A Poetics of Permeability

MEGAN KAMINSKI A Poetics of Permeability

For Want and Sound Melissa Buzzeo Les Figues Press, 2012 ISBN-13: 978-1934254400 $15.00; 112pp.

Blood Shane McCrae Noemi Press, 2013 ISBN-13: 978-1934819302 $15.00; 94pp.

Schizophrene Bhanu Kapil Nightboat Books, 2011 ISBN-13: 978-0984459865 $15.95; 96pp.

Flood Song Sherwin Bitsui Copper Canyon Press, 2009 ISBN-13: 978-1556593086 $15.00; 120pp.

Young Tambling Kate Greenstreet Ahsahta Press, 2013 ISBN-13: 978-1934103357 $20.00; 176pp.

Noise Event Heidi Lynn Staples Ahsahta Press, 2013 ISBN-13: 978-1934103418 $18.00; 88pp.

Things should be said more largely than the personal way. Things are larger than the personal way of telling. Juliana Spahr, Well Then There Now The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence. The body can be the agency and instrument of all these as well, or the site where “doing” and “being done to” become equivocal. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

In the long tradition of lyric poetry, including the myriad incarnations that might consider themselves “post-lyric” or “anti-lyric,” poets have employed a variety of strategies for constructing the relation of the self to the world. We might think of the traditional lyric poet/subject, the Romantic poet standing outside the world, or the confessional poet expressing love through intimate confession. We might also think of the anti-lyric problematization of the subject, the flitting between subject and object description that is the dominant form of the post-avant. The effect of these methods, and many others, can be a form of distancing—whether it be between the subject and object of the poem, between the poet and community, or between the reader and the text itself. Even some methods meant to collapse this distance, efforts that perhaps seek to involve the reader in the meaning-making process of the poem (using the reader as a catalyst for meaning), can feel more like a puzzle to be solved than an actual attempt at interaction. I am particularly drawn to the above titles for their exploration of subjecthood by means of a poetics of permeability—a poetics in which the self capable of, and perhaps defined by, a porousness insists upon the co-presence of the other, of the outside, of the

self as other. And while this permeability insists on this co-presence, it allows simultaneously for moments of distance, for moments to draw back and also to re-enter. In this artistic act of compassion and vulnerability there is an opening of the self and an acknowledgement of the various systems (people, objects, animals, ecosystems, histories) that compose the self. All this opening is not simply a means to obliteration or dissolution. In these works there is a reluctance to acquiesce to erasure, a struggle not to allow multiplicity to destroy the possibility of a whole. This insistence on the metaxy of the body and bodiless, of the ground and groundlessness, of past and present, might be seen as a kind of metamodernism. A poetics that is capable of complication and cohabitation, while neither subsuming, nor digesting, nor rejecting the various components that comprise and challenge it. It seeks to bring us together, to bridge the distance between us—distances of time, experience, body, and place. Melissa Buzzeo’s For Want and Sound builds a history of trauma and place in Long Island, exploring boundarylessness in its examination of the body and geography and the ways in which language works to construct and convey those relationships/realities. This boundarylessness is complicated. Buzzeo uses historical texts, testimony and documents from ritual abuse cases in the 1980s, as a starting point for a larger examination of the body, the self, and language. The boundaryless world of the book allows for a prolonged exposure, an opening up. What occurs in the poems is not just a re-examination of a painful public trauma. The poems erase the boundaries of time, place, memory, and self in order for the poet and the audience to fully enter: As we arrange a beginning. In vowels in verbs in leaves. We were a family. This is as we are followed. This I as we are folded, forced, and freed. You enter into as expanse. Everywhere and nowhere at once.1

The poet, the subject, enters into the documented history, becomes a “we” with the you (the reader? a speaker from Buzzeo’s found text? a community?), with the past, with the documented trauma. This porosity of self, of experience, and its embrace of the pain and suffering of others creates preconditions for a poetics of healing. An excerpt from “Book” (the first of the book’s two sections): I dissolve the right. This message. Arranging the light, the chairs. I dissolve the right. As we charted: subject. As we charted: soon.2

                                                                                                                1  Buzzeo,  71.  

Language, more specifically the syntax of the sentence, functions as site and medium for transformation and healing. Language from testimony and found documents is reconfigured to test and question the limits of grammar and to open up possibility. How do we “chart” ourselves and our experiences in language? How do these sentences fail us? How do they work to construct selves that separate us? How does our immersion in language precondition the type of experiences/sensory data we are more (or less) permeable to? Expansion: I open my arms today parallel to the sky. I am alone in this syllable. And it is inflamed.3

The poet becomes linguist; the body and language become one and not. Both permeable, layered one on the other, like translucent film that can dissolve and reform, allowing the possibility of being simultaneously inside and outside. As Buzzeo explores: And is there music outside of room. A room outside of language. We matched our voices to theirs. He watched me fold. Across this line. Inside and outside this one address. A reach outside of sentence? 4

The final long poem “Breach, Recoil” works as a sort of re-entry into this fraught and painful history. Through the construction of sentences, in the site of language itself, Buzzeo’s poems work towards a collective healing for Long Island, for the speaker/s in the poems, and for the reader. Language is a site capable of larger transformation: I wrote partition to be able to erase. To be elsewhere, partition. 5 Elaborate pattern, elsewhere.

