WOLFGANG GÖRTSCHACHER
Vocal Cartographies: Public and Private
Rae Armantrout. Versed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2009. 121 pp. ISBN:
978-0-8195-7091-8, US$14.95 pb.
Paula Meehan. Painting Rain. Manchester: Carcanet, 2009. 100 p. ISBN: 978-184777-001-1, £9.95 pb.
Kate Noakes. The Wall Menders. Reading: Two Rivers, 2009. 57 pp. ISBN:
978-1-901677-64-5, £8.00 pb.
Rae Armantrout’s Versed has had something like a triumphal progress
since it hit the publishers in 2009. First, chosen as a finalist for the
2009 National Book Award, it went on in March 2010 to win the 2009
award from the National Book Critics Circle and then, a month later,
as the icing on the cake, won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
The NBCC was impressed by “its demonstration of superb intellect
and technique, its melding of experimental poetics but down-toearth subject matter to create
poems you are compelled to return
to, that get richer with each
reading.” In a similar vein, the
Pulitzer Prize jury described the
collection as “a book striking for its
wit and linguistic inventiveness,
offering poems that are often little
thought-bombs detonating in the
mind long after the first reading.”
Considering the reputation of the
Pulitzer Prize as being the most
mainstream of annual literary prizes
in the United States, its award to
Rae Armantrout, a poet associated
with the West Coast “Language Poetry” movement, constitutes a
double recognition. Still, if one considers the literary predilections and
interests of the individual members of the 2010 three-person jury, it is
perhaps a little less surprising. When reviewing Armantrout’s previous
collection Next Life for the Sunday Book Review of The New York
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Times in 2007, jury member Stephen Burt, associate professor at
Harvard, described her as “a poet of supreme concision”, and went on
to elaborate his approval in terms of superlative enthusiasm, which
makes it, as it should be, a case of simple critical perceptiveness than
of a river changing its course.
The new collection comprises two sequences, “Versed” and
“Dark Matter”, which Armantrout had originally conceived as two
separate books. According to her publisher, the poems in the first
sequence play with the concept of “vice and versa, the perversity of
human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a
thin ice that inevitably cracks”. “Scumble” (p. 34) is a typical poem
from this section:
Scumble
What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words
such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or extrapolate?”
What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that
others would pronounce these words?
Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the
other person touched them lightly and carelessly with
his tongue.
What if “of” were such a hot button?
“Scumble of bushes.”
What if there were a hidden pleasure
in calling one thing
by another’s name?
Armantrout’s poems are usually short, pointing to a form which she
has derived from William Carlos Williams and, to some extent, Emily
Dickinson. She calls the short poem “a magic trick” and “the perfect
site for the presentation of transience, failure, impossibility” (“The
Short Poem”, Collected Prose [CP] (Singing Horse Press, 2007), pp. 8085; here p. 85), which also asks to be reread. The condensed form is
further characterised by an openness which involves, as she claims in
“Cheshire Poetics” (CP, pp. 55-62), “an equal counterweight of
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assertion and doubt” (CP, p. 55). In “Scumble” this is expressed by a
series of questions – syntactically in a parallel manner – which is only
intercepted by an assertion that uses the subjunctive and the lexeme
“perhaps”, and an example of a “hot button”. The poem’s openness
and its urge to be reread are also enhanced by the fact that it ends with
a question that problematizes the concept of metaphor. The persona
plays with the sensuality / sexuality of language and takes on the pose
of a linguistic voyeur. I also find it very impressive how Armantrout
manages in the third stanza to connect – both rhythmically and
phonologically by way of assonance – the lexemes “come”, “other”,
“touched”, and “tongue” and thereby creates an atmosphere alluringly
charged with sexual undertones. In this context it is interesting to
consider what Armantrout said in an interview with Travis Nichols for
The Huffington Post : “The question of what is sexy in a poem is fascinating. I think some kinds of uncertainty can actually be sexy. Did
that word (that look) mean what I thought it meant? Double meanings
in conversation, blues songs, or poems can be sexy. I think they can be
sexy whether their content is overtly sexual or not. They’re sexy
because they pull the reader into a relationship with the text in which
the balance of power is uncertain or unstable.”
