Pieces of Air in the Epic by BRENDA
HILLMAN
2005
Reviewed
by JEN
TYNES
Note: Read Jen Tynes’
Interview with Brenda Hillman here.
Brenda Hillman has
me thinking about the long poem. I appreciate speedy discoveries, but I am
invested in the big project. The story is extended indefinitely, until through
extension we become aware of its finity. It repeats
itself and returns to new things. It eventually reveals its body in a
meaningful way, strategy and realization of strategy for being part of the
world. Brenda Hillman’s Pieces of Air in the Epic says that it “is the
second book of a tetrology that takes the elements –
earth, air, water, fire – as its subject.”
Both books contain discrete poems and poem-series, but they read into
each other, function as continuations.
In both books,
Hillman seems to track the human necessity to define and name by process of
elimination: we recognize a valley because of the mountain beside it, a gust of
wind because of the papers it invisibly moves. We figure out what a story is by
tinkering with its parts. Wendell Berry writes, “It is the thought of not
writing poetry down that returns us to its mnemonic (its musical) form.” In Pieces
of Air in the Epic, Hillman reviews and questions and tinkers with a
history of poetry: poetry as song, poetry before it was written down, poetry as
mode for telling the epic, the hero story. The narrative is lyricism and vice
versa. The first poem in the collection, “Street Corner,” ends:
We could have said
song outlasts poetry,
words
are breath bricks to
support the guardless singing
project. We could have
meant song outlasts
poetry.
These poems exist in the good tension of
Poem; they resist being removed from the page and they resist being stuck to
it. Often they make sounds: onomatopoeia and puns. When poems say -eee or ch-chch, they are usually mimicking the natural world, the
animals. Sometimes, however, they reside in more ominous spaces: they tilllllt (“Enron Executives Take the 5th”)
or float “over e-e-e-each/ Exploded body into third forever/ News briefs with
short particulars” (“Nine Untitled Epyllions”), and
the repetition is mock, scary, a hole. Sometimes the fullness of sounds can
only be understood through the page. “Near Stations” ends:
blossoms fall diagonally
between
history and an endish
time. Crumble, horror;
a
thought star, having
thrown
throne thrown itself down
swallows the minus sign—
The physical shape
of poems also leads us back to sound. In “Air in the Epic,” columns sometimes
bleed into one another, suggesting a chorus, an uneven mind. Form reflects content:
the poem deals with focus, attention, main lines of questioning. In “Green
Pants & A Bamboo Flute,” four columns or blocks of
text contain fragments of narrative and suggest alternate readings, “like a
three-part song.” The reader feels like the reader of a play (for which there
are many parts and only one author); thinking about the voices is more
realistic than “doing” them. “If the flute cannot be found/ Its
breath is still in you.”
[On the “backs” of
poems, between titled pieces, there are some short, fragile pieces that seem to
go “off-book,” break out of form, although there is no overwhelming convention
for them to break. Some of these poems appear in brackets; others might as
well, as they are asides, incompleted, prayers. They seem small; in my mind the
font is smaller and there is no capitalization, though when I look back at the
book I see I’ve misremembered that. Urgent, a whole blank space of page before
them: they get your attention.]
Near the end of the
book is a series of poems in and about libraries, specifically about the smells
and sounds of libraries, the ways that people exist alongside paper. From “Dust
Acolytes”:
Who has come? What ironfoot iliad
girl approaches
the PS’s, her weathers
locked in gray flame? A steep
scent sends
energy back through the
fate myth. Readers walk mazedly carrying
your book~~ Did
you love paper
more than people? Perhaps its healing
These poems are double-spaced and spread
out, not spread thin but intimating, each word
highlighted against a base of quiet. The titles are cushioned in sets of
colons; they are both sturdy and fluttered. In “Dust Dialectical”:
Dust comes
from galaxies,
each mote bent at the waist
like a poetry translator,
slight train-
trace of sleeper breath, horizon hair
a flame of
doubt. In evening
The shapes of these poems become and
disappear into their meaning, but they are also self-conscious: as written
works, as poems. They are aware of the limits of language, but more importantly
they are aware of the limits acquired by language: “(loosatic/ is the word/ needed
here but Microsoft/ has rejected it)” and “Saw the exhalation of an ‘enemy’”
and “How does one write when the laws that limit power have failed.” The book
begins with two quotes (one is from The
Odyssey) about spinning and weaving: weaving stories, spinning tales. In a
2003 interview, Brenda Hillman says that making a poem is like "knitting a
sweater and someone is unraveling it on the other end." Alongside the
singers, there are seamstresses and textiles in these poems. From “Nine
Untitled Epyllions”:
Haunted by the
need to work, blinded
by cloth, I take
my needle through
gates
of ivory and gates
of horn, I sew,
I push the little
bright thing on through—
Hillman’s artists and artisans draw the
connection between breath and making, practice and being. “String Theory Sutra”
begins:
There are so many types of
“personal” in
poetry. The “I” is a needle some find
useful, though
the thread, of course,
is shadow.
In writing of experience or beauty, a cloth emerges as if made
from a twin existence.
