Recovery Project

The Leafless American
Edward Dahlberg

Edward Dahlberg was born in 1900. He was certainly a writer of bodily rhythms--his prose sharpens the senses, his eye weighs as precisely as it perceives. A true writer is a learned reader. One wise man will conduct you to another. . . On my desert isle, I would consider packing the collected works of Dahlberg, Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, if only for the added pleasures of the ghost-libraries animated by their books. We cannot perceive what we canonize. The citizen secures himself against genius by icon worship. Dahlberg seems to have avoided icon status, and still speaks directly to us, if only because he is blessed to not have one rock of a work to be buried beneath. One must be in league with all his writings to have a true sense of him. I've just begun high-stepping thru, and am still a bit sense-less. The Leafless American is a later work, produced in his sixties; it begins with a wistful prose poem that conjures the ethnopoetic energies of Alcheringa and Jerome Rothenberg's great quote-unquote primitive anthologies of the period; a call for a primal, original poetry of sinew-and-bone hewn intelligence. Throughout, Dahlberg's erudition and near-reckless proclamations create endlessly provoking passages, from suggesting that the US is (at last) a classless society (for the rich and poor both seek out the same base entertainments) to providing Nietzsche as a counterweight to the modern tendency of "desperado inertia". If Mr. Dahlberg loved the world, it was with a love that was mean and true; unlike his Twain, he is not "doting mad" for his memories. His native Kansas City has a crotch-rot scent. No poet can reflect a past with which he is not sorely at war. He captures with a lived-in wisdom the smut and religion of Missouri, the "venereal queen[s]" and "Brigham Young addict[s]". He also turns Spain over and over in his palms, exploring with an indifferent eye: his Spaniard is an expert idler though a careless shopkeeper, easily confused by giving change--yet, Dahlberg reassures us, Arithmetic is very bad for a nation . . . unless it has to do with navigation or the stars. Footsteps are traced all over the Spanish countryside: Picasso, Menelaos, Goering's widow.

One of the seven deadly sins of literature is a book review. I am quoting Dahlberg heavily to pacify his ghost, to keep him an arm's-length away--for years he haunted Charles Olson for failing to review (as Olson promised) The Flea of Sodom. I'm not aiming to pick up that bag of bones, but maybe merely to make public notice--I've seen enough to know that I'm getting with fast company when I enter Dahlberg's world. He peers over the entrance to Ronald Johnson's ARK. He's a sufficient enough watchdog, I think. Maybe this is a small public rite for me, trying to conjure his energy and ferocity into my own occasionally slack-jawed thinking. Twenty years of schooling, and I'm just now starting to put my own little gang together--I'm thinking my Virgil (who doesn't want one?) is a Dr. Frankenstein's monster. I nominate Dahlberg as the eye.

My favorite piece in this book is called "Methuselah's Funeral," which may be an elegy for Dahlberg's cat, or perhaps just Dahlberg composing in a Smart-ish mood--it's a strange piece, of ancient blood:

     The Islander is of Asian origin, and his curried vice sticks out in his long, but vacant Sumerian nose. His main occupation is sloth, although he is a clam-digger, and does some cat-trading. He has a cat-cemetery, and he buries animals in the same graveyard with his mother and father. It is hard to know whether it is a Siamese or a father that lies beneath a scrub-pine cross or a cement-block slab. The epitaphs are also misleading, for the grief inscribed in tender words on the headstones would awaken the most apathetic heart. "Here lies my baby, Samuel Shad, born April 12, 1935, who lived but four years, dying of gout; I overfed him, Jesus spare me."
     "This is the tomb of Timothy M., who ate too many moths, but who was good as the Apostle for whom he was named. Selah."
     "Jacob Stotesbury, Jan 4, 1867, d. Mar 2, 1929, R.I.P."
     "This is my Sister, Cherub Rahab, may she have happiness in Canaan, and may I be buried at her side, my hand in hers."

I'm unsure if Dahlberg needs recovering--he's always been back there, waiting, giving us (in the mist) direction. Alexander was embalmed in honey, and so are all his acts, because men care more for prodigies than they do for the wise or the just. I have no desire to embalm this book. Do I want to dig up the man, and then point? I'm unsure. I've only begun to read him. I want to bless the books (The Leafless American, The Flea of Sodom, Can These Bones Live?) I have read thus far (when I say "bless" I mean a cat blesses the shaft of light that enters a room by making it the subject of its leisure and bodily attention)--Dahlberg's difficulties may have stemmed from this: he belongs more to this, the post-American century, where the focus will be less on the "either/or" of the novel or the lyric poem, or the mainstream or experimental tradition, and more on the "either/or" of writing of Character or Personality. (Character as that which endures and enriches, regardless of its genre. Personality as that which charms and persuades, regardless of its source.) The more I grant myself permission, the more I seek Character in myself and others. Here's my hope for Edward Dahlberg, writer of Character--a second life. All knowledge, and what we call the intellect, is only the wisdom of the body.

