 | ||
Heather Christle’s What Is Amazing (2012), published by
Wesleyan University Press, reads like a treatise on what it means to be alone
in the world. Divided both physically
and rhetorically into three equal but distinct, untitled sections, each one
highlights a perspective on interpersonal relationships and selfhood. Buoyed by rich imagery and highly concerned
with form (or lack thereof), the collection is full of characters who, A)
attempt to connect with those around them and, B) come to terms with their own
identity. The former, it turns out, is a
far more daunting task than the latter.
The first section is
equal parts whimsy and longing, like little fairy tales that crop up in the
course of daily life. Despite the
inventive spatial setting, the characters themselves are unmoored, much like
the book itself is unmoored by an overall lack of punctuation. Despite these ever-present themes, however,
it’s not a depressing read. Not
necessarily. The collection is saved
from the darkest of darks by the duality of fanciful but mundane settings and
the tiny glint of hope that so often peeks, small but alive, from between the
lines.
In “If You Go into the
Woods You Will Find It Has a Technology,” the poem seems to say, “We are not
coming together. I cannot find you from
here.” Whereas the speaker, at first
blush, is more or less competent and comfortable with their place in the world,
the personified tree is not. Flashing
upon its LED sign messages that read, “grow
stronger” and “fireworks effect,”
the tree attempts but fails to connect, to convey anything profound or even articulate. Christle writes, “The tree is the saddest
prophet in history / but you don’t tell it that.” How could you possibly bring yourself to tell
it that? It wants so desperately to
connect.
Saying what we want to
say is sometimes so difficult. Even if
we can say it, our message often gets lost.
Somewhere in the ether our words and feelings hang, balancing forever,
and we know that they might not ever find a home. The poem ends: the tree “can’t see you and it
starts to cry.”
Of course, if the poem’s
speaker can read sadness into words like “grown strong” and “fireworks
display,” maybe they aren’t as secure as they’d have us believe.
The speaker in another
poem in the first section, “Self-portrait with Fire,” is far less able, despite
their best efforts, to don the mask of stoicism. They are quite pitiful, in fact, in their
need to explain themselves. The pleading
tone of the poem, of course, isn’t completely due to subject matter. The rhetorical structure of the poem—it’s
almost a confession—is also responsible for the urgency. The speaker is coming clean after having
feebly sought to deceive. This feature,
when coupled with word repetition, shows the emotional lengths to which they
will go to be understood. The speaker
pleads. The “[n]o no no no / no no no”
of the first and second lines and the incessant “I” permeating the entire poem
evidence profound desperation.
Whereas these are common
themes, not every poem in the first section is so haplessly vulnerable, though
usually vulnerable nonetheless. Toward
the end of section one, when “I’ll Be Me and You Be Goethe” rolls around, the
speaker is much more assertive, though no more in control. Christle writes, “[E]verything I do / I do to
get more beautiful so you will want / to love me.” From redecorating a room to redecorating themselves,
the speaker is an active agent curating their own existence. Not a bad way to be, unless you are doing so
at the expense of the very things that make you such a potentially strong,
unique person in the first place. This
almost-selfhood is mirrored, maybe even created, by the poems’ forms.
A few of the poems in
this book are dyed-in-the-wool sonnets. The
bulk of the poems in the first section, however, are sonnet adjacent while
never fully taking the plunge. They fall
in the general vicinity of fourteen lines, have a discernible rhetorical shift
or “turn,” and attempt to plumb the depths of the human experience, but
something holds them back. Maybe it’s the sensibility. Perhaps the otherworldly nature of the some
of the poems pushes back a little too hard against such old-school
formality. Regardless of the reason,
many of the poems are able to dwell in that sphere without being stifled by it. The ever-presence of sonnet-like poems,
however, dissipates when we begin What Is
Amazing’s second section.
Section two provides a
paradigm shift. Though not as startling
as the change we see in the third, section two is a bit older and wiser, though
some of the same issues from the first section persist. Whereas in the first section some of the
speakers are quiet and scared, in the second they tend to be much more contemplative
in their articulation, attempting something like control, though not
necessarily any more successful at interpersonal communication. In short, both sections display a
vulnerability, but the maturity of the vulnerability has somewhat changed.
In “Bash,” the thoughts
are there; the feelings are there.
They’ve got it inside them
waiting to escape. The words, however,
or maybe just the will to speak them, evade.
Whether feeling love or the mundane, the speaker cannot express
themselves. Christle writes, “I open my
ordinary mouth as if to speak / but find there is no voice there.” Later, the speaker says, “[T]hough I do not
speak it / that I love her in the ordinary way.” The speaker is able to tell us, but unable to
tell her. Misdirected as it might be, it is, after all,
a mature inarticulation, which is perhaps the greatest tonal shift
differentiating sections one and two.
And is not unique to this one poem.
Though “Up Again with the
Night” begins with inarticulation, this time it’s on purpose. “It’s no good trying to talk to a roof,”
writes Christle, “It will only turn away / Better to stand on it / and yell
facts at the stars.” “Up Again with the
Night” is a bold, assertive poem. In
other words, the speaker is much more mature and autonomous than a majority of
those in section one. With its “I will
be a leaf myself / resolved against sunlight,” and “I’m not sorry / I’m not
sorry,” the poem is far more a declaration of selfhood than a whimper of
solitude.
