Mei-mei Berssenbrugge\u2019s new book offers what I take to be an original way of reconciling realism and lyricism and, through that, finding roles for a lyric \u201cI\u201d that is not marked by lack or need or demand.\u00a0 It is simply another fact, and another mode for building the relationships of care on which lyricism is grounded.<\/p>\n
For these brief remarks I will have to focus on only one section of one poem, \u201cDJ Frogs,\u201d although it must be noted that other poems produce considerable variety for the principles I will try to establish:<\/p>\n
\nWe stand in a vernal marsh surrounded by spring peepers so loud I feel like a
\ntuning fork vibrating.
\nThe half-moon rising over trees sends shadows across water in complexities of
\nlight reflections, of opaque grasses, skunk cabbage, violet, indigo streaming into
\nsaturation like blowing sand.
\nWhy don\u2019t we enjoy night more often?<\/address>\nA density of peepers, bull frogs, crickets, cicadas rounds the corner of my hearing.<\/address>\nWhere rhythm should be there\u2019s space around an expected beat that I don\u2019t hear;
\nmy pulse falls through subtracted space.<\/address>\nIt\u2019s not a communication break-down or break in feeling; it\u2019s abstract.<\/address>\nFrogs communicate para-acoustically with the future, grabbing the potential beat
\n(silence) and materializing it from far off in light years.<\/address>\nHigh frequency animal noise is presence; discontinuity of hearing and future
\nalternates across gaps as variations in cone purples formally thought of as
\ngradual from tadpole or imago.<\/address>\nWind, heartbeat, object falling into water, perception merges with the surface.<\/address>\nYou open your hand near my face, a warmth like infrared, on two tiny frogs with
\nshining black eyes.<\/address>\nAny event has this invisible thickness, its other dimensions.<\/address>\nWhere dark sky fills with breezes, currents, moisture, dust particles and so forth,
\na parallel vault moves (as clouds merge and fuse) to form our psychological
\nclimate, a growth medium, like creativity in a dream rummaging through nights
\nin the future for data.<\/address>\nSpaces fuse; skin takes on crickets, tree frogs; owls take on polyrhythms, magic
\nAnd its overlaps.<\/address>\nI like listening to night creatures and trying to bring elements into a composition
\nIn which any sound can be used by the breakbeat for any thing.<\/address>\n<\/blockquote>\nOne\u2019s first question might be, where is the poetry here?\u00a0 There is a situation and a speaker and a \u201cyou,\u201d but nothing very much happens among them.\u00a0 And the details obviously do not stretch toward lyricism or even toward the metaphoricity that issues from particulars as they expand their fields of resonance.\u00a0 These lines are a striking example of what Oren Izenberg calls anti-artifactuality, which many contemporary poets think is necessary to break down the self-congratulatory displays of sensibility and sensitivity typically pursued by high-culture poetry in the West.\u00a0 But then the test becomes what Berssenbrugge can put in the place of such displays.\u00a0 She is patently not interested in the anti-absorptive, disseminating play of language, nor in any kind of aporia.\u00a0 This poetry is adamant about making sense.\u00a0 Indeed its anti-artifactuality stems not from lack of plain sense but from the density of details and abstract complexity of the relations into which the details enter.\u00a0 Yet Berssenbrugge is also no Reznikoff, or from a later generation, no Schuyler.\u00a0 The details do not comprise the poet\u2019s world; they comprise the modes of relatedness that constitute the thinkability of the poet\u2019s world as sustaining particular fascinations and abstract projections.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it is most accurate to say that Hello, the Roses<\/i> is Romantic poetry minus the symbolism and the rhetorical effusions that allow the self to merge with the force raising the objects of perception to the symbolic register.\u00a0 But what is Romantic poetry without its symbols and the rhetorical energies they call forth\u2014whether these energies solicit the egotistical sublime or Keatsian absorption in death and loss?\u00a0 Traditional names are not going to help here.\u00a0 We need to list the dominant qualities of these poems and then let those qualities suffice for our interests in naming.<\/p>\n
