Eric Baus

The To Sound

Verse Press

2004

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Reviewed by Monica Fambrough

“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective,” suggests filmmaker Stan Brakhage in his first book, Metaphors On Vision:

“…an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure in perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to a baby unaware of ‘Green?’”

A debut collection by poet Eric Baus seeks an answer to that question, as it asks us to consider the role of language in perception and communication. So often in contemporary poetry, emerging writers present their readers with simple ideas that have been intentionally disguised and mystified through distorted language and syntax. The To Sound reverses this trend with its relentless efforts to clarify some enormously complicated ideas. For Brakhage, the challenge was to give “form to his eyesight” through the medium of film. The To Sound documents individual efforts to communicate, through language, what is seen, while what is seen is constantly shifting and blurring beneath the lens of subjectivity. How is it that anyone is able to understand anyone else, when what we see is always distorted by our subjectivity, and what we say inevitably falls short of what we mean? Baus’s untitled poem in the first section of the book (page 15) explains:

I was thinking birds with extremely long necks

And my sister sees I was using words I didn’t know she nods and we know

a voice

my mouth uses rain to say the body is a sequence

that counts

as it moves the body is a museum

where we apologize for our voices

There is no specific word for the unknown birds in the poem, only a description of them, and the sister “sees a voice” rather than hearing or understanding anything. Traditional ways of seeing and speaking fail repeatedly throughout the collection, as illustrated above, and by the following excerpt from “Dear Birds, Nothing works the same way twice” (17).

If I say my eyes are quotation marks pulled across the sky, I mean the

way a beaten wing is parallel to treading water. I’m sorry for

transcribing the incendiary tenor you never wanted read into

your movements.

As readers, we feel the frustrations of the speaker. Nothing works the same way twice. Near homophones and syntactic shifts are screens and filters, inhibiting our own abilities to derive clear meaning from the text. But the difficulty is not difficulty for difficulty’s sake. It is an effort to make meaning in the midst of miscommunication. Language is suspect, and its traditional habits must be circumvented if any real connections between the writer and the reader are to be made.

Language doesn’t exist in a vacuum, either. It is always dynamically shaping and being shaped by our perception. The need for a truer, liberated form of seeing is articulated again and again in The To Sound. Images of eyes (particularly, damaged eyes), filtered vision, dimness and shadow permeate the book, with at least one of these elements appearing on every page. The first poem in the collection begins, “covered every window with x-rays of my bandaged eye” (11). The third poem is titled, “Dear birds, there is no natural light in here”(13). Or, there’s my favorite, on page 21, the speaker states, “I’ve got my ‘dealing from the bottom of the deck’ goggles on.” This is just a small sampling of what could easily become a list of hundreds of sight-related images. Also included are instruments of light and communication: light bulbs and radios, filaments and transistors.

Baus does not allow these preoccupations to become empty motifs or overextended metaphors. Instead, he connects the problem of seeing clearly with the problem of communication, a connection that is highlighted by the epistolary form Baus employs. Many of the poems in the book are in the form of letters, primarily to an unknown and seemingly distant “sister,” and occasionally, to birds. Something about the letters gives the impression that they are never received by their addressees, and as readers we feel a little guilty at intercepting them. Perhaps it is our interception that prevents them from reaching their destination. Are we, the readers, an impediment to communication in poetry? The answer is, at least in some ways, yes. As speakers and writers, we inevitably take part in the distortion of meaning simply by broadcasting and receiving words through our own subjective instruments of interpretation. Baus is implicating us when he asks, “Why are there so many cracks in my monocle, so much secondhand ink still left on my instruments?” (60). The “secondhand ink” in particular is admission of the ambiguously beneficial relationships between writers, their past and present influences. Sometimes the language we love, absorb, and imitate gets in the way of what we need to say.

The writer’s awareness of the destructive capabilities of language is one of the more delicate and powerful elements of The To Sound. The speaker suffers (“The way I asked you to say what you saw left me blind for half the morning” [26]) and the addressees are damaged (“embers lighting through her throat” [25]) as a result of their efforts to communicate. But despite the poems’ insistence that vision is a false experience and language is a sort of “sieve,” through which only part of what we mean may pass, some truth does get through. To see how Baus achieves this feat, we need only turn to the title of the book.

The To Sound points us to the eponymous final poem of the collection, a poem to which an entire section is devoted. The language crystallizes, shines outward, and for once, it feels as though the intended audience is not some bird or sister at a distance, but rather the reader herself. And for once, it seems as though the speaker feels confident that he is making sense. Interestingly, “The To Sound” is probably the most syntactically incoherent poem of the collection. Envision the gentle green complaint of the word processor’s grammar check as you read:

If I could amplify your glass. Atone for the sound of my incessant lips.

You are a. Too. Tuned to has. Ash.

You are the you and. The to sound. The utter the.

If I have to spit out all my teeth to stay in the.

The. Is it all to say the weight of the?

If I could stay lost to sound. If a single eye could say two.

(79-80)

The lines fall at what feels like the climax of the poem, and they are delivered with such direct assurance, they seem, after the struggles they are built on, to make perfect sense. The speaker is no longer in fear of the layers, the homophonic doubling, the distance between perception and intention. Finally, after our awkward and broken travel through the lexicon, we have arrived at a place that feels comfortable, even confident, with words.

If you pick up any journal of contemporary poetry that carries even a small amount of avant-garde cache, you will find a poem by a new young poet who exudes this confidence, celebrating the endless possibilities of language. List poems, sound poems, pun poems—they are all there, and they are all doing what, to a young poet, would seem natural. But The To Sound reminds us of the dangers of such fair-weather forays into the medium. Language distorts both what we see and what we mean to say. It is “a reverb strung through doubled arms, talking down a wall of stunted endings” (76). It is “stretched over the injured skin of lost and familiar waters” (75). And it is not always fun. Though The To Sound concludes on a celebratory note, it has a commitment to language that is less exhilarated, more honest. The words being celebrated are not dredged up from the bottom of the OED, but rather, they are the underappreciated glue of our everyday speech. They are framed in such a way that we notice them, when ordinarily, we would not. For once, we cannot avoid hearing the sound of what we continually say. The poem concludes:

To breathe glass. To unwind a wing.

To say the entire wound as window. Stone turned to sound.

If the sting unwound itself as sleet. As rain in the cut stem.

If the window to pronounce magnifies.

You are the one after end. The burned bird I woke up in.

(80)

It is as if, all along, we have not been paying attention to what is important. The To Sound is not so much a collection that expects us to derive pleasure solely from rhythm and sound any more than it expects its meaning to be transparent through language. It is, rather, an illumination of the nature of language, of looking, and of listening. If we watch a film strictly in search of its narrative, we will miss out on the beauty of its movement and light. If we use words only as a tool for communication, we might miss out on the beauty of “the to sound.”