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Sunday, September 19, 2010

chapbook review: Heather Cadenhead's Inventory of Sleeping Things

Heather Cadenhead’s chapbook Inventory of Sleeping Things (Maverick Duck Press 2010) collects what is probably a “best of…so far” for the young poet rather than poems unified by a major theme. That’s not to say the eighteen poems are void of recurring motifs; the palette of diction, image, and emotion seem to have been limited by design in this miniature, this small, rather abstract portrait of intimacy and ambivalence regarding it. For Cadenhead, love is the tie that binds, but is more “SOLD sign/ taped to layaway items” than invisible, slack, silken cord. Poem after poem she buries any optimism for relationships in dread (dread of loss of identity, dread of the finite including mortality), but even in this bleak repetitiveness a child’s handful of delightful, lyrical lines and phrases shine. As Horace tells us, the great work of the great poets, if we care to look past the varnish of their names, is merely a few bright, shining strings of words.

The poem that opens the collection “The Cracking of Bones Makes the Same Sound as Falling in Love” contains this: “You’ve gotten used/ to a heaven filled with telephone poles, but I want/ a sky that swallows ideas…” This sentence is musical. In fact, it could make two lines of nearly perfect trochaic hexameter, but broken up over the pattern of regular speech (as Frost might say), we get a different kind of music, one charged not by drumbeat but by accusation. The following line masquerades as the poem’s best one, “I want to know/why falling in love feels like listening to bones crack…,” but this is a game poets play with the trust of their audience. It sounds true…if one isn’t really listening. Maybe poets should play this game so we become better questioners of such declarations, better seekers of truth—so that we ask, what does falling in love feel like if not like listening to bones crack? Whatever the answer is, the combination of pleasure and revulsion continues in the chapbook with “So I Picked Up the Pieces and Threw Them Away” and more subtly in other poems.

“So I Picked Up the Pieces” is just as fleshy and ready to be peeled as its protagonist. “You asked if you could peel my layer,/ and I nodded, handing you a spearing knife…You slid your instrument over me,/ and I felt my skin fall off…I could see my fruit,/ Fleshed across a hidden core./ And you saw, too”. Maybe it’s ars poetica, maybe a poem about surrender or violation of the body, or is this a religious poem? I must admit I looked for religion or at least spirituality from the editor of Basilica Review, an online journal that “seek[s] to broaden the label of Christian poetry and art.” As I use a paring knife to peel my fruit rather than a “spearing” one, I had to hope that, in combination with the ecstasy of the scene and the penultimate piece of the chapbook “Autumn Claims My Bones,” Cadenhead was trying to guide her reader to something else, something beyond a simple metaphor for the male sex organ. From a translation of Saint Teresa of Avila’s autobiography Book of My Life: “Then the angel plunged the flaming spear through my heart again and again until it penetrated my innermost core.” Poetry should bring us to more poetry, to art, to music, to science, to history…This isn’t the only poem in Cadenhead’s brief collection that was the answer of another poem (see Harold Bloom). Read “Autumn Claims My Bones” and Sappho’s “One Girl” and Carl Phillips’s “Aubade: Some Peaches…” Read “Moonblock for Moony Days” and Mark Strand’s “Moontan.” Paste William Meredith’s “The Illiterate” over Cadenhead’s “Illiterate.” Read the entire chapbook and then Robert Lowell’s “Man and Wife.” I ask you to read these poems as companions to one another not competitors (with the exception of the “Illiterate” poems).

I am disappointed with the revision of “A Coat on a Love Seat, Translated.” Should I even be mentioning a version of a poem not printed in the work at hand? I’m not sure, but I believe that the internet’s influence on the way poetry is written, disseminated, and read should cause us to rethink the limits of publishing and critique. The original “Coat” can still be accessed on the website of the online journal Up the Staircase. The cutting of two strophes has resulted in each remaining strophe becoming a possible “translation” of the coat or what that coat reminds the speaker of; for instance, the speaker on a bed and pine cones on the limp grass which in turn are like women on chaise lounges. However, as readers, we lose the more tangible and relatable image of the woman who must work both inside and outside the home. We lose the message that keeping house—not just keeping it tidy but keeping it whole—is work. And, we lose the perfect, concise way Cadenhead had conveyed the tedium of the balancing act required of the “working woman” and wife in the simple refrain of “I work, I work.” Also, I am afraid that the poem as printed in the book may have been a casualty of the micro press. The last lines on the page look to be a mistake being identical in capitalization and punctuation to the lines from two pages prior. Despite the fact that it might be an error, I delight in the way these lines suddenly convolute the “rain” and the “you.”

