WOLFGANG GÖRTSCHACHER

Vocal Cartographies: Public and PrivateRae Armantrout. Versed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2009. 121 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8195-7091-8, US$14.95 pb.Paula Meehan. Painting Rain. Manchester: Carcanet, 2009. 100 p. ISBN: 978-1-84777-001-1, £9.95 pb.Kate Noakes. The Wall Menders. Reading: Two Rivers, 2009. 57 pp. ISBN: 978-1-901677-64-5, £8.00 pb.

Rae Armantrout’s Versed has had something like a triumphal progress since it hit the publishers in 2009. First, chosen as a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award, it went on in March 2010 to win the 2009 award from the National Book Critics Circle and then, a month later, as the icing on the cake, won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The NBCC was impressed by “its demonstration of superb intellect and technique, its melding of experimental poetics but down-to-earth subject matter to create poems you are compelled to return to, that get richer with each reading.” In a similar vein, the Pulitzer Prize jury described the collection as “a book striking for its wit and linguistic inventiveness, offering poems that are often little thought-bombs detonating in the mind long after the first reading.” Considering the reputation of the Pulitzer Prize as being the most mainstream of annual literary prizes

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in the United States, its award to Rae Armantrout, a poet associated with the West Coast “Language Poetry” movement, constitutes a double recognition. Still, if one considers the literary predilections and interests of the individual members of the 2010 three-person jury, it is perhaps a little less surprising. When reviewing Armantrout’s previous collection Next Life for the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times in 2007, jury member Stephen Burt, associate professor at Harvard, described her as “a poet of supreme concision”, and went on to elaborate his approval in terms of superlative enthusiasm, which makes it, as it should be, a case of simple critical perceptiveness than of a river changing its course.

The new collection comprises two sequences, “Versed” and “Dark Matter”, which Armantrout had originally conceived as two separate books. According to her publisher, the poems in the first sequence play with the concept of “vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks”. “Scumble” (p. 34) is a typical poem from this section:

Scumble

What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent wordssuch as “scumble,” “pinky,” or extrapolate?”

What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope thatothers would pronounce these words?

Perhaps the excitement would come from the way theother person touched them lightly and carelessly withhis tongue.

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What if “of” were such a hot button?

“Scumble of bushes.”

What if there were a hidden pleasurein calling one thingby another’s name?

Armantrout’s poems are usually short, pointing to a form which she has derived from William Carlos Williams and, to some extent, Emily Dickinson. She calls the short poem “a magic trick” and “the perfect site for the presentation of transience, failure, impossibility” (“The Short Poem”, Collected Prose [CP] (Singing Horse Press, 2007), pp. 80-85; here p. 85), which also asks to be reread. The condensed form is further characterised by an openness which involves, as she claims in “Cheshire Poetics” (CP, pp. 55-62), “an equal counterweight of assertion and doubt” (CP, p. 55). In “Scumble” this is expressed by a series of questions – syntactically in a parallel manner – which is only intercepted by an assertion that uses the subjunctive and the lexeme “perhaps”, and an example of a “hot button”. The poem’s openness and its urge to be reread are also enhanced by the fact that it ends with a question that problematizes the concept of metaphor. The persona plays with the sensuality / sexuality of language and takes on the pose of a linguistic voyeur. I also find it very impressive how Armantrout manages in the third stanza to connect – both rhythmically and phonologically by way of assonance – the lexemes “come”, “other”, “touched”, and “tongue” and thereby creates an atmosphere alluringly charged with sexual undertones. In this context it is interesting to consider what Armantrout said in an interview with Travis Nichols for The Huffington Post : “The question of what is sexy in a poem is fas-

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cinating. I think some kinds of uncertainty can actually be sexy. Did that word (that look) mean what I thought it meant? Double meanings in conversation, blues songs, or poems can be sexy. I think they can be sexy whether their content is overtly sexual or not. They’re sexy because they pull the reader into a relationship with the text in which the balance of power is uncertain or unstable.”

