>Mary Jo Bang's "Beast Brutality"

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“Beast Brutality,” The New Yorker September 8, 2008

            What I like about this “Beast” of Bang is its characters’ distance from each other, a key tonal and contextual element.  The story of this five-couplet lyric is this: the speaker is looking at pictures of a friend’s fallen-apart marriage.  Perhaps they’re on the couch, sipping Irish coffee, contemplating the meaning of life in context of this debilitating experience.  Whatever the setting, it’s—at least for the woman—an intimate moment, or it has potential to be so, one friend opening up to another about a relationship gone sour.

            But Bang’s sound play undercuts this potential tenderness.  The first instance is in line three: “The prompt queen sat with her crown on.”  Prompt queen is obviously a play on prom queen, providing some backstory for our lonely heart.  Perhaps she’d lived a good life in high school, married her sweetheart, and dreamed good dreams that, for awhile, must have seemed livable, sustainable.  Alas…  The consonance crunch of “prompt” and “crown” also undercuts this notion of the good life.  Not only does each word begin with a growl, each has monosyllabic punch.  The entire line does, hitting the reader quick and fast, a double-whammy since the play on prom queen is funny, too, as a demeaning slight.  Bang’s occasional rhyme also undercuts the alleged seriousness of this woman’s plight, particularly “measure” with “architecture,” which echoes of “Gothic arch”: “The insets between each Gothic arch providing a measure // Of what can be // Done with architecture.”  It’s slightly limerickish here both in rhyme and rhythm.

            As for the woman’s language, let’s just say she ain’t the prompt queen her friend might prefer her to be.  Her words are rather laconic, as though she’s speaking in a vacuum, as though she isn’t sharing couch space with anyone but herself.  This is a nice contrast to the speaker’s poeticisms, illustrating the characters’ separation rather than union.  This separation physically manifests in the poem’s last couplet.  Bang writes, “And then she looked away. / “And then we looked away.”  There’s no eye contact here, and there’s no originality either.  The speaker’s heard this sob story before.

            So who’s the beast?  What’s brutal?  Could be the dream of husband/wife, kids, car, house, all of which could be construed as something akin to the dog that bites the hand that feeds it.  Could be the dog—that emblem of fidelity—the woman and her husband stand beside in the picture.  Could be the woman or the husband, or both.  Or, it could be the poem’s speaker.  In fact, because she plays the part of concerned listener, she gets my vote as this poem’s beast, doing what she feels must be done: listening quietly.

>Jeffrey Skinner's "Reunion"

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“Reunion,” The New Yorker Sept. 1, 2008

            What I like most about “Reunion” is line six: “You should be elsewhere” (italics Skinner’s).  Is the speaker speaking?  Is the ghost of his dead relative speaking…dead father maybe?  Hard to say…and in a ghost-poem, any and all moments of not-knowing unsettle me.

            Jeffrey Skinner’s “Reunion” works via a series of oppositions, the central being strength and weakness.  It seems the poem’s speaker would like to be strong enough to move beyond his grief but remains prone to that loss as manifested by the reoccurring ghost of (let’s just say) his father.*  “Why do you keep returning” he asks the troublesome vision in line one.  Though he never conjectures the reasons, it’s easy enough for readers to conjecture reasons why he’d like the ghost to disappear: so he can get on with his life.  So he can finish his dinner amongst the comfort of the living.  So he can release his…guilt?  Many ghosts do return for retribution.  Later the speaker declares, “Same teasing of the strong, / same muffled terror of the uncertain.”  He can neither explain nor verbalize the visit, but he knows he’s powerless to it much as he is to doing anything about it.  He can’t speak of it, as though petrified.  When he (possibly) does—“You should be elsewhere”—he preempts the moment with “the suspicion I cannot speak.”  It’s mental speak.  Overtly, he’s powerless

            Another opposition is that of fear and complacence.  The speaker acts as if he is scared speechless, but his tone is practically serene with indifference.  Several of Skinner’s verb-less sentence fragments help create this detachment: “Thanksgiving dinner with all the relatives…Heavy drinking, as always…The newest baby / passed around like a contagious glow…Same teasing of the strong…”  No verbs equal no action, no engagement.  The ghost has arrived to engage the speaker, but the speaker chooses not to pick up the baton.  If this is an attempt for the speaker to bypass grief and get-on-with-it, it isn’t working.  As Skinner writes in the first line, the ghost keeps coming back regardless of the speaker’s cold shoulder.  Perhaps it’s this very rebuff that brings him back?

            The other major opposition that runs through the poems is that of the living and the dead.  Is the speaker truly visited by the ghost of his father?  Not believing in ghosts, I have to say no.  The speaker has simply conjured him up out of grief and the refusal to acknowledge the dead as dead.  In fact, the man is “alive,” Skinner writes, though his body is “more holographic / than warm.”  The only dead person at the table is the poem’s speaker, dead because he refuses to act: he can’t talk to the ghost, he’s one-hundred percent removed from the living guests at the table, and he can’t summon the powers to overcome this latent grief he’d like to keep buried in his subconscious.  Ironically, it seems this latter issue is exactly why the ghost returns “like a signal / carried by a frayed wire.”  The signs are there; the speaker just doesn’t see them.

            Of all the images in the poem, Skinner’s “frayed wire—there, gone, there—“ is my favorite.  It’s a dead ringer for the holographic ghost that keeps coming and going, coming and going, who’s too dangerous to touch.  “The newest baby / passed around like a contagious glow” is a nice, contrastive echo of this heat, as it is of the ghost—it’s implied he’s cold, “more holographic / than warm.”

