Review Essay: Time as Empire & Resistance

Kristina Marie Darling on Recent Work by Christopher Kempf, Shane McCrae, & Toby Martinez de las Rivas

Late in the Empire of Men
Poems by Christopher Kempf
Four Way Books, March 2017
$15.95; 80 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1935536871

In the Language of My Captor
Poems by Shane McCrae
Wesleyan University Press, February 2017
$24.95; 88 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0819577115

Terror
Poems by Toby Martinez de las Rivas
Faber & Faber. June 2014
£9.99; 80 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0571296828

Emanuel Levinas once described memory as a reversal of historical time. In the darkened rooms of the mind, events abandon their chronology; the grand narrative no longer fits together the way it should. Yet this unraveling allows us to see each spectacle in sharper relief, to perceive confluences and repetitions, to construct a lovelier arc, a story that is more pleasing to the ear. To remember is to take apart. And, in doing so, one invents the possibility of new teleology.

Three recent collections of poetry fully and convincingly acknowledge this complex relationship between memory, narrative, and our thinking about time. We have been taught to impose a linear progression, a clear sequencing of uncertainties and upheavals, imagining an end to history’s infinite transformations. Christopher Kempf’s Late in the Empire of Men, Shane McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor, and Toby Martinez de las Rivas’ Terror each question these linear models of time and history that have become all too familiar. Each volume offers a gorgeously fractured, elliptical narrative arc, what de la Rivas describes as a “razored Book of Hours.”

In the work of Kempf, McCrae, and de las Rivas, we are reminded that it is possible to “dance” through time with “terrific abandon.” Here, we are invited to imagine history’s “brightest trajectory,” which almost always gestures toward the “light & knowledge” that lie just beyond the arc of story. These skilled and subtle writers remind us what narrative, with implied temporality and causation, can and cannot hold. As the intricate structure—that careful architecture—of each collection begins to reveal itself, we are left only with “terror that is all-abiding,” the ruins of an empire we once thought we knew.

§

Kempf’s Late in the Empire of Men takes the form of a book-length sequence of persona-driven lyrics that consider the relationship between power, privilege, and various constructions of masculinity. The speakers range from “a man made of pixels” to an OK Cupid user who believes “love is plural.” With that in mind, it is useful to think of Kempf’s work not as advocacy but rather as a documentary project, one that gathers and accounts for narratives circulating within a deeply flawed culture. In Kempf’s deftly constructed sequence, masculinity and empire are revealed as a palimpsest that can never be fully or convincingly erased. We are reminded that the cultural moment we inhabit is in actuality a layering of past “cities” and their “music,” an “excavation” taking place just below our conscious perceptions of which we are largely unaware. As Kempf himself reminds us, “everyone we know is asleep.”

Throughout this collection, time and its accompanying narratives fold in on themselves, as we drift from the “Information Age” to “the ‘90s,” to “mythic” antiquity and back again. Kempf’s circular movement through history and its discontents allows us to see that inherited mistakes “are carried inside us like a seed,” how we have internalized a century of missteps, a path that has essentially trapped us, like a “floodgates” or “a divine wind.” For example, Kempf writes in “Sledding at the Harding Memorial,”

. . . & later that evening
the team of men whose job it was rose
from their dinners & lifted into place
the great slab, something Paleolithic laid
at the spot where history limped away
to remember itself.  & somewhere far
below us our father watched . . .

Kempf’s carefully curated imagery, the “great slab” of a “tomb” looming over the children as they sled on fresh snow, as well as the father’s omnipresence in their play, evokes a present that contains within it the past. Kempf fully acknowledges that we cannot simply exist outside of a shared cultural memory, as its implicit assumptions have been too deeply internalized. Yet he also gestures toward the possibility of self-awareness, a path “cleared free of small boughs,” a more cognizant navigation of history and the things we carry through its luminous gates. In many ways, this curation of cultural memory is the “spectacular fin de siècle,” “the Bellagio” that lies just beyond what we are able to imagine in the language of empire.

§

Much like Kempf’s work, McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor frames language as both intimacy and violation. He reminds us that we rarely choose the grammar we inhabit, with its implicit causalities, hierarchies, and judgments. For McCrae, this kind of linguistic imperialism is the ultimate violence, as grammar structures conscious experience, determining what can and cannot be dreamed, what thoughts must remain “deep and far in darkness.”

