Historical Imperatives in Arisa White’s Disposition for Shininess and Sara Veglahn’s Closed Histories

Closed Histories
Noemi Press, 2008

Disposition for Shininess (not pictured)
Factory Hollow Press, 2008

Review by Metta Sáma

Arisa White’s Disposition for Shininess and Sara Veglahn’s Closed Histories are two incredibly different chapbooks from two seemingly (on the page) different writers. While White’s poetics veer towards the lyric narrative, Veglahn’s work is determinedly lyric, with narratives always harkening in the shadows. Each of these books establishes a central focus: for White, the lyric “disposition” is the core of the poems, while Veglahn constructs a concept for, as her title suggests, closed histories. Despite these fundamental differences in the end product (the poem itself), White and Veglahn’s chapbooks are moody trajectories of the intersections between the personal, the public, the private, the memory and rememory, and the responsibilities of the individual to these not so discrete spaces.

White’s poems are sprawling or tight, playful and compassionate, stark and brutally honed to capture the core of the metaphor that she extends and warps and snaps and releases to a newness. This is innovation at its core: an ability to make new the old, to make unrecognizable the familiar, to comfort and destroy, to build the concept while also building the narrative (and lyric). This innovation is most noticeable in the titular poem, “Disposition for Shininess”, a six-part, eight-page poem (the second poem in the book) that expands the lyric presented in the first poem, “This is How it Went in Luke”. Where “This is How it Went in Luke” builds on an anaphora, “The daughter of,” and stages the book as religious/spiritual beginnings, “Disposition for Shininess” puts the narrative pieces in place. We learn about the births of various members of the family, and White, a master craftician, plays with physical birth, emotional birth, spiritual birth, the birth of geography, and the physical mappings between the siblings, the mother, and the mother’s lover. In White’s hands, every image is compressed and conflated to hold as much emotional resonance as possible: “Like over and over again we a post-it/to some stone she had to swallow,/some pain that can’t be exfoliated down” (1: 20-22); “She pulls her hair and there’s a widow./Slicked, she stands at the peak of her thoughts./Our mother polishes her requiem until it’s an opal./Watch it long it glistens like a leach” (2: 12-15); “We fold the smaller one into the bigger one/until we are one child our mother cannot hold.//. . .We know this exquisite corpse between us” (4: 2,3, 14). This poem, similar to others in the book, drops clues and picks them up, working deeply on nuance.

Sara Veglahn, too, is an exquisite innovator. Closed Histories, a series of untitled prose poems, build on a basic premise and re-create as it queries. Veglahn’s innovation happens within the lines, saturated as they are with quietness and mystery, with a surprise that startles the senses, but that, oddly, feel right, earned. She writes: “Where there’s a magic number for each/thought. I walk sideways down the road. I walk/careful and slow. The soldiers are in the fields./The soldiers are coming down from the hills” (2-5). I follow these poems because the voice is steady, confident, curious, and tenacious. Selah Saterstrom says that “Between the images an almost divinatory logic erupts,” and Veglahn captures that deep intuition in the middle poems, which begin in the simple and move quickly, stealthily, to the profound: “From the window, light. From the light, a/pattern. From patterns, the shape of the world./A thought in a shape. . . ./As if in a mirror, the way that you are not/yourself in your reflection” (1-5). Veglahn’s work feels like a mash-up of Muriel Rukeyser and Mei-Mei Bersennbrugge: deeply philosophical, utterly conceptual, fresh, political, and painfully compassionate.

Derivative of the Moving Image by Jennifer Bartlett

University of New Mexico Press, 2007
Reviewed by Metta Sáma

I’ve always enjoyed a book of poems that takes me on a journey: be it a full narrative, a lyrical fragmentation, a jaunt into surrealism, or, say, a basic concept: here is a soundscape beginning with A. I’ve mostly enjoyed how these books transgress their own rules, how they break apart the narrative moment to explore a lyric’s unsettling powers to transcribe a narrative on the outer edges of a cup, how they refuse to be stalled in a pattern. A poetic impulse, perhaps, to reconfigure, to remake; to piece together the puzzle while being wholly aware that on those puzzle lines, between those miniscule breaths that the pieces create, there are stories, moods, moments of un/reconciliation. The stories are always on the lines.

