New review of a poetry collection was published online by Cape Cod Poetry Review. It’s called Africa is the Mother Who Lies in the Grass by Donna O’Connell-Gilmore. If you’re looking for a good read to curl up to next to the radiator, look no further.
Lydia Davis
Of course, I’d recommend the recent compilation of all her collections (also known as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis) because she’s just that good, but if you’re looking for a shorter read or prefer to read collections in their own entity, then I’d have to push Varieties of Disturbance. Published in 2007, it contains a lot of micro-fiction, perfect for reading during commutes and lunch breaks.
Her spare, elliptical short fiction is critically acclaimed, but it forms a challenging body of work, dispensing with straightforward narrative in favor of a microscopic examination of language and thought.
Davis’s new collection, “Varieties of Disturbance,” continues that approach. Sometimes, a title can be nearly as long as the story, as in “Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans,” whose entire text reads: “Gainsville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!” We could almost text-message it, but then we wouldn’t get the effect of the surrounding white space, against which the words seem to suggest an almost gnomic quality. We might miss the exclamation marks, the italics, the iambic pentameter; we might miss the insight that we’re missing something.
Setting the Scene: Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is one of my absolute favorite reads. It could be the borderline poetic style. Mostly it’s the sharp wit. Either way, she still falls under the category of fiction on the shelves, so in this post, I’ll treat her as such. A flash fiction extraordinaire.
The catch: fiction, particularly flash fiction, is defined by scene and sequel. It’s what thinly divides prose and poetry. Scenes are time. Time adds tension to a narrative, because if there’s one thing everyone on the planet could agree on, it’d be that there just isn’t enough time.
At its core, a scene is a negotiation of some kind, the struggle between one character with a critical desire in the moment and another character or force with an opposing agenda.
Another way to consider scenes, however, comes in the form of emotional TEMPERATURE, the strength with which they grab hold of readers, involve them on a visceral level, keep them anxious, aroused, or invested in some way.
What I like about Oberweger’s definition is its appeal to emotion. Ask any writer what a scene is and they’ll say it’s a unit composed of action and dialogue; that it uses time as a factor of pressure to instigate conflict and disaster; that it ends when time or location changes and the character’s initial goal or motivation is played out.
In fact, all can agree that most scenes are structured by three main elements that work as a progression, a mini beginning, middle, and end in your story: Goal/Motivation, Conflict, and Disaster.
At the start of every well-written scene, a reader should be able to deduce the character’s motivation—something concrete and desired that s/he can take action upon. Then, of course, comes the conflict, because just as Rolling Stones sang it, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The character faces obstruction in some entity that strives to accomplish a goal that is mutually incompatible with the protagonist’s. The struggle ensues and a disaster strikes in the form of the unforeseeable as new information enters the space, resulting in the end of a scene.
Either a sequel or narrative summary can follow. Narrative summaries are used to provide pertinent information through compressed time. The sequel is constructed through the character’s immediate reaction or response to the disaster. Once the reaction is processed, s/he is faced with a difficult choice between equally unsatisfactory options; it makes up the dilemma. The sequel ends when the character works out a solution, a decision emerging.
Now, to get back to the lovely Lydia Davis.
Her style is certainly circular in its structure, a kind of experimental writing in which the narrative focuses obsessively on one thing or idea. It reminds me of a child grabbing onto something she’s not supposed to have and stubbornly clutching on with little pudgy fingers. But her writing also carries an aesthetic that’s remarkably innocent, despite the dark humor. While her sentences wind on in complexity, the diction is so concrete, so blunt, that it provokes a sense of innocence, as if the narrator is merely an observer that doesn’t fully understand the ironies she tells.
Her pieces have conflict. Some have resolutions, some have resignations. But how do scenes work in her experimental style?
I think “Varieties of Disturbance” captures best what her style offers. It’s a three page story in which the narrator constantly cycles back to the disturbances her mother causes when she tries not to disturb the other family members. The circular narrative creates dead ends of tangents that reveal more context and circumstance to the reader. These tangents create the emotional temperature that Oberweger discusses. It is the stuff that makes readers anxious, gets them invested in the story. These tangents stem from the character’s goal and result in exposed conflicts. Davis usually reaches an end through an epiphany or disaster, in which the real conflict or disaster is uncovered when all the conflicts build together and connect.
Below is a shorter piece that still follows the same circular style discussed above.
LYDIA DAVIS
Disagreement
He said she was disagreeing with him. She said no, that was that was not true, he was disagreeing with her. This was about the screen door. That it should not be left open was her idea, because of the flies; his was that it could be left open first thing in the morning, when there were no flies on the deck. Anyway, he said, most of the flies came from other parts of the building: in fact, he was probably letting more of them out than in.
