Catherine Meng. Tonight’s The Night. Apostrophe Books, 2007.

Review by Brandon Shimoda

I like to imagine Catherine Meng writing her poems in an abandoned Presbyterian church in an unspecified city, sitting at a table pushed up against a stained-glass window from which a pane is missing, allowing a clear yet triangular view of the surrounding landscape—urban street and park—to distract, when not informing, the periphery of her concentration. The keystone of her composition is the chair in which she sits: a wooden folding chair modified to the perfect height so that her wrists are leveled precisely above the paper on which she writes. The composition process itself a matter of conforming a developing set of materials to a pre-determined structure, much like the fitting of colored panes of glass into a lead frame; in other words, a process strict, with minimal improvisation.

I also like to imagine her leaving the church at the end of the day with a scroll of poems within her coat, joining a devoted group of friends at a bar around the corner, passing the poems among their generous hands, working and re-working them through her friends’ critical voices and, as the night draws increasingly worn, their combinatorially entropic and repetitive suggestions and thought processes. In other words, a process loose, with an allowance of improvisation.

After months, if not years, of this daily, dialectical pattern, the result—Tonight’s the Night, the inaugural publication by Apostrophe Books, a press committed to addressing the perceived lack of editorial work devoted to the “hybridization and intersection of poetic discourse with theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and pataphysics”—arrives, vanquishing both church and bar, solitude and companionship, interior and exterior, process and appropriation.

Of course, this is all speculation, but the imagining itself spins off Meng’s “Author’s Note” at the front of the book, which states that the poems “began as an experiment in repetition after reading biographies of both Neil Young and Glenn Gould.” Whether or not “began” suggests that Meng ultimately sloughed off the original prospectus for the poems, both Young and Gould factor fundamentally in their provenance, and stand, in many ways, as the lodestones to which the first seven pages of epigraphic material adhere. Both were born in Toronto and both are/were famously devoted to their individual tasks and beliefs, including musical works met with both critical acclaim and occasional confusion. Anything beyond that would also be speculation, though it seems that the differences between their approaches to composition and performance are integrated, if not embodied, in Meng’s poems. In fact, it is the idea of difference itself, and where difference verges into opposition, that the poems, with a soft mallet, crack themselves richly open.

Tonight’s The Night consists of forty-eight poems, all sharing the same title: “Tonight’s The Night,” which could, when read, act as either choral chant or a series of desperate and self-stimulating amnesiac affirmations. Tonight is what night? Tonight is the night! Neil Young sings it as elegy; Meng takes the repetition of the line to create a tautological structure, into which recurring words, objects, concepts, movements, images, materials qua materials, are placed, generated not as elegiac principles, but as a viral code attacking such principles. Let’s visit, for example, the majority of the first of the forty-eight poems:

In April it snows your favorite song. It wraps around your ankles

where Bach should be. Eyes confuse leafless trees with artificial trees.

Toward chord curve, towards trucks

barreling into their breaks where the lights of the city pick up

you follow the line. Shitting troops of geese

bellow toward an ugliness which wobbles weird,

the bald tire they make of the sky. Where this world folds

exposed to sun you can learn

about face. The articulate patterns of each blade of grass

…

While the videographer films a chopstick

tracing statues in window steam…

Many of the motions are similar to those in the opening of “The Waste Land”—April, snow, tree (leafless vs. dead), city, eyes (confuse vs. failed), lights, sun—yet their employments are different, not merely establishing the poetic and psychic environment, but exposing its pixels, as “the videographer films a chopstick / tracing statues in window steam.” If there was a chopstick, for example, creating the physical out of the ephemeral, it is only so by way of the videographer’s eye. Yet, both film and camera are the statues being traced of the eye’s steam-mechanisms—or, at least, the necessary components to make the mind manifest. Where within this dynamic does the poet fit? If the poet necessitates the instrument of a videographer to capture an image, and if the videographer necessitates the instrument of the camera to accept his/her assignment by the poet, then what is the poet’s ultimate function, in the company of such secondary and tertiary removes? And what are the images that these aids collaborate to create? In “Tonight’s The Night” #43: “Images exist solely to spread their own news” and “Images exist at all times. It’s just a matter of when / they decide it’s time to start.” Further complicating the dynamic, these estimations present images as self-creating, forms of their own, internal instruments, negating the necessity for poet and videographer—instruments aside—altogether.

And yet why, as recurring image-emblems, the pickaxe, geese, windmills, and the color green? Why a chopstick? Is it an eating utensil or a rudimentary piano tune? And how do either relate to Bach? Is there really any difference between “Chopsticks” and “Goldberg Variations” aside from the either facile or complex organization of notes? The “chopstick” reappears nine times throughout the poems; Bach twenty-two times, though it is well before the twenty-second cameo that Bach, the composer, is supplanted by Bach, the simulacra. For example, read the following inventory of Bach out loud:

1. It wraps around your ankles where Bach should be; 2. Maybe this is where Bach should be; 3. Bach’s head cracked open with a soft mallet; 4. if we keep Bach at the length of a chopstick; 5. what Bach is; 6. then Bach is; 7. what Bach is; 8. Bach was no robot; 9. Bach was a peach of a guy who came for art’s sake but stayed for the rice wine; 10. Did Bach fold the laundry or out-source the job?; 11. Bach has no true face; 12. Bach went weird in it; 13. What calls Bach half-naked to the mirror?; 14. even Bach with his ear to the flock & his hands on the keys; 15. Bach wanders unaware; 16. Bach found it a cruel thing; 17. Bach thought talk of birds was something she might faint from; 18. which Bach cut his finger on; Bach: I’m applied & I’m tired; 19. It was Bach; 20. Because Bach knows; 21. Bach worries momentarily on the birdlessness of the sky; 22. Bach should be, blade beyond blade, wave beyond wave, where the octopus emotes…

