Review Essay: METHOD IS UNNECESSARY TO REMOVE THE PAST SEASON: TOWARDS A POETICS OF UNCERTAINTY by Kristina Marie Darling

Confidence
Poems by Seth Landman
Brooklyn Arts Press, August 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1936767-397
$18.00 (Print) / $9 (Ebook); 136pp.

New To The Lost Coast
Poems by Joshua Butts
Gold Wake Press, January 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0985919177
$14.95; 110pp.

Hope Tree
Poems by Frank Montesonti
Black Lawrence Press, July 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1937854355
$11.95; 90pp.

We tend to elevate knowledge as a finished product, a somewhat permanent manifestation of our intellectual and imaginative labor. For many of us, poems are a form of knowledge, each one a small discovery made by placing disparate things—whether textures of language, vocabularies of imagery, or fragments of vastly different discourses—in the same rhetorical space. We are made to see relationships and confluences through the poet’s careful orchestration of the experiment.

Yet the exotic linguistic specimens within each line often become small dead things, housed under glass, considered at a distance. The work of the experiment, and the process of discovery, are finished before we even walked through the door. The reader is left to wander the great halls of a museum, a little brass plate beside each butterfly, explaining in detail its origins. Only when the findings have been labeled, catalogued, are we even allowed into the room.

For intellectuals, to inhabit an interstitial space—a temporary state of unknowing—mostly feels like tumbling down the tiny metal steps of the museum’s fire escape. It is a failure, a fall from grace. One can only gather herself and straighten her dress before anyone notices what went terribly, and inevitably, wrong. Our conceptual frameworks were built for certainty, and it difficult to step outside these familiar structures for thinking and reasoning. Yet the nerve-wracked psychic terrain of process is much more real and more true than anything finished.  The forms that this uncertainty can take are multiple, not limited to mere glimpses into an artist’s drafts. More often than not, things we think of as singular, unified, and unchanging—the human voice being one example—are revealed as inherently processual upon taking a closer look. In much the same way that the human voice is a confluence of influences, texts, and rhetorics, consciousness itself is inherently dialogic, shifting with the linguistic and cultural terrain we inhabit. The subject, and his or her every articulation, is an ongoing experiment, a process that unfolds in a larger landscape of unfoldings. This unfinishedness, however, is something we are persistently taught to overlook, to devalue, to move past.

Three recent collections of poetry challenge this tendency to elevate product over process, chance, and wondrous accident, offering a poetics that allows experiments to unfold before us. Seth Landman’s Confidence, Joshua Butts’ New To The Lost Coast, and Frank Montesonti’s Hope Tree each offer much-needed possibilities for conceptualizing a poetics of uncertainty. The poem becomes an unfolding, and a ledger of that of that unfolding.

In these collections we are no longer spectators led through the great halls by docents. Rather, the reader becomes a collaborator as they are invited into, and implicated in, the task of making meaning from the remarkable confluences that occur throughout these collections.

*          *          *

Though Landman’s Confidence could be considered a long poem, as we stay with the same speaker for extended periods of time, we are offered only the illusion of a unified perspective. The terms of lyric address are constantly shifting, the book a tangible record of these already past negotiations. The lyric “I” becomes dialogic, a conversation that unfolds before us as we move through the work. This extended meditation, though presented in a single voice, houses a multiplicity of speakers, rhetorics, and relationships, which persistently lay claim to the “I” that narrates these haunted and haunting lines. Consider this passage:

I’d rather be
you in my hoodie
I love the feeling
I let the light
know the lack a little
sometimes I write
for you
the look on your face
I don’t know
how it makes you feel
I don’t know how it makes you feel

Here the “you” is at turns reader and love object, the “I” shifting to inhabit these varied contexts. Compare, for instance, the intimacy conveyed by the phrase “you in my hoodie,” suggesting closeness to the point of sameness and interchangeability. Yet the poem soon drifts toward the language of popular culture (“I love the feeling”) and literary publishing, particularly the fragmentation of writing communities (“sometimes I write/for you” and “I don’t know/how it makes you feel…”). As the phenomena of the external world bear down on the speaker, we are made to see the constant presence of the other within the self. Landman calls our attention to the multifariousness of both subject and object, showing us that one complexity ultimately drives the other.