Armantrout’s poems contain many, often conflicting voices, one
of her predilections being the tendency to code-shift. It is also not
accidental that the “relation between stanza and stanza or section and
section is often oblique, multiple or partial. […] It is a way to explore
the relation of part to whole.” (CP, p. 62) This juxtaposition of
sections, usually either marked by numbers or asterisks, can also be
experienced in her poem “Equals” (p. 41):
1
As if, after all,
the thing that comes to mind
squared
times inertia
equalled the “real.”
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2
One lizard
jammed headfirst
down the throat
of a second.
After Armantrout was diagnosed with adrenocortical cancer in 2006,
she underwent surgery and chemotherapy. The second section, “Dark
Matter”, was written, the poet told Lynn Keller in an interview
conducted in October 2007, “almost as if it’s my last book, with that in
mind, with the end of life as a kind of lodestone for it”. According to
her publisher, this experience with cancer “marks these poems with a
new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking.” If Armantrout’s personae discuss the concept of
metaphor now, this is done in a different, more serious tone and
diction (“Something dark / pervades it.”), as is the case in section 2 of
“Integer” (pp. 93-94; here p. 93):
Metaphor
is ritual sacrifice.
It kills the look-alike.
No,
metaphor is homeopathy.
A healthy cell
exhibits contact inhibition.
In the last poem of her collection, “Fact” (p. 121), one can almost hear
a Beckettian voice and tone, reminiscent of Waiting for Godot:
Operation Phantom Fury.
*
The full force
of the will to live
is fixed
on the next occasion:
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someone
coming with a tray,
someone
calling a number.
*
Each material
fact
is a pose,
an answer
waiting to be chosen.
“Just so,” it says.
“Ask again!”
The poems in Versed certainly conform to Armantrout’s own
definition of a ‘good’ poem as one that sustains multiple readings.
Hers is a “poetry of witness” in which she tends, as she told Lyn
Hejinian in an interview, “to focus on the interventions of capitalism
into consciousness.” With an “open and noncontrolling relation” (CP,
pp. 103-120; here p. 120) to her poetic material, for example when she
presents her personae as being in doubt or in error, she opens up
possibilities for, and invites action on her readers’ part.
Painting Rain is Paula Meehan’s first collection since Dharmakaya,
also published by Carcanet in 2000. It is accompanied by a special
double issue of the scholarly journal An Sionnach [AS], published in
autumn last year, which celebrates and critiques in eighteen essays and
one interview, as guest-editor Jody Allen Randolph points out, Paula
Meehan’s “poetic choices, her playwriting, and the social and ethical
commitments that underlie both.” (AS, p. 5)
Originally from Dublin’s north inner city, Meehan has always been
aware, as she told Luz Mar González-Arias in an interview, that her
native town “was incredibly well-mapped in literary terms. But, yet, my
city wasn’t. [ …] So, although there were all these maps I still felt
rudderless in terms of my own life.” (AS, p. 36) In his poem “It takes
trees in summer” Brendan Kennelly defines Meehan’s stance in poetic
terms: “James Joyce would love to meet her / […] because she could
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take him / to avenues parks squares lanes / he bypassed, didn’t bother
with” (AS, p. 25). In the central sequence “Six Sycamores” she takes
her readers to such a site and thus achieves the aim, defined in her
interview with Randolph, of “integrat[ing] [her] work as a private
memorialist with an impulse to express collective memory” (AS, p.
260). It was commissioned by the Office of Public Works on the
occasion of the opening of the Link Building between number 51 and
number 52, on the east side of St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, in 2001. In
order to mirror “the architectural complexity and the ornamentation
of the houses themselves” and “what
they stand for, the ascendancy class,
the class privilege of the whole
colonial adventure”, Meehan decided
to experiment with the sonnet, as
both “house and poem are received
forms that can be re-inhabited and
are re-inhabited” (AS, p. 261). In a
technique that she somehow shares
with Armantrout, she juxtaposes
these sonnets with short monologues
by ordinary people who are not stake
holders, “unornamented in plain
speech with its own little dramatic
vignette out of a life.” (AS, p. 262) In
the titles of these monologues, which
are based on naval time, the poet is
keeping a log. For example, in “12.53
Third Sycamore” the persona is selfeffacing which makes the juxtaposition of a poor outsider’s voice with
the sonnet for “Number Fifty-Two”, built in 1771 by the banker
David La Touche, all the more striking, urgent, and dramatic:
spare a few bob mister
a few bob for a cup of tea
any odds mister
spare change please
help the homeless missus
a few pence for a hostel
god bless you love
spare a few bob mister
(p. 30)
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Thus Meehan enables her readers to eavesdrop on what she calls “a
conversation between the casual throw-away vernacular of the little
pieces and the more tightly wrapped language and ritualized energy of
the sonnets.” (AS, p. 262)
For Meehan, “the family can be a powerful prism, and gives you a
freedom to explore your whole culture through those intimate
relationships.” (AS, p. 259) It is an enlightening experience to read
Heaney’s “Digging” alongside Meehan’s “Cora, Auntie” in which the
maternal line is retrieved and retained by replacing the spade with the
sequin:
Sequin : she is standing on the kitchen table.
