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TRES
Review
by Jack Hughes
Mia
Leonin
Salt of Breath Crystallized
In her poem Meridian
Mia Leonin writes:
This is not the first time and I am not
The purest grain at the bottom of the bowl.
You are not the first meat to rotate over fire,
Each wave is not heaved onto a new beach,
Rising from the ocean of touches
A rhyme of wrists and ankles
A riddle of seaweed and bone:
Did we gallop into other skins to this same drum?
Is it rhythm
Or echo —scapula and flattened palm moistened and folding into one?
We have here a conflict between sensuous immediacy which is always new
and, in its freshness, constitutes a rejection of memory, and nostalgic
perspective which wishes for what is past to somehow become what is
present. She is the victim of guilt via her historical sense, which is
always heavy, always regretful, and which always threatens to dissolve
the presence of the present into an echo of the past, of the lost,
somehow fresher first love. And yet, as a poet, she is hyperaware of the
immediacy of the senses, their perpetual freshness, which is always new,
which, in a sense, is always, again, first love. This is a pure form of
creative tension, of what Heraclitus called the “the bow whose life is
when it kills.”
The ghost of Neruda echoes through Leonin’s lines and indeed all of
her poems. Neruda himself was fixated on the sea and how each wave is
new, and yet each wave is a ceaseless iteration of an endless,
depressive historical list. Again, Heraclitus said you can never step
into the same river twice since the water is always flowing; but history
insists on giving the river one fixed identity, one place, one name,
e.g. “The Nile.” Neruda was obsessed by these paradoxical
contradictions of flowing and frozen things, of love and death:
To the beating of the wave against the unruly rock
the brightness bursts and founds its rose
and the circle of the sea shrinks to a globule,
to a lone drop of falling blue salt.
Oh radiant magnolia unleashed in the foam,
magnetic traveler whose death blooms
and eternally returns to being and being nothing:
broken salt, dazzling roll of the sea.
Together you and I, my love, seal the silence,
while the sea destroys its steadfast statues
and razes its towers of fury and whiteness,
because in the weft of those invisible weavings
of unbridled water and incessant sand,
we maintain the harassed and only tenderness.
(Pablo Neruda, Love
Sonnet 9).
The
influence of Neruda is clearly detectable in Leonin. Part of that might
have to do with her personal background. She was born in Kansas City,
Missouri. Her mother is from Louisville, Kentucky and her father from
Havana, Cuba. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
at the University of Miami. She lives in Miami Beach. So, the influence
of the Southern and Central American, Hispanic and Spanish derivations,
Neruda’s latitudes, weaves into her bloodlines, and is evident in the
poems in her book, Braid, of which you can learn more here.
She writes between two worlds. Her father is Cuban and her mother is
American. How will she construct her own home, her own Isla Negra? Her
psyche is split among two (or more) worlds. How does she make what is
alien, native? Alternatively, how does she praise what is otherness
without domesticating what is wild? In her voicing we detect not only
the impetus toward sensuous immediacy and the grand intuitive themes of
love, death, memory and passion which come from Neruda and the south,
but also a more distanced intellectual note, something alien to Neruda,
and closer to the northern, the abstracted, the American:
We have loved before. We have entered the body of other bodies.
But our eyes swear they are meeting for the first time.
Our minds are working harder on this embrace
Than our arms could imagine.
(Meridian)
The
last two lines quoted above are not something that Neruda would say.
They are conflicted, they concede doubt, in a Hamlet-like, purely
intellectual manner, devoid of the tang of sea-salt or the taste of
licked sweat. There is not a single sensual particular in this stanza.
The flow remains Nerudean, but the abstract tenor reminds us more of
Rilke, or Jorie Graham:
The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. . . .
(Jorie Graham, Mind)
Thus
with Leonin, what I detect is a conflux, a zone of recombination,
between Nerudean motifs of passionate, metaphorically intuitive sensuous
immediacy, eros and thanatos expressed in pre-abstract, purely
figurative terms – and a more distanced, critical, discursive approach
related to postmodern north American poetry wherein we see an influx of
the prosaic and the critical-theoretic into the poetic. The one is the
feeling father from Cuba; the other is the thoughtful mother from
Kentucky. Thus as we continue to parse through “Meridian,” notice
how the imagery continues to bring us south toward warm beaches and
Neruda, while references to things such as “method” and “name”
yanks us back in a northerly direction toward Jorie Graham, Carolyn
Forche, and critical theorists:
Under the fraction of stars and seaweed and sighs,
Those sturdy leather shoes pulled you into the sea.
Like two blind calves they carried you on their backs
And I followed, our jellyfish sleeves
Billowing out, then clinging
To each new wave.
Fleshy hands. Moonlight of teeth,
Your middle name beating between my ribs.
The tide does nothing but divide and divide.
I cannot go to the sea without dragging you along.
In every ruined shoe lies the memory:
That salt of your breath crystallized, the method
Of your hands, your name rushing between my ankles.
