NOELLE KOCOT. Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems. Wave Books. 2006. $12

Reviewed by THOMAS FINK

Allen Ginsberg’s “America” is now a fifty-year-old poem. Largely through the example of Ginsberg’s
”representative I,” “America” asserts that outsiders in the U.S. embody a fundamentally democratic spirit, a basic “American-ness,” that the fifties mainstream ironically lacks: “It occurs to me that I am America.” Although she uses the “I” a bit more sparingly than the Beat bard and might not venture such a huge synecdoche, Noelle Kocot in her 33-page “Poem for the End of Time,” which occupies a bit more than half of Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems, her third collection, has produced a compelling revision (or updating or “child”) of “America.”

Kocot uses Ginsberg’s trademark anaphora, epiphora, and apostrophe, often plays off the precursor poem’s themes, and sprinkles in recastings of phrases found in “America.” For example, “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” is replaced by “Go fuck yourself with your 30 pieces of silver my neighborhood” (50). Starting on the poem’s twelfth page, Kocot repeats the word “America” often enough, but “my neighborhood” is the main refrain. A proud Brooklynite, she makes her “hood” and New York City in general loosely reflective of much going on in the nation. The poem begins: “My neighborhood my neighborhood my neighborhood/ Up in flames my neighborhood/ On apocalypse waves of scalene dreams” (26). Even if the poet intended the apocalyptic flames to signify religious punishment and purification and not 9/11—one should also ponder her later list of five events, including “buildings will crumble,” portending “the end of the world” (35-36)—it is difficult not to think of the World Trade Center destruction. Further, Kocot repeatedly brings in the connection between the second Bush administration and international exigencies:

This crazy government my neighborhood

With its rituals and spells my neighborhood

With its gag laws and baptisms

With its Golden Gloves and Southern Comfort

Rising with phoenix, rising from ashes

Rising from governments

Rising from corporate blood

Trekking it across Indonesia

Trekking it across Brazil

Trekking it across Africa

Trekking it across Kosovo

Trekking it across Emerging Markets

God weeps in my neighborhood

The South Pole has moved 15 feet in the last year my neighborhood

The ice is melting, the penguins are weeping . (32-33)

In place of Cold War paranoia—“them bad Russians./ . . . and them Chinamen. . . ./ The Russia” who “wants to take/ our cars from out our garages”—that Ginsberg parodies, Kocot alludes to equally problematic post-9/11 “patriotic” or fundamentalist Christian rhetoric and to globalization’s multinational corporate capitalist ethos and its dire environmental impact. For Kocot, “crazy government”-sanctioned “rituals and spells” and “baptisms” are conflated with “gag laws” (like the overreaching Patriot Act), and not the kinds of piety celebrated elsewhere in the poem.

Four years before John Kennedy realized such an ambition, the Jewish-Tibetan Buddhist Ginsberg speaks of his “ambition to be President despite the fact that [he is] a Catholic.” Kocot, who wonders when “America” will “hear [her] novenas” (41), is a devout Catholic, and the poem makes this clear. When Ginsberg says to “America,” “You made me want to be a saint” (as a reaction to “your machinery”) and speaks of having “mystical visions and cosmic vibrations,” this aspiration and its visionary complement stem from no Christian framework. Announcing that she “tore a hole in [her]destiny” (29, 30, 45), Kocot’s speaker seeks “a whole in [her] destiny” (30) that amounts to a visionary state burnished by familiar Christian tropes yet also including an homage to gay culture, as well as a tacit acknowledgment of AIDS’s devastation and a reminder of recent homophobic terrorism, all of which Ginsberg, who put his “queer shoulder to the wheel,” would consider very relevant:

Queer bald altar boy in leather blessing us all

Blessing Folsome Street

Blessing the Castro

Blessing the Valley of Death

Blessing Japanese Zen

Blessing blessing blessing

Us all for twenty centuries of stony sleep

Blessing us and blessing us

Paris, America your Holy Spirits

America Matthew Shephard is an angel weeping over us

Pierced by the Holy Spirit forever in heaven

America when will you hear my novenas

In smoke rising from jars

America the Creator has given me a shot of His presence . (40-41)

Perhaps deliberately critiquing her church’s anti-homosexual stance yet validating whatever ecumenical tendencies surface, Kocot seems to see her Catholicism in peaceful coexistence with other spiritual paths and “lifestyles.” Nevertheless, this is never sentimental pluralism. When the poet tells her country about her contact with “the Creator,” the slangy phrase, “has given me a shot,” emphasizes religious experience’s violent aspect; earlier, she refers to Anne Sexton’s “awful rowing” as “the rowing of penance” (29), and later comes the Blakean declaration: “I drip blood on your Church walls” (55). Allusions to Kafka, Yeats, and Celan underscore the apocalyptic theme; in the allusion to Yeats’ “The Second Coming” above that is reiterated elsewhere in the poem, we recall that “stony sleep” gives way to a “rough beast’s” fundamental violence. A line troping on Celan’s famous “Death Fugue” suggests how places like Bensonhurst in New York have been scenes of racist brutality, like his Nazi Germany: “Death is a master from Bensonhurst” (47).

In a distinct departure from Ginsberg’s “America” that might be comparable to “Kaddish,” political outrage in “Poem for the End of Time” gives way in certain passages to Kocot’s mourning for her late husband, the composer Damon Tomblin, who is cited in her biographical note on the book’s back cover and to whom the poem is dedicated: “Damon Daemon Damiano/ You were my fate/ You were my fate/ Our fate was joy/ How to translate/ How to transpose it/ How to transcend it/ To transfigure it” (31). But there is no gap here; both the political and elegiac themes—marking the threat and actuality of disappearance—are tied to Kocot’s effort at religious understanding and transformation of suffering.

