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Review by Maureen N. McClane
“You have had your day, and each day is a short life.” So says the painter Sean Scully, quoted on the wall text accompanying his painting “Night,” hanging now (Jan. 2007) in the glorious retrospective of his work at the Metroplitan Museum of Art, “Wall of Light.” One imagines that Michael O’Brien would agree. Like Scully, he orients us the sensible impact of a day’s passing—“clouds like nerves/day a quarry of light”. His poem “Salamanders” uncannily evokes the title of Scully’s retrospective:
wave
upon wave, in the
gap a gull’s shadow
crosses the water
*
walls of
light, wells
of light
How a wave becomes a wall becomes a well, how light substantiates itself in and through matter, how the contours of a day, a gesture, a mood make themselves felt: O’Brien takes these elemental measures, tracking the “Dawn, horizon, fracture of light” (“A Pillow Book, Continued”).
Let me say early on what will become obvious: this book gave me enormous pleasure. To read it slowly, meditatively, episodically in that alternately “Sleeping and Waking” state the book itself navigates, is to emerge with your mind and senses sharpened. I found myself newly alert to the light striking the buildings in lower Manhattan, open to the peculiar juxtapositions of urban signage; this is a poetry that works on your nervous system, a poetry commemorating “the/ nerves’ high, wordless song” (“Sleeping and Waking”). This points to a kind of Zen koan underwriting this work: what would a wordless poetry of words sound like?
A spare wind blows through O’Brien’s book, which opens with a prose poem overture sounding the places, themes, and means this book will pursue: “To some the world is given in images, to some in sentences . . . This is the story of a man sitting in a room writing everything down that comes into his head” (“Certain Evenings”). That last sentence is of course a lie—or, rather, a rhetorical gambit: this is a stringently economical poetry of minimal means but huge scope. The poems are typically short lyrics of a page, or longer serial arcs built out of linked, sometimes fragmentary, pulses. The book’s amplitude arises from its mindfulness, not its aspiration to itemize “everything.”
Author of several books, O’Brien is not as well-known as he should be. In the June 2001 issue of Chicago Review, Eirik Steinhoff observed that for many, O’Brien’s Sills: Selected Poems (Zoland, 2000) would provide their first acquaintance with the poet. Sleeping and Waking is my belated first encounter with his work. These poems may evoke for some of James Schuyler’s lyrics—their feel for cloud, sky, and color; the attention concentrated on ephemera (the title of one poem); the apparently casual line-breaks; the watercolorist’s rapidity of execution and sureness of touch.
It comes round, weather,
feelings, in clouds, in
strata, the shapes of
the day, pegged to their
shadows . . .
“For Cameron Brown”
Flicker of two white
moths in grass
interferes with
day’s pattern, monolith.
“Under Slievemore”
How a day acquires a pattern; how fragile membranes like moths’ wings, or the mind’s energy, might play across harder materials: these poems offer their own singular tracery. And unlike Schuyler, say, O’Brien is particularly interested in a kind of morphemic and phonemic play, signs and signifiers falling across the acoustic/cognitive field in a “vernacular rain”—
vernacular
rain
Jeez
Sheesh
…
Melon cola
Techni Cola
Da Costa Demolition
precip
coma toes
“Confetti”
Anatomy of melancholy and anatomy of commodity (“the brick of meaning, the brick of money”); technique rendered in “techni cola”: here we find an open-eyed ingathering sensibility equally alert to urban grit and shifts of weather. Mordant bits of dialogue conjure overheard, intimate dramas:
—Why stir up old stuff?
—There is no old stuff.
“A Pillow Book, Continued”
The billboards, graffiti, elevators, thriftstores, and subways of lower Manhattan provide the landscape—the “grid” and “graphlines”—for this poet’s urban pastoral: “Like traffic, magnificent, the sun comes and goes.”(“Certain Evenings”). Yet we move as well to other more conventionally pastoral zones: “Upstate,” to Maine, and to Slievemore (Ireland).