(Meridian)
This
is a very interesting conflux. I think that it’s very effective. The
danger with relying too much on the purely northern, critical-theoretic,
intellectual approach to poetry is that the text tends to become pale
and abstract, emptied out of intuitive sensuous tug:
In the fairy tale the sky
makes of itself a coat
because it needs you
to put it
on. How can it do this?
It collects its motes. It condenses its sound-
track, all the pyrric escapes, the pilgrimages
still unconsummated,
the turreted thoughts of sky . . .
(Jorie Graham, Manteau 3)
This
is beautiful writing, but threatens at any moment to dissipate into the
wholly abstract-ephemeral, into skywriting, dissolving all too soon back
into clouds. By staying close to the physical, the tactile, the
particulate objective-correlative, I think that Leonin has found a way
for herself out of that problem. Thus when she writes “your name
rushing between my ankles,” she is able to simultaneously reference
questions of method and naming which are, of themselves, abstract, and
at the same time harness them to the tactile sense-detail of withdrawing
wave, undertow, kelp strands wrapping your ankle, standing on a beach.
This is an effective combination, and moreover it is organic to her,
when you consider her family background.
One effective example of a poem combing critical-theoretic abstract
reflection and sense-details, inwoven together, is Robert Hass’ Meditation
at Lagunitas:
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
This poem reflects the fact that Hass had been working for years with
Czeslaw Milosz to help translate Milosz’ poems into English. Milosz,
who relocated some time back from Europe to Berkeley where Hass also
lives, is a poet who has always sought to combine meditative
philosophical reflection and sensuous immediacy. If there is a defect in
Hass’ poem it lies in the possible sentimentality and cutesiness, as
it were, of his romantic imagery. There is arguably a sentimentality
rising to the surface in statements such as “There was a woman I made
love to,” “the thing her father said that hurt her,” etc. One gets
the sense that perhaps Hass hasn’t fully gotten away with his
romanticism here. This is a problem that dorky northerners have. Poets
like Neruda, on the other hand, seem to be able to get ridiculously
romantic and over-the-top and yet carry it off without sentimentality.
This is a strength that central and south american poetry has.
Elsewhere in Leonin’s poetry one can see other examples of the
blending of northern and southern influences. For example, consider the
placement of the Barbi Doll image here:
Whether it's the myth of him
Or the peninsula,
Whether he dances across the burning bush flesh-footed
Or with bottle caps taped to his sneakers,
Whether his new girl is Barbie doll breasts
Or corn-stuffed body, red-yarned hair,
All the dolls are watching me tonight--mouths hemmed shut,
Eyes glued wide, as I cut and drain the bird that is my heart.
(Mojo)
This
is very interesting imagery, slightly wild with a surrealistic admixture
of North American pop cultural references (bottle caps, sneakers,
barbies) and South American natural romanticism (peninsula, the bird
that is my heart). Note how the underlying tonality of the speaker has
that sort of full-hearted love and death romanticism we associate with
writers such as Neruda or Garcia Lorca. One could not imagine a northern
dork like Hass really being able to get away with a figuration such as
“as I cut and drain the bird that is my heart” – you need to be
closer to Neruda to be able to do it. Yet a phrase such as “Barbie
doll breasts” you would never find in Neruda. It comes from Warhol,
from the New York School. It is too manufactured, too far away from
organic, elemental nature, to fit into Neruda’s tradition. Yet in
north america, nature, for better or worse, if we are honest about it,
does include the manufactured, processed, corporatized and
post-industrial, the plastic bag entangled in the highway-side bushes,
the KFC sign revolving over the landscape, the Barbi doll, etc. Leonin
is combining northern and southern landscapes.
Another poet who used sharpness and wildness of metaphorical imagery to
carry and ballast themes of love and death was Yehuda Amichai. In
passages such as the following Leonin reminds us of Amichai:
Candles are lit to remember. Eucalyptus heals.
Grandmother, teach me to forget.
Sit up old woman. Undo your tomb.
Clear the coal and venom from your throat one last time.
To forget him: Gather up your hair.
Divide it into his three most intimate parts:
His fingers longer than Moses' walking stick.
The indentation in the center of his chest.
His fear of touching jewelry.
(Mojo)
Again,
it is something having to do with the bloodlines of the poet’s
tonality that keeps a line such as “Grandmother, teach me to forget”
from being read as sentimental cliché. Amichai regularly uses phrasings
such as this without apology and without ruining his poems. Yet if we
saw a line like that in other folks’ poems we might register it as
being too emotionally loaded, too obvious, too sentimental. Standing
alone, “teach me to forget” is a vaguely breathless, soap-operatic
cliché. If we saw that phrase in an Ashbery poem, say, or Frank
O’Hara, we would likely register it as camp. What we learn is that a
given line might be emotionally false coming from the mouth of one poet,
while emotionally resonant and true coming from another. What is cliché
is said by one poet, is novel if spoken by another. Everything in poetry
is contextual. Anything is possible in poetry – there is no statement
that we could call per se cliché, unusable. Consider how the following
poem by Neruda is full of phrasings which, coming from the mouth of
another poet, we might condemn as being too romantic, pretentious,
grandiloquent, vague and grandiose:
And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.