What is compelling about Landman’s work is the fact that he does not offer a completed exegesis, but rather, in those early lines, a set of questions: To what extent is the lyric “I” dependent on other voices as a point of contrast? How can we understand voice, alterity, and subjectivity before they inevitably slip away from us, becoming something else before we have finished speaking? Will we ever extricate self from other, or would we even want to? As Landman tests out possible answers, we are allowed to see both defeats and triumphs, all of which are refreshing in their honesty. The poem is no longer a presentation. It has become a space for building hypothetical worlds, imaginative topographies that chart our progress as we think through some of our most difficult philosophical questions.

*

In many ways, this poetics of process that we find in Landman’s work must be understood as a form of resistance to the commodification of knowledge, voice, and affect. Perhaps for this reason, the voice we hear in these lines frequently assumes the stance of outsider, observer:

The past collapses
you are waiting
for something
what is it
for something to come
the size
of what is
viewing us

Fifty caterpillar heads
in nature

Here the speaker observes himself being observed (describing “the size/of what is/viewing us”), gesturing at the way the book itself, its characters, and its ideas will enter an economy of language and texts. Indeed, participation in such an economy is an almost necessary condition of audience, of the “I” and “you” relationship that is being described (in which the “you” is frequently the reader of the text). Landman provocatively pairs this discussion of writing, and its accompanying systems of valuation, with imagery that resists notions of utility, usefulness, and commodity:  “caterpillar heads/in nature…”

Indeed, much of this long poem reads as a ledger of the speaker’s resistance. We cannot affix labels, let alone valuations, to voice (and the multiplicities housed within it) because they are constantly in flux:

You already are
who you are
it happened in April
in the early 1980’s
steam coming up
in a big field
invisible life
rotting invisibly
and now you could
be anywhere…

Landman suggests that the individual voice arises, and is only possible as, a form of response. The dialogic nature of speech, and even consciousness itself, is enacted in the style of the work as we begin to gather that “I” and “you” have become interchangeable, the speaker recounting details of his life as though he were another. Within this carefully orchestrated conversation, we learn about the speaker through his interactions with those around him. This seeing ultimately becomes a source of self-knowledge. The reader, too, is asked to situate herself within the book’s relational topography, renegotiating, then dismantling, the boundaries she has constructed between self and other, subject and object, viewer and viewed.

*

Joshua Butts’ New to the Lost Coast complicates this portrayal of self as other. Presented as an extended sequence of poems that place disparate rhetorics, lexicons, and textures of language within the same rhetorical space, this collection makes us see the speaker as the sum of the various literary and cultural texts he has encountered. The collage-like quality of each line problematizes the subject’s individuality, the inherent novelty we attribute to every single person. Additionally, it becomes difficult to situate such a work within an economy of texts when all of language, even thought itself, is found language. Much like Landman’s work, we observe the systems of valuation as they are undermined and dismantled. What’s most compelling about these poems, though, is the fact that they discover, enact, and subsequently illustrate these ambitious claims through the behavior of language.

Butts writes,

The forgotten played-out orphans
pushing the long boats into the lake

can get lazy in their tans.
There’s no reason to travel to Measley.

Here the reader encounters the colloquial speech (“There’s no reason…”) alongside lyrical language (“pushing the long boats into the lake…”). As we move from line to carefully constructed line, we encounter vastly different registers. Even within a single phrase, we are presented with both parody and hyperbole (“…forgotten played-out-orphans”), a self-reflexive humor that arises from this juxtaposition of vastly different types of diction. The speaker is revealed as an amalgamation of the various types of language that populate his psyche, none of which are truly his own. We are faced with the impossible task of discerning the poem’s speaker from his linguistic surroundings, and readers inevitably see themselves reflected in this impossibility.

What’s most perhaps fascinating is the book’s treatment of agency. We rarely choose the types of literary, cultural, and popular texts that we encounter, but from these incredibly varied works, we cull everything: voice, our modes of representation, and even thought itself. The individual voice, then, is merely an inheritance. But none of it is really ours.

Butts shows us that every time we speak, we are inevitably committing an act of theft.

*

Throughout this provocative collection, we search for the speaker of the poem, a unified perspective that would allow us to situate the work in an economy of texts, in which everything has a rightful owner. Yet these readerly expectations, this preconceived notion of textual ownership that we bring to the work, become material for Butts and his wonderful linguistic experiment.

