MiPOesias Magazine

FRANCOIS LUONG

“The Kingdom of Heaven is Now”

Lara Glenum, The Hounds of No. Action Books, 2005. 64 pages, $12, paperback.

There is uncompromising and compelling violence in Lara Glenum’s impressive debut collection, The Hounds of No. The violence is certainly visual, such as when Glenum writes in “Wunderkammer” (“cabinet of wonders”)

One angel came forward & sank his fist into my stomach
as though it were a ball of wax He pulled out a dried-out
milk gland It looked like a tiny tumbleweed He then pulled
out: Two wigs A city A goat skeleton

but this violence is also linguistic as Glenum collides heterogeneous elements to de-familiarize the reader. The semantic collision is most obvious in the poem titles (“Slainguage,” “Oedipus Sock-Monkey” or “Crushifix”), but it also creeps into Glenum’s lines (take for example her neologisms “klepto-schooling” or “veinlights”) in a manner reminiscent of Paul Celan’s similar experiments.

Over the arc of the book, the precious and the cute (“porcelain” and “Sock-Monkey” are recurrent images) encounter the atrocious but do not coalesce into a well-shaped whole. In “Stranded in an Industrial Winter, The Bodhisattva Quan-Yin Begins to Solilquize,” Quan-Yin drifts his/her focus (hermaphroditism is another recurrent theme) from a “black jade heaven” to an “atomic clock” to “these 10,000 / kingdoms of disease” within the same sentence. The frenetic tone shows an unwillingness to settle down, to accept a common territory from where one could derive a meaning. Glenum’s poems are more akin to a maelstrom, threatening to engulf the reader. In effect, the poems break away from the preconceived relationship of language as subordinate to the world. They go against Wittgenstein’s proposition in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that “the world is the case of facts, not objects,” a proposition that American readers may take for too granted. It is not so much that language is inadequate to describe the world, but rather that language in its fullest power opens an horizon of possibilities not limited by the world.

Taken individually, the poems of The Hounds of No could strike as Surrealist or Futurist homages. The subverted discourse of the body, when Glenum writes in “Wunderkammer” “I was a meat-based creature I was chunky with carbon / I grew spleens, nails, fat-lobes, etc.” points at similar writings by Antonin Artaud or George Bataille, and Marinetti comes to mind for his glorification of violence when Glenum opens the poem “Marlene Dietrich’s Letter to an Unidentified Admirer”:

[: I am helping the handsome Nazi commandant to take the peninsula – In a gold lamé headdress, I recline on a bed of stuffed asps while he toys with my rodent-shaped mastectomy scars – In the final shot, I ascend a glass ramp into the mouth of a statue of jackal-headed Anubis, pursued by the Nazi commandant, whom I placed in an occult trance ::]

But Glenum goes much further than her predecessors. Her poems are not a celebration of the imagination or of a technocratic worldview that necessarily lead to a linguistic hegemony.
As she writes in her “Manifesto of the Anti-Real,” “Art is neither a consolation nor a butler to hegemonies. Even in its most discreet moments, art explodes” and “When the door of fascism is opened, Realism will be seen lounging like a whore in its inner sanctum.” The “Manifesto,” strategically located at the end of the book, sheds a new light on the book as a project.. It is difficult to take in earnest Glenum’s statement that “Irony is not a device. It is a state of being.” This position is ultimately paradoxical, but Glenum is not afraid to embraces paradoxes or contradictory positions. Her poetry resists nostalgia and mythologizing, as she invokes both the figures of Jason (of the Argonauts) and of Stalin in “Medea and the Snow-Angels.” There is no magnification of the mundane against the unspeakable here. The “knitting” that “a golden mask” at “an oracle in Ethiopia” “told me to take up” cancels and is cancelled by the admission that “I killed our children. / I kindled his desire.” There is no compromise, no dialectic.

What Glenum’s poetry proposes ultimately is a hermetic confrontation against the reality-creating empire. The Real is awful, but the true life is not elsewhere. To accept the created reality is to collaborate with totalitarianism. Ultimately, Glenum’s poetry, by resisting meaning, also resists a totalitarian appropriation of language.

Francois Luong lives in Houston, Texas. Previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pebble Lake Review, Denver Syntax and the Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets.