Djelloul Marbrook

Our Parenthetical Ontology, Deborah Poe, CustomWords, 2008, 80pp.

When I first heard Deborah Poe read, long before I had read Our Parenthetical Ontology, I imagined warm raindrops falling on my bare feet, which I had improbably stuck out of a window on a summer day. It was the dead of winter, enhancing the surreal aspect of this response to her work.

I’ve now read her book at least three times, and I think I understand this response. Everything about her language is magically improbable and unpredictable, and yet it immediately establishes its unassailable logic on the page and in the air. A reader might well imagine himself the young King Arthur discovering that his magus, Merlin, speaks the language of dragons and fairies.

Poe read her work that biting, snowy day unassumingly, as if she were reading another poet whose work she respected. She made no effort to heighten its effect on her audience. This is the kind of reading I instinctively prefer, because more dramatic readings have the odor of manipulation about them.

Poe understands better than most that language is what it does, and that every language has not only its many dialects, but also the language of otherlings that can be brought to life with skill and daring. That is why one wonders if her poems are English at all, and one is hardly reassured to find that, after all, they are English, because it’s not her intent to reassure us but to carry us into the far realms of language possibilities.

This is what tempts us to call her a conceptualist and to think that’s that. Our society indulges an Aristotelian compulsion to categorize, which has been given considerable if suspect validation by our critical establishment. It compromises inquiry. Poe is much too well read and admiring of the long history of poetics to mire herself in prosodic dogma. But she knows what modernism is about and doesn’t intend to retreat from its frontiers.

Whether we see her employing strophe or stichic (a bound line), her work
has a sometimes breathtaking sure-handedness, as in “Maxims”:

imagine a maxim that looks like spring,
more personified in the historian’s eye,
for particularity in lilac smells.

now, when origin of time was like this:
winter leaves, winter comes again
his story spring & the associative year
incorporated.

I can hardly express how much I admire the confidence of these stanzas, but I can perhaps give some clues as to why I admire them. In the first stanza there is a powerful tension between intellectual abstraction on the one hand and specificity on the other, and this in itself takes daring on a poet’s part, because the critical consensus is that abstraction is generally ruinous in its pretension. But it’s exactly right here. One can almost imagine a maxim as wintry, not as nuanced and shocking as spring. Hence Eliot’s April is the cruellest month. And this too points up the genius of the verse, because without any obvious referential material Poe invites Eliot’s musing, as well as many others, and so the verse is inherently referential without freighting itself with reference. This is subtlety of the first order.

When I first encountered James Joyce I did it the hard way, reading Finnegan’s Wake before his more accessible work. George Nobbe, a professor at Columbia, was amazed that I had been attending that wake for some time by the time I got to college. But I made the mistake of thinking that its strangeness could be attributed for the most part to its Irishness. If Professor Nobbe had known that he would have been less impressed. I only dimly grasped that Joyce had decided that a language must be turned on its head and inside out from time to time, and I owe my own best work to this notion. But turning a language inside out leaves blood on the floor in spring and on the snow in winter, and Joyce doesn’t invariably escape the onus of having done so. Or perhaps he wouldn’t have wanted to escape it. Poe, on the other hand, handles the language with what I might call the deference if not awe of a priestess. I have an almost limitless admiration for Joyce, so I imply no criticism here. I’m not sure an American or even an Englishman could handle language like Joyce. I have the sense that the Irish are on more intimate terms with their language, whether it be Gaelic or English, than most English speakers—a phenomenon perhaps akin to the tribal Arabs. Poe, I think—and I am far out on a limb here—has rather an American can-do approach. She knows language can be taken apart and put back together in many ways, but she disdains doing it for the mere exercise. Or even for the sheer fun of it. Her experiments never lead to contraption or improvisation. They work, as if she had run thousands of experiments beforehand so everything will be seamless and have the proper tensile strength. She is perhaps the best insight I can propose into the workings of her mind. Her brainpan must be a populous and well run laboratory.

Take “The Burning Question” on page 24.

It’s a three-stanza one-sentence poem, a considerable feat, for one thing, but its exquisite putting aside of language conventions, without vulgarly shouldering them aside, is what I deeply admire:

The burning question

of why the mid-day
tennis shoe sand shuffle
traipses beside the
florescent silk strewn cactus
flower well beyond its prickly

… not prickliness, because the very next stanza continues: and why the red rock.

I’ve been considering for weeks how to describe what I admire about this delicacy, this transfer of language from familiar usage to the purposes of otherlings. The alliteration, as it probably should be in the 21st Century, is casual, incidental. Nothing annunciative, as with Swinburne, for example. But there’s no doubt that the S sound insinuates itself for a reason, and in the third from the last line of this elegant poem we see why:

I see you seeing me.