To walk through it—
- Motivation: to win the argument
- Conflict: he wants the screen door open, she wants it shut
- Disaster: the flies
So, yes, all aspects of the scene appear within this flash piece—it classifies as fiction, though its simplicity and lyrical elements blur its distinction as story versus prose poem. It is clear from the start what each character desires. It is clear where the conflict lies.
Still, the repetition of phrases and the obsessive focus on the screen door incite a feeling of something left unsaid or unfinished business.
The circular form that Davis utilizes allows her to enrich the piece with complex undertones of human emotion. When you distill the story to the emotion underlying the scene, it becomes clear that there is indeed more than the scene factors, more than dialogue and action.
It forces the reader into a classic technique: reading between the lines.
Thus, the disaster is not only in letting flies in, but in the dispute between the characters. It is in their inability to communicate a compromise. The disaster strikes in a denial of problems that “came from other parts of the building,” in all the things they are letting out unacknowledged rather than accepting in.
Scene and sequel help provide the direction and tension that keep readers invested an entertained. Without it, characters wander through the pages without any sense of action or suspense, without any clear motivation driving their actions.
That being said, these structure devices don’t need to follow a textbook form. In fact, it’s probably better if they don’t. Imagine reading a 300-page novel that seems like a step by step guide for the character. How predictable would that be? And typically, as curious little human beings, we are entertained by the unexpected, humored by surprises and twists.
So, take a page from Davis. Experiment with your prose. Like linear forms? Great, change up the motivations; get the reader invested by taking them through a labyrinth of indecisive desires. Want to go more fabulist? Let the readers unravel the motivations, disasters, dilemmas, and decisions of your character in a braided essay.
Writing is what you make of it. The rules are more like guidelines, anyway.
(And yes, that was a Pirates of the Caribbean reference.)
Punctuation Unrest & Anarchy
International Punctuation Awareness Month (IPAM) has covered a lot so far. We’ve debated whether or not exclamation points exude lousiness or provoke emotion; we’ve disputed the prettiness of italics and the necessity of quotation marks. Colons—not of the organ variety—gained a spot light as the classy dash. And, of course, the epic battle between ellipses and dashes was brought to light. Some of these blurbs had points to make; some were just ways to explore the weirdness that is English syntax and grammar.
Have I really gotten anywhere with this month? Possibly. If only one person’s awareness is raised, I consider that a success.
Because remember: it saves lives. No one needs to be eating Grandma when they can eat with her.
So, yes, we’ve covered a lot. What could possibly be left? (Trust me, I’ve got enough ideas for the next two IPAMs but I won’t bore you with details just yet.)
How about punctuation anarchy? There are poets, like e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, who throw punctuation out the window. They’ve got their own style of line breaks and capitals that upset the balance. There’s simply no room for punctuation in their pieces. Numerous OULIPO poets fall into this category, along with some Dadaists as well, I’m sure.
But this final post of IPAM isn’t about punctuation disappearance—it’s about a poet I’ve met who has created her own system of punctuation because the laws of syntax and grammar didn’t provide the effects she was looking for. It’s about Nataja Flood’s system of dashes.
Just take a quick look at the poem below and see if you can figure it out.
NATAJA FLOOD
My book.
My body.My body.
Is not mainstream- – –
Manufactured and sold
in a small culture shop
in uptown Harlem,
but no one ever buys it
– – -they bypass it.It is not a New York Times best seller.
It is not on reading lists.
It has not sold out- – –
My book.My body.
No one has read it.
It is too big,
too heavy, too many pages –
small font, no spaces.
No one wants to read
my book.My body
is not a library –
people cannot just check things out.
My body is a book.
You will have something to
walk away with after reading.With beautiful trimming
around the edges, only made in hard cover,
my book is inscribed with thank you notes
to God for this body.
This book,
an eye catcher for wo(men)
looking for love
in hidden scriptures.My book.
My body.
It is a classic.Written in old English and Ebonics,
complex enough to fear,
deep enough to love,
to live in,
to be one with.It is a collection
and these are my pages –
brown
and broken down into parts.
A classic.Only one was made.
No copies or cats.
Just one book.
One body.
My body –
My book.Read carefully.
It clicked after a couple reads for me, but a few of our peers in the workshop hated it. They didn’t understand why she couldn’t just revert to one form of dash to make it consistent. But it is consistent.
