Otherwise Smooth by Rosmarie Waldrop
The creeks by
rob mclennan
Both titles published
by above/ground press, 2013.
The concept of
living in the moment is simple in theory but difficult to execute. It’s a
cliché dressed up as friendly advice yet also a core discipline in Buddhist
thought. It’s a dangling hook for vacationers and an art form for
procrastinators. We all feel the passing of time when peering backward but
how many of us identify the time ticking away right now, each second as
recognizable as individual words being read on this screen, at this moment?
Waldrop explores the relationship between our transient time in this cosmic
happenstance and the language we’ve constructed to explain it.
That said, if
we can ignore Rosmarie Waldrop’s reputation as a known poet and editor for a
moment, Otherwise Smooth bares only residual markings of poetry, visually. None
of the stern line-breaks she used in The Ambition of Ghosts, no fragile
cascades of language here. But, despite the title, these nine, numbered entries
elicit a raw form of poetry, one more concerned with understanding its own
nature than striking the most appealing pose. Here’s something of a centerpiece
from Otherwise Smooth, "5":
“I say “I” and
thereby appropriate the entire language. And trust I am,
through words,
gradually to become. A person? An instance of
discourse?
Plain as the sky to a fisherman? Beginnings are hazy, below
the belt,
where a face is not yet possible though already bespoke by
gravity. But
pronouns do not refer to anything in space and time
except the
utterance that contains them. Each time, like death, unique.
Not like
walking in light that lies like fine dust on the ground, but
language
handing me, each time, the gifts of memory, a past. A soul?
While the
voice excites intimacies of organic existence, modulates the
frequency of
pulses from nerve fibres. Code. Clouded sentence.
Crowded square
emptied of bustle by a sudden rain.”
The poem
reprinted above – indeed in its first sentence – forms an apex upon which all
of Otherwise Smooth hinges. Waldrop has articulated a voice that is not only
conscious of its own devices, it’s yearning to express innate feelings through
the confines of that manufactured language. The poem also ushers in the focal
theme of Otherwise Smooth’s second half, loss and death, which lends her “ticks
of the watch” awareness all the more acute.
Critically,
her assembling process, of choosing the best words to suit myriad situations,
plays out on the page. In "6", Waldrop’s grief is “Without body. Without air.
Therefore I too can’t breathe. Sore. Sere. The self goes from the self” while,
in "7", she describes mourning as “the passage of time you’re no longer in, and
the clocks risk stopping. The rock has split. Early. Eerie.” These amendments
of speech, almost like stutters on paper, reinforce Waldrop’s shock.
Given the
insular (yet universal) subject matter, these poems feel surprisingly sterile.
There’s no nostalgia with which readers might veer off course. The past exists
and is left alone but the present hasn’t been compartmentalized yet; it leaves no
hue or definition. And in that limbo Waldrop connects, her language battered by
suffering and hope, predestined to chase after permanence, recording every
tick.
“Mercy
does not come from the sky”
Norma
Cole, Coleman Hawkins Ornette Coleman
If the above quote,
which prefaces The creeks, feels like a foregone conclusion, rob mclennan
proceeds to trace mercy’s whereabouts from the ground up. What churns to the
surface isn’t necessarily forgiveness but a swelling of earthy compassion; the
waterways, hedges and concrete throughways we form relationships with, both as
obstacles and touchstones.
Poem "The
creeks" surveys a convergence of raw and abandoned materials: the dark,
iridescent wet of a cave, the date-stamped artifacts passed over. Appearing in
three prose findings, it’s handily the chapbook’s most loaded entry and perhaps
its cryptic key. Underground rivers meet slabs of pavement but there’s a sense
of disarray, that these “remains of civilization” lack category, appreciation.
Ample cases of
contrast exist in The creeks, between natural and manmade discoveries, forming a
mute awareness instead of any environmental concern. mclennan is very good at
implying the presence of two persons in his work without letting them obstruct his
focus, persons who more often adapt to the currents around them than act as
agents of change. As such, over “bashed ancient stone” and “useless, feathered,
goods” mclennan’s surroundings reverberate on the relationship between his
would-be anthropologists, always teasing a sensual interpretation.
Alternately “site
map: draft” collects a sequence on Ottawa’s concrete upheavals but still notes a
pulse lurking within its infrastructure.
“1.
hard-bodied;
crunching past,
a
singing, sword; the Queensway,
fractals, lifts; an interruption
carved from minutes; language promised,
vertebrae,
sudden-fused; a blind, and brilliant eye,”
mclennan’s
immersed in the language of a city, becoming. A conversation bound to change
with each new construction sign. Arising from the title poem’s deep abyss and lush
in the isolated prose of his “Escarpment pages,” mclennan repeatedly finds that
it is compassion linking the place and its commemoration on paper.
Some might
consider that analysis quaint but “Escarpment pages,” turns the relationship on
its head with the arrival of letters waterlogged by the elements. “The pulpy
mass of paper heart becomes.” As mclennan’s trajectory continues to climb up,
away from tangible surroundings, so too does his muse bleach into the creative
fray. From “Little sentences,”:
“Each
mark is equal to a line or a separate lie. The word sonnet
scratched
onto green paper. An envelope edge torn off as a bookmark.
The
hair of each curled photo cracks at the crease, memories that no
longer
remember. Once you were gone I divided into two distant
pools.”
Again the
virtues of place shape the language, this time coding personal vignettes in sleet.
And again, mclennan’s “we” proves resilient amid the shifting terrain. Offsetting
the massively daunting relationship between place and language with intricacies
webbed up in his signature, concise style, mclennan has illustrated a treasure
of ideas in unassuming strokes. “We might bend, but in new forms” he suggests
in “A terrible decay,”, a fitting closing poem that feels light-years removed from everyday topography but ever-closer to a timeless compassion.
No comments:
Post a Comment