Bad Boats by LAURA
JENSEN Idea by PAUL HOOVER
1977 1987
Bad Boats by LAURA JENSEN
Ecco Press
1977
Recovered by JASON STUMPF
The sea connects and divides. It is
beautiful, dangerous, and demands the attention of those who approach it, those
on it. Where ships come in the foreign is disseminated and language is
elemental, suspect. Many of the poems in Bad
Boats take the sea or shore as their setting, and many more are informed by
the sea’s nature and our encounters with it. Like the sea, these poems are
shifting and include palpable risk. Their movement is fierce and irresolvable.
At any moment one may be flung from safety. Cast upon the sea, one may fight
but must ultimately surrender to its forces.
The title poem, “Bad Boats,” begins:
They
are like women because they sway.
They
are like men because they swagger.
They
are like lions because they are king here.
This catalog of similes suggests a subject
difficult to capture while the title implies an easy distinction between the
bad boats mentioned and good ones we can only assume exist. The poem does not
answer the two questions it suggests: “What are bad boats, finally, like?” and
“What makes them bad?” More unsettling is that, by the poem’s end, one is
unsure whether the speaker has turned her focus to one of the other nouns in
the poem:
In
their egomania they are glad
for the burden of the storm the men are shirking
when they go for their coffee and yawn.
They
are bad boats and they hate their anchors.
Are boats used to describe women, men,
lions, or is it the other way around? As I read the poem, the question is the
question. The poem’s movement occurs in the way it links these things together.
Its primary interest isn’t women, men, lions, or boats, but the ways one
suggests another. Thus, the poem becomes an interchange rather than a static
description, much the way a Shakespearean sonnet’s subject is not its opening
line or final couplet but the distance it travels between the two.
In Jensen’s poems, a single object can
harbor many narratives and valences. So Jensen’s labor in Bad Boats is to decode the landscape she sees. Our view of this
world suggests a narrative of someone both nervy with resolve and hobbled by
obsession. Jensen speaks from extremity made all the more severe by the fact
that she doesn’t strive to impress her reader of extremity. The poems are
buoyed by a quiet authority expressed through Jensen’s diction and a tight
focus on conundrums, no matter how unsettling. She doesn’t allow us to question
the poems’ logic or broader contexts. Jensen has her readers rapt and puzzled
but always receiving more than we could have thought to seek.
Many of the poems in Bad Boats record unintended journeys into strangeness where the
speaker is first repelled but quickly succumbs to its powerful surges. One
example is her poem “After I Have Voted.” It opens:
I move the curtain
back,
and something has gone
wrong.
I am in a smoky
place,
an Algerian café.
They turn the
spotlight toward me;
the band begins to
play.
This poem evades expectations much the way
its events elude the speaker’s expectations. The poem is not political; nor is
its surprise humorous. Quickly, the poem’s exotic and public setting turns from
something “gone wrong” to a delight and wonder to which the speaker surrenders.
The poem ends:
The
Jell-O sighs into the candlelight.
My
eyes turn into stars.
Ah—the
colored spangles on my clothes,
the violet flashlights and guitars!
Throughout, the poem’s loose and
inconsistent end-rhyme (e.g. “café” and “play”; “stars” and “guitars”) adds to
a sense of the poem as a musical dreamscape. However, “surreal” doesn’t quite
describe this poem’s movement. Rather than being set free to roam widely and
wildly, the speaker of these poems is flung into a territory that is
increasingly bizarre. Non sequitur, here, is less artifice than a means of
describing an experience. Also, rather than suggesting disjunction, non
sequitur creates connections between democracy and theater, private and public,
small and large.
The two poems I’ve mentioned – along with
“Redwing Blackbird,” “The Harvest,” and “Here in the Night” – are among the
finest short lyrics written in the last thirty years. The first of these is
worth quoting as an example of Jensen’s mix of plain language and difficult
emotional ideas. “Redwing Blackbird” begins:
Yes, a locust
drilling, yes, its dwelling;
how did I wish to be a
little sad?
But my mention of these poems is to say
nothing of the experience of reading the whole collection which is no less
severe than a long sea voyage or paralysis. Bad
Boats, the first and best of Jensen’s three books, is not only a strong
collection in its own right but the announcement of a startling sensibility
sustained through Memory (Dragon
Gate, 1982; to be re-issued by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2006) and Shelter (Dragon Gate, 1985). Together,
Jensen’s body of work shows the kind of fierce attention to its subjects that
can only come from and lead to attention to the self. The work and wonder of
these books are made all the more intense and necessary by Jensen’s near
silence over the past twenty years.
Idea by PAUL HOOVER
The Figures
1987
Recovered by NATHAN
HOKS
charm, v. 5. fig. To influence,
enthral, powerfully attract or engage (the mind,
senses, etc.) by beauty, sweetness, or other attractive quality; to fascinate,
captivate, bewitch, enchant, delight....
-
Idea opens with a poem
called “Idea,” but the salient feature of “Idea” is not its ideas but its form;
it is a sestina without an envoy. They say sestinas are among the most
artificial of poetic forms and thus they require great skill, control and
order. Nonetheless, sestinas also produce a kind of dizziness. A refined dizziness, perhaps. The end-words work up a
frenetic whirling energy switching places like contestants in a game of musical
chairs. The envoy brings this frenzy to a close, repeating the end-words in
quicker, emphatic succession. In foregoing the closure of the envoy
The poem “Idea” does more, of course, than
work up this formal tilt-a-whirl. It does present ideas, significant ones that can
help us read this book.