The system of dashes is simple. Each hyphen, the “-“ parts, resembles a beat. Put one and it’s a quick beat, close to a comma. But it’s more than just an intake of breath. It’s an interruption, a stumble.
Put two and it’s two beats, about the same length of pause as a dash. Put three and it’s similar to the trailing of an ellipsis, but there’s always the rush, the steady sense of interruption, of tension building. Put four hyphens together and…well, you get the idea.
It’s a system that creates the kind of page poetry that can be read as performance. It’s remarkable and underrated.
So the big question is: should everyone experiment with punctuation? Syntax and grammar exist for the sole purpose of making it easy for readers to understand and grasp the concepts we express through images and alliteration and onomatopoeia.
However, are we missing something? Does punctuation restrict us when it comes to expressing emotion?
I’m not saying that there should be Punctuation Anarchy—that would be awful. Look at old texts in Latin (and the like) where punctuation is absent and grammar bombs are present and it’ll send you running to excess commas and periods.
What I am saying is that perhaps we can (and should) experiment with the system that already exists until you create something that suits your style.
To Dash or to Elide, That is the Question
With the continuation and near end of International Punctuation Awareness Month (IPAM), this second to last post is dedicated to the greatest conflict I have seen in a workshop—and mind you, it lasted the entire semester and remains unresolved—which is whether to dash or elide.
Though I suppose it would be more accurate to say the battles were pro- or anti- dash/ellipsis instead of over which should be used. Because in my experience, poets fall into one of two camps: dash or ellipsis. You love one, you hate the other. It’s like a Sharks and Jets situation, another Montague and Capulet if punctuation marks belonged to families or gangs.
I’ve seen battles won and battles lost for either side. I’m still not sure if there was any rational reasons behind it. If you think about it, the distinction should be pretty clear—I mean, it’s not like you’d use a dash in the place of an ellipse or an ellipse in the place of a dash.
A dash mark interrupts or creates a punctuated pause similar to a caesura. It signals a slight shift, a continuation of thought but perhaps not in the direction initially expected. Dashes encourage the reader and speaker to push on, even if syntax grows muddled.
It does not provide the reader with a pause long enough to collect her thoughts. No, that’s the ellipsis. It’s a point that trails off without a complete stop like a period or semi-colon. Instead, ellipses incite tangents and rouse contemplation. It’s the sigh of a poem, the breath between rushes of ideas. It enlongates and emphasizes a line.
The punctuation marks result in remarkably different effects. So why, then, do dash-lovers fight so furiously against the use of the infamous ellipsis?
Maybe the use of either mark reveals something about the writer. Perhaps a person is just naturally inclined to use one over the other. Maybe we just don’t understand each other.
In the midst of a six strong-willed peers, an epic battle between Team Ellipsis and Dash ensued. Each side boasted of its might and superiority through mockery and wit. One of them is featured below.
Which team are you?
ANDREW DOMINELLO
Ode to the Fairest Mark
My dear dot-dot-dot, triple-dot glyph, suspension point, et cetera…
I am of the humble persuasion that you are undoubtedly
the most exquisite, delicately arresting form of punctuation
in all the English language. And I implore you, sweet ellipsis,
to ignore the derisive remarks imparted by disciples of the dash,
with its dreadful, obtrusive terseness. You are no such trollop for attention!
On the contrary, you cut short the extraneous when I seek brevity.
You orchestrate aposiopesis when a musical line tapers into silence.
You allow me the liberty of calling my cessation a pause
when I am unsure whether or not I have said enough…
Colons: The Classy Dash
As IPAM passes the halfway mark, I bring you colons with this next post. And no, it’s not the kind you can find nestled around your small intestine. Though maybe in another dimension, I’d be a doctor writing a medical blog. Do people really write posts on goopy human insides? I guess that’s not that weird. I’m writing about a piece of punctuation, after all.
Just, no pictures—please.
All digressions aside, what inspired this post was the following passage, taken from William Strunk, Jr. & E.B. White’s The Elements of Style:
A colon tells the reader that what follows is closely related to the preceding clause. The colon has more effect than the comma, less power to separate than the semi-colon, and more formality than the dash.
Granted, it’s talking about prose and composition.
But for me, that sums up its use in poetry. A colon is not an anomaly but it’s not exactly a common piece of punctuation to use either; I see commas and dashes more often. But perhaps that’s just the way voice and syntax fall together when composed. Maybe it’s not usual for us to speak with colons, unless we’re listing—and list poems consist of a genre in itself.
