David Kinloch | In Search of Dustie-Fute / 2017

journeys into the underworld of thought

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Kinloch In Search of Dustie-Fute (Manchester, England: Carcanet, 2017)

 

David Kinloch is surely one of the most innovative poets ever to come out of Scotland. In his books he plays, at times, with archaic Scottish phrases, while spinning narratives from literary figures as various as Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Roussel, as well as translating Paul Celan—all of which are even more amazingly interwoven with discussions of his homosexuality and, as in this book, small feminist-based poems. In reading a book of poems by Kinloch one must be ready to take a long voyage through language, imagination, and space. If it isn’t always easy-going it is always worth the trip.

 

      In his newest book the poem goes on the search for Dustie-Fute, a Scots figure who is a merchant, a troubadour, a juggler, and in Kinloch’s book “a figure of Orpheus,” totally appropriate in this case since in a central poem/essay of this book, “Felix, June 5, 1994,” the poet explores the photographs of Canadian-born artist A. A. Bronson’s quilt-like works dedicated to men who have died of AIDS, this poem centered on Bronson’s lover Felix Partz:

 

                              You thread a sea with your eye;

                              each time the needle enters your flank

                              the pain composes you;

 

                              trees that hung your voice

                              among those patterns

                              wrap your quilt in foliage;

 

                              a dog barks through the branches;

                              a girl’s arm passes like an oar

                              across the unlit patches;

 

                              now your song kneels

                              at the river’s edge

                              and will not flow;

 

                              your passport head is pinned in silk.

       It’s not easy to parse this poem; it is after all a kind of gut response to an awful death, and perhaps it’s simply better to read Kinloch’s own narrative about the photo and Bronson’s art. But it clearly represents the poet’s intense insight into the worlds he represents and creates. Given the almost pin-size head of the original, set against various patterns and colors of the rest of the work, the last line of this poem is particularly painful. In death, Felix’s head has definitely become almost insignificant to the song the work sings about the underworld—the mad swirl of colors and patterns—to which he has given up his being.

     

     One of the work’s most brilliant poems takes the viewpoint of Joseph:

 

                                      Not mine. The call wasn’t for me. The phone

                                      rang in the next room and it was the Angel.

 

This multi-sectioned poem is a beautiful portrait of a man who loves but yet is kept apart from object of that love:

 

                                                              The boy

 

                                                   I teach him. He is grateful.

                                                   Holds love back for a future

                                                   as big as this nail

                                                   I beat into the bench

                                                   where it lies almost

                                                   flush with the wood.

 

        This lovely piece suggests the gentleness of the patient carpenter, while at the same time hinting at his sensuous desire for his beautiful son through the phallic images of the nail which he beats into the wood and the coming together of that nail with the bench on which, we suspect, the young Jesus lies. This Joseph, although described as a saint, is not always so saintly. In “St. Joseph’s Dream,” for example, he expresses what might almost be envy for his wife’s ability “to shake / hands with the Angel.” And some of his dreams are violent, particularly when his internal voices speak in his dreams, compelling him to Flee into Egypt. Kinloch’s Joseph is a man you might never have imagined in biblical literature or commentary, a sensual man attempting to make sense of his wife’s mysterious birth and his “perfect son.”

       Some of strongest poems in this moving book, however, come near its end, where the poet’s Orpheus must now come to terms with his Eurydice. In the long two poems of “Some Women,” Kinloch gives us entirely new perspectives of Lilith, Cain’s wife, Adah and Zillah, Sarah, Rebekah, Deborah, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, the daughters of Job, King David’s concubines, Hannah, Martha, Mary Magdalene, and others. If this sounds a bit like a religious-based text, think again. These women are quirky and strong, ur-feminists who recognize their world and their positions in it are untenable and difficult to negotiate. Mary Magdalene, for example, seems married to a Christ who demands she “Look within,” but because of the society in which she exists cannot find any                               

 

                                       What I remember is I was weeping,

                                       and I turned to the gardener (who looked like

                                       my husband) and I screamed, ‘The body has gone!’

                                       He told me to look inside. ‘Look within.’

 

                                       Two words. So I think he meant into myself.

                                       I tried but found nothing. Their questions

                                       never stop. I feel my bones going off

                                       to preach on their own, each with a slightly

 

                                       different story.  ……

 

     Sarah is presented here as a tart-spoken elder, not afraid even of the angels or the God who has sent them:

 

                                      Angels are good for a laugh: they come up

                                      and they say: ‘God will give you a child.’

                                      I laugh and I say: ‘I’m ninety!’

