Death in Gerald McCarthy’s Attica 1977
I have rarely been impressed by the poetry section of The Pedestal Magazine. In the current issue, however, I found an exception that addresses, in a poem set primarily in a prison, that final transition known as death. Gerald McCarthy makes the reader feel the oppressiveness of Attica 1977 by beginning the poem with the line “A skull” and only telling us in the next few lines why. By saving the words that signal simile for the second line, we get the presence of death whole and without mitigation. It is real. “[T]he pressure / the way the ceilings push down” comes almost as a relief except that a reader with even an instinctive awareness of the maxim or relevance will attempt to connect this pressure back to the skull.
This pressure makes something worse than a headache. More deadly too with “soft yellow patches”– the color of old bones– covering bullet holes.
We are taken on this journey into a skull, into death, only to find something quite close to the sort of activities young writers often engage in outside:
We smoked it there,
watched the snow fall in the yards,
outside.
And then we read
to each other, the words
spinning out.
Except that what is smoked is not a bong or a regular joint but “a thin jailhouse joint”.
The real threat of death to the poem’s speaker, however, only comes after the place like death (or like its sign) is left: “On my way home / I skidded in the drifts”. Could this be the grip of death remaining from the prison? The speaker’s thoughts certainly return there, but then they drift to a place that instead of being a skull carries thousands of skulls, as if each of the dead in the Capuchin’s cavern of skulls represents a place of imprisonment.
Sphere: Related ContentWang Xiaoni’s “White Moon” Death
In depicting the moon at midnight as the lighting for a rehearsal of death, a striking take on the connection between death and sleep, Wang Xiaoni’s “White Moon” connects the time of night most distant from the transitions between light and dark to the most dramatic transition which human beings experience. The moon, in its purity transforms the speaker to a skeleton; the sight overwhelms her mind so that memories of being human cannot change this impression.
The final line, however, focuses on her feet, an image of grounding. Perhaps the speaker can return to her human body (and to sleep) even before the long hours pass and the transition to full sunlight occurs.
Sphere: Related ContentBorders & Boundaries Here & There
In the current issue of there., Loretta Clodfelter’s Here/There series of photographs plays with the concepts of the titular terms and, in so doing, foregrounds the question of the border between here and there. Her photographs add a dimension to this investigation that the mere presence of large letters reading HERE and THERE cannot. Seen on site, the installation of the term THERE seems paradoxical; someone must have stood in that place and erected those letters and, to that person, the place so labeled must have been “here”. The photographs, however, freeze and emphasize the gaze of the uninvolved viewer: to this individual, HERE is never here, as s/he must always be somewhere else in order to look at the word.
Finally, the location of these words on the Oakland/Berkeley border further emphasizes the line between here and there, though the word-sculptures themselves illuminate the constructed and subjective nature of that division. One, too, is led to speculate as to where one side of the border is always here and the other always there and, if so, what factors lead to that labeling. (This aspect of the project could be seen as the art reading the audience rather than the audience reading the art.)
Sphere: Related ContentSpam Lit & the Liminal Poet
A recent Guardian article on Spam Lit includes a quote from Ben Myers stating that “A spam poet is as much an editor as a bard“. This places the poet in a liminal role, somewhere between selector and creator. In fact, every poet acts in such a way: not every grouping of words is original (some are overheard), but more importantly words themselves begin (in most cases) before they are used in poetry (and even neologisms have root in something). What spam-originating poetry, like other found poetry, does is to highlight this borrowing function and thus the threshold on which poet-artists stand.
Sphere: Related ContentDermaphoria (2007)
Dermaphoria (2007)
Written in 2007 by Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria is the second novel from this talented and challenging US author. Having structured his first novel, The Contortionist’s Handbook, around a narrator whose memory was that of a savant, Clevenger chose ‘amnesia’ as his primary condition for this text.
Eric Ashworth wakes to find trouble in the form of a police officer named Ansliger but without any recollection aside from the name “Desiree”. At this point he is faced with the prospect of a prison sentence for being the architect of an increasingly popular new drug which is spreading virulently through the streets of Los Angeles.
In a frantic attempt to reconstruct the fragments and shards of his shattered memory, Ashworth begins using the hallucinogen he has created. As a consequence of this usage, he suffers a disorientation of his perceptions and awareness of the different realities generated by his impaired mind which causes a paranoid sensibility and addiction to achieve permanence in his consciousness.
Clevenger’s written style has an unerring congruence with this novel’s subject matter, thematic concerns and structure. The deliberate layering and disordering of different narratives, scenarios, sequences and events contributes to the reader’s difficulty in establishing the actualities of the plot, producing an elegant, sophisticated and complex novel that remains compelling to the last. Boundaries of psyche, the liminal spaces of the mind and body, the ‘exactogen’ at the centre of this text synthesises human feelings and then forces and aggravates the transgression of boundaries both physical and mental through the hallucinations and the after-effects.