She is nearly twenty-one.
It is nineteen sixty-one.
They are sewing red sequins, the women,
to the hem of her white satin dress
as she moves slowly round and round.
Sequins red as berries,
red as the lips of maidens,
red as blood on the snow
in Child’s old ballads,
as red as this pen
on this paper
I’ve snatched from the chaos
to cast these lines
at my own kitchen table –
(p. 39)
In Painting Rain, Meehan once again manifests her “strong sense of
landscape, community, and selfhood as the triangulation” for her
work. “[T]he concerns”, she claims in the interview with Randolph,
“are global and always have been.” (AS, p. 264) In the anti-pastoral
poem “Death of a Field” Meehan’s persona becomes the “professional
memory of the tribe” (AS, p. 268). Meehan relates to what she calls
“one of poetry’s oldest functions” which for her “is to not just
memorialise place, but to translate a place into language so that it can
be an archive in itself but also a measuring stick for future change.”
(AS, p. 267)
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I’ll walk out once
Barefoot under the moon to know the field
Through the soles of my feet to hear
The Myriad leaf lives green and singing
The million million cycles of being in wing
That – before the field become map memory
In some archive on some architect’s screen
I might posses it or it possess me
Through its night dew, its moon-white caul
Its slick and shine and its profligacy
In every wingbeat in every beat of time
Her persona uses a romanticised style that might, in its diction,
rhythm, and phonological quality, remind one of Dylan Thomas’s
“Fern Hill”. However, in the final poem, “Coda: Payne’s Grey” (p. 96),
Meehan admits the impossibility of the poet’s task to capture nature’s
movement in words. In her poem the painter’s paradoxical effort to
contain nature on canvas, to capture nature’s movement and define it
in stasis, is revealed:
I am trying to paint rain
day after day
I go out into it
drizzle, shower, downpour
but not yet the exact
spring rain
warm and heavy and slow
each drop
distinct & perfect
The final poem leads Meehan’s readers back to the title of the
collection and explains the epigraph from The Diamond Sutra: “Words
cannot express Truth. / That which words express is not Truth.”
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The thematic link between Meehan’s Painting Rain and Kate
Noakes’s second collection, The Wall Menders, is defined by Peter
Robinson when he claims that Noakes’s “attention to detail […] is a
metaphor for her theme of environmental repair. Reading her poems
with the care they deserve gives an intimation of what it might feel
were the world in safe hands.” In “Suffolk beach” (p. 11) Noakes
combines a fairytale quality (“I’ve slept on discomfort, this pea / under
a mattress has kept me awake.”) with a
discomforting atmosphere produced by
the personified agents of nature (“the
way the land surrenders / to the sea
with a sigh, // a sliding-under of
shingle, / how marsh and fen seem //
to sink, shift underfoot, / bedrock’s
unstable coverlet.”) that ends with “this
disconsoling birth of light, / barely
warming the dead.”. Central to
Noakes’s collection is a sequence that
retells “Mestra’s tale” (pp. 29-36), from
Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
from Mestra’s point of view. In threeand four-line stanzas, quite often with
an underlying iambic rhythm, she tells
her story. The following stanza may
serve as an example:
A wave spins me round, the sea is kissing me,
a tongue of water in my throat. He vanishes,
leaving me with a scarf of kelp
and this gold clam in my hand. (p. 30)
It is unfortunate, though, that proof reading has been a good deal less
efficient than it might have been, for quite a few errors have slipped
through the net (e.g. in “Along the Indus”). But these are things the
reading eye may remedy. The Wall Menders keeps its end well up in
good company. All three volumes provide both challenge and stimulus
to those interested in poetry, things sufficiently rare not to be missed
out on.
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