Armantrout’s poems contain many, often conflicting voices, one of her predilections being the tendency to code-shift. It is also not accidental that the “relation between stanza and stanza or section and section is often oblique, multiple or partial. […] It is a way to explore the relation of part to whole.” (CP, p. 62) This juxtaposition of sections, usually either marked by numbers or asterisks, can also be experienced in her poem “Equals” (p. 41):

1

As if, after all,

the thing that comes to mindsquaredtimes inertia

equalled the “real.”

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2

One lizardjammed headfirst

down the throatof a second.

After Armantrout was diagnosed with adrenocortical cancer in 2006, she underwent surgery and chemotherapy. The second section, “Dark Matter”, was written, the poet told Lynn Keller in an interview conducted in October 2007, “almost as if it’s my last book, with that in mind, with the end of life as a kind of lodestone for it”. According to her publisher, this experience with cancer “marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking.” If Armantrout’s personae discuss the concept of metaphor now, this is done in a different, more serious tone and diction (“Something dark / pervades it.”), as is the case in section 2 of “Integer” (pp. 93-94; here p. 93):

Metaphoris ritual sacrifice.

It kills the look-alike.

No,metaphor is homeopathy.

A healthy cellexhibits contact inhibition.

In the last poem of her collection, “Fact” (p. 121), one can almost hear a Beckettian voice and tone, reminiscent of Waiting for Godot:

Operation Phantom Fury.

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The full forceof the will to liveis fixedon the next occasion:

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someonecoming with a tray,

someonecalling a number.

*Each materialfactis a pose,

an answerwaiting to be chosen.

“Just so,” it says.

“Ask again!”The poems in Versed certainly conform to Armantrout’s own definition of a ‘good’ poem as one that sustains multiple readings. Hers is a “poetry of witness” in which she tends, as she told Lyn Hejinian in an interview, “to focus on the interventions of capitalism into consciousness.” With an “open and noncontrolling relation” (CP, pp. 103-120; here p. 120) to her poetic material, for example when she presents her personae as being in doubt or in error, she opens up possibilities for, and invites action on her readers’ part.

Painting Rain is Paula Meehan’s first collection since Dharmakaya, also published by Carcanet in 2000. It is accompanied by a special double issue of the scholarly journal An Sionnach [AS], published in autumn last year, which celebrates and critiques in eighteen essays and one interview, as guest-editor Jody Allen Randolph points out, Paula Meehan’s “poetic choices, her playwriting, and the social and ethical commitments that underlie both.” (AS, p. 5)

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Originally from Dublin’s north inner city, Meehan has always been aware, as she told Luz Mar González-Arias in an interview, that her native town “was incredibly well-mapped in literary terms. But, yet, my city wasn’t. [ …] So, although there were all these maps I still felt rudderless in terms of my own life.” (AS, p. 36) In his poem “It takes trees in summer” Brendan Kennelly defines Meehan’s stance in poetic terms: “James Joyce would love to meet

her / […] because she could take him / to avenues parks squares lanes / he bypassed, didn’t bother with” (AS, p. 25). In the central sequence “Six Sycamores” she takes her readers to such a site and thus achieves the aim, defined in her interview with Randolph, of “integrat[ing] [her] work as a private memorialist with an impulse to express collective memory” (AS, p. 260). It was commissioned by the Office of Public Works on the occasion of the opening of

the Link Building between number 51 and number 52, on the east side of St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, in 2001. In order to mirror “the architectural complexity and the ornamentation of the houses themselves” and “what they stand for, the ascendancy class, the class privilege of the whole colonial adventure”, Meehan decided to experiment with the sonnet, as both “house and poem are received forms that can be re-inhabited and are re-inhabited” (AS, p. 261). In a technique that she somehow shares with Armantrout, she juxtaposes these sonnets with short monologues

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by ordinary people who are not stake holders, “unornamented in plain speech with its own little dramatic vignette out of a life.” (AS, p. 262) In the titles of these monologues, which are based on naval time, the poet is keeping a log. For example, in “12.53 Third Sycamore” the persona is self-effacing which makes the juxtaposition of a poor outsider’s voice with the sonnet for “Number Fifty-Two”, built in 1771 by the banker David La Touche, all the more striking, urgent, and dramatic:

spare a few bob mistera few bob for a cup of teaany odds misterspare change pleasehelp the homeless missusa few pence for a hostelgod bless you lovespare a few bob mister (p. 30)