(Neruda, Poetry)
Phrasings
such as “drunk with the great starry void” or “image of mystery”
would certainly be registered as intolerably pretentious or clichéd
coming from the mouth of many other poets, because such phrasings would
not be authentic and real in relation to the poet’s own specific
individuality and cultural bloodlines. Yet such phrasings are natural,
organic, true to Neruda, and in that sense, register to us, the readers,
as allowable phrasings. This is a very important point. There is no such
thing as cliché in general in poetry – only cliché in terms of
statements that ring false coming from out of the mouths of particular
poets at particular times.
Leonin directly confronts the issue of mixed landscape in her poetry, of
Cuba + America in her own family background, in this poem:
What's too much for him is his bride's red hair,
Each curl a chili dreaming on its vine.
How her thoughts must sizzle under such a fire.
Ramon is from Cuba. Red hair on an island
Is like plantains in Utah, a volcano in Kansas.
When he reached the middle of the United States,
He kissed her belly and swore off everything un-American.
No prayers like cries or sirens of salsa at his wedding.
Only food on toothpicks and well-rehearsed prayers.
Now there are Vienna sausages and ambrosia salads.
A video camera protrudes from the right eye of each man.
Now tall women carry plans where their hips used to be.
He remembers his mother's warning: Qué problema
For the woman who lets two do her hair at once.
It tangles the sensibilities, spears the heart with vanity.
In the dressing room, the hands of his new sisters
Sweep and lurch through his bride's hair
Like bats in a beam of light.
(The Wedding of Ramon)
I
think this poem represents a glimpse into her poetry in the future –
here we see echoes of the nature-driven romantic rhetoric of Neruda,
only now colliding with and trying to locate a way to live with the
strange technological dislocations of the postmodern North American
popcultural environment, where “a video camera protrudes from the
right eye of each man.” In this regard, the urban setting of Miami
feeds perfectly into Leonin’s cultural and imagistic concerns. The
city is aswirl with a continuous collision of languages and cultures.
The premodern and the postmodern intermix in chaotic profusion, through
which with the help of her stylistic verbal machetes, the poet must make
a path. Describing Miami, the poet and teacher Robert Stewart remarked
in an interview:
Q: In your book of essays, Outside Language, you describe yourself
sitting in a Miami bus aswirl in languages you don’t understand but
that you comprehend. Would you elaborate on, “The language becomes
pure mystery; and in this state of incomprehension, I am welcomed
home”?
A: I was not designed to become a poet, an essayist, a literary
editor. I was designed—and my use of the term "designed,"
here, is garish, perhaps, folding into it whatever influences any
person—to be a laborer, and I almost was. Even now, I'm a slow reader,
a ponderous thinker. Writing gives me the chance to revise my stupidity
into something better. Thank goodness. The summer after I graduated from
high school, my plumber father came home one day and told me that he had
enrolled me in a small local college. All I had to do was sign some
papers and get advised. Tuition was $100 per semester, full time, and I
could work for that much. If not for my father, I'm pretty sure I'd be
driving a fork lift in an industrial park somewhere, good enough.
Yet your question exposes a fundamental dichotomy in my own
intellectual life and that of many other people I know. Many people
can't read literature. We have to accept this. When I read to an
audience an absolutely brilliant poem by Mia Leonin (my former student),
people mostly stare at me like I'm nuts. I am nuts, but people have to
become nuts. In Mia's poem “Chica del Campo,” a girl from a village
in rural Latin America says, “Only the machetes have noticed my new
walk. / They flash their smiles at me. They are cutting me a path to the
city.” The language is mad; and it takes practice to become that mad,
to rise outside of our usual perceptions.
My experience on the bus in Miami took me to an emotional understanding,
not a literal one. Of course, there are many literary readers—someone
is buying books by Alice Munro, Bharati Mukherjee, Richard Ford—but
many people also believe they need to understand everything in a logical
way, or they feel lost. I can't help that. Artists can't stop for them.
Artists have to advance the art, which means being able to comprehend
emotional meaning though language, even though someone else is looking
only for the conventions and easy redundancies of mass media.
(Interview at http://books.missouri.org/eviews/september.html)
It
is no coincidence that in describing his reaction to Miami he references
Leonin. The allusions to the proximity between the poet and madness and
to the proximity of mystery, incomprehension, and home remind us of the
poet’s traditional double status, at once close to the core of
language and in that sense at home, yet also homeless in the context of
a larger mass culture. Plato, in The Republic, excluded the poets from
his ideal state on the grounds that they were too close to madness. Yet
poetry would seem to be close to the fundamental home of language. There
is a sense in which to be at home in American mass culture, to be
materially successful and at home, it is helpful, even encouraged, to be
essentially alienated and displaced from the pure core of language –
for material success in America goes hand-in-hand with adherence to a
tissue of “conventions and easy redundancies,” the stilted bad
poetry of real estate salesmen and politicians. Yet this tissue of
conventional and tired language binds the regular world together,
imposes an order, however artificial and banal, over flux. When the poet
lifts this veil of conventional names up from the teeming actuality of
the planet, the result can indeed be madness as the mind confronts the
multiplicity of the nameless. Blind formless chaos rushes in upon the
psyche of the poet who has disconnected the conventional significations.