 

                                      They stand up indignant, unfold their wings,

                                      ‘You can’t laugh at God,’ one says.

                                      I laugh and I say: ‘I’m ninety!’

        

                                      They leave in a flap and I have a wee boy

                                      called Isaac who name mean ‘he laughs’.

                                      I laugh and I say: ‘I’m ninety!’

 

     Kinloch ends his work, appropriately, with a re-visitation to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth based on Rilke (and a photograph by PaJaMa) and a strange overlay of the homosexual poet Cavafy with a Syrian refugee from whom he hears in Glasgow, who demands that he go (perhaps like Mary Magdalene on an inner journey) to Alexandria. But in this poet’s world anything is possible, as the voice of the poem suddenly discovers that it is only “nineteen and a quarter / mile from Glasgow to Alexandria.” (In fact, there is a Scottish town named Alexandria new Glasgow.) Indeed, the world has shrunken. Dustie-Fute may exist just around the corner.

 

Los Angeles, May 17, 2019

Reprinted from Hyperallergic Weekend, Sunday, June 30, 2019.

Bernadette Mayer | Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words / 2015

on the move 

Bernadette Mayer Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Barrytown, New York: Station Hill, 2015)

 

I first began reading the works of Bernadette Mayer in 1975 or 1976, contemporaneous with their publications. While I didn’t realize it at the time, Mayer wrote them in her late 20s and early 30s, quite close to my own age.

    Mayer’s work seemed so inexplicably mature that I couldn’t have imagined that she was just a couple of years older. I also did not know that she had begun publishing eleven years earlier, with Ceremony Latin (1962), which appeared when she was just 17. This young woman’s voice was like no other at the time, a poet with obviously a deep connection to Gertrude Stein, who, nonetheless, did not imitate or sound like Stein. Far before the linguistic explorations of most of the language poets, Mayer, collaborating with artist Vito Acconci, was exploring verbal sound experiments such as the portion of Sin in the Bleekers that appeared in her 1976 volume, Poetry:

 

                      Salaam my Salems on a banker’s disturbance

                      Crass dots, a prelude for daughters

                      In their transparence—which is the secret.

                      Lay way, the markets in drools of temptations.

                      This is the end of a lender,

                      Who sent his miss. ……………

 

If I had no idea whatsoever what it meant, it nonetheless sounded perfectly assured and meaningful, as if every word belonged in the sequence in which it appeared.

     Her Poetry, in fact, opened my mind to a playful relation with language that freed words to suggest their meanings as opposed to forcing meaning into words. At the same time, Mayer seemed to be so knowledgeable, with her Catholic school education, about traditional forms. As the new collected early works, just published by Station Hill Press, reveals, she knew her Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, even the Greeks. She could write a wicked sestina as in her “The Aeschyleans,” one of my very favorite of her early poems:

 

                         These berries, with their choices, come to earth

                         To scatter and confuse the sainted warriors,

                         A part of crime’s return to grace

                         And the innocence of criminals which

                         Enervates us like the coarser forms

                         Of truculence. Rude labors are ordinary and still.

 

                         They speed the haphazard. Slow manners till

                         Desires long buried on the earth

                         Among the exigencies of place and concurrent forms

                         Which frightened even staid warriors.

                         May transfix the movements of warriors. To grace

 

                         These corridors with flowers is a chance for grace

                         As if ancient events were surfeited and still.

                         …………………………..

 

If one wanted further evidence of Mayer’s startling erudition, moreover, one need only read her beautiful Eruditio Ex Memoria which Mayer comments on her process of composition:

 

                       I didn’t want to carry around my school notebooks anymore,

                       but I didn’t want to throw them away either so I tore random

                       pages from them on which I later based this book. I saved the

                       doodles too.

 

     I reviewed that book in my only substantial contribution to Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews’ L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, where I described it as being a kind of abbreviated “anatomy,” the Roman comic genre of Petronius’ Satyricon, a more modern example of which is Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. Today, although I wouldn’t disavow what I then wrote, I might also describe the work as a highly concentrated encyclopedic fiction, a work that in its brief twenty-five pages in this new volume condenses knowledge into poetic associations. The first two paragraphs demonstrate its effect:

 

                        I saw a doctor, a doctor. It was Antonin Artaud. He was elected

                        to the Royal Academy, no that was Chekhov. This is the Russian

                        Theater, it’s 1962 or so, the moralist of the venial sin is here,

                        resigning over Gorky. Doctor. “The Seagull” defends Zola and

                        Dreyfus, it’s the Moscow Art Theater. Chekov is Godard. This is

                        what I learned at school. This is what I thought: Artaud, Antonin.