Language becomes body, body becomes text, and subjectivity becomes permeable: “I left a part of my body in every book in partial/pages, presence. Dissolved.”6 For Want and Sound embraces, complicates, and implicates history, geography, and the reader, bringing us all into a larger and at the same time more intimate community of shared experience and language. Using the body and language as site, Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene similarly explores permeability as a poetic mode and practice that can facilitate healing on both an individual and public level. The poems explore and dwell in a collapse between the self                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           2  Ibid,  40.   3  Ibid,  24.   4  Ibid,  30.   5  Ibid,  98.   6  Ibid,  93.  

and external subject matter, “the high incidence of schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities; the parallel social history of domestic violence, relational disorders, and so on.”7 On a panel at the 2013 &Now Conference, Kapil talked about “study(ing) materials to the point of erasure and beyond.” That sense of decay, permeability, and absorption enacts itself both in the physical text that becomes the book—a handwritten notebook buried in the yard left to absorb water, freeze, bleed its ink—and the poems’ exploration of migration, mental illness, self, and geography. The notebook absorbs its environment and is absorbed by it as well. In this way the notebook, the urtext, enacts the porosity of the body and of Kapil’s poetry: All my life, I’ve been trying to adhere to the surface of your city, your three grey rectangles split into four parts: a red dot, the axis rotated seventy-six degrees, and so on. But then I threw the book into the grid. It was a wet grid.8

The poems continue in their exploration of these systems, working against fragmentation and also against assimilation, all towards a poetics of healing. That isn’t to say that the book is looking for easy answers or towards making some totalizing conclusion. As the speaker declaims, “I cannot make the map of healing and so this is the map of what happened in a particular country on a particular day.”9 The poems examine what it means to have a home, and what it means to be without one. And in many ways the book does provide a map, though it is one that complicates even while it clarifies, a map through and composed by our bodies, history, and language. While Buzzeo’s and Kapil’s books take historical moments of trauma and their lasting effects as topics, Kate Greenstreet’s Young Tambling maps a seemingly more personal story, the story of a girl: “for once, the hero is the girl, and her point of view and her actions are the primary focus as the story unfolds.”10 The back cover tells us that the book is “based on a true story,” and she says once in the poem “this is almost my story.” However, it quickly becomes clear that the book-length ballad, divided into six sections, is a bit more complicated in both its subject and subject-position. The girl in Young Tambling is simultaneously the heroine of the 16th century “Tam Lin” story, Greenstreet herself, and all girls (“This story takes place everywhere”).11 The narrative that runs loosely throughout the book is an amalgam of narratives, some personal, some borrowed from friends and acquaintances, some overheard, some literary. The construction of images in the poems also creates the effect of a gathering, a pulling together and integration of all stories to make one that is both true to an individual experience and capable of capturing a collective experience. Throughout the book, Greenstreet reminds us of our role as readers and also of hers as poet: It’s a song about a girl who listens. I explained that part to you.

                                                                                                                7  Kapil,  i.   8  Ibid,  4.   9  Ibid,  48.   10  Greenstreet,  5.   11  Ibid,  22.  

She’s been a child. She has a child’s love. Later, when we were walking, I could see that she was spelling, in her mind, the words that we were saying, and from time to time she stopped to write one down, if the letters were right.12

Perspective, narrative, and images accumulate and bleed together throughout the poem. Each memory shapes and reconfigures the ones that precede and follow, combining to form a beautiful bricolage. As Greenstreet’s poem explains, “People ask me why my photographs are torn./ The purpose would be// to learn. To represent a life.”13 Like Kapil’s Schizophrene, the ballad of Young Tambling is composed of fragments, serving as moments of rupture, but also as moments of (and possibility for) greater connection. The endgame in both these works, as well as in the other books described in this essay, is neither a permanent fracture and rupture, nor a perfectly re-assembled whole. Instead, the poems work as maps, allowing for flux and the inhabitance of multiple perspectives. The life/lives that emerge in Young Tambling are often fraught with tragedy and great sadness, but they are also filled with empathy, compassion, and the transformative power of art. In telling the story of Young Tambling, Greenstreet insists upon the ways in which our own stories and our own selves are thoroughly shaped and constructed by the lives of those we encounter. While a poetics of permeability can bring together disparate moments across time, place, and perspective toward shared commonalities and healing, it can also point to what might be unbridgeable moments of rupture. Shane McCrae’s most recent collection, Blood, examines the ties of family through some of the darkest moments in America’s history and also in a more contemporary present. It is a brave and unflinching book. As one might imagine from the title, these poems are blood-drenched: They couldn’t see the fingers there was so much blood could Only see the blood

