Reviews

by Cole Swensen

Conference by Stacy Doris
Potes and Poets Press, 2001
Paperback, $12.95

Stacy Doris' new book Conference continues her explorations of both form and tone-the form is expansive, theatrical, and actively visual-lively marks indicating characters fly about like errant accents over the pages-while the tone strikes a poignant flippancy that is deeply moving and entirely her own. Being a conference, voice is crucial, and the interjection of voices-in dialogue, in monologue, into and out of each other-constitutes the dynamic principle. While there are characters, they're not stable, but tend to mutate, equating with proliferating stances and objects-and are all somehow birds. Not literally, perhaps, but the presence of birds is so pervasive that it seems to permeate them all. It's this omnipresent birdness that evokes the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar's masterpiece The Conference of the Birds as the ground against which Conference figures itself.

This twelfth-century epic poem (whose author figures as one of Doris's characters), originally considered heretical because of its incomprehensibility, features a world of birds in crisis, searching for a unity that they ultimately discover is themselves. These are the elements with which Doris begins. Her own, very different incomprehensibility functions, as did Attar's, to surprise readers into a non-logical understanding that requires their participation.

She uses the notion of a world of birds in crisis to evoke contemporary political reality, which she addresses with a marvelous subtlety, never dogmatic or didactic, yet charged with an imminence that looks straight at the present global predicament through characters such as Genocidal Logic and Emergency. Doris, a student of Arabic, is particularly attentive to the centuries-long strain between the Islamic and the Judeo-Christian worlds. Her deep skill is that, while she never mentions it directly, we are in no doubt of it.

The unity that constitutes the goal of Attar's poem is ever-present here too, and signaled by a , underscoring sound, song, and the unpronounceable. But because she's dealing with the actual world rather than with Attar's mystical, allegorical one, the ultimate unity is multiple and problematic: "I take the puppet, which is myself, and fling her against the sky." "Idealists see unanimous as continuous, and deity is invented thus. // I miss her." That a paradoxical disunified unity is at the center of the book is apparent from the Table of Contents, which is subtitled "Map for this book as it is not itself," but ends with the exodos: "celebration of ( word)"

It would be too easy to read this as unity attainable through language-it's not that; instead, language is a mechanism to engender more language in a tumult: "If it happens my friend has wings, she is an angel, therefore falling. She is awake thus woeful. A lamb a bay. Reversing to graze. Its mouth sews to moth. Upside-down so un-fallen, roasting in sun-slag. Amber-legged mutton. The whole spirals until it is the sun, and so inanimate, so veiled. Angel ribs. Dressed in a sky mask. The wings, in form collapse." The principles of proliferation are many: semantic, sonorous, associative, and comprise a headlong meditation that fuses the political, the ethical, and the spiritual, and that attempts—and attains—a personal accountability.

© Cole Swensen. All rights reserved.