The process of deconstructing, erasing and removing the default
parameters of conventional mindset can be intensely painful. Mankind
cannot bear very much reality, said T.S. Eliot. Heraclitus was called
“the weeping philosopher” in ancient Greece because his vision of
the underlying nameless flux and becoming of things was so acute.
Orderly normal modes of thought and language allow us to limit our
empathy, control our emotions and at least feel as though we understand
our world, even if this is just an illusion. In postmodern terms, the
casting-aside of organizing metanarratives (see Lyotard) or fundamental
organizing worldviews such as the traditional Christian worldview, while
necessary to intellectual integrity, can be extremely difficult to bear,
since the comfort of such metanarratives was that they gave a sense that
everything made sense. There is a sense of comfort in viewing the world
through the narrow organizing lens of, say, the traditional Catholic
faith, or through the narrow gaze of a True Believer in American
capitalism, or through the limiting filter of the Joe 6-Pack workaday
secular materialist who lacks either the education, the leisure time, or
the oddity of mind to think beyond tonight’s reality TV shows and this
Friday’s paycheck. Those people are not afflicted by deep unsettling
doubt and dislocation in the way that a real poet is. The existential
distress felt by a Kafka, or a Pessoa, or a Keats, comes along with a
loss of faith in the normal mass-market organizing cultural rituals,
entertainments, and tropes. Accordingly, a sadness creeps into the
rhetoric of the poet as she tries to free herself from the normal ways
of looking at things, yet not get trapped in the crazy idiosyncrasy of
the unknown, the abnormal:
When I was a child, something burned
Something smelled of flowers
Something glowed of organdy and hickory.
Ojalá
Breezes, dresses burning
Orange, organdy flames
Licking up my mother’s legs.
On the days she prayed, I watched her hair spill around her face,
God tumbled into pieces at her knees.
She gathered him in her dress
Little twigs of yellow glass and fallen petals of aluminum.
She began to weave them into her hair.
You have not noticed, she spoke to the mirror
That the trees make their own altars?
You have not seen the hymns carved into their arms?
The offerings perched among the branches like crowns?
I too shall carry my offering on my head, she told the mirror.
(Memory of Fire, published in Indiana Review).
The
poet remembers childhood; brings to mind colors, smells, touches; brings
to mind the mother; invokes religious sentiment via the mother. Yet
something strange has happened with the religion. It is heretical,
untraditional: “God tumbled to pieces at her knees.” A fragmentation
has occurred; the god was deconstructed; a regathering is now occurring
out of fragments, as in the Egyptian myth wherein Isis gathers up and
reassembles the body of Osiris: “Little twigs of yellow glass and
fallen petals of aluminum.” A peculiar relocation of religious motif
back to primal natural setting accrues: “trees make their own
altars.” We have also seen this relocation, at once a gesture toward
the original, the primal, and a challenge to the established and
accepted, in Dickinson:
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church--
I keep it, staying at Home--
With a Bobolink for a Chorister--
And an Orchard, for a Dome--
Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice--
I just wear my Wings--
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton--sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman--
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last--
I'm going, all along.
(No. 324)
At
the end of Dickinson’s poem, she substitutes a strange sense of
process or becoming for a sense of achievement, result: “I’m going,
all along.” For someone who is split between two settings – as
Dickinson was between the rigid doctrinaire orthodox Christianity of her
American cultural environment in the 1800s, and her own idiosyncratic
freethinking ways – perhaps this insistence on becoming over being, on
movement over placement, is a basic survival tool. If she cannot be
pinned down to any one placement, position, she evades the splitting
sense, she is not separated. In the quantum fuzz of pure becoming, she
is at least potentially here and there at the same time. It is when
reduced and fixed down to nonpoetic denotative literal rational meaning
and definition that a figure such as Dickinson becomes supremely
endangered: as eccentric old main dressed all in white; as plain-faced
breathless infantile-acting recluse in the descriptions we receive from
Thomas Wentworth Higginson when he went to visit her; as freethinking
heretic by the church and sex-role standards of that time; as bizarre
unpunctuated failure by the conventional poetic standards of the time.
So, she suffered the anonymity of her “barefoot rank” status as
unpublished outside in the world of the poetry of her day; but she was
also amorphous, ever-shifting, not yet quantified, defined: not
definitively split. For Dickinson, poetry, with its ability to work
slightly ahead of our outside of rational categorizing thought, with its
ability to almost not quite make sense (in Wallace Stevens’
formulation), was the source of a text which was unified, whole, and
home, precisely by being undefinable under normal criteria and thus
producing befuddlement in literary-establishment figures like Higginson.