could see

The fingers there was so much blood / They couldn’t tell the fingers from14

There are many moments in the book like this one, when violence and bodily wreckage accumulates and overwhelms. The blood of the title is both the blood shed in the history of slavery and racial injustice in America and the blood that unites us as family and as human beings (and sometimes that blood is spilt by and flows from the same source). Rather than observing from afar, McCrae’s poems are written in the first person—a combination of persona poems telling some of the most horrific stories in American history, often revolving around familial connections (the connections of blood), and also poems about family and brotherhood grounded mostly in the present day. This perspective is in many ways a difficult one to inhabit, and one with a fraught history, as McCrae acknowledges in an opening epigraph from the Federal Writers’ Project’s                                                                                                                 12  Ibid,  90.   13  Ibid,  75.   14  McCrae,  59.  

recommendations for how one should tell the story of an ex-slave. By occupying the voices and stories of these historical figures, McCrae explores a past and a legacy that can neither be erased nor atoned for. The poems are powerful examinations of the moments, sometimes tender and sometimes horrific, that connect us as humans and family. Composed of one long poem, Sherwin Bitsui’s Flood Song paints a contemporary world where nature, Native tradition, history, and commercial and industrial remnants bleed together. Flood Song sings of and to a disappearing world. Bitsui’s poem is filled with beauty, as well as decay and violence. There is a sense in which he is guiding us along, slowly, towards the apocalyptic future that we have all had a hand in creating: In a stadium of afterglow— I parcel ounces of my body for each acre grazed, spear my hands with my sharpened knees to keep some kernel of this trail my own, some piece of the idea of now before it becomes was.15

In this excerpt, and throughout the book, Bitsui offers his body to the earth, just as the earth has absorbed the bodies of our ancestors, the by-products of our industrial processes, and the trash of spent consumer goods. Bitsui offers himself up as permeable voice and body. He, in the voice of the poem, is not just conduit, but also site. In Flood Song the body, the self, and the earth become one in a profound act of vulnerability and compassion. While the poems present the present as a sometimes beautiful cobbled-together world, they also whisper that this world is fleeting. The poems function simultaneously as map and elegy: Coyote howls canyon into windows painted on the floor with crushed turquoise; captures cranes secrete radon in the epoxied toolshed; leopard spots, ripe for drilling, ooze white gas when hung on a copper wire I pull electricity from their softened bellies with loom yarn. I map a shrinking map.16

The effects of “development” are shown with all their destructive force, and the poems at the same time are careful not to escape into easy answers by placing the blame for this desecration of culture and land solely on external forces. By showing that we are all culpable for and affected by this destruction, Bitsui offers warning, an elegy, and perhaps even hope that in acknowledging responsibility there might be a capacity for change. Heidi Lynn Staples also engages a disappearing ecosystem in her book Noise Event. Staples’ poems are stitched together from scraps of personal experience, history, and the various plants and animals that comprise the Florida ecosystem. The book opens with a series of poems titled “Waves Fly Back,” which cobbles together seemingly                                                                                                                 15  Bitsui,  26.   16  Ibid,  46.  

disconnected elements—romantic encounters, a description of a loved one’s illness and mastectomy, marshes, birds, and descriptions of land development: when he entered me the tip of the peninsula as the swiftly flowing current, the beginning of the gulf stream, i whispered cup-like, rose-pink flowers, leaves ovate to heart-shaped, wavy-edged to him— dunes migrate downward if they are not stabilized by hardy vegetation, such as sea oats that can withstand sea spray and burial by sand.17

This amalgam illustrates the porosity of our lives and our selves—the way that one concern and occupation can easily become another, and the role that place plays in our everyday experience. It also makes clear the fissures, the ways in which not everything can be absorbed, integrated, or perhaps healed. The acknowledgement of the eroding dunes does nothing to save them, even when one knows how to slow their erasure. In the poem, our attention quickly returns to the human beloved. Another poem in the book, “Florida Native,” weaves together descriptions of colonial violence with a letter to a boyfriend, resulting in an examination of place, self, belonging, violence, and love that embeds and implicates the author and the reader. The combination of Staples’ musicality and her willingness to wade into Florida’s dark colonial history and environmental crisis, rather than observing from afar, gives her poetry a visceral resonance. There is also a musical quality to the logic of the poems, one of echo and refrain, melody and dissonance. The experience of reading Noise Event, as with the other books considered here, is not one of quiet admiration and consideration, but rather one of wreck and wonder. Though the books discussed explore a variety of aesthetic approaches and topics, they have in common a permeability of the poetic subject. This permeability allows for an ebb and flow, a simultaneous entry and retreat. There is a messiness in this interrelation that complicates these works, denying tidy conclusions. And while I am not arguing that these books are part of a self-conscious literary movement, I believe that they embody an approach to the poetic subject that revises and counters what came before and that maps possibility in an engaged and necessary poetics.                                                                                                                             17  Staples,  7.