If writing is lying, nothing is true
and pressure is on the
mind, not eye,
as if in a single
sentence a thousand
phenomenal objects fled a
single thought. (9)
These lines are hypothetical. This platonic
world of pure ideas,
Idea was
To put it another way, charm is the book’s
rhetorical gesture par excellence.
The argument might say something like: in the face of philosophical dilemma,
mimetic problematics and the iffy reliability of
language, at least a poet can come along with a magic wand of poetry and start
charming the heck out of things. Things aren’t that simple, of course, so the
wand charms in all the wrong directions. This is what happens when the world of
ideas somehow slips away from the philosopher’s stronghold and into the hands
of a poet.
Thus, problems of speech and language creep
up time and again:
We wanted to talk
like gods, but how do
our gods talk, comprising
Tony Lestina and tuna patty melt? “Oh, yeah?”
and “So what!” are
among the sounds we hear
on a furtive pink
sand island in one of the
neighborhoods.
(“After Cotton Mather,” 49-50)
In this way we are bombarded by radical
shifts of diction, shifts which span from the extreme colloquial -- “So let’s
forget it, pal,/ but call me once in a while, OK?”
(“Calm Song,” 57) -- to a humorously archaic and
artificial iambic -- “My mind to me a Kingdom Is” (“Subject Matter,” 52).
Last year a Russian
baker, not knowing English
well, wrote in kind of
jelly, ‘Happy Dearthday...’
(“After Cotton Mather,” 50)
To write, to
wreathe, to writhe
and other declensions
of turning...
(“This About That,” 32)
And as we “decline” through these twists
and turns, we become prisoners observing strange effects of language:
Whispering into the language,
the edge of talk
itself touches tongue to thought.
We stand by as observers in the spoken
forward
movement of exactly what we
are, something
mumbled through a wall
like prisoners saying
goodnight, and again there’s
the sound of wind
leaving a trace of itself.
(“After Cotton Mather,”
50)
Here we sense the tenuous force of
language: it constitutes “what we are, something/ mumbled...”;
yet this mumbling, conflated as it is with “the sound of wind/ leaving a trace
of itself,” threatens to drift off into pure sound. In these poems, the traces
Idea not only investigates the phonetic hazards
of language, but engages in the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry:
A person can’t be
too careful when it
comes to the use of words,
and poetry is
lies--that’s what people think.
It wants to put you at ease with one or two
great words, like
‘oranges’ and ‘birds.’
It wants to make a scene where a Cadillac
sinks into the river,
its radio still playing.
And maybe it’s delightful, like a cheap
suit
full of polkas, because
of the truth it reveals.
(“Others as Ourselves,” 25)
These stanzas illustrate a characteristic
move in
The
School of
Metaphysics used to be
located over Harry’s
Bar...
(“The Orphanage Florist,” 37)
As the everyday and moments of privileged
insight constantly intersect, language acts as the third element in the
equation:
Kinda wish you’d been
there,
between a blur and that
thing there,
the thickest kiss,
innate ideas,
and a neon sign that
reads: EAT DIRT CHEAP
since that’s the name of
the place.
(“What Can Be Shown, Cannot Be Said,” 35)
The sign stands between the “blur and that
thing there,” a charmingly colloquial phrase illuminated in neon.
Finally, it should be noted that Idea registers a deep discomfort with the personal lyric and the I that comes with that
territory. These poems hover artfully between the radical destabilizations (of
syntax, speaker position, etc.) of Language poetry and more conventional
stances of the speaker-centered lyric.
It’s a serious business being yourself,
but nobody else would
do it.
You walk around with neon hair,
do ninety in maybe an
alley.
(“Innate Ideas,” 17)
and we feel a pull in
two directions at once:
...if there are angels
they’re reading
instruction manuals
on how to start a
car, how to comb their hair,
plus they’ve got their
clothes on backwards,
so walking here is
going there.
(“Urge,” 19)
Compare that ordered, very legible notion
of going two ways at once (i.e. ambiguity) with the following section from the
long final poem “From a Gazebo”:
I have found a brief wing should
too much of weight the
felt have who
be need must there
for Souls some pleased
if plot of ground
scant song’s within
bound to be time twas moods past day
me hence for is and
selves a twist
doom price we gloves to
firm this high
bells fox by hour fair
hair strong ants
bells peak near night
for track undone
bloom soar that sell a
bee’s bent dance
loom wheel weaves wheel
at maids nor pure
sift here her pens
their blood serves four
cells she her mitts
which are content
invent their sheiks past
at not at fret nuns
(85-86)
The first five words start on pretty
standard syntactic ground, but these lines soon start to work like quick sand.
Prepositions go haywire, verbs get conjugated up, down and inside-out,
and we’re pulled into the punchy rhythm and crunchy texture of these
monosyllabic, anglo-germanic words. Each word
ultimately finds itself in a state of grammatical ambiguity. Nothing new in
that; but the effective charms here are