Finally I arrive at my “last things.” In Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken,” Rich identifies the problem of male-dominated culture misnaming woman’s needs and being. Inventory of Sleeping Things looks at that misnaming in the most claustrophobic, if not the most intimate, of environments, the co-inhabited home. A poem like “A Man Names Things” reassures me that I’m not entirely wrong about my interpretation. The themes of ownership and identity which I briefly touched above are gender-neutral; both the “you” and the “I” mistake his or her own desires and fears for the other’s needs. In “Raven,” for instance, the speaker provides us with two stanzas of hope and then these lines:

If I am alone, I am not whole.
What I want is this: Bare
fingers pulling bread from
the same loaf, a glass of wine
from a shared skin, a deep burial.
There, the ground will swallow us, together.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed a couple of poems like “The Astronaut’s Lost and Found,” (I believe it’s telling that the ones I liked the most had more than a good dose of magic realism in them. A review is just an opinion after all) and followed the reasoning of the arrangement of poems (the side-by-side house poems were a nice touch, like decorative support columns), but wish that the chapbook had been treated more as a form and that it had freakin’ page numbers.

I invite Heather Cadenhead to respond to this review. After all, this isn’t workshop wherein one must remain silent while her peers praise and criticize her (and how much of our practice of ignoring the poet has to do with previous generation’s lack of all the communication tools we now have? Not saying I want the poet to interfere in my reading of his poems; I don’t like to be managed that way, but as an experiment…) I would be more than happy to post her response here believing dialogue can be beneficial to the appreciation of poetry especially to those not so arrogant to have already formed one immutable opinion of it.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Reflection: When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision

I'm trying to keep track of what I read and what I think about it and I had to return my library books, so now I'm presenting you with a bit of my self-directed study in Twentieth-Century American Poetics (I'm using the book edited by Gioia and others). My hope is to be able to formulate, despite the fact that it might change in the next week, by the end of reading and writing about the essays in this book (and others maybe), my own poetic theory or something.


on Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken”: Writing as Re-Vision, 1971


According to Adrienne Rich, Henrik Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken is about the male creative have made of woman and woman’s awakening to that use. Like his contemporary, Bernard Shaw, Rich invites us to consider what will happen to society/culture “when we dead awaken.” (Note: I am currently reading the play, and while certain Rich’s synopsis is valid and likely an example of re-Vision, I would wager most critics or fans of the piece would say it was a bit more “universal”—but read on to find out what Rich thinks of that.)

Rich uses this idea of waking in the sense of opening one’s eyes and she transitions quickly to a call for Re-vision which is the “act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” Re-vision, is not just a poetic theory, but a political call for action, and it calls toward women, the “special” ones –those in academia and of certain economic classes—and artists, to validate their struggles and privileges by helping less “special” women through a Re-vision of the culture through critique of its old texts, writing of new texts (and text here means “art”) and perhaps not just history but historiography. “We need to know the writing of the past,” Rich declares meaning, I believe, both that we need to know past writing and that we need to know how the past has been written down or transmitted to us. “We need to know the writing of the past…not to pass on tradition but to break its hold over us.” Underlying Rich’s entire point is the faith that life will imitate art or that, “What we see, we see/ and seeing is changing.” Rich seems so much more optimistic than I expected; I hear her saying under all these other words, yes, poetry matters.

Rich’s essay moves from the broad, the public, the this-affects-us-all to the narrow, the private, the-this-affects-me. As she navigates us from the one point to the other, she talks about the misnaming of woman and her needs by male-dominated culture. Writing is re-naming and re-visioning. Critiquing tradition and literature allows us to see how “we have been led to imagine ourselves” and the way we live so that “we can begin to see and name and live afresh.”

