her colloquial monologues are filled with the impressive meanderings of an apparent housewife, or single woman, or contemporary witch. Which is to say, a woman who does the cooking for herself, watches TV, looks at the weather in the yard, drives nowhere and comes home before dark, and probably has to take a fistful of Xanax to ward off her serious depressions. This is the character I imagine.

Her straightforward tone is deceptive in that it almost feels as though you're going to read some boring confessional prose, but you're surprised by her adept maneuvering. Collins' speaker attaches herself to the domestic, mundane details of suburban life, and skillfully delivers the reader to moments of contemporary dryness, humor, even irony.

Spring

I was making a roast.

The smell wafted from the kitchen into the living room,

through the yellow curtains and into the sunlight.

Bread warmed in the oven,

and in my oven mitt, I managed to forget

that I'd ever punched someone in the face.

It seemed so long ago, I might not even have done it.

You can see in these lines a directness true of someone like Anne Sexton, without the imagistic flare. But in the confessional tone and in the volatile intentions of Collins' speaker there is something built over the feminism of the 60's. It almost feels as if you're reading the diary of a 1950's housewife, filled with, not quite restraint, exactly, but a politeness that neatly dresses some other psychological fervor.

There is a sisterhood too, to something like Frank Bidart's earlier poem "Confessional" in which his mother hangs his cat in Collins' longer poem written in sections, "Dawn". The title reminds me of William Carlos Williams' assertion that murder doesn't happen at midnight, that this is the classical error. Collins' poem surprises us with how it proposes violence and reason at the same time, with its psychopathic, calm invitation:

5.

It's wrong to kill.

That's why,

he explained to the person,

he was holding the person's

face and throat.

Nothing was supposed to happen,

not death and not pain. No one

should be doing anything right now,

that was what he was demonstrating

to the person, who didn't know:

this was an explanation.

One gets the feeling that Collins' speaker is something from a Flannery O'Connor story, a philosophical criminal, but really they are like any of us, filled with an attention to beauty, that somehow feels so far:

11.

Gentle, painful sound,

it's coming from his face.

He doesn't want to talk,

hates the air; it moves toward the same things,

beautiful night,

beautiful night again, best missed

from afar. He thinks his personhood

in the dark in a room is the same as the dark

inside a small bag or a drawer.

Essentially, there is a deep distrust between Collins' speakers and the civility of the cultural business of waking up, having a home and family, cooking dinners, watching the light die nightly, only to start over and do it again, again, again. These are somnambulist monologues in which Collins attunes to the ultimate order of the universe, which burns us alive:

January

A night fire,

and this one really burns the house down.

At dawn it's still smoking

and I love it so much,

like the world has happened the thing

I wanted;

not like it loves me, but like,

"I know, I know,"

it says, "calamity,"

like, "why not for you, too?"

and I feel so included and ordinary

like I know what real order is

and like it exchanges a look with me

together as the sky gets lighter.

. . .

Friends and strangers, steal it if you can.

. . .

If you can steal the daylight from the daylight, you will know what fire means.

. . .

The dog, the tree.

Blind mountains.

The darkness is me. Pulled from me.

Strange, migrant.

My shadow getting up from my body

like a man climbing out of his grave.

. . .

LORD AND BOAT: JEAN VALENTINE

. . . . . . .

The title to Jean Valentine's new book LITTLE BOAT seems to me indicative of her work in which the domestic and the seen become fragment and artifact in memory. Valentine's poems enact the artifact of language, in which fragments, bits, sensual flashes bear the weight of metaphor. What is the "little boat" and what does it mean? The literal sure, but intuitively we expect--even understand--that it is also something more. The body that bears our spirit? The book that carries our voices and poems? Certainly. In Valentine's work, a fragment of domestic language delivers the weight of feeling, the spiritual weight, and still maintains ineffability. In Valentine, metaphor is mystery, like experience. In Valentine, furthermore, experience IS metaphor, and meaning--spiritual.

In the poem "La Chalupa, the Boat" her poetic strategy is clear: to mark experience with intuition, a blind understanding. Inside the "blue boat painted with roses, / white lilies--" she says "I am poling / my way into my life. [. . . .] It seems / like another life". Her poetry, for me, is experiential, phenomonological. She's not giving us narrative journalism, to record exactly what happened when she was twenty, but a kind of shorthand for intuitive experience, for an abstraction: spiritual memory. Even more importantly, she does so without granting us any kind of discursive understanding. We're not told what kind of lesson any experience should offer. If her poetry gives explanation, it is so she, with a blindfold on, can understand the perameters of intuitive knowledge, which Kant said should be inexplicable. Inexplicable knowledge? Ah, true poetry.