It’s July
4: air is full of mistaken stars & the wiggly half-zeroes stripes
make when folded into
fabric meant
never to touch the
ground again—
and goes on to say “By
its I/ mean our, for we would become/ what we made.” As Pieces of Air in the
Epic sends me back to Cascadia with more
sophisticated ideas about how the forms of those poems render earthshapes, so do the threads at the end of this book send
me back to the beginning of it, revisiting what it means to separate a craftmaker from their craft, a shape from its place, a
narrative from its convention. The stories and the songs are not divisible, but
by testing and tinkering with them, Hillman begins to expose the greater map of
their system.
Sundays on
the Phone by MARK RUDMAN
2005
Reviewed by CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING
Following the tradition of dialogue poetry, Mark Rudman’s ninth book of poetry, Sundays on the Phone
delves into a store of actual and personal memories he has of his mother
Marjorie. The longing to somehow re-visit, re-enact, rearrange order in what
seems a tumultuous and passionate mother son relationship powers the book. Rudman reminds the reader of the novelistic possibilities
for poetry, that its scope can reach out to situation,
prose that is not the symbol laden prose poetry we’ve grown so used to but that
recounts parts of a life. The dramatized anecdote and its attendant, subtly
transforming texture move past the reader under the guise of reality. That
unpretentious, direct delivery allows the awful emotions that can radiate only
from parents to encroach and punish the reader rather than to fall maudlin. Not
easy to pull off at this late date. (Albert Goldbarth and David Kirby in the generous candor and
off-handedness of these poems.)
A lyric memoir, the jacket offers, Sundays on the Phone moves
through four sections of spare and cut dialogue poetry interspersed with prose
poems and long sectioned poems of varied lineation. Voices talking to one
another in the blank silence of the page, that is what Rudman’s
apparent habit of having talked to his mother every Sunday morning at
The first poem of the first section—titled “Kid’s
Stuff”—explores childhood from the vantage of the parent. Rudman
goes on to draw airy problematic spaces so they can be later contrasted with
the personal as in “Back Stairwell”:
Like a rustle
of eternity
Shattered in
the vista of receding
Clouds,
antennae, water towers…
And I think
we are not far from ecstasy
Even in the
interior. (3)
This more
abstract texture serves as a good backdrop in which Rudman
can establish his more mystical and lyrical authority, and which helps him move
to his own childhood, to the strange establishment of generic figures of
adulthood – Marjorie’s husbands, quickly drawn, grouped, named. Soon the
plainest detail from life in its own generic quality equates itself with
tenderness, heightening the presence of that ominous mother, Medea in “Cutting Edge Production: Medea”
and Marjorie’s potential for rage.
Having established that sense of unpredictability in the figure of a
mother, Rudman gets back to his large open terrains
again, yet these aren’t delineated by the physical world but by the dialogue
between himself and his mother, their squabbles in the movie theater (“How Bad
Can it Get”), the tedious quibbling about her gourmet cooking and Rudman’s own son’s limited palate “Sole Responsibility”.
The nagged and nagging rigmarole of trying to explain something to a stubborn
parent is perfectly captured, held on its angry
terrain with few moments of peace or transcendence for most of the middle of
the book.
Interspersed with these narratives that search for explanations
of why this second husband for the mother, why that move back to
“You couldn’t control me when I was alive and now that I’m alive
in another way you have
even less power over me.
You are sitting in that damned dentist’s chair 37 stories high
over
Don’t interrupt—” (12)
(“Approach of the High Holy Days”)
Anyone who
has lost someone close might have a strange and instant mix of relief,
lightheartedness – oh yeah, I know that voice, the voice that continues – and
feel a deep pang about the life in it. Rudman takes
us deeper and deeper into varieties of this kind of conversation; she complains
how her bones hurt now that they’re ashes and teases him with her knowledge of
the term from his area of expertise, simulacra: “You smile Mark. /The dead read their Baudrillard.” (“The Birthday Call”). These moments all underline the way
the poet struggles to process the mother’s dominating presence, ignited by
flinty insecurity and fueled with huge indignation, even long after she’s gone.
How can one deal with the unresolved conversation, and un-resolvable fallout?
The dialogue poem allows us to move from the strange outlying regions of
supposition and its atmosphere of rarified bravado into the real, and shocking
anger of, say, “Late Lunch”. In it the speaker and son show up almost an hour
late for a lunch the mother has cooked and as soon as they’re in the door:
“Oh why don’t you just go fuck yourself.
Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and go back to
Oh my god. (86).
This poem’s wanderings
into bald narrative permit Rudman the kind explicit
summation and revelation that earlier landscapes of the book wouldn’t have
supported. The result seems purgative. Most of the rest of the book ramps these
dialogues into the lyrical and the transcendent without truly detaching from
the live report of a human voice. The rarified and the real dissolve and
resolve their boundaries, as in “The Albuquerque Interventions” that allow Rudman to hear his mother say:
“I told you.
I knew if I
could go
Further than
I could go I would know
What lies on
Solitudes’ other side.”
And Rudman replies:
“You may have
told me.
(Pause.)
I didn’t
know, I don’t know.