Likewise, I believe, Leonin uses and needs poetry as a quicksilver
messenger of irreducible pure becoming, of flux and irrational shiftings,
in order to cure her own interior splitting. Consider the bio she wrote
for herself:
Mia Leonin is half Cuban and half American. Her first book Braid
was published by Anhinga Press and selected as part of the Florida
Poetry Series. Leonin has published poetry in many literary journals
among them New Letters, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness and
River Styx. She is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets
Alfred Boas Prize and her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart
Prize. She has received a Money for Women Grant by the Barbara
Deming Fund.
Look at the first sentence of this: “half Cuban and half American.”
This is how she formulates herself, in prose, outside of poetry: the
split evidences itself immediately. No amount of validation, awards or
recognition is really going to heal this elemental starting position. Is
her home here, in American postmodern postindustrial poetics, or there,
in the zone of Cuba, Lorca, Neruda, the blood-and-salt song lyrics we
see in “Buena Vista Social Club”? Poetically speaking, it is in
both, in the mixture, the collision of origins which is a new origin –
which Miami simulates. In her poems, there is a sense in which painful
splitting is recognized, recedes, and is replaced by mystery. As Rita
Dove says, “if you can’t be free, be a mystery”: that is one way
of characterizing the free-flowing shiftings of imagery and tone that we
see occurring in poems such as “Chica Del Campo”:
I sleep with my heart wrapped around oranges,
One rib unplanted in the field of knives.
Cathedral of old women. Do they know
They are sewing me a gown of beads with their prayers?
Shade of women, working through the heat.
Weaving wings from banana leaves and thistle.
Even bruised, my hips steer these canvas work clothes.
Even untouched, my breasts call the stones to drink.
Only the machetes have noticed my new walk.
They flash their smiles at me. They are cutting me a path to the city.
If I do not leave soon, this town will make a woman of me:
A new tool, a brick oven.
I have an eye on my neighbor’s feisty palomino.
I’ve been coveting my mother’s only coat.
Soon, I will tie up my hair and ride towards Cartegena or Bogotá.
I will scoop up this God-faced village and blow it into dust.
The tone here definitely has a substrate of sadness, but it lacks the
passive depressiveness of, say, George Trakl. There is an active and
energetic, or determined, feel to it, which operates as a refusal to be
defined and thereby contained and defeated: “If I do not leave soon,
this town will make a woman of me.” The buffeting bruising of desire
achieved does not keep the speaker from remaining in a state of active
desire: “Even bruised, my hips steer these canvas work clothes.”
Likewise, the isolation brought about by the failure to achieve, or to
be achieved, does not dissuade the speaker: “Even untouched, my
breasts call the stones to drink.” The speaker desires, and the desire
has a transmuting or metaphorical effect on the imagery: it is as if as
she reaches one image it changes into another. It is as if by remaining
in active process and continuous metaphorical change and becoming, the
speaker is protected: the machetes, dangerous in themselves, “flash
their smiles” at the speaker in an ambiguous gesture of fearful
beauty. Making a path through the wild involves cutting. Although it is
refreshing and adventurous for the poet-explorer to be off the beaten
path and beyond the wheel-ruts of expected progressions, multi-lane
highways of conventional thought, it is also frightening to confront the
chaotic forest and there is something awful, guilty and sacrificial
about the necessity of cutting a path, of reducing the pathless chaos of
the unnamed into that path which is the poet’s line of sentences. Her
use of the machete image brings to mind this passage from Neruda’s
Nobel Lecture:
Those who were with me knew how to make their way forward between the
dense leaves of the forest, but to feel safer they marked their route by
slashing with their machetes here and there in the bark of the great
trees, leaving tracks which they would follow back when they had left me
alone with my destiny.
Each of us made his way forward filled with this limitless solitude,
with the green and white silence of trees and huge trailing plants and
layers of soil laid down over centuries, among half-fallen tree trunks
which suddenly appeared as fresh obstacles to bar our progress. We were
in a dazzling and secret world of nature which at the same time was a
growing menace of cold, snow and persecution. Everything became one: the
solitude, the danger, the silence, and the urgency of my mission.
He is clearly speaking here metaphorically as well as with any literal
meaning the passage has. The double sense of adventure and risk that
comes with being a poet is adumbrated by Neruda here and elsewhere
throughout his writing; it is associated with that continuous series of
metaphorical transformations revolving around a core subject which is
the hallmark of his style. Likewise, Leonin’s poems typically take one
basic core subject or emotional impetus and proceed through a series of
metaphorical transfigurations, for example:
If this were noon,
If my hand were a well and you children,
We would tell stories and drop stones.
Or if I knew calypso
And could stand ornaments in my hair,
I would tempt you.
Call it what you want.
Call a body a figure, a dream dipped in symmetry.
Call it a canvas wired with delicate circuitry.
I am told the body wills states of discomfort on itself.
Fevers, sweats, even sneezes--
Things conjured up by the body to save itself.
I am told the back aches
To keep from collapsing
Blood vessels throb
To keep from bursting
And two bodies sleep
To keep from devouring each other.
