Pam Rehm

The Garment In Which No One Had Slept

Burning Deck Press

1993

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Recovered by Stan Mir

In the proportionally mythic confines of Keith and Rosmarie Waldrops’ house, home to Burning Deck, a guest, typically a party guest, admires the innumerable items on their shelves, walls, or floors at some point in a night’s visit. These items range from early books of Duncan and Dorn, seltzer water out of old-fashioned blue bottles, Keith Waldrop’s own collage pieces, and/or a mysterious black Easter egg to name just a few of the many artifacts affecting the ambience of the Waldrops’ house. Take the black egg, which the Waldrops keep in a glass cabinet with other curiosities like expired driving licenses, fortunes, more collage, and photographs. Normally, cabinets like these have gifts for sale in them at antique shops or in the gift shop at the end of a long day in a museum.

The black egg. When I asked about it Keith Waldrop said, curiously, “Oh, that is from Pam Rehm, but we’ve never opened it.”

“Does it have something in it,” I asked.

“Yes.”

John Taggart, on the back of The Garment In Which No Had Slept, describes Rehm as “clothed in an intense hesitancy, a serious shyness.”

Does it have anything in it?

Yes.

The Garment In Which No One Had Slept is neither black nor an egg, but its author, on the Burning Deck website, describes her book like this:

The poems are all experiments with form: all the dresses tried on. I was trying to feel through words in contrast to having a feeling and trying to describe it…just like myself, these poems are wanting without knowing what they want. They were my trying to figure out what to believe and where to begin. I was trying to stand, to understand all the movements inside my own body. I think the poems were my first questionings of what it means to be in relation.

"In relation," which seems to echo Martin Buber in I and Thou:

Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.

Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.

These reflections by both Rehm and Buber correspond to more of Rehm's writing than just The Garment. As a person, as a writer, I am often "wanting without knowing what I want," and the only way to know is "to feel through words." This process makes relationships between people and things more apparent. Relations are as abstract as quantum physics, or more appropriately put, as abstract as the language required to determine relations. At my worst, I forget the uses and possibilities of language when television, radio, and other media appropriate words over and over again like insurgency in combination with words like bombing. Media’s assumption and limiting of words’ meanings create an opposition to the complexity of a language made various in its capacities throughout history. Through her work, Rehm unveils further uses, further modulations of language. In other words, she removes the limiter or governor one uses in cars or other machines to prevent them from going too fast. She sees “the world within / the word begin” and must “be all curiosity” as she says in “Of Single Intent” from her book Gone To Earth. Casting off the governor streamlines the bric-a-brac of a day in order to "bring about existence."

The Garment In Which No Had Slept, which was pared down from a longer thesis version at Brown University, was published only 12 years ago in 1993, but unfortunately it seems as if it was published in a vacuum. Prior to this book Rehm published two chapbooks, and she has since published two fine books, To Give It Up (Sun & Moon) and Gone To Earth (Flood) with another, Small Works (Flood), on the way.

In addition to her published books, the spring of 1994 saw the ambitious apex of the M appear with Rehm, Lew Daly, Kristen Prevallet, and Alan Gilbert as its editors. By the fifth issue, Rehm and Daly moved into assistant editor roles. And by the sixth, the project came to an end. The first issues contain editorial statements full of idealistic pronouncements; "We believe at this time that poetry must catalyze and aid in the sustainment of a passionate insurgency." The editors hoped that following Dickinson, Melville, Stevens, and others that "a new understanding of their task as iconoclasts (italics mine) and not innovators will emerge." This call to aesthetic arms shares similarity with John Milton recognizing his task as iconoclast after the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the publication of Eikon Basilike, which celebrates the king. John Milton put his mind and pen to the task of quelling the hysteria surrounding the king by writing Eikonoklastes, which tears down the image of the king. This serves as a prime example of the iconoclast's, or insurgent's, task, i.e. turn the static into something frenetic.

As I briefly mentioned, Dickinson was a poetic model, and in her particular interpretation of "spirit," which is "Conscious Ear." In order to avoid, as the editors say, “any language that creates or reflects the kinds of diversions and sedations required for the triumph of capital, [which] is, finally, a language of denial,” then one must possess a conscious ear. As an example of what Rehm’s ear picked up, I quote from The Garment's “THUS I FIND MY LEGS”:

We are paying for all of this unnecessary construction. Knowing

this hasn’t seemed to move us into devotion or out onto the

missile fields. We are afraid. To act.

The subject in this excerpt is perpetually current, and this is especially so in our fear to act. This fear rears its head in all we do, from forging a new poetics to operating as citizens in a country which often makes us feel unwanted. And we watch on television or read in the papers the motives for an insurgency we think we understand but can’t truly comprehend.

Lest it go unnoticed, I sense love in apex of the M's editorial statements. In their words, "Poetry's madness leads to love." The black egg. "The desire that moves things / is love" Rehm writes in "Repudiation" from The Garment. This emotion is central to Rehm's poetics and intrinsic to her world view. Love is integral to the iconoclastic task, and in Rehm's case, love "brings about existence." In her book To Give It Up, Rehm writes in the poem, “An Elegy On My Having Not Lived”:

All these thoughts I feel I cannot turn

the silence from A reference is made

from self to self, a simple suspension

between letters For which the mind

makes a face for and a heart

And a part which can’t be reached

but doesn’t stop it from reaching

Rehm is an iconoclast not because she is, at times, formally inventive but because she reaches for what can't be seen, that is, she strives for knowledge of "what it means to be in relation." Her insurgency should, at least partly, become ours. Rehm is not the only one who must "figure out what to believe and where to begin." To do this, must we open our cabinets and break open the black egg that may hide our conscious ear?