Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy

Muumuu House, 2009

Reviewed by Kathleen Rooney

Reading Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs, it is tempting to picture her words stenciled in bright colors on the white walls of an art museum. It is tempting to imagine them presented in the style of the work of Lawrence Weiner. It is necessary to keep reminding yourself that she does in fact call the things in this book “poems,” because they resemble conceptual art at least as closely as they do poetry.

A great deal of poetry written since the modern era presents the reader with a lot of heavy interpretive lifting to do while withholding obvious cues as to how to go about doing it, thereby requiring serious parsing to understand exactly what the poet intends you to “get.” Avant-garde poets from John Ashbery to Arielle Greenberg have pushed obscurity of intent even further, demarcating spaces in which readers can play among any number of potential meanings. But this is not exactly what Kennedy and many of her Muumuu House peers—including Tao Lin, Zachary German, and Brandon Scott Gorrell—are doing. Kennedy and her cohorts invite the reader to share responsibility not only for interpretation but also for composition; they don’t so much provide a space as they do component parts. Where her avant-garde predecessors built playgrounds on which readers are expected and encouraged to play, Kennedy seems to encourage readers to build their own playgrounds. She basically pushes a pile of Tinkertoys toward you—or maybe not even that; maybe what she provides is more like the contents of a drawer. Kennedy does seem to have criteria as to what these contents are, but the main criterion appears to be that the component parts amuse her. Whatever happens next is largely up to you. To put it another way, the pieces in SMHPMR are as much like installations as they are like poems.

In this regard, Kennedy’s work also shares with conceptual art a persistent questioning of the nature of what art really is anyway. The premise from which these questions often begin is: is this art / a poem? Then proceed to: is this art / poem doing what art/poems are supposed to do? Is this art / poem worth the time of the artist / poet who made it and the viewer/reader regarding it?

Countless people before Kennedy have posed these questions and countless people will pose them after her, but she seems to be framing them in a fresh, young—even deliberately immature—way. A lot of conceptual art seems disappointed with art itself, like When I started, I thought art would do certain things for me and it hasn’t—why not? In her poem “No One Cares about Poetry,” Kennedy confronts this disappointment in literature, writing:

You ask me if I have been doing any comics

I say “I am trying to focus on poetry right now”

You say “no one wants to read poetry”

I say “I know, I’m just doing it for the money”

My friend says “poetry is terrible”

I say “I don’t want to think about poetry”

Kennedy’s poems seem justifiably disappointed with poetry, and in turn they frustrate the reader. They use the word “poem” often enough (five of the pieces in the 64-page volume contain “poem” or “poetry” in their titles) that you know that the application of the term is not some unconsidered mistake, but they cause you to wonder whether what you consider a poem and what she considers a poem might not be the same thing. Daniel Handler says in his blurb that they are poems. Muumuu House says they are poems. So okay, but why? The tension created by this question is what makes the poems so good and so fun to read.

In “My Dog is a Little Obese,” for instance, Kennedy creates comedy and pathos by frequent repetition and the misdirecting nature of the poet’s abundant knowledge about Clif Bars:

put the clif bar in your pocket from a florida gas station

and walk away

put the entire box of clif bars from a duane reade in penn

station in your bag and walk away

put two clif bars from price chopper into your pocket and

walk away

this is a CVS, there are no clif bars here

buy 4 clif bars from albertson’s and feel bad

there is 50 mg of caffeine in your clif bar

cut the clif bar in half with scissors and eat one half and put

the other half in a bowl

hide the scissors in the closet

there isn’t any caffeine in the lemon poppyseed clif bar

put organic green tea extract on your tongue and put your

tongue in my mouth

there is 50 mg of caffeine in my brain

The poem addresses many conventionally poetic themes: eroticism, vague body anxiety, love and shoplifting. But the poem insists that it is really about something else, which is an all-natural and organic energy product. This poem, like the others in the collection, lets—and requires—the reader make crucial decisions about it, the first of which, of course, is whether it is a poem at all. It’s not that Kennedy does not employ poetic technique; of course she does. She simply does not employ this technique to a clear end. You can see how the piece is working: it is a list poem that feels slightly more sophisticated than a Wikipedia entry, operating by the accretion of pointless information and specificity. You are just not completely sure why it is working that way, or to what purpose it does so.

To find comparisons to Kennedy’s work (beyond her fellow Muumuu Housers), it’s frequently as useful to reach to the visual arts as it is to reach to poetry. She’s kind of like Frank O’Hara, sure, especially when she writes about oranges and grocery shopping as in the poem “I Went to the Grocery Store Today,” which begins:

I bought blueberries, raspberries, pears, grapes, a pizza,

and a giant orange

I carried it all home on my bike

I felt nervous…

As peripatetic, conversational, and matter of fact as she and O’Hara are, Kennedy may be even more like the artist David Shrigley. Just as his faux “outsider” art displays a deliberately primitive and semi-batshit working class Scottish sensibility, Kennedy’s poems display a flat and affectless middle-class American one. She is smart, and can write complex, term-paper-English sentences with multiple clauses and well-placed modifiers, but most of the time she chooses not to. Relatedly, Shrigley’s cartoon drawings are bad, but you still know that they are actually good, that they are done not by an amateur crackpot, but by a trained artist with serious ideas and concerns. Ditto Kennedy’s poems, which are deceptively naïve and plainspoken. Because they frequently pose as disposable, as trash, part of the pleasure is that you get to decide whether or not they have value. They don’t purport to be of enduring artistic worth, but if you can come to the conclusion that they are, you feel great.