A less restrained poet would have started the poem with this line. And then everything would have been anticlimactic, but the poet would have had the benefit of saying, Listen up.

Poe listens to where her words and thoughts want to go. Placement isn’t everything in her work, but it’s a big part of it, and in this way she reinstates the importance of looking at a poem, its visual life. That’s why I visualize a collaboration here with a web designer, because I think this kind of poetry can be deployed on a screen in ways that would be pointless for less daring prosody. I see words and lines coming and going, brightening and dimming, coloring and fading, and moving like weather across the digital sky. (There is, unfortunately, no way with the textual software employed by this blog to replicate Poe’s deft placement. Suffice it so say that I think of martial art and ballet moves that can’t be made, are not in the canon.)

Saying this, I think of her “Two-Stepping to Dolly Parton’s Jolene,” another poem where the title and first stanza elide:

planning to go to That bar again,/tonight as if going to see my man/i took care—like never—/before/i sat down in the shower/I pulled/the razor/against/& slowly—the hair

My software has savaged the placement of this poem, which is exquisite—in fact this is one of the poems that moved me to think of rain—but I want to speak to some of its pleasures other than placement.

Look at that caesura between tonight and as if going to see my man: we need it to catch our breath, to prepare us for the riffs and slides of this memorable poem. Now watch how the speaker uses a lower case for the personal pronoun and then the conventional upper case. Lower case is tenuous, unobtrusive, but by the time she pulls the razor she has become more decisive. So this contrasting ploy pulls us into the speaker’s mood shift. The ampersand is where the object of the word against ordinarily would be, but the poet wants to say slowly before she conveys the idea of shaving, because, after all, it could have been a different kind of razor and she could have been opening her veins. But there is something even more intriguing about the use of this ampersand. It is an arabesque, a particular kind of arabesque that loops the reader counterclockwise and then thrusts him forward into the word slowly—in the manner of a left-handed submarine baseball pitcher. It has something of the function of a caesura about it, but it is visually elegant and engaging, giving the reader a moment to regroup as if on the verge of an adventure.

This is an extraordinarily rich poem of 42 lines. It has very little punctuation, relying on sense and placement, but it does have a comma at the end of the second line and a period at the very end of the poem. I scanned this poem again and again over a period of a month, asking myself why Poe didn’t dispense with that comma and period. Not because the poem, when first read, raised the question, but because as a poet I wanted to know, to see her reason. I’m not sure I do. I reasoned that the second line didn’t need the comma simply because no pause was needed, since the third line is deeply indented. Hah, I finally said to myself, that line needs to be impeded, and it’s the only line in the entire poem that does need to be impeded, because everything that happens in the poem happens as a result of that line. I hope Poe herself may someday tell me if I have come anywhere close to her intention here. And as for the final period, space with no punctuation would trail off, and I don’t think Poe wants this poem to trail off. She wants it to end like a tango or the two-step it is. This period pushes back against the preceding 42 lines just enough to remind you of where you’ve been before you go on to somewhere else.

And here is the beauty, the grandeur even, of language out on its farthest pales. This is a poetics of the unguarded frontier. No pickets are posted here. The poems simply deal with what they counter intellectually and emotionally. With most poets you can think of a tool box into which they reach for just the right tool to implement an idea. But with Poe—although not with all language or conceptual poets—it’s as if you’re watching the nightly reforging of the tools. There is a kind of progression from the mechanical to the electrical to the electronic to the alchemical.

Deborah Poe is the new fiction editor of Drunken Boat, the highly regarded literary journal. Assistant professor of English at Pace University, she is also the author of a number of chapbooks. She has received several literary awards including three Pushcart Prize nominations for her poetry and the Thayer Fellowship of the Arts (2008) for her poetry and fiction. A fiction writer as well as a poet—I haven’t read her fiction yet—I would expect her extraordinary sensibility to make Drunken Boat’s fiction selections groundbreaking.

In the spirit of her title, I conclude with a parenthetical note. On page 44 is a short poem called “Revision.”

]No one conjures you from pieces

from hair and voodoo

No one makes you real

The next stanza is in parentheses. But you see that right-sided bracket at the beginning, don’t you? There is no other bracket in the poem. Why is it there? Well, first of all, the poet wants you to wonder why. Second of all, it isn’t necessary for you to apprehend her own reason for putting it there. You can entertain your own reason(s). It does give the line a start, doesn’t it? As in startle. It pushes the thought out onto the stage from the wings of the poet’s mind. But these are just speculations. The power of this sort of poetry is this enigmatic use of language to evoke consideration. And the elegance of this sort of poetry is that the poet is not insisting that you go along with her own ideas. So, finally, this is participatory poetry. Not the poetry of received and handed-down ideas, but the poetry of inquiry, provocation and discourse. It could, in this light, hardly be more modernist.—DM