Wednesday, August 21, 2013

"We Humans"



“We Humans”

I’ve been reading the poem “We Humans” from Darcie Dennigan’s book Madame X. I’m always fascinated by how much and how little a poem can contain. Kenneth Koch once said, “I like the idea of bringing the whole world onto the stage.” I get it. The potential for truth and its varied rhythms becomes more likely in, not so much an endless bucket, but a bucket in which an endless number of things might be fetched. The sifting of more dirt unlocks more gold. The juxtaposition of varied dirts is better than gold. The world has to be our subject and our audience, to some extent.

The title “We Humans” stakes a claim on a pretty big subject, but the poem’s intimacy and precision both keep its big promise in check and ultimately fulfill it. The poem opens, “My boyfriend believes aliens built the pyramids.” We readers get invited right into the bedroom where the speaker and the speaker’s boyfriend watch a PBS documentary on those same pyramids imbedded in the boyfriend’s belief. A lesser poet would mine intimacy from the chinks in this relationship, or worse yet make a voyeur of the reader. Sex scenes are fine, I suppose, but how many writers can truly render the act so its mystery rivals the mystery of the pyramids?

Instead, Dennigan creates a room as fragile and uniquely detailed as one in a handcrafted doll house: the unlit Christmas tree, those Oreos that cross an imaginary line, the paper roses equally likely in magic and science. The poem retains its status as miniature while still addressing belief and identity, what we share and what we want, what we want to share but cannot. The last line is shocking in its want. It effectively and personally calls for the world to continue.

                                   -- GFA

Sunday, August 11, 2013

"Strange Little Machines"


In conversation, Glen Armstrong sometimes refers to this or that poem as a “strange little machine” and, among others, I think of Dickinson.  Some poets protest against the idea of their efforts being algorithms at work but it needn’t be an insult to attribute creativity to machinations.  With the right sort of machine and program running, one’ll have practically infinite variability in outcome.  “Nature” in: odd, lovely, machination out.

That’s how Dickinson works.  One could almost call it an “empirical” activity.  Nature, plus an awareness of “the” literature, in: riffs and variations from there.  I think of Whitman in this context, too, where the riffs become waves and the variations attempt to set us off into new territory.  Nature and literature get run through their minds and we end up with some fortunate inventions.

And by invention here I like to go back to what’s summed up in the old rhetorical word “inventio”, which people tell me can be translated from the Latin to English as either “invention” or “discovery”.  The ambiguity is an advantage here because it points to something that’s neither fabricated out of nothing nor completely given.  Rather, the result of inventio is partially constructed, not unlike they way we’ve found out memory works.  Our brains too are strange little machines.  -bbc