Two Reviews

by Nick Moudry

Such Rich Hour by Cole Swensen
University of Iowa Press (Kuhl House Poets), 2001
Paperback, 110 pp. $16

Self and Simulacra by Liz Waldner
Alice James Books (2001 Beatrice Hawley Award), 2001
Paperback, 69 pp. $11.95

In a letter to Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer writes, "The trick naturally is…not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. There is really no single poem." This "trick" is one that Cole Swensen and Liz Waldner have learned and brought to fruition, with both poets having recently won the Iowa Poetry Prize, Swensen for Try, which appropriates the visual arts and Waldner for A Point Is That Which Has No Part, loosely based on Euclidean geometry.

Such Rich Hour by Cole Swensen uses the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the famed fifteenth-century book of hours, as its source text. Swensen, in her own introduction, states, "The poems begin as a response to this manuscript, and specifically to the calendar section that opens this and all traditional books of hours." The poems follow the calendrical rhythm of days and months, but jump around the century in years, mapping a history of the century in which European culture moved from the medieval toward the Renaissance. Included here are the birth of perspective in painting, recipes for pigments that include sneezing and the discovery of new planets, "(seven known + the two nonexistent) / (chunk of ice and the other simply gas." Yet "the spatial world" that Swensen recreates is, as it was then, partially indetermined, "(four cardinal points, four seasons, four elements and / if each planet had a ghost." Elsewhere, the four elements expand to include ether, raising the poignant question: if science has brought our "understanding" thus far, how outdated will our current "knowledge" be in another 600 years?

The book is not solely confined to the fifteenth-century; it expands to include the invention of the railroad and Giovanni di Paolo's representation of the human heart, "the comic shape that will someday anoint all those bumperstickers" and, of course, Thanksgiving. As in Pound's Cantos, Swensen attempts to reconstruct our contemporary notions of history by assembling the fragments of a past, but unlike Pound the work is more focused and thus feels more complete.

The plague is here and so is the Hundred Years' War, but both are expertly downplayed by a minimal black humor: "And this at the height / of the plague" ends a poem about Spring. They become the tragedies of which no one wants to speak and the major advancements in the arts and sciences take precedence in the book. "[T]he dead in their number beyond number" neatly return at the end, but are overshadowed by "the white light" of the rest of the book.

Mathematics plays a major role, as does the discovery that "connects / clocks to astronomy" and how both reconfigure our conception of time. The math, mirroring the society, becomes more sophisticated as the book progresses from "January 5 ÷ 5 / = One" to the formula for the isosceles triangle: "(iso)3 or / -->x÷3."

The work is fragmented, thoughts stop mid-phrase, quotation marks and parenthesis appear without closure. Some text in quotations is italicized; some, not, making it difficult at times to tell whether or not Swensen is actually quoting. French and Latin phrases appear frequently (not surprising as the book deals primarily with French history) and Middle English makes a brief cameo. The etymology of modern language is discussed in the same breath as new pigments: "kermes comes from the Arabic made Latin kermesinum made Italian cremisno, / cramoisie in French and a brilliant crimson." Only as it moves toward English is the color understood to be "brilliant."

In concept, the book resembles the baroqueness of Susan Howe's recent work and Swensen's use of line and level of abstraction is reminiscent of Kuhl House series editor Jorie Graham, but the voice is unmistakably Cole Swensen's; few contemporaries would dare break the concrete poetry barrier to make their words resemble a scythe:

                         (How swing this scythe so I look a little less like
                                                                              my own death)
                                                                              who
                                                                         sings
                                                                       of

Despite their content, the poems are as contemporary as any being written today. Although each individual poem relies on the rest of the book, Swensen's project, as a whole, is successful.

Self and Simulacra by Liz Waldner is a much looser collection than Such Rich Hour and Waldner's previous collection as well. The three disparate sections read like a collection of chapbooks, the middle section actually having been a chapbook (Read Only Memory, Seeing Eye Books). The book centers around its title, the idea of the self as a simulacrum. In her own endnotes, Waldner relates her book to "Lamarack's theory that an organism may be affected by its environment and pass the adaptations so affected to its offspring." The problem, according to Waldner, is in the present where "we are directed to become isolate, profit-generating consumers, especially of others' meaning. How then must we live? > who is we? > what is a self?"

The book begins rather strongly with a section based on Gray's Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology, which serves as Waldner's "proof" of Lamarack's theory; "for each individual owes its existence to a preceding one like itself," she writes, but even her "explanation is / only a likeness / only like another Thing."

The writing here is highly erotic, full of blossoming flowers and "odalisque her thighs." If not for the underlying search for the self, this section could be mistaken for lesbian erotica. In the opening poem, Waldner attempts to cast off the influences of her first book, "My course is rotten, I channel Mr. Berryman who am not such a man." But the influences soon return with Stevens "Waving adieu, adieu, adieu." Many of the poems' meanings hinge on the reader's knowledge of certain botanical terms:

                    My raceme to your umbrel. You terminal,
                    me currant, choke-cherry, barberry. You milk
                    weed, you flat cyme to my corymb, my kiss alas
                    like a moth on the right flower at the wrong time of day.

A trip to a botany book illuminates the reader to the fact that Waldner is creating an identity gap between the "I" and the other via the differing structures of their floral axes; yet the two physically join in a sort of cross-pollinating gesture.

In the middle section, Waldner uses the archaic diction of Sir Thomas Browne as springboard, a rather similar move to Swensen's appropriation of Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. But at times Waldner gets stuck in her mimicry, "Camest thou strokedst me, wouldst give me water with berries in't and teach me how to name / the bigger light." When she begins a poem with the Browne line, "I must confess a great deal of obscurity…" she means it. The poems are interesting enough unto themselves, but few really pay off. One exception being the last in the section, "Wherin our bones with stars shall make one Pyre…":

                    Can the sunfish drown?
                    Again shall the Vessel say to the Potter
                    Why hast thou made me thus? Let me rather
                    (or more of the same) Be in love with dead Sir Thomas Browne.

Here she makes a significant break with Browne's diction while still maintaining an overt reference to his work and creating an irregular rhyme scheme.

In the last section of the book, which is more of a hodgepodge than the first two, Waldner comes closest to realizing the political agenda she stakes out in her endnotes: "How can I (ashamed of Rwanda, Bopal, death row, NAFTA, SUV) / live in the new polis which is the clamor of tv…How come nobody seems to notice there's nobody there to see?" On television, the self literally becomes a simulacrum. Even the old dog of language as representation wags his tail, "letters / -of credit and credence- accrue, / mortgaging meaning against which to borrow." While in her last collection Waldner flirted with the critique of capitalist society, this time around she has, in her own way, waged an all out assault.

The playfulness and plasticity of language that has come to characterize her work is here, but with much less punk exuberance than before. The line "Address, redress, dress me up and down" somehow fails to retain the linguistic intensity of A Point Is That Which Has No Part.

Old sayings are revised, "Neither a burrower nor a surrenderer bee; when push / comes to shovel from now on I push," and Waldner finds "no greater pleasure than pleasure in writing." Only through language can the self escape its image. She splits words in half, sometimes thirds, "be(e)/d," which allows for multiple readings of the same construction, but after awhile it is like having season tickets to see the Harlem Globetrotters, the same trick shot does not always produce the same magic. The real success of the book is when she pushes new poetic ground, be it channeled or not. While all the poems may not hit the bullseye, most do, which is impressive considering how small the target is.

 

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