Fanny Howe, Love and I

A man might not want a child

Because he has his brain to carry around.

The passenger who whispered

Clutched his head like an infant.

I understood him.

He was sick of pontificating over revisions and drafts

Until they ruined the first burst.

This is how he explained it to me.

A solitary wreck winking back tears:

“I was scared, scared of leaving my dreams behind

and no one to interpret them.” (“Turbulence”)

One of the great discoveries of my thirties was the American poet Fanny Howe, and I am very pleased to be able to go through her latest poetry title, Love and I (Minneapolis MI: Graywolf Press, 2019). Howe has always been, in my mind, akin to the late Toronto poet bpNichol, in their shared ability to compose a lyric that extends everything they’ve done prior, but is also part of that same whole: “a poem as long as a life.” Howe’s is a lyric that builds, extends and continues, one step beyond each other step, writing on faith, history, love, Catholicism, hope, philosophy, childhood and all the patterns that might emerge between. “I love so many of them,” she writes, to begin the opening poem, “Allegories,” “But they are only half a decade / Away from being disproved.” A bit further, the poem “Turbulence” opens: “Some who never feel loved keep traveling.”

Her poems have the appearance of quick sketches of long-considered meditations. I’ve always admired the extensions of her lyrics, furthering one step upon another. Her poems and her poetry collections and her works of prose build, endlessly, and her utilization of the poetic fragment suggest that sections could be moved, re-sorted, and still maintain a particular structure (an unbound sequence of poems by Howe might be intriguing at some point; where the order emerges via the reader, thus potentially shifting the work of the poem as well). 

The Word is like a flood in shape and speed.

You will like the way it rushes east and west at the same time.

Echoes and solidifies and breaks apart.

It streams like a Northern Light. But it’s the Word.

The Word makes no sound.

The Word never made no sound and will not

Ever, out of parched minds and tongues

Break this law.

essays in the face of uncertainties

Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster responds to my email on the death of Joe Blades, saying that even though she didn’t really know him that well, she and her husband were both finding themselves affected by the news in ways she found unexpected. Joe wasn’t that much older than she or I, which I suspect is a factor, but Christine suggests it’s the crisis itself: one more thing on top of one more thing. She’s right, of course. Concurrently, the Boston Globe runs the headline “Sunday’s Boston Globe runs 21 pages of death notices as coronavirus continues to claim lives.” As William Wan, Carolyn Y. Johnson and Joel Achenbach reported last week in the Washington Post:

By the end of the week, residents in Georgia will be able to get their hair permed and nails done. By Monday, they will be cleared for action flicks at the cineplex and burgers at their favorite greasy spoon.

And it will almost certainly lead to more novel coronavirus infections and deaths.

We’ve been on lock-down long enough that the expected ways of speaking on it, and speaking to it, fall away. At nearly six weeks, we enter into uncharted territory. In some corners, re-openings begin, even as polls show that the larger percentage of the population are concerned about opening too early. Christine is in the bedroom, talking to her father on the phone. The children are downstairs, watching Nature Cat. The sun is out, although there’s rain in tomorrow’s forecast. We will have to send them outside today. What else can one say of silence? In an essay on the subject of “No” in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018), Anne Boyer writes; “Silence is as often conspiracy as it is consent. A room of otherwise lively people saying nothing, staring at a figure of authority, is silence as the inchoate of a now-initiated we won’t.”

Refusal, which is only sometimes a kind of poetry, does not have to be limited to poetry, and turning the world upside down, which is often a kind of poetry, doesn’t have to be limited to words. Words are useful for upending the world in that they are cheap, ordinary, portable, and generous, and they don’t mess us up too badly if we use them wrong, not like matches or machetes, but poetry is made up of ideas and figurations and tropes and syntaxes as much as it is made up of words. We can make a poetry without language because language as the rehearsal material of poetry has made the way for another poetry, that of objects, actions, environments and their arrangement. This is not saying to be a poet means you can only rehearse turning over the world: now try putting the chair on your head.

That, certainly, is a different kind of silence. Silence, as absence, comes in multiple forms, in multiple levels and flavours. Silence, around which sound forms, thereby providing silence its shape. As Fanny Howe wrote of St. Francis of Assisi, and a period of six months through which his movements are unrecorded, in The Needle’s Eye: Passing through Youth (2016): “It is possible that Francis, like others, fell in love with the silence of the desert, with the gardens and fruits and palm trees and fountains and marble buildings, sidereal skies.”

Ours is an alternate silence, one that emerges through agreement, the terms of lock-down and social distancing, but one that brings with it an absence of regular interaction. And yet, we exist as a household of four-plus-cat that haven’t torn each other apart, content and comfortable in our isolations. We are fortunate in this, I know. But we have further to go. In many ways Boyer is the perfect companion for lock-down; for her steadfast refusals and defiant stance on isolations, disappointment and imagination.

essays in the face of uncertainties

Ben Doller, FAUXHAWK

The word is a verb

but the word

is a noun

I noun you

I noun pronounce you

now pronoun you I do—

I am my wife’s wife.