As void of punctuation as
the first section, and as singular in its narrative focus, the second section
shows the other side of sentience: the standing up, for better or worse, and
owning our identity. And in some cases,
even trying to change it. This new, mature
speaker, however, does little to prepare us for the third section, with its
deep imagery and overall defiance of being approachable in the mundane
way.
Section three is
challenging, requiring a more patient attention and a willingness to leap a bit
further to reconcile certain juxtaposition.
But Christle, exercising her poet’s craft, helps us along the way—the
most obvious bit of guidance, aside from the punctuation, being the use of
multiple stanzas.
Just like the new
presence of punctuation, the fact that the poems are now broken up into more
than one piece plays a significant factor in how we are able and allowed to
read them. The poems are different
because of punctuation and their physical form, yes, but for the same reasons
we, too, are different as we navigate them.
Being given the clearer, more concise roadmap renders us a bit more
competent to make our way through poems that, frankly, are far more
opaque. Opaque, that is, if our overall
goal is to discern something like concrete or literal meaning. Fortunately for us, Christle’s multiple
stanzas, or maybe I ought to say the empty space between the stanzas, provide
us the direction we require to reach a destination.
Couplets are the most
common reoccurring form in section three, so much so that, despite the
outliers, the two-line form comes to define the third and final section of the
book. One such grouping of couplets, “Last Time I Wore This Sweater,” shows just how
beneficial the space between the stanzas can be.
The
unpunctuated couplets slow us so that each syntactical unit garners our full, thoughtful attention. Christle writes:
That morning when
weather erased the mountain
and I kept talking into the white
like an American
and could see nothing I then rubbed
the feeling
that all the data I had collected
(the white) (the
mountain) (the talking) was draining
away through
this vast and new hole with which I
coincided
How unsatisfying would the word “America” be with
no blank space trailing behind? The fact
that the stanza ends (we could fall off it like from a cliff) lets the reader
linger on the word; it resonates. The
richer for it. By taking our time, new,
deeper meanings are gleaned. I won’t
trouble you with my own interpretation of the line; suffice it to say, I’m
allowed to run with my own interpretation because of the void between the first
two stanzas. To quite a different end,
we could similarly discuss the space between the second and third stanzas.
The
enjambed, parenthetical line and stanza break between lines four & five is
just plain weird. Whereas the first few
lines read much more smoothly and prose-like, once the parentheses descend upon
us, we must rethink matters drastically.
We don’t know quite what to do with it, and perhaps the poem doesn’t
quite know what to do with itself. The
poem gets strange and so the reading is supposed to get strange. Or at least different. Our way of thinking must change if we are to
accommodate the poem’s own change. But
to assume it’s all about guiding us would be foolish. Sometimes the stanza breaks, especially when
coupled with a lack of punctuation, allow us to make our own decisions.
Choices
abound in “What Will Grow Here,” a poem for which couplets serve to provide us
multiple avenues for exploration.
Christle writes:
another
miracle is
to
forget
in
the garden to find
nothing
with a name
to
pass on through the green
as
if it were an hour
gathered
together by glass
as
if to breathe
were
to take apart the sky
and
why not
if
everything is moving
and
down in your gut
there
is that
borrowed
blue
Where does one syntactical unit end and the other
begin? Are these lines end-stopped or
are they enjambed? Sometimes, like
between the first and second stanzas, we can imply punctuation for ourselves:
“Another miracle is to forget in the garden—to find nothing with a name” or
“Another miracle is to forget—in the garden to find nothing with a name.” If the former, the stanzas are knit together
much more tightly, and we must read them as such. The latter choice, on the other hand, lets
the first two stanzas hang independently, floating in their own orbit, letting
us linger as long as we like before moving on to the next. The importance of that space, or lack thereof,
cannot be overestimated.
We have several such
choices in the poem, each decision tethering us to a different breath pattern
or set of implications. Yes, the sum of
our experience is a major factor in determining how we’ll receive a poem, but
artistic creation is not passive. The
best poet nudges us, often without letting us know that we have been
nudged. Toward what destination does
“What Will Grow Here” nudge? Maybe the
freedom to go our own way (within the poet’s framework) itself is the nudge.
Poet-craft aside, the two
poems printed above in their entirety dovetail nicely with the theme running
through the rest of the book—namely, inarticulation. In the former, the speaker articulates into a
void. No one there to hear it. In the latter, the speaker recommends a
letting go of knowledge and communication.
We should all be lucky enough sometimes, the speaker says, to pass
untouched through life, if only for an hour.
The urgency of the incessant “I” and the pleading “no, no, no” is
replaced, peacefully and quietly, with “why not?” And in reaching this point, the collection
has completed the arc.
Three sections, three distinct
sections, make up Heather Christle’s What
Is Amazing. Each, however, despite
their differences, speak toward the same element of human longing. From the almost-reality of the cover art, to
the speakers unmoored by their lack of punctuation, the psychic transition is
palpable. Across the three stages—urgent
longing, assertive declaration, recognition and acquiescence—we step slightly
more toward security, though some things won’t be resolved.