                            Hemispheres become loose in the country, there are new forms.

                        Stanislavsky, etc. Add up a column of numbers, it comes to

                        William Carlos Williams to me. What are the spiritual heights, she

                        said  Just as Uncle Vanya looks like a dial, Paris comes and goes,

                        prissy, lightfooted and beautiful-looking, but, by and large, outside

                        forces come to the surface. By the same token, we seem fully uneven,

                        without the bones and stays. The homecoming: she opened and

                        closed her conversation with adequacy. There’s a picture of a man

                        with a spring for a body. There’s a picture of a woman dancing with

                        a leaf for a hand, her head on a string, hanging forward. It’s Madam

                        Shaw. Relevant is relevant, irrational knot, unsocial socialist, un-

                        pleasant and pleasant Madam Shaw. Oh Shaw, polygammarian, the

                        candidate, there’s a heart and a louse on the skunk.

 

      In Mayer’s recreation of what appear to be her school lessons, the doctor she visits or first conjures up is understandably associated with the great dramatist and theater director, Antonin Artaud, who spent much of his childhood and later life under the care of doctors, suffering, early in his life, from meningitis, neuralgia, and clinical depression, and, after years of visiting various sanatoriums, ended his later life with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

     Correcting her purposely “associative mistake,” Mayer quickly shifts to another great dramatic figure, Anton Chekov, who actually was a medical doctor, who proclaimed “Medicine is my lawful wife, literature is my mistress.” Many of Chekov’s plays, moreover, including Uncle Vanya—which Mayer mentions in the second paragraph—were directed by another great modernist director (with theories very different from Artaud’s theories of madness), Constantin Stanislavski, with whom she begins her second paragraph, whose “method” theories he brilliantly used to direct a revival of the previously failed Chekhov play, The Seagull, himself performing in the play as the writer Boris Trigorin. And, indeed, after growing weary from directing and performing another important Russian playwright, Maxim Gorky, Stanislavski did indeed take a leave from the Moscow Art Theater which he and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko had created. Chekov, who died early of tuberculosis, also had to seek the aid of several doctors, and died, so legend has it, soon after one of them offered him a last glass of champagne.

     Is it any wonder that these “figures,” if listed in a column, might “add up,” as Mayer puts it, to William Carlos Williams, who was yet another writer, medical doctor who was also major figure of modernism?

     The third major figure of this thumbtack history of modernist theater, inevitably, is the great Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw, who, born in the mid-19^th century, certainly came out of the Victorian world of “bones and stays.”  Shaw himself married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, who refused to have sex with him, the marriage with the “Madam Shaw” which Mayer mentions, accordingly, never being consummated. The “irrational knot” which Mayer mentions is a reference to Shaw’s novel The Irrational Knot wherein he describes the failure of a marriage because of an upper class wife’s inability to share her workman husband’s interests. And, indeed, Shaw was a “unsocial socialist.” The reference to Shaw being “polygmammalian,” is, of course, hinting at his famous play Pygmalion.

     In short, in just two paragraphs Mayer sums up a history of important early 20^th century theatrical works by purposely conflating literary figures who were doctors, and noted “theatre doctors,” men who changed the way theater was performed and created.

     For all of her wonderfully complex experimental works, however—and there are many, many others among her early writings—one might find it hard to love Mayer’s work as much as I do if one sought merely playful language. For Mayer is nearly always in motion in her life and writing, as she expresses it in the long poem “Moving.’ Throughout her works she shifts not only in her literary approaches but in her expression of self, sexuality, political viewpoints, and relationships with the world about her. As she hints of this in “Moving” and later in another poem, restating the same words:

 

                                                 we’ve solved the problem, the problem is solved.

       men are women, women are men. i’m pregnant for a while you’re pregnant for a

           while. “if someone doesnt change into an animal, we wont be saved someone

        must change into an animal so that we can be saved” a man turns into a cat………

 

For this reason, if for no other, Mayer is what I might lovingly describe as a “messy” poet, an honest writer who is utterly unafraid of expressing her emotional doubts, fears, and confusions in the very process of creating. Particularly in her love poems, but also in many other works, Mayer interrupts her own writing, asking herself rhetorical questions, berating her style, demonstrating her angers and frustration—just, to use the cliché, “letting it all hang out.”