But somehow
you’ve erased
All the good times.” (119)
A great counterpoint
to this almost excruciatingly vivid mother is the usually mute grandson, Rudman’s child Sam. Almost by the strength of his
adolescent inscrutability, the child foils or attracts his grandmother’s ire,
revealing its selfishness, and his own imperviousness, something the reader
almost wishes the raw speaker could embody as well. He’s like a blank rock in a
hoodie at times, eating only his steak and noodles to
his grandmother’s chagrin, a boy who would like vegetables if only she’d raised him (?). And so he models his own brand of
resistance to change, like the mother, and cleverly, one she can’t always get
her hooks into, though she does embarrass and anger him at times. Sam becomes
the traveling, valued pawn that always turns up in dysfunctional triangulated
relationships, the one which provides examples for good or for bad, depending
on who’s doing the talking:
She’s back.
“So, no bar
mitzvah for you Sam, huh?”
(He smiles.)
“I don’t
think so.”
“Well, it’s
too bad that your parents didn’t (as if I’m not in the room) give you some
religion.”
(Red-faced).
The ambiguity of Rudman’s quasi-stage
directions give the dialogues a kind of weaving, ungrounded quality. Is
the mother red-faced? Is the boy? The boy, the reader decides. And as one moves
through more and more expanses of dialogue, one finds one’s self picking out
what part is the mother’s, what part Rudman’s, almost
being moved to sketch the names in the margin. This blurring of the identities
lets Rudman say why it is so hard to deal with one’s
parent: it is hard to deal with someone whose faults are so familiar and, one
hates to think, possibly like one’s own. Clearly Marjorie is not always
rational, and Rudman maintains a kind of un-cool
posture in relation that irrationality.
Rudman takes the poetic focus
off style, surface, cleverness, and steeper ravines of syntactic invention to
pay tribute to what his mother meant, set as they are in a clear and ingenious
set of contexts: dialogue, narrative, prose, not to mention specificity and reflective
summation. The ins and outs of story matter here: guilt, the mundane, the
burden of caring for children and caring for parents, cities, meals. In “Late
Lunch” he seems to reveal what piece of sand has been wearing on him, both
causing him to remember and sometimes despise that determined woman. The reader
can hear the volume summed up this way:
My mother didn’t manage my life, but she curtailed the
satisfaction I took from my life.
Had all this not been so bitter, I could have grieved.
I could have written a lachrymose elegy. (89)
___
I don’t think she has a moment when she isn’t thinking about
herself.
I’ve known thousands of people, never anyone like her. (91)
Like Wind Loves a Window by ANDREA
BAKER
Slope Editions
2005
Reviewed
by BRIDGET
CROSS
As if a point of interest could be found
where in place we are dilated with craving. I put a model of the drink in the
model of the cupboard that represents the one in the real room. Try to
understand behavior like our own.
We do understand this behavior: the poet’s
attempt to gaze inward trumped by the need to make a model of all that must be
looked at and consumed en route. Andrea
Baker’s Like Wind Loves a Window encompasses that distraction in 56
sound yet scattershot pages—a prose-poem preface and three sections titled “gilda,” “bird,” and “body,”—and reading it is not unlike
trying to write a poem: the fight to move through the mind’s noise in hopes of
somehow making it back to the self.
Baker watches
herself and gets watched in turn so that her efforts at explication are quickly
unraveled. While her steady prose spreads through the book’s first section, it
intersects eventually with the shifty lines that break through the rest—often
only a quick smattering of words to a page, reluctant to offer a foothold:
“birds hang / Suspended / Like a bird hangs.” What she means to explain pulls
out of her reach so it’s unrecognizable: “pull your face off / from the
tattooed face // my broken egg eyes.”
But she finds her
fuel in the wild-goose-chase nature of her ideals, and what’s so enjoyable
about reading this book is watching that dynamic unfold. She chases down definition
and desire, all the while decorating the poems with obstacles. She tinkers in “gilda,” like she means to crack the code of herself but is
constantly sidetracked by her own ornamentation. She catches and obsesses on
her models, as if to say, This is not the real me, only my reflection: “the
former yellow house hung as an ornament from a ceiling / all the cars were all
in hiding / but the rooms had nowhere to go // and the center room was
surrounded / by other rooms / so it had nowhere to go.” She blockades her
senses: “ghost out my sight.” She insists on occupying only the figurative:
“make me a bird / things are getting out
of control.” (It’s worth noting, too, that the third section contains four
poems titled “not a bird,” possibly in frustration: Not a model. Not a mirror.
This is actually me.)
In the final
section, “body,” Andrea Baker cops to her own devices: “every sight is an
instrument / to absorb us.” The
diversions she’s inhabited
now act as sustenance, as if her own need to be fed is replaced by that of her
loved ones: “I feed you / all my little chairs…I feed you the round empty /
spree of your mouth.” It’s a satisfying conclusion in that Baker has in no way
renounced her distractions but seems to celebrate them. Once again, we do understand this behavior. It offers
some hope about turning chaos into form, harnessing obsession with a poem’s
visceral elements, and allowing that obsession finally to feed the poem, the
way “the window waits to be fed / one minute more.”