In some poems there is an elusiveness reminiscent of Williams, as in "Gray":

gray
"the order of the mother"
one degree Fahrenheit

News Armature:

Expect sleet or snow[. . . . . ]west coming east

[ . . . . . . ]You may not have wanted to be there
[. . . . . . .]It may have been because of the pain

helicoptor[ . . . . . ]on your left side
man asleep
child[. . . . .]on your right

But it is precisely the elusive nature of meaning that embues her work with such compelling and credible force. In very few lines, she insists on tenderness toward mystery. In the 6 line poem "All around the house" she describes the outline of a room, around which "they" are lying:

All around the outside of the room I was given
they were lying, uncovered
in plastic rags, newspaper, rusted tin;

lying right up against the aluminum siding
of the room I'd been given,
as if it gave off warmth, the siding.

Instead of explaining the literal moment, journaling the historical incident, here Valentine is explaining emotional memory--she is journaling spiritual incident. "They", "the room", "the siding", "the warmth", even the fact that the speaker is "given" the room, all begin to take on metaphorical import. The repetition of "the siding" at the end is a kind of carress; it announces love. The conditional "as if" helps to imply a larger meaning than the literal. It implies more than the literal when we ask ourselves what the poem refers to. That simple phrase supports another reading, for isn't this a poem aout the body and the spirit? A mother and children? A rented room and puppies huddling against it for warmth? Whatever the literal might be, the metaphorical certainly speaks to our desire for comfort, for kindness, for deliverance, for warmth.

Valentine's poems, moreover, seem to question whether there is any difference between history and dream. For Valentine, the daily spoken is the broken artifact of meaning, and even religious language takes on this weight. In her poem "But your touch", the "Lord" is an artifact of both Christianity much as it is of Eastern Hinduism throughout the rest of the book. Valentine often refers to Lord as "Madonna", one place directly to "Mary and Gnesh" and later in the book it becomes relative to other Eastern Buddhas. In this book we must ask ourselves what is the "Lord"?, much as we had to ask ourselves what is "the little boat"? Again, Valentine insists on intuitive meaning, and not dogmatic definition:

But your touch was everywhere, Lord
to be accomplished
though no one could see it
A great human thing was being accomplished
:[. . . . .]it drew every last part of him
into you

[. . . . . . . . . ] : the lost sailors, diving for mines
off Korea. Every white hair,
black hair, every invisible
threshold, course and fine.

In another poem, "Lord of the world!", we might even say that "Lord" is something gnostic, pagan, a being that witches conjure:

Lord of the world! [ . . . . .] soft
unconditional galaxies,
look at me look at me! [. . . ] faraway

animal made out of dots
up in the other sky, Woman! [. . .] please you
nurse my child, please

nurse my other child.
Rub my hand discovered
caught in the prisoner's hand, rub
with your milk his hand.

Here we experience the human consolations desired by the speaker: "look at me", "nurse", and "rub". But equally as important is the way the religious overture of the poem is driven into the prison. Who is the prisoner? In this, our era, we certainly feel a pang of history. Abu grave, anyone? This underlines the metaphorical prisoner that each of us is, each of us with a body. Valentine's poetry succeeds for me in reminding us that the political act is also a spiritual act.

Friends and Strangers, in her poetry we remember that experience is mystery, and that real memory is a kind of dream.



To my soul (2)


Will I miss you
uncanny other
in the next life?

And you & I, my other, leave
the body, not leave the earth?

And you, a child in a field,
and I, a child on a train, go by, go by,

And what we had
give away like coffee grains
brushed across paper . . .


. . . . . . .

THE ANGELMONSTER OF SYNTAX AND SYNESTHESIA

. . . . .

Hello? Is anyone out there? This notebook is a strange place to be playing around. In case anyone has wondered about this whole hybridization of poetry and porn,

not that anyone reads this blog, but the idea that it's being sent out into an immediate, unseen, audience--that audience is itself a product of an echo in space--that somewhen, dear Friends and Strangers, you are, and you are reading this in your hyper-windowed version of now, synaptically

here I am, basically unedited, in my intellectual and emotional pornographies. If porn is the staging of intimacy, and if poetry is the effort to achieve pleasure by means of baring Self to Otherness through the serious difficulty of language,

then here are my bare attempts at speaking to you roughly, privately, and partially through the lie of personality, as I work through my loves, in lines broken or sentences wonderstricken, trying to enact how certain poetries leave me, as Willa Cather has written, "deliciously, yet delicately fired."

. . . . .

One of the most compelling aspects of Ralph Angel's work is his monstering of syntax. In my last post I considered the synesthesia at work in his consciousness, the crossing of sensory information as he intensely and actively attunes to multiple details at once. He senses, or divines, his own existence from the crossing of emotional moods with physical incident. We see this, for example, in the first poem of his new book, Exceptions and Melancholies:

"With Care"

Whoever has a quiet mind

up on the roof the season turned the bath towels purple.

Quiet is the demolition. The neighbors got to know eachother
someday soon.

Boys pull the apples to the ground. Clouds
keep the sky together. And the hardest-working part of it steps
. . . . .from the window scenes

into a pair of jeans, wouldn't you?

I said I found lakes there
and odd pieces of meaning that have nothing to do with you

and wink back.

. . . . .