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Thus Meehan enables her readers to eavesdrop on what she calls “a conversation between the casual throw-away vernacular of the little pieces and the more tightly wrapped language and ritualized energy of the sonnets.” (AS, p. 262)

For Meehan, “the family can be a powerful prism, and gives you a freedom to explore your whole culture through those intimate relationships.” (AS, p. 259) It is an enlightening experience to read Heaney’s “Digging” alongside Meehan’s “Cora, Auntie” in which the maternal line is retrieved and retained by replacing the spade with the sequin:

Sequin : she is standing on the kitchen table.She is nearly twenty-one.It is nineteen sixty-one.

They are sewing red sequins, the women,to the hem of her white satin dressas she moves slowly round and round.

Sequins red as berries,red as the lips of maidens,red as blood on the snow

in Child’s old ballads,as red as this penon this paper

I’ve snatched from the chaosto cast these linesat my own kitchen table – (p. 39)

In Painting Rain, Meehan once again manifests her “strong sense of landscape, community, and selfhood as the triangulation” for her work. “[T]he concerns”, she claims in the interview with Randolph, “are global and always have been.” (AS, p. 264) In the anti-pastoral poem “Death of a Field” Meehan’s

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persona becomes the “professional memory of the tribe” (AS, p. 268). Meehan relates to what she calls “one of poetry’s oldest functions” which for her “is to not just memorialise place, but to translate a place into language so that it can be an archive in itself but also a measuring stick for future change.” (AS, p. 267)

I’ll walk out onceBarefoot under the moon to know the fieldThrough the soles of my feet to hearThe Myriad leaf lives green and singingThe million million cycles of being in wing

That – before the field become map memoryIn some archive on some architect’s screenI might posses it or it possess meThrough its night dew, its moon-white caulIts slick and shine and its profligacyIn every wingbeat in every beat of time

Her persona uses a romanticised style that might, in its diction, rhythm, and phonological quality, remind one of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”. However, in the final poem, “Coda: Payne’s Grey” (p. 96), Meehan admits the impossibility of the poet’s task to capture nature’s movement in words. In her poem the painter’s paradoxical effort to contain nature on canvas, to capture nature’s movement and define it in stasis, is revealed:

I am trying to paint rain

day after dayI go out into it

drizzle, shower, downpour

but not yet the exactspring rain

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warm and heavy and slow

each dropdistinct & perfect

The final poem leads Meehan’s readers back to the title of the collection and explains the epigraph from The Diamond Sutra: “Words cannot express Truth. / That which words express is not Truth.”

The thematic link between Meehan’s Painting Rain and Kate Noakes’s second collection, The Wall Menders, is defined by Peter Robinson when he claims that Noakes’s “attention to detail […] is a metaphor for her theme of environmental repair. Reading her poems with the care they deserve gives an intimation of what it might feel were the world in safe hands.” In “Suffolk beach” (p. 11) Noakes combines a fairytale quality (“I’ve slept on discomfort, this pea / under a mattress has kept me awake.”) with a discomforting atmosphere produced by the personified agents of nature (“the way the land surrenders / to the sea with a sigh, // a sliding-under of shingle, / how marsh and fen seem // to sink, shift underfoot, / bedrock’s unstable coverlet.”) that ends with “this disconsoling birth of light, / barely warming the dead.”. Central to Noakes’s collection is a sequence that retells “Mestra’s tale” (pp. 29-36), from Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from Mestra’s point of view. In three- and four-line stanzas, quite often with an

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underlying iambic rhythm, she tells her story. The following stanza may serve as an example:

A wave spins me round, the sea is kissing me,a tongue of water in my throat. He vanishes,leaving me with a scarf of kelpand this gold clam in my hand. (p. 30)

It is unfortunate, though, that proof reading has been a good deal less efficient than it might have been, for quite a few errors have slipped through the net (e.g. in “Along the Indus”). But these are things the reading eye may remedy. The Wall Menders keeps its end well up in good company. All three volumes provide both challenge and stimulus to those interested in poetry, things sufficiently rare not to be missed out on.

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