The first quality is this proliferation of details moving from intimate moments to difficult abstractions, which puts consciousness ineluctably in a world, while resisting metaphor and symbol as claims for some kind of higher consciousness brought into play by the desiring ego.\u00a0 Berssenbrugge seems never to have met a noun that she did not want to put in a poem. The other qualities involve complex sets of interrelationships among those details.\u00a0 The second quality is how form becomes a matter of weights among phrases created largely by the differing length of line units.\u00a0 The sentences read as prose, but a prose so insistent on being in the world and feeling the different textures of this world that it seems to take on the ontological density dreamed of by poetry.\u00a0 Third, Berssenbrugge uses abstraction like no other poet I know because of its continuity with the world of perception.\u00a0 The poem is simply the work of a mind alive to the possibilities of its own attentiveness.\u00a0 The line \u201cIt\u2019s not a communication break-down or break in feeling; it\u2019s abstract\u201d opens possible feelings for the functions of \u201ctuning forks,\u201d[i]<\/a> \u201csaturation,\u201d \u201cspace,\u201d and \u201csubtracted space,\u201d and then six of the last eight units offer an impersonal perspective stressing modalities of perception that are themselves abstract building blocks of the scene.\u00a0 In these passages abstraction fuses with fact, and in so doing, gives the mind a home that it need not fight for or worry about: mental work constitutes simply one form for completing sensation.<\/p>\n
Indeed the presence of so much abstraction gives considerable metaphoric reach to the role of \u201cspace\u201d in the poem without aligning space with any given metaphorical register.\u00a0 An intense physicality of space is created first by the sound of the frogs (as disk jockeys playing various records), then the play of light \u201cstreaming into saturation,\u201d then night itself, then the strange figure of \u201cthe density of peepers \u2026 rounds the corner of my hearing.\u201d\u00a0 And then the space turns in on itself to create something like an additional dimension composed by thinking, and listening to the poem offer the rhyme of \u201csubtracted space\u201d with \u201cabstract.\u201d\u00a0 Following this play on spaces, the poem works to build a new space in which it can observe both \u201cWind, heartbeat, object falling into the water,\u201d and make of that conjunction a realization of how the abstract sense of \u201cperception merges with the surface.\u201d\u00a0 On this basis the reach of the final units into \u201cother dimensions\u201d seems simply continuous with the order of perception, while beautifully moving out to psychological climate, back to dream that desires, and then to \u201cpolyrhythms\u201d\u2014at once utterly concrete as sound and utterly abstract as the mind\u2019s gathering of those sounds.\u00a0 The poem\u2019s metaphoric reach is not symbolized; it is simply named\u2014another noun for the space of perception that becomes that space.<\/p>\n
Finally I want to comment on the poem\u2019s use of personal pronouns.\u00a0 I had to read these lines several times to even notice that \u201cI,\u201d \u201cwe,\u201d and \u201cyou\u201d all play their part.\u00a0 And their part is simply to gather perceptions and note the impact so that the event might be a focus for quiet transformations in the scene.\u00a0 The personal seems a mode of conduction that allows care to flourish without calling much attention to the personal features of the one caring.\u00a0 This is why pronouns can suffice.\u00a0 But imagine the poem without these pronouns, and you will have a powerful contrast indicating what roles humans can play in establishing these other dimensions for the event.\u00a0 Each time a personal pronoun occurs, it brings what I think are the only metaphors and similes in most of the poem.\u00a0 The similes when \u201cI\u201d occurs establish great figures of invested activity that nonetheless can be completely absorbed into the scene, without the kind of residue or lack that indicates the psychoanalyst may be not be far behind. And the emergence of \u201cyou\u201d is even better. \u201cYou open your hand\u201d offers a lovely contrast. It switches intimate perceptual densities that climax in the image of a couple of tiny black frogs with shining eyes, which magically reflects what all intimate gestures among couples might feel like, while anchoring Eros in continuity with the frog\u2019s world\u2014another dimension indeed. \u201cI like\u201d introduces a stunningly quiet passage. It identifies the \u201cI\u201d with the operator of similes, while allowing the simplicity and control of approval to provide satisfied acceptance of anything the scene or the \u201ccomposition\u201d might open into.\u00a0 An affective tone is set for an endless proliferation of those nouns.<\/p>\n
I cannot forget that this is only the opening section of the poem.\u00a0 How it folds into a more complicated and expansive composition of the whole will have to be the topic of another post.<\/p>\n
-Charles Altieri<\/p>\n