In terms of influences, that this is reviewed favourably by both Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk offers some idea of the direction the author has taken yet this is only a précis of the menu from which he has undoubtedly dined. With an LA location and pages peppered with underworld slang and vernacular, this is the stuff noir is made of, the seamy and seedy criminalities at the forefront with a wily female on the lookout for her next make. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is offered as a seminal comparison and influence by Clevenger and I would point to the work of Ken Kesey as another fundament for this wonderful and highly ambitious novel that is executed with panache.
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Naomi Woddis’s Poetry Mosaic
If you have not yet seen Naomi Woddis’s new project, Poetry Mosaic, go take a look now. Every month she posts a set of questions and then uses excerpts from emailed answers, along with passages from her own work to piece together poems. This process straddles the threshold between collaboration and individually produced work, as the input of many is still filtered through a single individual’s selections. By directly stating her process and by including the original answers, as well as the names of their contributors, she exposes this liminality.
Indeed, in exposing this liminality, she suggests its existence in more traditional poetry (and other forms of written art). Whenever we write, we depend on language developed by others not only when they were speaking with an awareness of language but also when they were going about their daily lives and answering (or asking) questions of various kinds (as Naomi Woddis puts it, “[a] mosaic is made of many tiles, even found tiles, cobalt blue will be found alongside grannies tea-set.”) This is true whether we borrow at the level of passage, sentence, phrase, word, phoneme, or letter.
Sphere: Related ContentUmbrella Summer 2008: Orsorum
Orsorum means a beginning, a start, an undertaking, or the first few words. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the section of Umbrella’s Summer 2008 issue that takes this term as its title proves a treasure trove of transitional poems and themes.
In “The Velvet Dun”, Jackson Lassiter mocks those who “wax poetic of morn” for ignoring the true terrifying potential and power of a shifting time.
Have they never been unnerved
by the impaling dawn, hid
cowering in dread beneath
a yellow blanket’s vain shield?
However, he fails to give those of us who have not hidden (in dread– I assume we have all hidden from morning in irritation) reason to share or at least understand the fear before moving on to his love of “smoky nightfall”, turning what could have been a revelation about the dangers hidden even in rosy-eyed times of transition into just another night-owl-taking-on-early-birds poem, though admittedly an enjoyable one.
By contrast, his “What Do You Do With The Old Stuff?” begins with an attempt to create a transition, through a “purge” of unneeded material possessions. An inability to unload less physical rem(a)inders of the past gets in the way of change. The reasons for this change, displayed in the third paragraph, give this description of stasis its power and relevance.
Patricia Fargnoli’s “‘There is a radiance in each of us—could we but see it.’” uses a line from a poster not only as its title but also to communicate a transition that stands in shimmering counterpoint to the less present transitions of aging: the slow falling into pain and dysfunction of the body, the loss of loved-ones to death. “Yes oh yes, it sizzles in the cleft of my long dormant / sex”.
In “French Movie”, Robert E. Wood valorizes liminal and ambiguous space in film:
…pauses dominate if the goal is Cannes.
Sometimes it’s best if one character speaks no French
and the subtitles are white on white
More significantly, he concludes on a figure frozen in a transition: “someone has paused on a bridge at night”. A bridge works as an extended threshold between two riverbanks or two states; here, remaining on the bridge represents a valuable silence.
The speaker of Enriqueta Carrington’s “Suites for Cello Solo” attempts to use synesthetic music (”sunlit G in major mode”) to reawaken the recently dead. However, even an art that dwells in liminality cannot undo the transition of death once complete.
Rick Mullin’s “Montclair Father, 46″ highlights the ability of the media in general, and photography in particular, to freeze a moment of transition– in this case, a horrific and brutal moment of transition– in time and thus make it possible to be shared again and again. The effect of this is left to the reader to determine, even as the speaker puts down the paper and attends to his daughters in the second stanza.
Joan Merriam enacts a transition by resetting Neruda’s “Ode to Enchanted Light” in an office setting. The world become “a cup overflowing / with coffee” rather than “a glass overflowing /
with water”. Liquid is transformed and wealth redefined as that which speeds up life rather than that which is necessary to life.
David Graham, in “Statewide Razing”, narrates how a wrecking company name may inspire visions of the transitional act of a building’s destruction spread throughout a far broader locale. A phrase perhaps representative of the ambition of a company’s owner becomes a sign for decomposition with machinery equated to “burying beetles and carrion crows”. “The Honey of the Earth” takes snow as that most liminal of spaces, the blank page and offers that up, not as the intimidating specter so many writers fear, but as a valentine.
Finally, Clay Stockton’s essay follows the turns and transitions of Michael Donaghy’s “Upon a Claude Glass”.
Sphere: Related ContentLiminal Masks
Jeannine Hall Gailey’s essay, Why Women Wear Masks, in the current issue of poemeleon indicates how the persona poem embodies liminality.
