PILOT: JOHANN THE CAROUSEL HORSE by JOHANNES GÖRANSSON
reviewed by TYLER FLYNN DORHOLT
Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008.
If you are unfamiliar with the work of Johannes Göransson, whose first book A New Quarantine Will Take My Place (Apostrophe Books, 2007) shot up the poetry scene like a drive-by paintballing, Pilot: Johann the Carousel Horse will still have you as an active passenger in its expedition. On the other hand, if you are familiar with Göransson’s work—even better—for you will feel as though you are piloted from the land of A New Quarantine Will Take My Place to the island it may just have wanted to be on all along. Here we must note that Pilot can and does stand quite significantly on its own, but also further rewards a reader for coming from the pages of Göransson’s previous poems to existence within a grander, be it more stripped and danger-diving artifice. And these poems do dive; they even look dangerous on the page, moving in short staccato lines that pull off both brusqueness and concinnity: they are thin, they are fast, they are piloted.
In considering the paintballing aspect, I want to gesture at how it is both the feeling of being hit by the paintball and the various dottings they make that, after reading, will remain on your body and in your mind. Coincidentally, body is explosive in these poems; intricately, each poem dials its investigation with fast-paced placement of its particles—“the presenting parts/the palp pulps”[1]—traps its subject with interrogation—“cancel in/the aperture victim/we are applying/nickels to in”[2]—and portages the space between with turbulence. Here, and often within or next to the nursery rhymes (“gone wrong”) we are provided Swedish translations that often seem more like a mirroring, but are at once a necessary compulsion and a refreshing for/of the eye, as the eighth and ninth pages of “Los angeles torso-contains the concept for total liberation” suggest.
There are models Det finns modeler
to throng out of att tränga ut
the empire you must ur imperiet du måste
conduct bruise- föra sårbrusen genom
sounds through den nya ekonomin
the new economy leka tjuvochpolis
play policeandthief med det fantastika
with the fantastic exoskelettet
exoskeleton[3]
Perhaps one of the more pointed poems in the Carousel lot, this particular piece serves less as a form of unleashing its intent and thus more so a way of containing content. Content is intent in Pilot—nouns become verbs, verbs become nounal, muscles spasm within unsound. The “policeandthief” guide becomes a spectacular requirement for this tale, a necessary dualistic role choice for understanding the hypertrophy of the text. However, there doesn’t really exist a space between policing and thieving, either for the narrator or for the reader (the excitement coming in one’s choice of the two), and this realization becomes a way to work at the density of events taking place within each propelled form. Incidentally, and quite movingly, the jagged complexities in these poems arrive out of a language that carves into its subject—it is knowingly spare to the point in which there doesn’t exist a moment in where a word does not belong, as if the needles of a porcupine have been dislodged, converted to a brush, and sent to stridently comb through the community of the text.
I heart your soundproof
landscape exposed
silver in darkrooms
the kissing disease
is my cake and the viewer
should have cancer
drink champagne
out of your mother’s hands[4]
Despite the often-frenzied terrain, the references to the viewer allow him or her to put trust in the pilot, which highlights the importance of Pilot as title. In a sense we as readers need to be flown through this tale, for the control is in the hands of Johann the Carousel Horse and the subject-tinkering is best left up to the pilot. Nonetheless, since this flight jets through an incredibly intricate laboratory of tinkering, one must hunker down in their seat as not to leap over the victims having collapsed in the battle below—the text. And there is a sorted out battle here, a battle with scraps strewn about as ornaments and artifacts—shells everywhere, pearls abundant, chalk tossed all around, anemones for roam, torsos trammeled and traipsing, and within the unhinging of such space these artifacts turn into signifiers and in turn hold Pilot together with tenacity and seeming ease:
The concussion has been abused as a source of gazelle:[5]
While the exocity is
populated we black
in materials for
binges do not count
for you deter me
shove when I neck
out and kiss a woman
with my shell mouth
the light is on and
the spectators have
begun to shovel
Perhaps one of the most engrossing consistencies in Pilot, which there are many of and whose layers add surprise upon each rereading, is the commingling of tone and subject with a rapidity that demands a reader’s attention and benefits from their participation. Each poem, each paint ball, few of which rely on punctuation, jut out directly from the narrator’s theorizing, almost like Celan’s Atemwende, or “turning of our breath,” which makes reading these tales not only interactive but addicting. Furthermore, the multi-lingual sections and translations become equally imperative for one’s pulsing through the tale, in that they allow a breath similar to a roman numeral or asterisk in a long poem, but with a presence aesthetically revitalizing and a voice that knife-nips its subject with syllables.