            Unfortunately, the “Reunion” noted in the poem’s title never quite occurs.  It’s more like a meeting of old friends in line at the grocery store.  Each sees the other, but neither wants to acknowledge that fact with much more than a glancing head-nod, if that.  The ghost of the dead father attempts to toast his living son, but, as the son notes in the poem’s last line, “the rim never [touches] your lips.”

 

*Why dead father?  Line 10 states “you, at the head of the table.”  Of course, a father could sit anywhere, and anyone could sit at the head of the table, but it’s an odd detail to include if it isn’t intended to be telling.  And, I just don’t believe the speaker would have this much trouble facing facts if the ghost was someone else, including his mother.  

>Michael Dickman's "We Did Not Make Ourselves"

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“We Did Not Make Ourselves,” The New Yorker Sept. 1, 2008

            Michael Dickman—not to be confused with his brother Matthew, also a poet-contributor to The New Yorker—has written an airy, fragmented piece on the process of invention.  Invention of self, invention of world, invention of invention.  Structurally, the piece offers some nice changes-of-pace that pertain to different modes of the speaker’s thinking; contextually, it’s rooted in the conflict of blank slate vs. determinism, though neither model seems to come out on top.  Or, they both do.

            So, the poem begins with dream, wakefulness, and the conflict therein: “We did not make ourselves is one thing / I keep singing into my hands / while falling / asleep // for just a second.”  It’s early morning (we discover in the ensuing few lines), and the speaker is caught in that moment of vivid dream-world threaded by a string of consciousness.  Who is actually speaking is unclear: the sentient, wakeful self or the self flying through dream?  Is the awake version doing the “singing” or is the dreaming version doing the singing?  With this quasi-paradox, the poem dives into “self” determination, if such a thing is ever truly determinable, with something akin to prayer and lament.  Are we we?  Am I me?  No, we are not, he croons before drifting off to create anew.  The lines of the opening stanza stagger back on themselves as though they, too, retreat into darkness and slumber.  They become shadowed by thought-dream, “asleep.”

            But moments later, the third stanza—one long, long line—asserts itself: the speaker falls asleep “for just a second // before I have to get up and turn on all the lights in the house, one after the other, like opening an Advent calendar.”  This deviation from the relatively short, chopped lines that precedes it sticks out of the poem much as it sticks out of the speaker’s dream world.  This, for a moment, is conscious thought.  Throughout, there are three such instances of awareness.  What’s interesting about them is that they are greatly in the minority, as though consciousness is something that happens less and internal spinnings, to which the conscious self appears susceptible, happens more.  The speaker seems relatively incapable of producing and keeping himself in the present.  Rather, he keeps falling into the past, into the dream (and, after all, what’s the difference?).  And this happens over and over.  As Dickman writes in the poem’s final three stanzas, “There is only this world and this world // What a relief / created // over and over.”  And as for self-awareness, well—.  Don’t bet on it.

            The result is that neither the wakeful present nor the dreamy past becomes tangible; instead, both worlds grow to inhabit the same physical (mental) space, and the speaker is left only somewhat solaced by that fact.  “What a relief,” he claims, the poem’s opening dismalness all but wholly disappeared.  At least, it seems, the speaker has something to count on, intangible and abstract thought it may be.  And he needs this act of creation to be accountable because so much of the world exists way beyond his sphere of control and understanding.  He “didn’t / make grass, mosquitoes / or breast cancer….I didn’t make my brain / but I’m helping / to finish it,” Dickman writes.  He hasn’t even made himself.  In fact, this is one of the few poems I can think of in which the speaker, though ruminating at length about himself, appears to be absent.

            What I find interesting about some of the poem’s imagery is that, though the speaker remains very proximately concerned with his existence in a concrete world, the dilemma is a metaphysical one.  On one hand, he’s chalking up his “self” to a blank slate mentality: he’s born a zero and it’s up to the environment to start filling that zero in.  On the other hand, some images offer a bit more deterministic approach, which makes the memories (environment) and their impact arbitrary, a dead end in the speaker’s search for self: “My brain opening / the chemicals in my brain / switching on.”  In either case, the poems says the same thing: I’m not responsible for me, I arrived at the whim of chemicals and of “Dogs / Trees / Stars.” And the “Dogs / Trees / Stars” really only arrive at the whim of chemicals in the brain.  It’s a vicious circle.  Consequently, the speaker seems to be waiting for Godot.  Waking up (from what exactly?) is “like opening an Advent Calendar” that announces nobody’s arrival.  He can search both body and mind—and do it “over and over”—but he’ll perpetually come up empty-handed.

            What bothers me about the poem is its use of the universal “We.”  For a piece so overtly concerned with the existential self, why are we all being lumped into the mix?  If the speaker is so completely unaware of himself, whom he did not create and whom he cannot penetrate, then it seems very likely he remains very unable to penetrate any concept of we, which he also did not create and cannot penetrate.  This becomes problematic as early as the title and provides the occasional slip.  “I can still remember back there / How we’re born,” Dickman writes.  Now I’ve taken these lines out of context of the surrounding lines, but since they’re written as individual stanzas, that shouldn’t be a problem: the individual stanza should be able to stand up for itself in isolation as well as in communion with its surroundings.  But, how can this speaker remember how we were born?  Seems a weird thing to ponder here.

            Am I nitpicking?  Maybe.  But for a poem that claims self-awareness flees at the speed of time in units as large as the smallest units of time, claiming anything for all of us is a stretch.