I cite the first half of the poem, which is grammatically striking, in a way that other poems of his are. Is the first sentence an address, stating that "whoever has a quiet mind" will notice the effect of the season on the bath towels? Or is this person actually on the roof, where the bath towels are purple? There is a syntactical confusion here reminiscent of E.E. Cummings, both playful and compelling. Is a pronoun our subject? Is a prepositional phrase? Further down, our subject is just as ambiguous as "the hardest-working part of it" (if "it" refers to the sky) steps down out of the sky, from the windows "into a pair of jeans." Here is a figure, bodiless, undefined, without sex or identity, that still "steps" and climbs into a pair of pants. And if that displacement of being weren't too much to comprehend, suddenly we are forced to acknowledge our own "bodiness," as Angel asks, "wouldn't you?" There is an intense conciousness driving these poems, and the rigours of his syntax are themselves the anchoring of his voice.

In the third sentence, the tense itself is confused by "someday soon." Really, it's the word "soon" here that distracts us, forces us to question meaning itself. Time wormholes time. Without warning we're suddenly in the past, or the future. This gives us a portraiting effect, of a place, or an experience of knowing-a-place, which happens at all of our points of knowing it at once. His sentences are trains that fly past us, as we glimpse ourselves in their momentary windows: "I said I found lakes there / and odd pieces of meaning that have nothing to do with you // and wink back." Now the you is uncertain. Is this an address to you, Friends and Strangers, or to the figure in the "window-scenes", and is this to whom Angel will "wink back"? Again that confusion of tenses, the past and the present happening simultaneously. Angel demands of the sentence everything possible in his meaning. He confronts our linearity, challenges how we read consciousness.

Sometimes the distance between the subject and the verb in a sentence is overwhelmed by the image-laden phrases it contains. In the poem "Inside Out", for example, the first sentence separates the second subject from its final action:

Outside the summer heat was shimmering
and after resting on the beach
I walked until the bay
grew saucer-shaped again
and blue, and so the bowl of pears and even the binoculars
were painted there, and from every
room pushed the land
away.

The phrase that strikes the bell of the ear is the final one: "and from every / room pushed the land / away." "I walked" he writes, and "pushed the land / away." But this isn't the meaning we comprehend. Instead, we're overwhelmed by the world between. In fact, this is the effect of a syntax that distances the body from the sight. The visible world here fills the space between the "I" and its actions, the EYE overwhelms the consciousness with its gaze of "the bowl of pears and even the binoculars". The rest of this sentence, "were painted there", adds to the confusion between perpective and time. A poignant example of this kind of displacement is the poem "Soft and Pretty," an 18 line sentence in which both the speaker and the reader experience the distancing of experience from feeling, mind from incident, body as a relative consciousness. On the one hand, we're confused about what's happening to whom, and on the other, we realize that we are the whom and the what's happening too.

Notably, line breaks in Angel work to emphasize parts of speech, and in some cases, to personify them. In the last citation he writes, "room pushed the land", a phrase that displaces the meaning of the sentence, but adds to our poetic wonder. In his poem "The Coast", there are lines that recall William Carlos Williams' isolation of parts of speech:

. . . Alongside
a warehouse a palm tree
flares.

Another
hillside is about to open. At the edge
of death the earth
turns. A child
dances,

the wind
goes singing by.

These line breaks condense nouns, highlight prepositions, and by enjambment compliment subjects with multiple verbs. Notice lines like "a warehouse a palm tree" that help us to itemize objects, or "flares" and "dances" which pronounce action, and in turn recall "turns. A Child", a line that helps to center the playfulness of this poem, that exists "at the edge" where "the wind / goes singing by". Or consider the simple density of the line "of death the earth" in which the preposition evokes a double meaning in the relationship of these two nouns: "the earth of death", a phrase that implies an inherent nihilism--and "of death the earth", a phrase that implies resurrection, implies that about death we might reference the living planet.

I'd argue that this attention to syntax is a result of Angel's voice, as it listens inwardly, a netting of the sensory, as he minds the world and his relation to it. I don't think he strives to be complicated, but he's whispering to himself these prayers of attention. Like Williams, the cadence of his line is meant to clarify, to bless, and this blessing is an engagement of sorts, and this engagement is the remnant of his existence. His poem is his evidence of experiencing a complex and nuanced and delicate synesthesia of mood and moment. His poem paints his voice demolishing the distances of time and image, as they are rapt with perception and certain feeling.

"Playing Monster"

Of sprinklers
on the tilted lawns, a child,

the lions of repose smoothly sculpted
from the first steps
of a civilized but unrelenting
privacy,

the babble of the run-off.

When I'm in doubt
I am the sound that separates itself
from a leaf-blower
that comes inside with its flock
of parrots.

I think my body's breaking down

where a good friend isn't
actually.

. . . . .

Friends and Strangers, Angel's is a poetry that in its directness is almost easy to discount. His syntax forces us to slow down, forces us to read again, demands in fact that we learn how to read his sentence, reminding us that reading is an act of comprehension. Like poetry, it is an act of awareness. His poetry asks that we enter a consciousness not unlike our own, but one we've neglected to consider, one that must filter the storming variables of existence as our relation to them falters and feels.

. . . . .