 

          How can I write you about deanimation, love

          Deanimation-Love

          Deanimation, Love—

          My love

          & yours

          I am not on your shelf, you are not on my shelf

          But

          I want you to be

          Your subject

          Subject to

          The greatest love of all time—a woman’s face with Nature’s

                      own hand painted

          Forgive me now, I am putting you on my shelf

          The mantelpiece, the design, the waiting for your call

          …………………..

 

                            (“Deanimation Love” from Poetry)

 

In poem after poem, particularly in the last work of this volume, The Golden Book of Words, as she attempts to raise three children, feed them with little money, and simply keep warm from the cold Massachusetts winters, Mayer composes works that that reveal her everyday activities intruding upon her more intense poetic expressions and thoughts.   

       

            …………………….

            Full of animal crackers, I joke with you

            About buying a bra, I measure myself

            I have a 38-inch bust, as they used to say

            But with nipples excited by the tape measure

            It’s only 35, I guess this is not a decorous poem

            As Donne or Pope would have set it all up

            Fourteen hundred to eighteen hundred A.D.

            In the western world we’ve got

            Where the work of women holds up half the sky

 

            And yet the desire to write tonight

            Is borne, dare I say it, like a seed

            On the wind and so on, we were talking to your mother

            …………………

 

                              (“Easy Puddings” from The Golden Book of Words)

 

Or, as in the previous poem in that volume, “The Heart of the Hare,” she is unafraid simply to list her daily duties for the week ahead:

 

              Tomorrow’s Monday maybe we’ll do some laundry

              Clean clothes for one night in New York

              I’ve got to hardboil some eggs for lunch on Tuesday

              Pack a complete bag and stay healthy

              …………………..          

 

In other words, if you really want to read this often-rewarding poet, you also have to deal with her as an everyday human being. If I seem to have inserted myself into this review more than usual it because reading and talking about the poems of Bernadette Mayer demands a very personal response. In Mayer’s work you must be willing to follow her along the valleys in order to get to the mountaintops.

     But oh how wonderful those moments of utter linguistic freedom and revelation are, as in the absolutely magical and joyously comic poem about a strange local family living near her in Lenox, Massachusetts:

 

             They come down on their snowmobiles for the last time,

                      come down to meet the car.

             They’re shouting, “Hoo Hey! The snow! Give them the snow!

                      Let them eat snow! Hey! The snow!”

              Looking like wild men & women, two wild children & a

                      grandmother too, they’re taking turns riding the

                      snowmobile, they’re getting out.

              Hoo! Hey! The snow! freaking out.

              Everybody in town watches, standing in groups by the

                       “Road Closed” sign.

              Shouting back, “Take it easy! The snow!

              On Bashan Hill they’ve lived in a cloud, watched. They’d had

                       plenty of split peas, corn, Irish soda bread, fruitcake,

                       chocolate, pemmican. But the main thing was—NO PLOW!

              Day before at the Corners Grocery, news got around. “They’re

                       Coming down from Bashan Hill—never to return!”

              The snow!

 

                                  (“The End of Human Reign on Bashan Hill”, from

                                        The Golden Book of Words)

 

In just 39 lines, Mayer creates a narrative poem that reveals, through her presentation of this wild family, the separateness, isolation, and inner vitality of the community so completely that we might almost read it as a novel.

     In such a constantly unstable world as Mayer’s you never know what you might find, as in the simple nature poem, “Instability (Weather)”

 

                   ……………………………………..

                   I must get back to the lilacs

                   So excited when I saw them first blooming in the back next to the

                           apple tree

                   I nearly jumped for joy my heart beats rapidly

                   Because they are late & we are moving

 

                   Blossoms for Lewis & Charlotte who’s here

                   The lilacs were so far away I didnt get to them

                   But I wont tell, I’ll go with a scissor tomorrow

                   The scissor I’ll hide in the woods tonight

 

                   For some strange reason I’ll never say

                   I’ll never have lived a more exciting day

 

Even if one can comprehend why the lateness of the lilacs blooming might give the narrator some joy, what does the fact that family is moving have to do with the lilacs? Why won’t she “tell” and from whom is she keeping this secret. Why didn’t she “get to them” previously? And why has she hidden the scissors in the woods? In Mayer’s hands, even the simple discovery of a lilac bush and the process of cutting a few of its flowers to place in a vase becomes a magically ritualistic act, as if the narrator, presumably Bernadette, were connected to nature with forces that cannot be explained. And in the process of reading her poems, the reader, too, is taken there, a place where he might never have discovered without the poet’s very personal eye, voice, and hand to guide him.

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2015

Reprinted as “The Drama in the Everyday: Bernadette Mayer’s Early Poems” from Hyperallergic Weekend (August 15, 2015).