(Consider This)
The
figure of the body here transmutes, is shifted from one metaphorical
comparison to another, all under the auspices of love, desire. The moral
sensibility we witness at work in the poem is reminiscent not just of
Neruda in its tragic/romantic undertones, but also of Amichai, who mines
a similar tonality in his poems of love and nostalgia, and also of
Wislawa Szymborska, who like Leonin in the above poem, combines
reflection on the body as subject matter with rueful and ironic moral
reflection. The closing couplet in “Consider This,” in particular,
is strongly reminiscent both of Amichai and Szymborska:
They amputated
Your thighs from my waist.
For me they are always
Surgeons. All of them.
They dismantled us
One from another. For me they are engineers.
Pity, We were a good and loving
Invention: an airplane made of man and woman,
Wings and all:
We soared a bit from the earth,
We flew a bit.
(Amichai, Pity, We Were A Good Invention)
Bright
freshness of a detail can offset at least part of the weight of sadness.
The beauty and pungency of an image, of a sensory glimpse, touch, taste,
can balance depression. A tension begins to form between the underlying
sadness of desire (which always leaves one unsatisfied and longing) and
those sharply seen, incised, individual images which flicker with beauty
and possible pleasure. For example in this opening of Leonin ’s poem Drought, consider the tonal balancing between the happy sensual
image, “a bowl of sweet corn,” and the sad deprivation-sense of
experiencing the drought:
Every evening, my mother places a bowl of sweet corn
At the door of each bedroom.
Mornings, heat tangos up the sides of our house
And I find her squatting, swatting flies,
Her brown eyes narrowed at the half-empty bowls.
With these droughts comes a wanting to die. . .
Later in the poem, we see these additional small, sparkling sensory
details:
So, she sprinkles my sheets with cornstarch.
She places silver coins under my arms and behind my knees.
Leonin is adept at deploying these brief imagistic clarities as it were,
sprinkled, across the surface of her poems, which seem to prevent the
darkness and the tragic sense from becoming too pronounced or
overwhelming the tone. She never seems to lose her sense of the childish
enchantment of the image; therefore her darkness of tone never seems to
become so desperate that it ceases to be poetry. However, since she is a
poet of desire, nowhere in her poems does one get the sense that she has
really solved the problem of desire or offered herself a calm or a
solace distinguishable from death. For her, to desire seems to be to
live, and therefore she endures a sense of unfulfilled longing which may
ultimately be tragic. But the sense of sensory wonder balances the sense
of the tragic. Neruda seems to allude to something similar further along
in his Nobel speech:
From all this, my friends, there arises an insight which the poet must
learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All
paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we
must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in
order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our
clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this
song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the
awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.
A bilingual or bicultural poet has an advantage over other poets in that
the experience of knowing two languages allows one to see each language
both from the inside as one who speaks it and from the outside as one
for whom another language is native. For this reason I believe we can
see unique stylistic sensitivities to the amerenglish language in
writers such as Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, owing to their
bilingual backgrounds. The act of moving from one language to the other,
of translating back and forth, allows one to apprehend the instrument of
language, in a way that someone who only speaks one language may never
experience. In Leonin’s poems we see deployment of words and phrases
from both her father’s and her mother’s side of experience, and from
the multicultural Miami atmosphere, which seem to afford her poems more
color and vibrancy as a matter of verbal surface. From her poem How
the Braiding Began:
Sigue
In English, the literal translation would be, “keep going” but what
we really say is “Don’t stop” – at the center of pleasure –
its possible negation. The impulse to cover one’s mouth during – the
impulse to shield an exclamation.
One can see here how her facility with both languages provides her with
an opening for creation of interest in the reader. The device she uses
here is similar to Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse, where
he takes a kitsch/cliché phrase or image from the world of modern love,
and deconstructs it, teasing out original meanings and perceptions, as
here in this riff off the romance-movie cliché of dark sunglasses:
Dark Glasses
(The amorous subject wonders, not whether he should declare his love to
the loved being, but to what degree he should conceal the turbulence of
his passion: his desires, his distresses; in short, his excesses.)
...Yet, to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its
excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but
because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen:
I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the
active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known
and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings:
that is the message I address to the other. I advance pointing to my
mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily)
finger I designate this mask.
Likewise, in the excerpt form Leonin’s poem, she shows us how lurking
within the love-movie clichés “don’t stop” and “keep going”
one can find paradoxical and interesting deconstructive detritus, if one
looks acutely. This is a form of creativity, deployed within the poem,
but really adopted over from the literary genre of critical theory, of
which Barthes would be an exemplar. It is a sophisticated technique on
Leonin’s part and represents an acknowledgement of American MFA-circle
influences and a departure from the influence of Neruda.
Leonin is very good at inserting the terse one-liner into her poems, the
single vivid perception or aphoristic notation. This sort of device
allows for rapid tonal modulation in the text, as well as contributing
to a discontinuous, fragmented effect which gives the text specifically
lyric values as opposed to the merely storytelling or merely narrative.
Consider these lines excerpted from her poem The Invention of Skin, published in Chelsea:
She had a way of being in mourning simply by being alone.