McCrae’s collection shows us that the present moment “memorializes” a history of linguistic dislocation while also bearing it indefinitely into the future, into the empty rooms of “no country we have seen.” One of the questions that drives the collection is whether one’s life in language is a captivity that cannot be shaken.

Midway through the collection, McCrae introduces a powerful series of prose vignettes that depict a child exploring an abandoned house. As the sequence unfolds, these unused rooms—replete with “furniture,” “kitchen appliances,” “toys,” everything one would need to build a life—become an emblem for lost possibility, an existence outside the constricting language of empire. McCrae reminds us, though, of the loneliness of this dream, as it is language—with all of its flaws and shortcomings—that makes possible community and shared experience.  He elaborates,

The houses and the warehouse were separated by about 100 feet of dirt, and patches of broken concrete, and thorny, low bushes, and grass. I call it a village, but there wasn’t more to it than what I’ve just described. I call it a village because it was abandoned—the words seem to go together—and filled with trash and also things I thought people wouldn’t have left behind, things that looked important to me . . .

In much the same way that the “village” with its “low thorny bushes” was “abandoned” years ago, filled with “things that looked important,” McCrae’s riveting speaker is haunted by a shadow community, and a shadow self, which both exist outside of language, with its residue of trauma and violence. The meadow and its echoing structures become a space for dreaming, an emblem for freedom. But this transcendence, too, is deeply problematic. McCrae reminds us that when one flees language and empire, there is no one on the other side to greet you.

§

Terror, too, considers the ways each word contains within it the world, its histories, and its upheavals. De las Rivas, however, takes this line of thinking in a slightly different direction, exploring the ways language can both inform and destabilize our thinking about time. Here, we are made to see that found text can decenter narrative, unraveling its “brake of thorns,” exhuming “the full range of its tragedy.” Through carefully orchestrated juxtapositions and skillful shifts in register, de las Rivas reveals the “blue lustre” of antiquity in each syllable. As we drift between “the lyric” and its “formal counterpoint,” we are finally able to see modernity, its “spite” and its “denials,” in sharper relief. Indeed, the poems in Terror render us startlingly aware of the many distinct empires and upheavals that inhabit each utterance, every word a “wide array twitched open” to reveal a kingdom, its “light-bearing rage.”

In such a way, de las Rivas challenges the familiar linear models of time and history. “The summer wind tilts in my mouth,” he writes. “I cannot set one word down straight.” As de las Rivas himself admits, it is markedly difficult to situate the work’s language in any given temporal moment. His sentences are instead a ledger, tracing the speaker’s movement through a vast, rich, and ultimately shared cultural memory. By bearing witness to the “raucous, oppositional light” contained in every speech act, de las Rivas calls our attention to the violence implied by linear models of temporality, the erasure inherent in the creation of a master narrative. He writes, for example, in the opening poem of the collection,

Seventhly, I pray for the sparrow with a slashed tongue
        who in Egypt wore a jackal’s garish blunt head
& ferried dead children across the river, but in England
        he’s a happy, fat fellow.  I listen to his declining
brotherhood at Broadway:  there is one fewer every day.

Here, and elsewhere in the book, de las Rivas acknowledges the many ways that the language of an empire is internalized. One fashions an identity out of its teleologies, its implicit hierarchies and judgments. At the same time, he calls attention to changeability of language, geography, and as a result, concepts of identity. The sparrow, with its migration and flight, becomes an emblem for our place in a vast and inherently unstable linguistic terrain. In much the same way that “the sparrow” metamorphoses from a creature with “a slashed tongue” to a “fat, happy fellow,” we are made to see the possibility of migrating within language, discovering new frameworks for organizing the world and our place within it.

The “terror” evoked in the work’s title, then, is not the captivity described by McCrae, or the entrapment inherent in Kempf’s master narratives. It is more like awe, the “wonder” and “shivering” when presented with infinite possibility. 

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of twenty-seven books of poetry, most recently Ghost / Landscape (with John Gallaher; BlazeVox Books, 2016) and the forthcoming Dark Horse (C&R Press, 2017). Her awards include three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet, as well as a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, a Fundacion Valparaiso Fellowship, and three residencies at the American Academy in Rome. She is the recipient of grants from the Whiting Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund. Her poems appear in New American Writing, The Mid-American Review, Poetry International, Passages North, Nimrod, and many other magazines. She has published essays in Agni, The Gettysburg Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, Descant, and elsewhere. She is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Quarterly and Grants Specialist at Black Ocean. She divides her time between the United States and Europe.