He writes in “These States,”

Mine bathed.  Mine sold arms.  There were fifteen here that I didn’t know.
Mine saved up coupons to get one of those.
Mine yodeled, then dove into the Great Lake.

Butts culls language from a several histories, regions, and temporal moments. We see fragments of colonial newspapers (“Mine sold arms”) alongside modern popular culture (“Mine saved up coupons.”) and the literary language of hyperbole (“Mine yodeled, then”). As the poem unfolds, the speaker’s regional identity arises from these fragments. We begin to gather just how indeterminate that identity is, the subject a collage of language, culture, and various master narratives.

Throughout the book, the reader is called upon to assume an active role discerning the philosophy being set forth by this orchestrated collision of vastly different lexicons, discourses, and registers. Rather than envisioning a reader who purchases a book to witness someone else’s imaginative labor, the reader becomes a co-conspirator, ultimately disrupting the very foundations of our linguistic and textual economy.

*

Frank Montesonti’s Hope Tree shows us, perhaps more than any of the other texts, that an experiment inevitably has an element of violence. We destroy the established order to see what luminous possibilities emerge from the ruins. Presented as a continuous erasure of a tree-pruning manual, Montesonti excises significant portions of the source text to unearth something wondrous, the lyricism buried within the rhetoric of instruction. In the source text, destruction and regeneration are inextricably linked, and Montesonti helps us see that this is no different when thinking of language.

Rather than presenting only a finished product, a beautifully manicured garden, Montesonti allows us to see the foliage torn, sheared, and shredded as its transformed into something new.  He writes, for instance,

Observe your particular tree

pointed away

toward
….the winter months

As these lyric fragments are unearthed, the visual presentation of the work gestures at the source text’s absence, the sentences and paragraphs that have been shorn away to allow us access to this small moment of beauty. The violence of the experiment is not only made tangible, but it is revealed as necessary. The visible absences, the white space that populates the book, is the scaffolding that holds up these fragments, distinguishes them, and shows us how to move through them gracefully.

At the same time, we have the language of instruction—yet its utility has been undermined. Much like Landman and Butts, Montesonti uses the notion of the experiment, and its inherent uncertainty, to undermine a system of valuation that assumes certainty. By removing all that fits this definition of value, Montesonti shows us that what remains is what is most beautiful. Yet none of this magnificence is his, as the entirety of the work is found text. We are prompted to consider all text as found text, all of language as appropriation, and every poem as an act of careful curation.

*

Throughout Hope Tree, the language of instruction, the language that fits within a familiar economy in which texts circulate, is rendered not only useless, but also wonderfully and surprisingly humorous. Montesonti writes,

remain in that position throughout       life

until the complete bend

has been accomplished
……………………..tied firmly

What is particularly engaging and novel about this erasure is its rendering of familiar language suddenly and wonderfully strange. Though one may find amusement in the instructions given (“remain in that position throughout life”), this passage reveals what is at stake in reestablishing and affirming the value of process. As we are allowed to see the destruction of the experiment as it unfolds before us, familiar things become progressively less legible, less recognizable. We arrive in a place where we no longer speak the language or know the customs. We gain the ability to see our linguistic conventions, our many hierarchies of value, anew, and inhabit them in unexpected ways.

What’s more, we’re able to build something entirely new, because we’ve seen things being built before. These innovative collections each offer us possibilities for working within a textual economy that values certainty while also revising its terms. The forms that this questioning can take are revealed as multiple, perhaps as much so as the fragments of consumer culture that circulate around us. Though vastly different in style and approach, these writers share an investment in using the artistic resources and repertoire of poetry to dismantle prevailing systems of valuation from their very foundation: the rules of language itself. The reader becomes an accomplice in this wonderful subversion of a product-oriented textual economy, as these writers engage us in imaginative work that will continue long after each book has ended.

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over twenty books of poetry, including the forthcoming DARK HORSE (C&R Press, 2017). Her awards include two Yaddo residencies, a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, and multiple fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, as well as grants from the Whiting Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund. Her poems and essays appear in The Gettysburg Review, New American Writing, The Iowa Review, The Mid-American Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is currently working toward both a Ph.D. in Literature at S.U.N.Y.-Buffalo and an M.F.A. in Poetry at New York University.