These lyrics offer a semiotics of political economy. “A television set left on in the room, a furniture music” (Another Autumn,”): Satie’s “furniture music” makes its way into a 21st C. aesthetics. If Muzak is to be redeemed by thoughtful ears, here is the chance. O’Brien gives us the mind’s ear at work and at play.
O’Brien continues and furthers a great modernist project, infusing a neo-imagist swiftness and objectivist ellipticism with a calm that seems to come by way of some Asian poetries. “A Pillow Book, Continued,” “After Yu Lu,” “After Otaka Gengo Tadasuke,” “Gloss on Stevens”: these titles nod to the East, to Asian poets, and indirectly to those transmitters of Eastern poetries, or ideas thereof, into poetries in English: Pound, Stevens, Philip Whalen.
The aesthetics of the fleeting suggest an ethics, and one of the more striking aspects of this book is its hard-won ambivalence about likeness, about “Correspondences,” to invoke the title of Baudelaire’s famous poem. We walk here not through a forest of symbols but through a vale of signage, itself transitory, headed for the dustbin, blinking messages to unknown and inadvertent recipients. O’Brien is a devotee of singularity, of the “Once,” as the title of another poem has it; yet like any artist alive to pattern he is open to recurrence, to near-rhymes of sound and thought and gesture, epiphanies of identity and identification and transfer: this is that, this is like that, this becomes that. “Once” offers a stunning ars poetica, a drama of perceived similitudes ultimately abjured:
on the street she
yawns, her jeans
yawn, her knees
rhyme with her eyes. . . .
work against correspondence, the
world is not a
book, everything is
not something else, you
could look it up
“Everything is not something else”: a stronger proscription against “handling” one’s perceptions, “working up” one’s material, could not be found. (Here Schuyler’s commitment to “just the thing” is relevant; as is W. C. Williams, “no ideas but in things,” and Pound’s “direct treatment of the thing.”) For an artist of language, the temptation is to verbalize and textualize the world. O’Brien reminds us that likeness inheres not in or between objects, or between the body’s parts (the knees that rhyme with her eyes); likeness arises in the mind, that correspondence-making machine. Mind moves through the world, plays upon it, but leaves it—should leave it—untouched:
Likeness washes
across things without a
trace, a cloud’s
shadow in a field.
“Under Slievemore”
Somewhere between essence and existence these poems move, as we ride with the poet on the “Local”:—“now breath turns to speech/ now the obliterating trains”.
O’Brien and his fellow Flood poet Pam Rehm share something that—after twenty-three books published by that press—we now might want to consider a kind of house ethos if not style: a poetics of the attentive, scrupulous ear; of the purged ego; of economical musics. If O’Brien channels a kind of Buddhist receptivity and Zen gaze, Rehm’s lyrics bespeak a more explicitly Christian, or perhaps post-Christian, discipline—“an anxious discipline,” as she puts it. Echoes of the Song of Songs and Genesis, and references to Lot’s wife and the paschal lamb, anchor this work in an intense, ongoing tradition of Protestant self-scrutiny. Writing in an Emersonian transcendentalist line, Rehm emerges as a true antinomian: “To each her own paradise,” she writes. But instead of the ecstatic privileged epiphanies antinomians typically seek, Rehm is brought by inner light and the inner ear to “a paradise of loneliness/incurred”. Melon cola, indeed.
This book continues the idiom and preoccupations of Rehm’s last, Gone to Earth (Flood, 2001). As in that book, the poet circles intently around questions of possession, material and metaphysical—self-possession, possession of and by commodities. One feels the poet’s motto might well be one of Dickinson’s complex overtures to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I am in Danger, sir. We are all in danger, these poems suggest—in danger of self-forgetfulness on the one hand, self-preoccupation on the other; endangered by the sickening surfeit of late capital; by the barrage of distraction and pseudo-activity that governs many of our lives. The more clearly erotic focus of Gone to Earth gives way in Small Works to two central concerns—one, the prevenient care of a mother; the other, a more generalized inquiry into making, will, discipline, the acts and hours of a day (thus the final series of twelve poems, “Acts of Anxiety” through “Acts of Making,” which comprise the last third of the book). In its deepest aim, this poetry seems apotropaic, designed to ward off harm and injury precisely by directly confronting threat. This aim emerges most clearly in the appealing poem addressed to her young son, “A Charm For Sleep for Nathaniel”:
Fear has an ear
in it
and so it appears
on all sides of night
laden
with beasts.
