Joseph Lease. Broken World. Coffee House Press, 2007.

Review by Anna Eyre

Broken World, by Joseph Lease requests that the reader understands perception is not a form of rest but of approaching. Robert Duncan said that poetry begins with perception, and Joseph Lease begins perception in a broken state. When fixed perception or certain definition is shattered, new forms and meanings emerge to recreate our language’s limitations and thus our world’s limitations. Symbols dwell in possibility and Lease ignites the fire beneath their phoenix. Joseph Lease’s lyric voice and compassionate intellect place the reader in a world in which the illusion of certainty is wiped clear by the immense complexity of the quotidian. Lease’s “pieces of mirror sweep the word” and allow the reader to reflect on their situation as a self in American, personal and ancestral space.

Broken World begins with the poem, “Ghosts” in which Joseph Lease alchemically changes the definition of words. “Ghosts” consists of two line stanzas or chants that offer a repetition of change and ode to the beloved: “the word for dawn / is others.” The word “dawn” as “others” grows to encapsulate more than its traditional demarcation (beginning light) to include all that is (by definition) different or separated. In this sense what is left out of dawn is nothing. The poem ends after the stanza— “is others / the word for light” in one line— “is nothing”. Here light is nothing and included in dawn. Thus, not even nothing is excluded from dawn.

Lease’s lyrical shifts offer the reader a balancing stick for a tightrope walk through surrealistic mindscapes. In Broken World, each word is the next and changes your mind. Lease never backs away from saying what he means. As in section 2 of “Broken World” (For James Assatly) “I’m wired to my greasy self portrait. Every day in every way. America equals ghost. The wrong side of history. Flat matted yellow weeds. Who could believe “God chose me.” Flat matted yellow weeds. God chose?” In these lines each word is the subject and the ideas present in them rub the personal self against physical and political space. An esoteric question is posed against weeds and a self which is “wired” to a self portrait is posed against the “every” and the portrait of a nation. These perceptive observations ask the reader to observe their own interior subconscious landscapes as mirrored by their surface’s exterior placement. A few lines later Lease writes, “In each room someone is fingering her or his soul.” And further down, “Two blocks from campus, a boy, maybe ten or eleven, yelled at a Junior High School girl: “Ho-bag incest baby, spread your legs.” It’s all naked out here. Nothing is here. It’s all one big strip mall. We have a Ponderosa.”

In “Cy Twombly,” Lease writes “sweetest songs in the words you have become them one-way ticket or this is the transformation is wonder.” Lease calls readers to attention by provoking from them the idea that we have become songs in words and in doing so are a one-way ticket or one-way vision of or to transformation. If we are these songs, then why not make them the sweetest? Words define our thoughts much more than our thoughts define our words. The thought occurring in this line is a subversive resistance. Here, thought is a continuous thread which weaves one subject into the next, transmogrifying them into one another on the way. In the same poem, on the next page, appear the lines: “and it was all I could have hoped for to be included or insulted to live here and not call it a waste land to live here to be included and insulted and not to hear any misery in the sound of the wind.” Lease yearns for a place in which he is not excluded in any way, a place in which the self’s interior and exterior limits are at peace with one another—a sort of dawn. His use of repetition shatters meaning’s pattern. Lease’s repetition breaks from condition and explodes a new meta-consciousness onto frontiers of understanding. As Lease writes in “I’ll Fly Away”:

compulsive repetition usually implies a lack of

resolution between self and space

my friend is saying prayers

and saying prayers, there’s nothing else—

The second half of Broken World consists of the longer poem, “Free Again.” Pauses occur in the repetition of its title like a bell or rattle whose incantation clears and prepares the ground, air, space for further meditation. In “Free Again” this idea of inner and outer or the nether-nether or nadir as it relates to self definition is further articulated and explored. He writes, “USA means the outer miracle kills the inner miracle:” and later, “Where am I equals who am I”. Deeply present throughout “Free Again” is the American landscape and the impression it leaves on its inhabitant’s psyches.

Evident in this landscape is the lack of potent, mystical symbols. An idea echoed in the first half of Broken World, Lease writes:

the elegies are taking off their clothes—

I can’t make something out of nothing: Holiday Inn sign,

Independent Taxi—there are no symbols, no open roses hanging

down to the grass—shadow and wind, blue-grey car, bright red

car—there are no symbols, no spells—and water was my dirty

name:

In America, our once powerful symbols have been incorporated or appropriated by corporations fueled by a capitalist economy. Lease goes on, “I’m just trying to make a night or a cathedral or a pine—why don’t people talk about corporations and power—“.

Lease’s reclamation of words as sacred and profound symbols occurs in his reclamation of space as well. He writes, “—in the forest we can say anything that comes to our minds and the words form shapes and flicker and leap—choirs or repetition fired from graves”. In the dark and wild corners of our mind language and words still possess the ability to create or become aware of spirit as it is linked to eternal soul. Lease announces:

America

named you, said you are “I”: strip

malls equal temples or clouds that drift to the words we can’t

speak—

singing hymns for no reason: and, and,

and, and, and—I,I,I,I,I—

America has alienated the individual to feel as though the ego were divine. When this happens you “can sell your soul and / the nation profits”. Our collective self is a nation who profits from our illusory individuality and paranoia. In light of this, “money has won everywhere,”.

Yet there is hope and Lease brings forth the potential for people to dissolve the symbols and reclaim them as magic.

you say the sky, and think you mean the sky—

the sky betrays you when you say

the sky—

Words do not encapsulate all of what they stand for unless you infuse them with the power to do so through open prismatic perception, absorption and reflection. Our ownership of what we claim depends so much on the definition we ascribe and believe in. Lease’s use of natural idioms reinforces the idea that our most common words are in need of infusions. If we were to understand that “like anyone else, we had our shattered selves—like anyone else—we owe ourselves and all we are to death—“ perhaps we could ascertain the notion that the death of the symbol is the possibility for its recreation. We must find an exterior and interior landscape in which this destructive and creative force can nurture such potential. Lease asks, “Who are your senses—who is your darkness—who is your wilderness—“.

Broken World is an astonishing book whose magic unfolds with each re-turning of the page. It is an inexhaustible energy source to savor and return to for hope and inspiration when faced by the fixed nature of America’s paved over interior and exterior landscapes. Lease grasps for other voices to chant and pray with the full potential of words and thoughts. He understands that “we need to know why voices fall apart—” and offers that in these endeavors, “the readiness is all—”