The poems here are little and fragile. They are old women dying alone in drafty back bedrooms. If you enter, you have to be quiet-they have important things to say, but you'll need to lean in to hear them. Every word Wong May writes in this, her first collection of poems, is important because she writes as if she has few to spare, as if she's going to die before she gets to the end each of poem. In "Point of View", I imagine just that-longer lines like deeper breaths getting shorter (shallower), two-line stanzas like heart beats getting weaker until the last stanza is erratic:

These are transparencies between time & space,
Pork-rinds which when held against light

                        Death, I am
                        (I am afraid)
                        Fascinated

In this poem, we are given a pig. As promised in the title, this is a book of animals. This is a book where each poem uses an animal to chew (pigs, dogs, cows, tigers, etc.) and peck (chickens, black birds, etc.) at our sensibilities, where an animal manifests itself as our own sense of fear, where an animal, in a sense, becomes a mascot for our own deaths. Wong May is dying here, figuratively of course, and at her figurative bedside are animals. Some of the few poems where animals are not in attendance are the poems directly written to her mother. Perhaps the animal manifestation in these cases must remain implied. The figurative death in "Dear Mama" is in her own abandonment of her mother in China (presumably to come to the States):

                        By the same token I leave you,
                        I leave myself (with you). The
                        going forth

                        henceforth a grafted green
                        fit to live
                                    or die.
                        By the same token I leave

                        you living,
                                    dying, or
                        unfit for both, waiting

                        for my return: Your
                        big eyes,
                                    short arms
                        that I inherited, failed.

In a poem not addressed to her mother, where animals manifest themselves as signifiers of death, an old lady is looking for birthday cards at Kresge, "Bending over/the birthday cards (like/a camel on 3 legs) the old lady//asks me to pick her one/her mouth is chicken-blood fresh". The birthday cards are reminders of our impending fate, and by comparing the old lady to a camel, Wong May manages to convert one our most durable, life-giving animals into one about to collapse into its unavoidable doom. The blood of chickens, one of our most fragile animals, is shed unendingly, but because the blood is fresh, it is full of life and offers a sharp juxtaposition to the images that come just before it.

These poems are not Haiku. But, like Haiku, there is so much weight in what is not being said. There is a wordlessness here that is so profound-Wong May is very careful with the words she doesn't include. BGBOA is an experiment perhaps in Haiku that has unraveled itself, has become completely undisciplined, but retains that core minimalism from when it was once tightly wound. Please, Wong May, break my heart at the end of "Apology" with syllables achingly close in count to that of Haiku:

                        You owe me just this:
                        A bundle of dead birds.
                        I won't want it.

Please Wong May, in "The American Best Seller", scare the bejeezus from me with your wordlessness:

                        "This is me your
                        murderer calling from
                        Florida at 3:15
                        sorry to wake you
                        up I'm describing
                        that scene
                        I need your

                        help." Let me
                        think
                        about it
                        I say, and I

                        walk barefoot
                        to the bathroom
                        & wash my face

In their unraveling from the traditional form, a perfect lack of balance has been found. The bulk of these poems make me incredibly uneasy-particularly because of all that is missing. But also because Wong May sheds a good amount of blood and she has a dirty mouth-it is all really very becoming. She doesn't close the doors that she opens, and worse yet, she opens the doors that are already open, and closes the doors that are already closed. Perhaps these are David Ignatow poems that she has written, that have been pecked at by black birds.

But unlike Ignatow, I think, Wong May is much more concerned with where her words are on the page. Her decisions about lineation are essential to the success of the poem. I am in awe with this, partly because my own poems have no dependence on lineation. My words take hold in their own context, not necessarily through positioning. But I've no doubt experimented (maybe to no avail). Wong May's are somehow more beautiful to look at; her poems are to be appreciated with the eyes perhaps-perhaps poems to be read all at once, not from top to bottom. I see the spaces as much as I see the actual words. It is unclear how these poems don't topple over. As I read "Beer" over again, I realize that I do not read "(out of the house", but allow them to float, subconsciously.

                        There is this darkness rising
                        from under the table under
                        The bed

                        I'll give you 3 crumbs
                        if you stop at my breast

                        There it is climbing
                        up my legs. My left arm
                        is numb. Soon the table
                        will be floating

                                    (out of the house

                        With us at it
                        Still drinking beer

She allows the darkness to be even more mysterious by shifting our focus to "you" in the second stanza (am I the darkness?). This is where the uneasiness arrives. I am unsure how she feels about me. I am unsure how I feel about her. She makes me question both our roles in this whole mess. At the end of "Ankles": "Leave my ankles//alone you (who have/tossed me on your/knees) said probably//to Death or was it/Death speaking"

I've found myself drawn to Wong May's fragile little poems. They deserve more elbow-room in the conversation, and could serve as an appropriate second entry point for any look at Chinese-American poetry, or for that matter, a second entry point for anything that has come out of Iowa 3 or 4 decades ago.

This I do know about Wong May: She is almost completely undocumented, unphotographed, and unreviewed. She got a BA at the University of Singapore, got her MFA at the University of Iowa in 1968, and wrote three books of poems (Reports [1974] and Superstitions [1978]). In 1978, she curled up into a tiny ball and disappeared.