Fear certainly has an ear in it; and this kind of acoustic and orthographic double play is central to Rehm’s technique: “Hatred and dearth/ salvaged from a thread”; “Endure has an end”; “Eden=need”. As this last example suggests, Rehm’s literalism—her fixation on letters as well as sounds—can lead to propositions that some will find forced. To many, Eden is precisely the absence of need. Yet the work of Rehm’s poems is to sound out, tentatively and scrupulously, the logic of such equations and transformations:
When rescue is secure
Your reward is with you
The anagrammatic logic of such lines suggests that in Rehm’s poetics, language inscribes its own possible cures and charms and balms; thus the closest attention to a restricted range of significant words stands forth as an alphabetic practice (if not a book) of revelation.
Resonant keywords recur in Rehm’s book—“reward,” “secure,” “threat,” “balm”; so too key tropes—the figure of etymology, homophony, anagram, paranomasia. It is as if we are to become like children, encountering the world and the world of words anew: the proximity to nursery rhyme, ballad, fable, and jingle is not accidental. Small Works pursues a Blakean commitment to the apparently simple: think of Blake’s “Introduction” in his “Songs of Innocence,” when the piper (under instruction from a child on a cloud) drops his pipe and plucks a “reed” to write his songs “in a book that all may read.” The deft homophonic pun and transformation, through which the plucked “reed” becomes that which we “read,” is an allegory of poetic practice, specifically geared to child as well as adult auditors/readers. So too Rehm proceeds, making a wager on what can occasionally seem to be idiot-savantism and largely winning that wager.
If O’Brien’s poems constantly open out to the particulars of this passing world, Rehm’s move us ever inward. There are very few concrete nouns or visualizable places here; instead we move through a realm of language pondered and picked at, with words transposed, broken open, hymned. This is, then, not a poetry of deep image but of deep word, Rehm sounding out in almost Heideggerian fashion the ramifying levels of a word’s depths: “aspiration” (evoking breath, spirit, as well as a strenuous hope); “concrete” (the building material, as well as that which is materially specific as opposed to abstract).
This kind of poetry, so deliberate in its movements, so exact, so monochrome in its seriousness, threatens over a volume to become precious, its movements too easily resolvable into moves. I do not think this book so lapses but it stays just this side of such a fate; I admire its profligate strictness, its rigor, its relentless intensities. “Small Works” is of course a perverse boast not unlike that of many miniaturists; I am small, I contain multitudes. Rehm’s refusal of glibness, of premature fluency, together with her scarifying probings, constitute a kind of lyrico-spiritual exercise, acts of devotion as well as “acts of making.” Such a poetry makes the biggest wager, asking us to consider what we think poetry is for or might be for. This is not a poetry of sweetness and light, or of delight, though there is charm. Small Works offers a poetry of instructive attention, enacting a linguistic and conceptual pedagogy. It is the antithesis of the knowing, ironical and post-ironical poetry flourishing in most hip magazines, and it shares little with poetries more traditionally preoccupied with moral and ethical concerns. No one would ever “say” these poems; they are not “voiced”; yet they bespeak a sober sensibility attuned to the deepest frequencies. These poems move astonishingly close to a grim silence, yet they ward off that silence, taking the measure of our days as well as the ways we measure them. These poems are exemplary: they have designs on us. Language and things have designs on us. The poet is unembarrassed to let us know that and to show that.
Both O’Brien and Rehm manifest a paradoxically bold humility. However different their work, both make a poetry against noise. Theirs is an anti-monumental poetry, offering “only a constant disappearing/ into the day’s allowance” (Rehm); “a day gradually effacing itself, perfecting its absence” (O’Brien). This is work that allows itself to be—to quote another poet, Angela Sorby—“really barely there”: yet there it is, rigorous and delicate.
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