The second reason a writer might choose to write in persona has to do with the psychology of the writer. Carl Jung spoke of the persona as the mask or façade that each person presents to the outside world.
The persona…is the individual’s system of adaptation to, or the manner he assumed in dealing with, the world. Every calling or profession, for example, has its own characteristic persona…. Only, the danger is that (people) become identical with their personae—the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice…. One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is. (420)
In persona poetry, this is doubly true—the writer knowingly selects another person to represent in their work, which unconsciously displays something about their internal psychology. Writing persona poems might allow a writer to fully voice an emotion they might be repressing, such as anger or sadness, without feeling they are personally vulnerable. They can express opinions without fear of reprisal, since, after all, the writer isn’t presenting their own opinions, merely those of a created character. This can result in an artistic embrace of the “shadow” self, as well as an exploration of the anima/animus of the writer. Using archetypes from fairy tales and mythology allows writers to explore the subconscious collective imagination that we share as well.
The speaker of a persona poem necessarily has a liminal identity. It is at once the poet and someone else; from the poet’s perspective it exists on the threshold between self and other. In the case of an archetypal figure, it exists between self and many, even all, others. This liminality feeds into the poems that Gailey describes as “subversive remaking of patriarchal narratives”. To change the old stories requires an transitional, temporary, and incomplete identification with the
The bulk of the essay examines the use of personae by Margaret Atwood, Lucille Clifton and Louise Glück; it is worth reading with these ideas in mind.
Sphere: Related ContentMystery in Derek Henderson’s “The Road Along St. Jude’s”
In Boxcar Poetry Review’s May 2008 issue, Derek Henderson’s “The Road Along St. Jude’s” stands out for its development and defense of mystery. The poem begins with and builds on a mystery the mystery of what emerges “[o]ut of my lungs” and then travels over “backroad and gravel”. With the patron saint of lost causes in the title, this reader at least can imagine heavy phlegm or the blood brought up by that once-poetic killer we now call tuberculosis or by the vulgarly familiar TB but the strength of the title’s suggestion of travel also creates the idea of a person emerging from the lungs, perhaps in fact the speaker.
Dwelling in this mystery with the reader along for the ride (whether kicking and screaming or enjoying the vicarious negative capability depends, of course, on the individual’s preferences) Henderson writes the erstwhile lung-dweller to “Crossed curves” that it perhaps travels “over”. The nature of these crossed curves themselves is uncertain. They could be roads that turn away from an intersection rather than continuing straight, or perhaps “Crossed” should be taken as a verb. Though this seems unlikely given the tenses of other verbs in the poem, the first-time reader will not see any of these until after the nearby comma, so it remains a reasonable possibility for at least half a breath. Another possibility picks up the religious theme of the title: the phrase could describe a Celtic cross.
This possibility connects the first stanza with the last:
You want to paint my
God that leavens the tree
Failing—again, falling—into a church
God leavening the tree suggests growth but also draws in echoes of the Passover holiday when (human-made) leavening is not allowed, while the last line suggests the felix culpa: the Church only exists because of original sin, and falling into a church brings up all sorts of redemption narratives. A Latin phrase may conjure up associations with the Roman Catholic Church, though this effect will be at least mitigated for readers who recognize its origin in Horace. Indeed, this problematic religiosity supports a reading of the final stanza as a protest against those who want to paint God, and by extension, the mystery the poem begins with in any particular concrete way.
The middle stanzas also substantiate this meaning as phrases and incomplete unpunctuated sentences suggest heteroglossia. This part of the poem appeals less to me, however, as it seems only to provide a supported resting place for the mystery rather than building and defending it.
Sphere: Related ContentUnmasking Transformation
C.J. Conner’s “Masks”, the cover image for Volume 1, Issue 3 of The Sylvan Echo captures the transformations of an (adult) lifetime in a single picture of two women in similar dresses with similar hairstyles and earrings. The younger woman removes an elderly mask, the older woman a youthful one. The former could be taken as the memories of a bygone time hidden beneath wrinkled skin, the latter as potential wisdom (or dementia) underneath smooth skin. This is somewhat complicated by the skin on the women’s necks, wrists, and (where not hidden by gloves) hands matching the face under the mask.
Maturing, however, though often associated with certain milestones, has never been a linear process. Not one of us develops constantly and consistently along a rising line; we face setbacks, wrong turns, and regressions. Any thoroughgoing transformation will proceed in such a zigzag manner. That the particular steps in a transformation that this moment of unmasking cannot be determined precisely makes Conner’s art more representative of the whole process rather than a single point within it.
Also important here is how the eyes suggest that the two women pictured are separate individuals rather than aspects of the same idea or figure. Not only does each woman have a different eye color, but also each has one eye set in her mask and one in her face. Both these eyes work together, suggesting each individual’s continuity within transformation.
Whether such continuity is more an artifact of how we frame our world than of reality, C.J. Conner’s method of portraying it in “Masks” adds an intriguing layer to an already complicated image of transformation caught in time.
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