Review: Little Million Doors: An Elegy by Chad Sweeney

Reviewed by James Benton

Little Million Doors: An Elegy
Chad Sweeney
Nightboat Books, April 2019
$15.95, 80 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1643620008

Like a hurricane of images, or a tsunami of grief, Sweeny’s lines strain against a background of stability and coherence that barely holds together. The book is an elegy not only because the title tells us so, but because it performs its elegiac ritual without the filter of conventional form or syntactical coherence. If grief is inchoate, the poet asks, what language is sufficient to the duty it is called upon to perform? The answer is a language suddenly released from its duties to inform or to persuade—functions of containment, framing, and interpretation—a non-syntax left to its singular capacity to conjure the ineffable, to bring it into being.

This is not hyperbole. What this book does is how it does it; the message is its method. There seems to be little advantage in trying to force conventional meaning in the sense of narrative arc or the capture of an insight through lyrical flourishes. It is not what Ferlinghetti might call a “workshop poem.” Instead, it creates an entirely new language of grief and recovery that at once recognizes the stable ground of being on which it had once existed while exploding into a new universe of fracture, compression, and transformation. Consider this moment (for what else can we call it):

My clothes grew tired an
End of day I begged this

Air to
Hundred me

As many genders
As bees

In the lavender field my
Lovely hero

What nothing like sleep did the water
Where have you

Gone little murder find me here

The book-length poem is set almost entirely in couplets, though that form is broken at irregular intervals. The first word in each line is capitalized, a long abandoned poetic tradition among contemporary writers; it is a practice that stands out in contrast to the absence of any other markers of “standard written English,” creating considerable cognitive tension. The tension is compounded by what James Longenbach calls annotated line endings, endings that crosscut standard syntactical units and disrupt what we think of as the normal flow of thought. Since we cannot decode the syntax in the normal way, we must constantly reassess what we are reading, just as the speaker constantly and urgently reassesses their decentered reality.

And there is a speaker of the poem. A speaker chanting a dissociated glossolalia. Nouns functions as verbs, objects transform into subjects, lines shift their center of gravity without warning:

My life without me in it at the center

Of no center is a flower

The first of these two lines could be read as a coherent syntactical unit: “My life without me in it at the center” except for the line that follows, which by itself is not a coherent syntactical unit. We back up, capture the phrase “at the center,” give it a different grammatical function to perform, and complete the second line. This pivot of grammar enacts the rush of thoughts and emotions that happen during an emotional breakdown. The speaker does not tell us they have had a breakdown, does not interpret the breakdown, does not make an argument about cause and effect. We simply experience the breakdown on its own terms.

To read these lines on the page is one thing; to hear them read aloud is quite another. Try it: you quickly fall into a cadence similar to that of a preacher intoning from the pulpit. The sound begins to resemble the effect of Whitman’s long lines of exaltation or that of Ginsberg’s long lines of rage. While at first the chain of images does not appear to make sense, you begin to understand the nonce language and take it as it comes. Toward the end of the book, however, the language begins to coalesce, the fracture becomes less disorienting:

A boy was measuring the day
He had a big hoop

The sun emptied its arrows

Into him
He though the hoop invisible

The language seems to come out the other side, but not completely; the speaker seems to come out the other side of their grief, but not completely. The speaker is transformed; the reader is transformed. Little Million Doors is a tour de force performance.

Chad Sweeney is the author of six books of poetry, including Little Million Doors (Nightboat Books, winner of the Nightboat Prize, 2019), Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga), and Wolf’s Milk (bilingual Spanish/English, Forklift Books)—as well as two books of translation from Spanish and Farsi. His work has been featured in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Verse Daily and the Writers Almanac. Sweeney holds an MFA from San Francisco State University and a PhD from Western Michigan University. He teaches creative writing at CSU San Bernardino and lives in Redlands with his family.

After leaving the Navy, James Benton worked in a series of professions, including, among others, shipyard electrician, debt collections, credit card security, and private investigations before returning to college to finish a degree he began in 1982. He holds an MA in creative writing from Cal State Sacramento and an MFA from Eastern Oregon University. He is the author of one book of poems, Sailor, and his work has appeared in the Tahoma Literary Review, ragazine.cc, Rattle, Word Riot, and other journals. He currently teaches English Writing at EOU.

Chad Sweeney
from Little Million Doors: An Elegy

Long days of rain a phone was ringing

High over the steps the wet

Gables of the world immortal it was

Our souls streaming into quiets

Of woodgrain toward what

Plane of convergence for years I could not

Answer a music in pain the undying

Will undying in the dying grass

Into us a little while
Light lets nothing is

Sovereign a page a box
Brimming

All delicate
In the body held

In the coarse
Rope netting

Of the body time keeps

Branching what

Does it want in us each
Carries her

Death like a vase of deaths
Was I

Married in the soft sleep

Of marrow I can’t explain
Children see me

Inside them I watch
Language move the year

Death I think if there is such a
Place in beauty

Landscape
Without the landscape in it

And nothing outside me
Thin colorless

Sky among the olive
Branches and in the long windows

Of children’s mouths
My life without me in it at the center

Of no center is a flower

A man there is follows
Me

Through woods every age but this
Is no woods ahead on the road

The hands
Flutter

Windows whole rooms of his body
In doorways his voice in

The crossing who my
Son in cedars is he

Me from the bell note
This thunder under

Granite understands us

And this must be what love

Feels like this
Spreading out over

Surfaces

Of leaves they flicker out

The children they are all
Children now their hands

On the drums the borders and
Bread is and is

This the gift