The repetition may conjure the emergent voice of an exasperated chicken, or the rhythmic materiality of language akin to that in the poems of Lisa Jarnot and Harryette Mullen (owing both to Stevens and Stein), but the repetition of “Bach” also forces a misplacement of Bach within his own name or, rather, the negation of Bach by way of poetic appropriation. Bach—as do the other aforementioned emblems—becomes grist for the [wind]mill. As “Tonight’s The Night” #18 avers, somewhat duplicitously, “if / you are looking for action, you are in the wrong place / because nothing happens in these poems.” That might be exactly right: what is happening is the formulation of nothing—or only-thing?—by the repetition of poetic materials into oblivion. (Williams’ oft-quoted maxim, “No ideas but in things” was immediately followed by the word, “Invent!”)

There is, however, relevance in Bach besides being an analogue for the invention of a thing into invisibility. What is relevant between Bach and Meng, and in relation to Glenn Gould, is the concept of the fugue. All of the epigraphs in Tonight’s The Night attributed to Glenn Gould are related to the idea and the problem of the fugue, a mode of contrapuntal (indicating multiple, yet independent, melodic lines) compositional practice engaged by both Bach and Gould. The fugue, here, seems to be guiding the project by way of its use of exposition, imitation and counterpoint (“the counter-point of snow,” “Tonight’s The Night” #36). The voices that Meng lets sing are like the “grass & geese” let fly from “Bach’s head cracked open with a soft mallet.” The poems unfold with gathering momentum, each poem, each line, developing through variations of image and voice—at times clinical, at times spontaneous, a little bit Gould, a little bit Young. It is worth quoting “Tonight’s The Night” #13 (originally published in jubilat) in its entirety:

A thief returns & puffs pillows, arranges sheets

& sleeps with his axe in the ice chest.

A thief stashes his axe in the ice chest while he sleeps.

While he sleeps, a thief’s axe waits in the ice chest

alongside ground beef. Alongside ground beef

a thief’s axe waits while he sleeps. A thief sleeps

while cattle stand hoof deep in the cattle yard

waiting to die & return as ground beef.

A thief sleeps & he dreams he is flying, he dreams

he is a man who plays a fabulous drum.

He sleeps & he dreams as the cattle must. Of grass

& geese. This is to say a thief sleeps soundly.

This is to say there is only one melody, the rest

are borrowed. Occasionally one will return

& burn down the barn.

Contrary to the contrapuntally derived nature of the fugue, the poem states that “there is only one melody,” yet sneaking in the qualification that “the rest / are borrowed,” subtly contradicting its claim. The claim follows twelve lines of exposition, subjects and counter-subjects, answers and counter-expositions. “This is to say” enacts the fugal coda, with which the poems in Tonight’s The Night are rife.

It is frequently in the final lines of a poem that Meng reveals herself—or “a” self—albeit through minutely dissembling exegetical acts. “This is to say…,” for example, culminates, while confusing, the preceding lines. (As a side note, I’ve had, for some time now, Meng’s MFA creative thesis on my bedside shelf. It is a collection of poems entitled Dissembly, which is among the holdings of the University of Montana’s Mansfield Library. It contains the poem “Possible Perceptions” which reads, in its entirety, “Perchance.” I see also that Meng received her undergraduate degree from the College of Santa Fe, which as Neil Young tells us, is “less than 90 miles away.” My apologies to Catherine for exposing this information…)

There is something important in the yielding of song in the dream in “Tonight’s the Night” #13, a song arriving in the form of a “fabulous drum”—visceral rhythm. Everywhere throughout Tonight’s The Night, the poems draw both eye and ear toward sound—from “In April it snows your favorite song” to “green grew beyond bearable until it was / no longer the color itself—& this / was how music was discovered” to “go to the window & watch for the sound”—in a complex reinforced by Heidegger’s stanzaic meditation on synesthetic thought: “As soon as we have the thing before / our eyes, and in our hearts an ear / for the word, thinking prospers.” When, in “Tonight’s The Night” #46, the poem begins, “Breeze marks the difference / between scrap metal & music,” it is as if the repletion of windmills—as the pickaxe, the geese, the chopstick, and so on—become the instruments of thought with the form capable to dictate poem over refuse, or the ability to compose one out of the other. There is a profusion of fine lines—in both senses—in which opposites attract. “With the obvious / avoidance of drums / the drums announce themselves,” reads “Tonight’s The Night” #44, music born of opposition.

Tonight’s The Night comes on very much like the opening of the Neil Young song of the same name: gradually, assuredly, with each pronouncement of itself opening up a parallel emotive passage. I love the song—it makes me giddy in the way that many artfully repetitive compositions do, and I find myself flushing giddily with the poems in Catherine Meng’s book in a similar way. It is repetition, yes, but it is moreso the alterations in form that, through repetition, result in a wholly different composition from the one originally commenced, so that the poetic face is familiar and foreign, simultaneously. It is the giddiness that accompanies time spent with a voice that is always new, no matter how many times encountered. When Neil Young sings “Tonight’s the night” over and over again, he is building an environment of expectation that renews itself with every listen. I’m not entirely sure how many times I’ve read Catherine Meng’s Tonight’s The Night, but, like listening to an album, or attempting to decode the vagaries of interrelations possessed within the repeated listening of any musical composition, the number of times is irrelevant in the face of the expressive object as multivalent and protean experience…

because the asking is a cutting in two & we already know

this is a one trick pony galloping

gallantly toward a ripe field of grass, the whole field

unwinding in glorious s-curves, as the road does

on a night like tonight when the wind…