The recognition of the closeness of her husband’s name to the charged word (“Daemon”) that, in a Christian context, has two very different meanings, one implying a potentially positive energy and the other linked to devilry, parallels difficult questions suggested by the anaphora “how” and the reiteration of “trans” (or the problem of crossing). A musical composer is involved in “transposition” of keys, and Kocot the poet knows the difficulties of “translating” her love for him and her loss of him into language that can re-present this emotionally for readers: “I’m making my pilgrimage from Word to Thing” (43). The question of how to “transcend” the “fate” of tragic separation and to maintain the “fate” of “joy” through religious “transfiguration” is a burden that fragile written words must assume. Kocot seeks to climb past literary theory” (54)—i.e. Derrida’s and Baudrillard’s—and, like Ginsberg, who sought to levitate the Pentagon through the human voice, tries to assert utterance’s spiritual power: “I am speaking this poem as I am writing it my neighborhood” (52); “I turn on all the lights my neighborhood/ For this we were given a voice my neighborhood” (58-9). Aware of how poststructuralism has critiqued this “phonocentrism,” Kocot insists upon the urgency of her longing for a miracle that would transform or transfigure the “hole” into a “whole.”

In a sense, Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems is a collected bifurcation. The title’s first six words, indicating the long poem, locate Kocot’s inhabiting of a Ginsbergian style and mode (perhaps even more decisively than poets like Anne Waldman and Eliot Katz who were so aligned with him). The last three words, indicating “otherness,” signify a style bearing much greater resemblance to disjunctive experimentalism within the New York School and even to Language Poetry: “Softly bleats the irony on the table./ Softly bleats the . . . “ (“Tu Fu,” 14). Kocot should be proud of this bifurcation: she has the courage to make the intriguing differences within her work simultaneously available.

A representative poem among the sixteen “Other Poems” is “I’m Not Fighting It. But It Isn’t Doing Me Any Good.” “Poem for the End of Time” lacked end punctuation, whereas this single-strophe poem has a lot of it. This focuses attention on the connections and disconnections between successive fragments and sentences:

Neural white in welkin blue.

Traumatic acceptance in the blowing wind.

Too much inhaling deeply within the legal limit.

Closing one’s eyes in deference to the magma

Of wedding rings, I do not swagger beyond the solstice.

I want to hear the song of the twanging firmament,

A destiny whose entrails are a method. (16)

With its two sentences at loggerheads, the long title establishes how resignation is unsatisfactory; I would surmise that this involves the poet’s loss of her husband. The shift from the expected “neutral” to “neural white” suggests the ghostliness of a nervousness within “the blues.” Not an “acceptance” of past “trauma,” the act of acceptance itself produces trauma, even if it is preferable to the greater suffering of protracted denial. “The blowing wind” might be either a trope of prophecy (vatic immersion) or of externally inflicted pain. Since “inhaling deeply” implies the physical manifestation of either vexation or in-spir-ation, the defensive assertion of being “within” a “legal limit” positioned against excess (“too much”) links the anxious testing of degrees of sobriety/intoxication with sanity/insanity.

The speaker must protect her psyche against the eruptive potential of what “wedding rings” mean to her, as she carefully imposes limits on her emotions (with demarcations of heat and cold signified by “the solstice”) and on demonstrations of ego. The relatively straightforward expression of desire for transcendent perception (“song”) may serve as a longing for compensation for this suffering and restraint, but the second clause of the last sentence above is stunningly enigmatic, and the relationship of the two clauses is problematic. “Song” or “firmament” and “destiny” might be equated through apposition, or the poet may be listing the two in succession as components of her desire. What kind of “method” is the inner stuffing of “a destiny”? Are exposed “entrails” a trope for the materials of confessional poetry as a “method” for lamenting, or transcending a difficult fate? Kocot’s language is far too dense and indirect to be assimilable to confessionalism, but questions of exposure and concealment are surely implied.

The second half of this sonnet-length poem intensifies a sense of the widow’s double consciousness:

There are artichokes boiling on the stove,

A picture being hung,

A reversal of all known convictions in the semi-dark terrain.

I watch other people’s little windfalls

In the bright passage of days.

They fall beyond the precinct of chipped hands.

They fall beyond the trap door where love is burning. (16)

The adjective “known” calls attention to itself as it modifies “convictions”: while one tends to think of convictions as consciously held, perhaps unconscious convictions, elicited by daylight experience, can “reverse” them. The speaker’s observation of others’ “little windfalls” (which echoes the prior mention of “the blowing wind”), including such aspects of domesticity as cooking and hanging pictures, entails “a reversal” of the perspective that melancholic mourning, the acknowledgment that her “hands” are as irreparably “chipped” as damaged china, is the only possible response to such a loss. For the speaker, this reversal “isn’t doing . . . any good.” In fact, the reiteration of “fall” after “windfall” exudes a negativity that marks her alienation from others’ cheerful domesticity, even as she recognizes that her elegiac convictions involve falling through “a trap door” and that her “love’s” “burning,” along with ennobling fervor, involves violence, pain, and perhaps even self-destruction.

As it turns out, even though “I’m Not Fighting It. But It Isn’t Doing Me Any Good” is stylistically different from and less “political” than “Poem for the End of Time,” both are meditations on extremity and on severe loss. This is also true of most other poems in the first part of the book. Thus, bifurcation is too strong a word: stylistic diversity ably assists thematic continuity.