Kennedy’s poems also have more in common with certain fiction writers of the 1980s, Lorrie Moore especially, than they do with many poets writing now. There is a sense in Kennedy’s pieces—as there is in the minimalist/realist fiction of the 80s—that the narratives have been pared way down, and that the author is trying to eliminate as many clues as possible as to what the reader should make of the story. Kennedy’s work is not necessarily minimalist in its language—though it is often that, too—but minimalist in its guidance to the reader. You get the impression, in the piece “Probably Going to Die Alone” and elsewhere, that the story being told is not necessarily the most interesting one to tell, but that’s the choice the writer is making and you have to do what you can with what you are given.

The poem “I Want to Write a Poem with You,” for example, tells a tragic-comic and violent story—“a bear headbutted my window and its head broke through”—via a narrative progression that is fairly straightforward. In this poem, as in others throughout the collection, there is the occasional non sequitur, but for the most part there are a lot of sequiturs. There are many gaps and ellipses, but these blanks are fairly fill-able by the reader since virtually every narrative event occurs as a natural consequence of a prior one; the work proceeds by a clear logical progression. The bear hurt its head, so the speaker “went in the kitchen and got antiseptic,” but the bear is a wild beast so “the bear bit my hand.” When the speaker “used my bloody hand to draw a picture of a salmon on my sheets to attract the bear” her tears “ruined the picture and the lines ran together and the bear lost interest” and so on until the end of the story.

In general, Kennedy employs very few metaphors. When she uses the word “hamsters,” for example, in the aforementioned poem—“I tapped my fingers on my pillow and pretended that a stampede of wild hamsters was coming to destroy everything I own”—the hamsters do not “represent” anything; they are not a symbol. Kennedy uses the word because she finds hamsters funny.

On the rare occasion that she does use metaphor, she does so to call attention to their inadequacy, thereby casting the idea of the apt metaphor—so central to the way poetry has historically been understood to operate—into doubt. In “Brighter and Clearer,” she writes “After I forget something I said I would remember, my brain becomes a roll of vegetable futomaki that an obese chinchilla is trying to eat all in one bite.” She uses the chinchilla comparison not because there is anything intrinsic to the concept she is attempting to convey that requires it, but because that is what she feels like doing.

Throughout the collection, Kennedy exhibits a refusal to claim much, if any, poetic authority, if not an outright mockery of said authority, as in the purposefully funny and inept metaphors in the poem above. Uncertainty is one of the few things Kennedy seems even vaguely comfortable claiming. This too is artifice, obviously, but it is highly effective.

This uncertainty is often presented in the form of a faux documentarianism, as if the speaker is performing a careful and scientific analysis of her own thoughts and desires as they occur in real time. In “Poem,” the speaker notes:

My friends are sitting around me, stoned

Making comments about “nipples the size of CDs”

I am staring at the floor feeling uncomfortable

And now self-conscious

Because my entire breast couldn’t even fill

The diameter of a CD

And I start thinking of my friend’s breasts

And I start glancing around at them

Like I’m in the locker room

At the YMCA

And I can’t tell if I’m a lesbian

Or just insecure

Such catalogues of emotional reactions to allegedly real-life situations create a sense of truth, even though we can never know if these situations happened. Similarly, in “Learning to Pee Standing Up,” the speaker discloses such facts as “I pee, on average, for about 5 seconds” before concluding “I don’t know why I thought this poem would be a good idea / I’m embarrassed.” Over and over, Kennedy’s speaker expresses her lack of a clear sense of herself as a self, thereby evoking an impression of complete honesty, even though it may ultimately be false.

When it is not merely expressing uncertainty, Kennedy’s poetry is often outright self-deprecating. In a world where most people don’t give a shit about poetry, you might as well call the second-to-last poem in your collection “Shit Poem.” You may conclude that this poem is worth your while, but Kennedy doesn’t suggest that you should. It would be a mistake to dismiss her work as self-indulgent, though—it isn’t that. It can feel like a waste of time, but to its credit, it never says it isn’t.

In “Manatees,” Kennedy writes “In the Carribeans, there is an Antillean manatee sprinting in a lagoon at 15 mph to amuse itself,” and follows this statement shortly with “In the Amazon, there is a manatee renewing 90% of the air in its lungs in a single breath,” and “In Pennsylvania, there is a human writing a poem and only renewing 10% of the air in its lungs in one breath.” Though she does not make the connection explicitly, here Kennedy seems to define the project of the poet herself: a rare, cute-yet-repellant, and kind of helpless creature doing a repetitive, inconsequential, and largely arbitrary activity to keep itself entertained. Readers happening upon this activity are likely to be entertained, too. In amusing herself, Ellen Kennedy amuses her audience. The poem concludes:

In outer space, there is a lost manatee orbiting the earth, free from sharks, rejection from its family, the risk of being slashed by a motor boat, and the pressure of obtaining a suitable mate to continue the population and avoid extinction; not feeling safe or relaxed but rather feeling a profound sense of loneliness and desperation with a complete loss of hope in ever finding a meaning in existence.

Abject hopelessness, awkward fumbling, and gentle anomie rarely feel so touching and funny as they do in the hands of Ellen Kennedy.