Goransson is no stranger to the world in which language keeps a bullet in its gun. Directness, however, is less the fixture of confession within these poems and more so the mode in which subject remains in its cleanest and clearest place for retaining both the passion of the poem and the pleasure of its readers. The poem stakes out a muddy crevice in the bivouac of language in which to plan its attack, and here I speak of attack as only that speed and aim in which a poem is given after having been polished. It must additionally be noted that the poems in Pilot have and act on their ability to be dynamic as separate entities, hence the quasi-militaristic adjectives here employed.
The auditory body has been prolonged with cruelty:
The child acquires its
internal systematic
clang we apply a cancer
metaphor but it is
nerve show for nightingales
a rancid throat has been
industrialized streamlined
for the invitation
to the retro-city
where the auditory
no longer fits into
a mannequin I belong
in the theatre I have voice[6]
The reappearance of exocity and auditory topics in these poems effectively unsheathe themselves and dig right into their landscape, often arriving as key signs from behind the narrator’s megaphone. Exotic has its root in particle physics and from what I understand of it has an element of being deterred by gravity. As too, do these poems, I’d say. Yet grounding is impertinent here and the multiplicity of the exoskeleton, anatomically speaking, admits its vulnerability to predators and environments. The poems (flights) of Pilot acknowledge the susceptibility of character to place and in moving quite fast and willingly through this place succeed in carrying the tale of Johann the Carousel Horse to its end. Which is not to say a reader won’t receive a declarative end within this book, for it toys with its powers to return to the place in which it arose. This is the madcap allure of Göransson’s work, the propulsion of the speaker’s linguistic limbs as having moved freely through an often unknown and feared territory, a territory that exists during but more so after colonization, after the shells have been disjointed then fastened to the mouth of the speaker in a place devoid of sound, flattened with chaos. Here, dismantling is assemblage:
Seashell:[7]
Has to be scolded
will not be
interrupted
should not arrive
like pigs
will not constitute
a wilderness
will not be hosed off
The shells might be the most recurring images in the text, but they are also the most vivid and transformative motifs present within the tale. Playing with sound and unsound throughout, some of Göransson’s characters have shell mouths, and all the implications of sound inside a shell end up parlaying a smattering of sounds into the colossal sound of unsound. Whereas A New Quarantine Will Take My Place was a drive-by paintballing, Pilot is the result of many drive-bys, of a land abandoned and revamped, a trapping of the sound of a photograph of the paintball on the way to its target, a result of the human inside itself and without a sound onstage and glittering.
The receiver is threatened
we pass the visible
traces of hundreds of millions
insects are
burned in the fields for
five minutes
the turbulence girls us
in public out
with the pressure voice
the unsound takes effect
in the receiver
the natural drama
glittering films[8]
That the book begins with a poem entitled “Inland Empire” is a play I’m still enjoying a varied reading of (this duplicity is a gem), for it not only nods at then opens the surreal ground upon which David Lynch operates (in his film of the same name), but it also secures the story’s place within Los Angeles, a place as placeless as can be and thus understandably proper for Johann the Carousel Horse to trek through. I hesitate to proffer my own close reading any more than I have. There is an immediacy of ecstasy for the reader in Pilot, which also makes reader instantaneously a character in the tale; incidentally, reader-as-character always impresses an immersion into fantasy and inescapable joy.
What it might be keen to note is how these poems answer a certain call that it seems Göransson’s early work posited theories for answering. Pilot pulsates with bare-boned brevity and visceral density. Sounds stick, characters collapse and are silently plucked back into the plane. In reading Pilot I always felt willing to be passenger and will, with quick staccato kick, be so again, even if knowing that I cannot stay for long. I insist you become a passenger too reader, for Pilot’s thrill is unpreventable and dangerous, its immersion is skeletal and surreal, and its author, Johannes Göransson, proves that he can traverse a wild scene with poise. Additional flights will not be delayed. They will come around swift and they will make their mark.