In this in-between moment, when Rich is trying to connect me/us/our with her, I begin to feel disoriented. Rich was born to a doctor/professor at Johns Hopkins and graduated from Radcliffe after winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Four years after that book was published, she published a second. By the time she wrote what I have in my lap as part of an anthology of poetics, she had published at least three more books. She says she has been allowed to think of herself as special because she did not threaten the male privilege of naming her “special,” but at least the Man had named her and saw her as a poet which she desired to be named. In a society driven, it seems to me, not by art but by the exchange of commodities, by having a commodity, a book (or being given a book, which is sort of what a first book prize does) she can no longer threaten the male system by which things are named (nominated and dominated). For poets, a book currently acts as a name-tag or museum placard. Without one, who knows what to call us, what I am? I am neither saying, yet, that to be liberated for the pursuit of Truth or something like it, something like poetry, calls for a united denunciation and refusal of prizes, books, publication in little magazines nor that the prizes, books, and publications make one less of an artist, at least that wasn’t my intention. I’m still thinking about these things because I am young in multiple ways and can’t fight off the desire for recognition, to think myself special and have others think it, and silly as it might be to the more educated, the wiser, the harder, the ones that have been there-thought that, I’d like someone to say, hey listen, she’s a poet, so yes, what she says matters.

Rich’s dilemma to “consider [herself] a failed woman or a failed poet” allows my return to her obviously well-intentioned example of herself as a woman working under male-created assumptions and judgments. One assumption: “poetry should be ‘universal.’” What Rich realized is that “universal” meant “nonfemale.” Rich uses her private life to illustrate how the assumptions of what a woman should be/do and what poetry is/does are male-constructed myths that we can (I believe she means should and are and will but I’m not there yet, not entirely) break from through writing, through our own creations. The creative process and the traditional female role proved difficult for Rich to synthesize (and this continues to be the case for female artists that have also chosen—how much it was actual, informed choice is debatable—to marry and have children). This part reminds me of Kristeva’s “Women’s Time,” because it has to do with our language being connected with time or how our time is put to use:
“I was writing very little…partly from the discontinuity of female life with its attention to small chores, errands, work that others constantly undo, small children’s constant needs…my anger and frustration were hard to acknowledge in or out of poems because in fact I cared a great deal about my husband and my children…For a poem to coalesce,…there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of the mind is needed—freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched way.”

Rich includes her own early poems to show how she was subconsciously working with themes of thwarted feminine imagination, male/female dichotomies, etc. which she now works with consciously. The formally and visually constrained poetry of her student days seems to have been unraveled, snipped, torn, stretched until it became something that seemed more to her like a poem than an exercise. There is craft present in “Thinking of Caroline Herschel…,” the most recent of the poems she provides in the essay, but it is a craft of deconstruction and fragmentation. It is the demolition before the new house is built, an obvious try at breaking away from male language and allusion in order to construct her own. I’m not well steeped in Rich’s poetry, but that’s a part of this process. I will read her with purpose. I wonder has the renovation continued and what stage is it in now.

Rich speaks about her life and her own poetry, I think, in order to validate the personal in poetry, the I. She is in essence saying that speaking from one’s experiences isn’t necessarily self-indulgent but can be, in fact, political. Women writing about women and about themselves is perhaps more political than men writing about the same things that make up the news. “In condemning U.S. imperialism or the Chilean junta the poet can claim to speak for the oppressed while remaining, as male, part of a system of sexual oppression (which, Rich suggested, is the model for all oppression). The enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else,” she says. Re-Vision might be another way of saying that in the male myth, the male-centric narrative, it’s the wars, the Big Things that matter, but the little things, the women (and “women” stands in for much more than that which is female) who are washing their clothes or hanging someone else’s clothes out to dry, are part of the story. We just have to see that it’s so and tell it and re-tell it, because that part of the story matters.

I thought this was a well-written piece, still relevant over thirty years later, and Rich put into concise, quotable sentences things that had been less organized, but already present, in my mind.