I wive. I wave the news at a beetle

who must die.

It runs into and out of

this house

of mine. (“RUN”)

San Diego poet Ben Doller’s latest poetry title is FAUXHAWK (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015). The author of the poetry collections Dead Ahead (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), FAQ (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2009) and Radio, Radio (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2010), as well as two collaborations, the poems in FAUXHAWK utilize an energized, and nearly manic, sense of play through erasure, repetition, exaltation, the footnote, lyric fragment and collage, as well as some of the most lively and gymnastic turns I’ve seen in a very long time. The collection is constructed with an opening, seemingly self-titled section of shorter poems before moving into shorter poem-sections: “Earing,” “Hello,” “Pain” and “Google Drive.” Part of what appeals about this collection is seeing the ways in which Doller is, with such a lively glee and a fierce intelligence, stretching out the boundaries of his own poetic, from the staccato-accumulations of a poem such as “[BEE]” (“I background my ground. / I backlist my list. // I backtalk my talk. / I backwash my wash.”), the erasure/excisions of the poem-section “PAIN”(“Consider thee carefully / what thou taketh for pain”), to underscoring the overwhelming footnotes of the poem “HELLO,” a short lyric poem awash with forty-six different footnotes, the first of which reads:

 

1. Hello: The poem functions in the book as a phatic and in media res greeting as well as a belated introduction to certain poetic effects and themesthat are mobilized throughout the material. “Hello” is an Americanized compromise selected over the course of millennia from a multiplicity of alternatives: “holla” (stop, cease), “halon,” “holon” (to fetch), andmany more, hunting hollers (“halloo!”) and hailings. Each term conveys more a sense of pulling another into one’s sphere than an act of politesse or acknowledgement, an interruption or imperative as opposed to an introduction. Hail Caesar. Sieg Heil. Hey Girl. Halt your motion and attend to your addresser. Not until Edison successfully lobbied that the word be used as a greeting for telephone calls, a way to acknowledge the scratchy silence about to be breached, ws the term standardized. The telephone was originally envisioned as an open line between two offices, and a bell was originally proposed as a way to initiate a conversation until Edison’s suggestion (“I don’t think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think?). Another Bell, Alexander Graham, who is credited with the invention of the telephone, but who appropriated much of the vital technology (including a liquid transmitter) from one Elisha Gray, argued for “Ahoy!”

The poem, “[BEE],” also, becomes a poem that, rhythmically, would be quite wonderful to hear aloud, and the sounds and rhythms that run through the breaks and collisions of Doller’s poems are quite striking. In FAUXHAWK, Doller articulates and explores the difficulties with language, and how language is so often misued and misappropriated, in an exacting and glorious music, and creating a fine and precise tension between drudgery and song. As he writes to open the poem “DUMMY”:

Isn’t it dumb

to write a

letter

at a time.

“On Google Drive,” he writes, in the sequence/section “Google Drive,” “the eucalyptus trees / sing Philip Levine // behind the Korean / bakesales.” The sequence/section plays off of a form of poetic translation, opening with a quote by American poet Fanny Howe, who is referenced throughout the sequence: “I’m rewriting Fanny’s book probably a gift for a friend / Or from her file I stole it from the faculty lounge.” The sequence reads as a curious blend of possible translation and poetic response to Howe’s poetry, from the cadence to the ghazal-like fragments and connections between them, and his coy references to the strong undercurrent of Catholic faith that runs throughout her poetry. “Unlike myself,” he writes, “you are immune to cliché. / Yours is faith to write what you say // myself, I can’t always tell when I’m joking / and I pop out of bed plotting paths to get loaded.”

In the notes at the end of the collection, Doller informs that “‘Google Drive’ is a word-by-word writing-through of Fanny Howe’s ‘Robeson Street,’ from the book of the same title, published in 1985 by Alice James Books. The line ‘Schizophrenia is hearing voices, not doing them’ belongs to the comedian Maria Bamford.” Still, each referenced link to Howe’s writing throughout the sequence reads as both link and deflection, which could easily be a matter of Dollar utilizing Howe’s language, but not necessarily similar intentions, somehow allowing him opportunities to slip his own poem underneath the structure of what is a variation upon hers:

Blackbird stealth fighters sure make noise

Mach 12 over beachvolleyball totally Top Gun

Officehours are over, but there’s a Spanish Miltonist

Interviewing for an empty chair, holy smokes

The weather so soft I go vegan for the challenge

Hunger as an element, not hunger,

inconvenience as continuous present

You just know the daughters

Skyjacked the text

Paradise Lost, if these wars are my Vietnam

Oh Fanny I’ve barely watched

So no thanks

Hold the onions, shouldn’t you be on strike

You’ve been working since you made me my grassjuice

Three hundred and twenty seven more days

Are due this year and even with that many lives

I’d still be this lazy (“Google Drive”)