. . .
You let the draft in the room settle
Into your hand below my breast.
. . .
Only women and snakes carry music in their walk.
. . .
No amount of intelligence
Can stop women from carrying out their fate.
. . .
Candle -- abbreviation of fire.
Gutter -- abbreviation of rivers.
. . .
The trick is not to take off the clothes.
The trick is to take off the body.
These are very sharp aphoristic statements which one could readily
imagine finding in a philosopher’s notebook. They help to give the
poem a wisdom aspect, and break up what could be excessively prosaic
narrative continuity. They have the tartness and provocative quality of
aphorisms by true philosophers such as Pascal, Weil or Wittgenstein, or
the following by Helene Cixous, which Leonin quotes: “For us, eating
and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love.” It is a real
strength to be able to generate aphoristic fragments, which operate at
the abstract end of things, and also generate sensual images, which are
not abstract. Leonin is able to work both at the aphoristic/abstract and
the sensory/imagistic ends of the linguistic spectrum. For example, look
at the extreme sense-sharpness of imagery, counterpointed by occasional
rueful abstraction, in her poem “The Repeating Garden” (published in
Indiana Review):
Mahogany globe of the avocado.
Wrinkled stone of the peach.
Invisible, fibrous center of the pineapple.
She eats the core the seed the pit the center.
She does not stop at the delicate ribbing of the mandarin.
Not even the luminous center of the coco can fill her.
She stops and smells the bark of trees, their branches and fingers.
She lingers and presses her back into tree trunks
In hopes of some fusion, some exchange of calcium and wisdom.
. . .
She tastes desire in the scent of every living thing:
A twig wants to be a flag, a stalk of cane groans
And longs to be a machete.
. . .
She mates. She doubles her venus.
She eats.
She glistens and skips. She triples her grief.
These are wonderful sensory images, pungent with detail. It is as if the
sharper the sensory perception grows, the more piercing the tragic sense
of the aphoristic abstraction. We are reminded again of Dickinson:
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
There is a sense that where Leonin gives us such extraordinary
particularities of sense-impression as the “delicate ribbing of the
mandarin” or “luminous center of the coco,” this extreme acuity of
perception is bought at the price of an extreme deprivation, and extreme
desire or need. It is like the details of what she looks at are pressed
up against her attention in severe, bright focus, because they are
pressed up against a vacuum, a blank roaring lack. She is like the man
dying of thirst in the desert who can imagine the fizz and taste of
coca-cola in exquisite, hyperrealized detail in his consciousness,
precisely because the liquid’s so desperately missing. In this way,
painful or negative desire is coupled point-for-point with refreshing or
positive imagistic clarity. She suffers desire in order to paint in
detail. If she were happier her imagery would suffer.
For every poet, there is a positive critique and a negative critique.
Any strength connotes a weakness. My negative critique of Leonin would
be about the same as that of Neruda: that with her preference for
multifarious and proliferative metaphorical progression, there is a
dearth of nonmetaphorical documentary, as it were straight-line reality.
We never really see a flat, documentary, Raymond-Carver-esque approach
in her style. She never has the simple flatness of Constantine Cavafy.
Although she is a love poet, sometimes it seems to me that her endlessly
digressive metaphors efface or conceal an underlying documentary simple
reality of personal existential life-situation which I would like to see
more clearly. This has the effect of making her love poems curiously
distant and obtuse when it comes to erotic particulars. For example in
this poem:
“Thank you” is something I do not say.
You are not a gift. You are not a man
Wielding presents instead of sharp things.
Only children and dogs can be trained to show gratitude.
The balloon is released. The leash slips off
As soon as real desire passes by. Gratitude
Is the arc of a branch above the unpicked fruit.
The tomb’s gaping mouth. Our ancestors tumbling back
To their tawny womb, dried apricots, figs, and dates
Fastened to their textiled wrists. Rubies
Crown the femur of our buried past.
Cherried earth. Spiraling fruit. Magnificent bird
Perched on your shoulder, mute as an ear of corn. Grateful
Is only half the truth. I hear the sigh of your pendulum. Let it swing.
Let it swing. Vine of bruises. Stem of wrists, I plant them for you.
(Thank you, published in Chelsea).
We
get the sense that although she sheds her clothes in real life, with her
lover, her language or poetic rhetoric never sheds its clothes, with the
reader – it’s always pretty well dolled up in rhetorical finery. In
the above poem, I feel like the sheer variegate profusion of
metaphorical imagery serves to hide the underlying human drama or story,
and I hunger for a glimpse of her actual daily life in all its
unmythological, unembellished dailiness and ordinariness. Notice how the
imagery has little to do with the actual daily American life we are lead
and struggle with every day; instead the poem gives us archaic nature
references such as “unpicked fruit,” “ear of corn,” etc. The
poem feels somewhat derivative of Rilke, and the imagery is somewhat of
an incoherent cornucopia. This prevents the full human pathos from
coming out. While the poem seeks to state a humble human love and
gratitude, the technique with which it is written is over the top with
metaphorical flash. I would be interested in seeing whether Leonin could
pull off a poem on this theme in a more humble or plainchant voicing,
such as we see in Cavafy, Jane Kenyon, James Wright, or William
Stafford. Alternatively, it would be interesting to see her become less
surrealistic and more explicitly autobiographical in her presentation,
along the lines of Robert Lowell’s “Life Studies,” or Milosz’s
personal-meditative poems. Where I get most excited about her poems is
where I see her mediating between a mythological and archaic landscape
or set of figurations, and other images which are flat, bland and
contemporary – it is the radical distance between the Neruda-archaic-natural
imagery, and the current-american-popcultural imagery, which really
makes sparks fly in her poems:
Sometimes she lit votive cups and sent me outside.
