BODY CLOCK by ELENI SIKELIANOS
reviewed by JESSE MORSE
Coffee House Press. 2008.
Four years after the simultaneous release (October 1st, 2004) of Eleni Sikelianos’ widely praised and translated The California Poem, and her hybrid memoir of her father, The Book of Jon, Sikelianos’ new book, Body Clock (Coffee House Press), inquires after the relationship of the body (specifically the metamorphosis undergone during pregnancy) to the concept of time. At times the philosophical nature of this work is intense and difficult, reminiscent of The California Poem. Yet resounding throughout Body Clock is a celebratory tone for the birth of her baby girl. The magical interplay of these two moods gives Body Clock its sustenance. Sikelianos’ skillful weaving of the everyday (poems about her child) with the metaphorical (delving into the nature of time and growth) lead one to believe she could write adeptly and with excitement about anything.
Those who reaped the great reward of completing The California Poem can find a similar long line and music throughout Body Clock. Though the subject differs, Sikelianos’ confident voice does not. There is a hybrid aspect. A great deal of fascinating new words. An ability to maintain a landscape (in this case, time), to consciously move toward and away from it, to paint it in a clearer light.
The eight sections that make up Body Clock alternate between the body clock and poems concerned with a larger world. From an interview with Selah Saterstrom:
Before I was writing the “Body Clock” poems, and while I was writing them, too, I was also writing poems that were engaged in the “outside” world, because it kept throwing its language and problems and ideas into my household. The first section of the book includes a long poem I’d written while living in New York in the aftermath of 9/11. It seemed important to have the world and home (body) side by side in this manuscript, so the sections alternate between something that might be called “world” and “home” sections. They begin to interpenetrate more and more as the poems go on, though they don’t ever totally merge.
(Coffee House Press Release)
Sikelianos’ explorations (What kind of time is occurring inside my body? How do growth and time relate? How do I represent time? When does the outside world get involved?) are embodied textually and graphically. The drawings, attempts to physically depict hours and minutes, done by Sikelianos herself, are difficult to imagine without the book in your hands. Circles, lines and dots make up minutes. In the later pages of the book, hours graduate to flowers and jellyfish-like swirls.
Thus the time at work in Body Clock is multi-faceted. The alternating sections remind one of a minute hand, slowly ticking. Confronted with Sikelianos’ natural longhand, an image of the author comes into view (sitting at her desk, writing and drawing, taking time). There is the time of the baby growing in Sikelianos’ womb; the visceral time of the outside world. The inquiries Sikelianos makes are, in a sense, timeless. Sikelianos’ experiments with hours and minutes (taking precisely that amount of time to construct a poem-drawing) make up a whole other kind of time.
an hour is not an hour
if it takes 1 minute
48 seconds to draw (p.97)
These experiments with minutes and hours are the most original and refreshing aspect of Body Clock. Sikelianos places copies of the original poem-drawings above the typed-out “residues” of the text. From the “NOTES ON MINUTES AND HOURS” at the back of the book:
I began making sketches in my notebook to clarify an experience in which I found my self languageless. In this strange new condition, the outside body was acting like a clock, engaged in a timed performance out of which a product would emerge. The inside body was a body preparing to move from timelessness to time... My initial plan was not to find poems, but to find time. Soon, I realized, in the hours, that these were poem-drawings. If it will help the reader, I add: the handwritten words were made within the hour and its line-gestures. The typed language below, which appears as a footnote, is the language residue of the experiment. The shaped residue of language is the portion I’m most willing to let clarity represent. (p. 149)
This ambition to “find time” comes through again and again in Body Clock. The whole book could be read as a variance on this mission. If time were a balloon, Sikelianos pokes it in myriad places, each offering leaving a unique though similar indentation; a representation of how we might register time, both clock-time (a human construct) and body-time. In fact, Sikelianos engages with both these aspects of time simultaneously, using the precise measurement of an hour, or a minute, to frame her body-time explorations.
From the “First experiment with an hour”:
1:24:50 pm now I have filled the hour’s outer petals with arrows the baby
cries she is hun
gry
I do not suffer
symmetrophobia
I see symmetry and asymmetry
unfold that is
just like an
hour its amours arrows as
gleeful spermatozoa
rushing to meI see this corner (petal) of the hour peaking like an ancient
wave, a shark’s fin or an
antique prow inside are
capsized e’s
curled needles, gleaming golden sharp (p.100)
The “residue” continues in its interpretation of the drawing Sikelianos herself has made. The “residue” recounts her baby’s actions. It contemplates on “the humans I / love and live with.” The poetry is surprising and invigorating. With the enigmatic drawings and Sikelianos’ subsequent self-interpretations, an extremely intimate snapshot of the author, and her concerns, develops.
***
One predominant recurring character in Body Clock (besides the author and Eva Grace, her baby) is, fittingly, Venus. The Roman goddess of love and fertility acts, naturally, as an entry point for Sikelianos’ constant, wondering mind - a historical figure and backdrop to ground her ethereal musings. Sikelianos reveals a “world of things” found in “Venus’s Cabinet.” Venus “rises over the hills” of the remnants of “the sweet city” (New York after 9/11). Here, in one of the more intriguing, stand-alone pieces:
What thing time can’t shatter
________________________
watch a yellow
curve, curve yellow – can you? and a
pool of shadow. How the lemon
dives into its own (shadow), or is birthed
from an umbilicus
of it like
Venus on a darker wave.
Two pools of shade intersect. You learn
that the lemon has a half-life
of light. This lemon might
hurl itself from space
torpedoing like a sun-field into
the baby-sphere. Yellow [f]lies down in the bed
of the lemon, wakes
the baby who was sleeping there
like a hard bar of sunlight. (p. 42)
Venus, surely not the focus of the poem, provides a balance and point of reference for the poem to revolve around. The lemon-yellow movement and visual light of the poem find ground in the figures of Venus and the baby. The “baby-sphere” is the landscape Sikelianos works in. The poems are her renderings.
***
Amidst all of Sikelianos’ philosophical and temporal investigations, there are brief moments of pure music. Take Fragment, unnumbered:
a book
of hours made of body
fluids the skull falls
into ruin, rain .
now warm the winter throat
of my loves
(p.79)
It’s impossible to read that line (“now warm the winter throat / of my loves”) without, if you are a poet, acknowledging how beautiful it is, and, in turn, feeling better because of it. To begin the fragment with such uncomfortable imagery and deftly move into the rhythm and solace of warm winter throats gives one, frankly, reason to cheer.
For fear of proselytizing, I will admit that Sikelianos’ work, and Body Clock is no exception, takes a great deal of time and energy to digest. For this critic, that is a gigantic plus. If you are new to poetry, however, or appreciate poems that rhyme, you may want to wait a few years before tackling Body Clock. Not that the poems taken individually are difficult, per se. Just that getting your head around an entire book of them as one entity, as a philosophical exploration into one subject, could be overwhelming. Sikelianos is one of the most ambitious writers working today. Any reader should give her the proper time and attention.