Jennifer Bartlett’s Derivative of the Moving Image (DotMI) is one such book. Divided into five titled sections (“When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.”, “Derivative of the Moving Image”, “Essays on Birds and Light”, “The Music Of”, and “Hypnagogic Diary”), each devoted to its own form/al construction: prose/like poems to lined poems that make use of the page-whole. Bartlett’s poems often teeter, often spin, often skip, often drown in the process of grieving.

A friend once said that prose poems should be neat little blocks; the poet who doesn’t make the block is lazy & not doing justice to the poem. I thought the friend was a little rigid and too invested in rules. When I read the first section of DotMI, however, I paused to reconsider that rule. The poems in “When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.” are quite heart collapsing, honest, and vulnerable. Many of them deal with the death of a sister, or death and dying in general. There is loss: of the body (“Her one collapsing lung thrown/onto the emergency room floor” (“When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.” 18, 19)), of what is real, of what one wants (“Why do you desert me? You know/my limbs are fragile (“Ghost Boy” 4, 5)), of what one can(not) hold (“That is why the moment my sister left her body our parents/made us turn from her” (“Elegy for the Trees” 16)), and of course, there is the perpetual impending loss (“This is/where we begin to give up, the both of us” (Coup de Grace 23, 24)). I can only admire the bravado of writing through such quakes, of that intense desire to excise from the psyche those hauntings.

And yet, I wonder I wonder I wonder. At what moment am I reading (Lord help me) poetry. Yes, I’m ready for the attacks. Bartlett’s first section read like the beginnings of essays, the beginnings of poems, the promise of that distilled insight. But these are the beginnings. I hesitated in writing about this book, because I, too, have lost and suffered and wanted nothing but the thing itself out of me. And poems helped me to deliver those things. Poems were the matter that could hold the fragments, the fractures, the dissonance. But, is the book of poems the place to house these beginnings?

Grief is difficult to write about, yes. There are clichés that sit with us (“Angels lie with me against these/worn sheets, assuring my journey” (“Coup de Grace” 2, 3), “my limbs are fragile; like paper dolls” (“Ghost Boy” 5), “Your house smelling like tattoo ink, if it can have a/smell” (“When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.” 5, 6)), and so on. There are tropes that hold the fort (moths that appear (perhaps only) to the person who has lost a love; moths that transform from annoying little pests to creatures “more beautiful than butterflies” (“From a Paris Hotel Room”)). There is the overstatement (“Tulip Farm” and “Elegy for the Tree”) that can create and destroy an entire poem.

So, I sat with this book trying to decipher where the poetic impulses were, where the tight sprawls of insight were, where the (dare I say it) craft was. I wonder: if these prose bits (in sections 1 and 3-5) were “tighter” in outward appearance, would Bartlett have sacrificed some of the easy pronouncements, some of the excessive overmakings (the dependence on the prosaic syntax, for example) to get to the bone? (In other words, could this book have survived without that first section? The other sections pick up speed (although there are still those moments of syntactical proseyness that stalls the emotions), and while filled with trepidations (“I plan on your leaving”), there is a bravado that transgresses the small worlds (“I am getting good/in this practicing”). Yes, there is a sweet wickedness in the I who is “[c]omplete in [her] autobiography of dirty feather” (“Whose Music Excels the Music of Birds” 20).

I love a first book of poems. I’m curious about structure, about voice and tone, about playing it safe, about jumping hard on the burning hot crushed glass, about temperament and musicality; I’m curious about all of those little poetry no-no rules broken or embraced or both. I’m curious about that workshop hand and heart, which is often vibrantly apparent in many first books. Mostly, I want to know that the poet has somewhere to g(r)o(w). Bartlett’s Derivative of the Moving Image is filled to the brim with a willingness to risk it all, and for that alone, I look forward to (a) lullaby without any music.

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Small Murders by Carrie McGath

New Issues Press, 2006
Review by Metta Sáma

Because of DNA

DNA everywhere. Hair follicles, eyelashes, hidden hot pink toenails, scraped knees, bruised fingers. Carrie McGath’s debut collection, Small Murders, looks for evidence with a trained, meticulous, inexhaustible eye. From indentations in beds to material inside a glove box, from the bent back of an assiduous artist to the wooden closet of a boudoir, McGath seeks out the tiny parts, the small murders, of the mind, the heart, the psyche, in order to detect the who, why, and wherewithal of love.