Sometimes she took me to Dairy Queen.
Sometimes we poured turquoise rocks into a glass bowl
And dreamed of water.
Ojalá
When I was a child, something burned
Something smelled of flowers
Something glowed of organdy and hickory.
(Memory of Fire)
Here, the simple insertion of that one line,
“Sometimes she took me to Dairy Queen,” forcibly dislocates us from
any memory of Neruda and creates a whole new set of troubles, a whole
new chaotic forest, one both south and north American, one subsequent to
Neruda’s time, one for which no path has yet been hacked – one for
which the flashing ambiguous machetes of Leonin’s formidable lyric bag
of tricks are perfectly designed. I would love to see some poems from
her in which the archaic-mythological landscape inherited from Neruda
and Garcia Lorca is further shed and the giant circus which is the
contemporary Miami Florida landscape is further hacked into. Beyond
that, at some point, if Leonin wishes to be truthful to her entire
actual existential landscape, she, like the rest of us in the poetry
world, will have to find ways of addressing cyberspace, the internet,
media-driven society, and technological society, somehow with the same
facticity and veracity that forerunners such as, again, Neruda,
addressed and encapsulated the feel of earlier modes of society. To
highlight what I mean, consider the overall tonality and rhetoric of her
poetry, against, say, the much less lyrical, much less humane and warm,
but in some sense, much more contemporary, rhetoric of Baudrillard:
What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the
operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to
interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is,
quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of
connections and watch it operating like a video-game. All this cerebral,
electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a
superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified
theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal
excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much
about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is
ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain
and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts
unfolding before us - and this itself is a superstition.
(Baudrillard, from America)
Finding ways to bridge the gap
between warm, but slightly old-fashioned, tropes of poetry in the grand
high style of meditative romanticism, and the very abstract and chilly,
but somehow uncannily new-sounding, tropes of critical theory, is an
obsession for poets such as Jorie Graham and, more recently, Forche (see
her new book Blue Hour), and my guess is that Leonin is beginning
to explore this vector in more detail. In any event, that would be my
negative critique.
Leonin is a very talented poet. Regardless of what directions she
chooses in the future, what she has done so far in verse effectively
bridges two cultures and is true to the vision Neruda had of poets in
the Americas:
As far as we in particular are concerned, we writers within the
tremendously far-flung American region, we listen uncea singly to the
call to fill this mighty void with beings of flesh and blood. We are
conscious of our duty as fulfillers - at the same time we are faced with
the unavoidable task of critical communication within a world which is
empty and is not less full of injustices, punishments and sufferings
because it is empty - and we feel also the responsibility for
reawakening the old dreams which sleep in statues of stone in the ruined
ancient monuments, in the wide-stretching silence in planetary plains,
in dense primeval forests, in rivers which roar like thunder. We must
fill with words the most distant places in a dumb continent and we are
intoxicated by this task of making fables and giving names. This is
perhaps what is decisive in my own humble case, and if so my
exaggerations or my abundance or my rhetoric would not be anything other
than the simplest of events within the daily work of an American. Each
and every one of my verses has chosen to take its place as a tangible
object, each and every one of my poems has claimed to be a useful
working instrument, each and every one of my songs has endeavoured to
serve as a sign in space for a meeting between paths which cross one
another, or as a piece of stone or wood on which someone, some others,
those who follow after, will be able to carve the new signs.
(Neruda, from Nobel
lecture)
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Poetry
Michael Rothenberg
Diane Thiel
Nick Carbo
Mia Leonin
Michael Hettich
Campbell McGrath
Kelle Groom
Steve Kronen
Kemel Zaldivar
Pris Campbell
Michael-Earle Carlton
George Murphy
Howard Camner
Geoffrey Philp
Terri Carrion
Nancy Knutson
Jonathan Rose
Barbra Nightingale
Ian Krieger
James Brock
Amy Serrano Zorrilla
Denise Duhamel
Virgil Suarez
Micro-Fiction & Shorts
Terri Carrion
Diane Thiel
Artists
Artist Intro
Ivonne Bess
Diego Quiros
John Canning
Jeff Filipski
Arlene Magloire
Cassandra
Gordon-Harris
Holly Picano
TRES
Mia Leonin
Terri Carrion
Richard Blanco
Interviews
Campbell McGrath
Previous Volume
Volume 16
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