GERALDINE KIM. Povel. Fence Books. $11.20
reviewed by DANIELLE PAFUNDA
The most obvious predecessor of Geraldine Kim’s Povel, oft noted, is Lyn Hejinian’s My Life,
and Kim’s mock-Hejinian introduction beats critics to
the punch. Though Povel’s tone echoes Kathy Acker’s post-sincere irony/post-ironic
sincerity—think Blood and Guts in High
School, but trade incest and heroin for disconnect and coffee—more so than My Life’s cooler elegance, Kim is no
less confident than Hejinian in her manipulation of
swerve:
It’s almost like a dream now. He named his car ‘Maria’ after the
blue-veiled
Wonder herself.
The tone of his voice had an eerie quality to it, like talons. He
asked me again to lie
down. My warm face pressed against the
cool white wall.
Eyes closed, his knocks on the door
reverberating throughout the bathroom. I
could never get myself
to get completely buried by the snowflakes.
‘Of course
I’d fuck you if I were a guy,’ I tell her. Sunday afternoons. I write ‘As edgy
as a blanket and as
smelly as paper’ because it’s funny. I
decided to become a
vegetarian the day we
dissected chicken legs in middle school.
Not because
of the chicken legs.
Povel’s speaker leaps gulches, and spins our confusion between causation and
correlation, but she’s most acrobatic in the subtler slippage. Is ‘he’ who named his car ‘Maria’ also he who
beats on the bathroom door? Is the
burying a nod to the book’s preoccupation with (occupation by?) suicide, or is
it an autonomous memory of child’s play?
It’s the slippage that hooks us.
And, yes, conceptually Povel references My
Life, but formally the two have less in common than we might expect. Kim doesn’t opt for the stricter mathematical
parameters or the touchstone phrases.
There’s naught but a red herring of chronology when “My first memory is
of my dad trying to kill my mom” appears on page one. In fact, this statement announces that if
there is a plot, it advances unpredictably.
Barely legal, the speaker drops childhood apparitions alongside current
fantasies, real-time interactions, and the so-recently-past-it’s-present. Where My
Life reads gracefully self-aware, verging on calculated (if only from some
hyper-intelligent subconscious control room), Kim’s text spills out unchecked
as fast as she can type. Literally unchecked, as the spell-check mechanism dogs
her and second-guessing litters the field.
Where My Life appears
hermetically sealed (though arguably not, as evidenced by subsequent editions),
Povel’s borders are permeable as later sections offer editorial comments on earlier
sections. And though there are many
recognizably felicitous moments in the text:
That wasn’t the entire story. I gather my things and for a moment I forget
I am
in
tree
branch. An orange rind twisted about a
park railing.
there just as many over-the-top bombastic,
vulgar, or awkward:
The pee coming
out of him got faster/harder.
The Australian
women bore the bare breasts like roasted hams.
“Hello,” I say to
the toilet.
So consider
instead a more recent Hejinian experience. The
Fatalist began with Hejinian’s assimilation of
all her outgoing e-mail text—typed text, typed on a computer (we can imagine)
quickly and in conversation with some other.
Consider its less elegant lines, “I vomit and lose one day” or “I too am
an asshole,” the result of Hejinian’s decision to
open the line to crasser language.
Consider the Ashbery blurb:
“That’s what fate is: whatever’s happened,”
writes Lyn Hejinian at the end of her breathtaking
long poem, The Fatalist. In this sense we are all fatalists, since
“whatever” has happened to us all, and we all recognize it when we see it. Yet it has seldom been more sumptuously
tallied, tabulated and illuminated.
We could paste it
on Povel’s
back cover, over Laura Bush’s face. Kim
certainly tallies, tabulates, and illuminates the “whatever.”
None of this is to diagnose Povel as simple derivative.
It’s complexly derived; what happens when all the chemicals in the air
mix with those in the dirt, in the asphalt, in our aggressive blue nail
polish. Her multi-layered “whatever” begins
with what any of us have—the markedly different permutation of
culture/history/experience/body that positions a subject—and goes on to devour
our late-twentieth-century “whatever.”
The shrug and roll, the:
It’s silly to think this is only happening to
me.
It just doesn’t resonate today. I write another list of things to do…Even
though I already knew the joke, I had her
tell it to me anyway. Writing this
way because I’ve been deemed a failure
otherwise.
Just wanting to be happy. ‘Same difference,’ my friend from seventh
grade
would say. Like a forty-year-old inside a middle schooler’s body.
In this way, Povel reads like a rambling late night e-mail
from a kid sister who seems jaded beyond her years, but that’s our own naivete; she’s exactly as jaded as she should be. Or an IM session. Not quite one-sided, as Kim reluctantly but
compulsively engages the live world, quotes, paraphrases, parrots and mimics,
and imagines us, her readers. She nearly punishes us with her thorough
catalogue and examination, and the hardly explored tangents. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure without the
prompts, without the endings. Perhaps without the choices.
We’re in it for the surprise, our curiosity approaching morbid, and for
the rare confirmation that someone else’s head contains as much detritus, flux,
shame, and electricity as our own. The
entire project is a hair’s breadth from performance art, and why shouldn’t it
be? Povel’s speaker performs audience whether or not she’s willing, even to
her own suicide attempt, and we watch her watching.
Ultimately, Kim reveals an
existence more symptomatically than strategically postmodern. Povel’s speaker should not be read as a warning or promise
of what our shifty, media-spastic times are about to produce. She is what is already here, as inundated as
the world is relentless in its transmissions.
A lifetime of objects
“Japanese beetles,” “yellow-neon earring-spikes,” “rosary,” “Nintendo,”
subjects
“my parents,” “my brother,” “my ex,” “my ex’s mom,” “sarcastic
Starbucks guy,” “Michelle Branch,” “Nintendo,”
and sensations
“my lips are chapped,” “my fingernails smell metallic,” “I
almost choked on his cock”
loop through her in an unfathomable
sequence. Each time she looks up or out, the loop is refreshed, and we are
implicated.