Small Murders opens with a tour through a small antique shop, where the perspicacious narrator frets over a series of fragmented doll parts. These “exact dismemberments” hang above the narrator, on display: “brown hair, red hair, dishwater blonde hair,/feet, arms, legs, and heads with eyes,/eyes with eyelids that shuttered when touched.” Despite the baleful atmosphere of this macabre backroom of the antique shop, the narrator sticks around, surveying, making notes of “the gunshot doll”, the “armless teddy bear”, and “two jaundiced plastic arms”, and returns a week later to purchase the small box that contains more parts: “two baby doll teeth,/a small nursing bottle,/a tiny dustpan in 1950s blue” (7). McGath specializes in broken, discarded left behinds, attending to these objects as nurse, scientist, surgeon, and lover.

She recalls the dashboard Virgin in Henry’s taxi, the woeful eyes of Hans Bellmar’s dolls, and a pomegranate rotting in an abandoned refrigerator with tenacious clarity. Later, she returns to the slaughter, more clearly, with “So Nice to See You”, “Rape Dreams”, “Nights Marred Like Crickets in Metal Fan Blades”, and “Murder Girl”. In poems like “You Are a Rifle in My Closet”, “Daylight Savings”, and “My Libido”, the violence is less bloody, yet the narrators suffocate under an intense need to love intensely. In “A Good Nympho Can Get a Lot of Guys Killed”, she writes: “And didn’t I call you a jackass/for not taking the love I gave you seriously?/And then I walked away wanting to cry but seeing the cool/absurdity of crying, so I didn’t” (9).

By the end of the book, I’m convinced this narrator (these narrators?) is “the loneliest girl in the time zone” (1, is “an ordinary object. A compact” (14), is the tremble, the “eerie paths”, the “scouring pads”, the “round and red as plums” nipples, and more and more and more. By the end of the book, I’m just as convinced the fertility of McGath’s imagination becomes overpowering, overdone, and indeterminate. Where restraint is needed, the hand is heavy.

And yet, this is a mesmerist’s narrative hope: to create a lyric fecundate, to unrestrain. Carrie McGath has accomplished this feat. Read it and watch your mind follow the beautiful tangle of dots.

Theory of Orange by Rachel Simon

Pavement Saw Press, 2007
Review by Metta Sáma

“Free association is or “Everything that irritates us about others, leads us to understanding ourselves.”: a review of Rachel Simon’s Theory of Orange”
–Metta Sáma

Rachel Simon’s debut collection, Theory of Orange, 2005-2006 Transcontinental Poetry Award winner, judged by Dean Young, opens with the (false) promise of a “Recipe for Success”. Simon leaps from “eighth-grade embarrassment” to “a new apartment” and back again to “desired birth order[s]” and “compar[ing] childhoods”. This “recipe” seems to comment on poetry-making, book-making, as well as poet-making: “burn it in your cheeks for when doors/swing toward you faster than your arms can brace./Befriend lost children in the produce.” (3) The ironic title and attitude creates a light, self-conscious tone for the book.

A voice and brain-driven poet, Simon honors the frustrated leaps that permeate her world. In poems such as “When You’re Not Allowed To Daydream”, “Anxiety”, “Autobiography” and “Humid”, the jumps invite. In the prose poem “Daydream” she writes: “One can live for years without knowing the teaspoon is inaccurate. Call the bureau of weights and measurements. They’ll understand. In massage school I learned to rub a full belly in clockwise motion…” (1. Not only is the prose form a wonderful tool for these leaps, Simon’s humor has a mental, emotional, and psychological organization, creating a delightful and capricious symphony. In other poems free association works well for Simon’s tone, but don’t compel me to return to the lines and engage on a level beyond quirky, and often, predictable brain play.

Simon’s line, voice, and emotional range are most memorable in the poems “Rope” and “Present Tense”. These elegies to a friend who died young are heartbreaking because Simon gives way to the heart, the spirit and the body, as well as the mind. The lines are lumpy and the stanzas achingly untended, the language splinters, and I believe in all of the creaks. From “Rope”: “I can’t picture you opening the door of the hardware store/comparison shopping rope gauge, fingering/the textures, picking the blend that felt best rolled in your fist.” And ends: “Two years later,//two years in which I’ve pressed my face/into a pillowcase every night/I’m told you used a bedsheet, spun and knotted”. This poem honors the Simon seen earlier, the poet daring to take risks by moving from one idea/situation/image to the next, seamlessly and unpolished. Unlike the poems in which brain play is a short crutch, the shifts here feel entangled and real and powerful and muted in grief.

Many poems fail due to their floppy line and inert line breaks. There is no sense of identity in the lines as units, nor in the line breaks as tension and revelatory moons. While I enjoy free association, Simon’s thoughts on the page feel forged and lackluster. I’m more interested in seeing where these thoughts connect, instead of seeing that a poet can imagine queerly. The book, as a whole, feels staged, fretful, self-conscious, and anticipated. The poems often end abruptly or go on longer than necessary. Yet, Simon is a poet worth waiting for, precisely because she is self-conscious, fretful, stagey, predictable, and like any great young poet, willing to fall hard.

Metta Sáma is a book reviewer and poet. She previously reviewed Celia Homesley’s first book for Hercircle.

Body of Crimson Leaves by Celia Homesley

The Backwaters Press, 2006
Review by Metta Sáma

“a star/which grows slowly/more luminous”: Reading Celia Homesley’s Body of Crimson Leaves

To look at the cover of Celia Homesley’s debut poetry collection, Body of Crimson Leaves, one can easily imagine a Gretel or Red Riding or Snow White, some innocent and utterly curious girl, unafraid of the unknown, adventurous, and willing to get lost, in order to discover the bodies of leaves, the brilliant flesh of earth, and the haunting ease of trees. Homesley’s poems are quiet and unearth a hand willing to remove layers of bodies, slowly, for the hands to discover dirt, to discover a desire to listen to the river that “lies still,/nerves rotted” (44). This is a book of longings that penetrate the senses until the self is frightened, until the self is unabashedly clear about what it means to “die/picking flowers for/the dead” (45).

Body is a journey, of sorts, a collection that, as the title of this piece suggests (from “Night Pond”), reveals its interiors slowly, as if the body of the book itself, and the body of the poems themselves, are stars that do not, at the end of their lifespan, dim, but pulse and radiate, provide light by which the work can be read. In “Lily in Rain”, Homesley writes of a relationship that has wilted and blossomed, through age:

Old love

White trumpet

You curve through the hole
In my fence as if

I will float
Down into this weeping
Press my lips against your throat (16)

Similar to other poems in this collection, “Lily in the Rain” ends inside of a moment, leaning towards a silence, an emptiness, as if the poem itself waits for the luminous moment. Here, the poet leaves us in the stillness of desire, that of the “I” and that of the “lily”: each seems to want what the other possibly cannot and will not give. The sparsity of language, of punctuation, & of the line are further signals of the quiet embedded in curiosity and longing, and the promise of illumination if one is willing to listen and hunger. (Note, for example, that one unusual line, with “as if”, lingering off to the side, alone, and wondering.) These are not easy poems, ones with a firm ending, a closing of the door or the resolution of a problem; these endings signal wistfulness and perpetual aching.

Homesely works at her best when she sets out to discover what she’s willing to anticipate, whether it’s the lily she could press her mouth into, as lover, or the she who waits to dream of taking “lovers./Like shadows” (62). In these poems, the writing is direct and curious, and the poet embodies the minor quakes of need. In the back matter, Ralph Angel notes that “Everything grows in … Homesley’s [poems]. Everything rises and returns.” And if the line is a measure of growth, if the line is a measure of rise and return, then Angel’s elucidations are apt. When Homesley writes of the body in “Journey of the Spiritual Body”, for example, the “child/who feels worthless/save what his fingers/form//steeples/or the visages/of birds” (39) creates, in the line and its break, a body and spirit that “rises and returns”. We have to wait, in Homesley’s poems, for the light to break, to give way to feeling and meaning.

Body of Crimson Leaves builds and shines in this emboldened debut collection. While there are several poems that fall flat (in terms of tone and query), it is the body of imagination, the “chaos/I like to think of as beauty/when no one’s here to tell me otherwise” (31) that sparks and guides.