Still, the excerpt begs consideration. The colon offers a unique advantage to other forms of punctuation and is incredibly successful when the situation fits. It acts like a beacon, a sign that what’s about to follow is “closely related” to what began. It’s a direction of insight, whereas the dash incites more of an interruption, a deflection. And unlike the semi-colon, colons provide a connectedness. Plus, it has that dramatic pause factor that you just can’t get with a comma.
Here, it’s easier when seen in action. The following quirky poem has not one, not two, but three colons in addition to a myriad of dashes, hyphens, parenthesis, and an ellipsis (which is a topic for another post).
THOMAS LUX
Wife Hits Moose
Sometime around dusk moose lifts
his heavy, primordial jaw, dripping, from pondwater
and, without psychic struggle,
decides the day, for him, is done: time
to go somewhere else. Meanwhile, wife
drives one of those roads that cut straight north,
a highway dividing the forestsnot yet fat enough for the paper companies.
This time of the year full dark falls
about eight o’clock – pineforest and blacktop
blend. Moose reaches road, fails
to look both ways, steps
deliberately, ponderously… Wife
hits moose, hard,at a slight angle (brakes slammed, car
spinning) and moose rolls over hood, antlers –
as if diamond-tipped – scratch windshield, car
damaged: rib-of-moose imprint
on fender, hoof shatters headlight.
Annoyed moose lands on feet and walks away.
Wife is shaken, unhurt, amazed.– Does moose believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Speaker does not know.
– Does wife believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Speaker assumes as much: spiritual intimacies
being between the spirit and the human.
– Does speaker believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Yes. Thank You.
Nowadays, colons are used to convey emotion.
😀 🙂 😦 😛 😐 
:3
But plop them into some poetry and I’ll ask: aren’t they doing just that?
Quote Me On That
When it comes to dialogue in poetry, what the battle really boils down to is whether lines should be embraced by quotation marks or distinguished in italics. There are certainly pros and cons to each. But in the end, is it just personal preference?
I fight for italics. The number of times I have supported quotation marks over italics can be count on one hand. To put it simply: I just don’t like quotation marks. They’re ugly. They stand out. They pull the reader out of the poem. The small flecks on the page mess up the alignment and positioning of words on a page.
But maybe that’s just me. I mean, it sounds a little obsessive, doesn’t it? There aren’t any valid reasons to shun the punctuation mark from poetry, except for the subjective opinion that it might distract the reader for a moment.
Do they do more good than bad, if we move past quotation marks not looking pretty on the page? It makes a clear distinction that what you’re reading is dialogue. You can use italics elsewhere in the poem to add emphasis in stressed areas without having to worry if it conflicts with italicized dialogue, or if italicized dialogue looks like it might be a thought instead of a spoken line.
All reasonable concerns. I have also supported quotations when the poem is bi- or multilingual, as other languages tend to be italicized.
But if anyone tried to put a quotation mark in one of my poems, it would happen only over my dead body. Even if I don’t fully understand why, quotation marks in poetry just rub me the wrong way.
For example, Rebecca Morgan Frank wrote this quirky poem called “Dialectic” (from Little Murders Everywhere) that spins off of language, contrasting the juxtaposed concreteness and abstractness of words. In it, the two subjects speak the words aloud to feel them out.
Now, which method do you think she used: quotation marks or italics? Which do you like better? Is it a personal preference or is there a reason you chose the one you did?
Or are you just wondering why the hell someone wrote a 440-word post on the positives and negatives of using quotation marks in poetry when it looks fine either way and do these kinds of things seriously keep me up at night? (My answer, by the way: more often than you’d think.)
This is one of the punctuation debates that I will never solve. To me, the italics (which Frank actually did use in her poem) will just always look better. And while it may be shallow, it’s enough reason for me.
Exclaim & Proclaim!
The first post of International Punctuation Awareness Month (IPAM) brings us the infamous exclamation mark.
I’ve seen it in page poetry on the rare occasion. But it seems to dot the end of sentences in stage poetry far more often. Why? Because we exclaim and proclaim! It’s only natural, especially when putting on some sort of performance and tapping into emotion.
So then why is the exclamation mark so cringe-worthy?
The addition of an exclamation mark seems to cheese up the line, almost as if it then displays too much emotion. But it is still used, and by big name poets, too. In fact, one of my favorite poems has three embedded in a modern sonnet.
RITA DOVE
Persephone Falling
One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled,
stooped to pull harder—
when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished. No one heard her.
No one! She had strayed from the herd.(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Don’t answer to strangers. Stick
with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.)
This is how easily the pit
opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.
Rita Dove isn’t just some random amateur pulled from a high school auditorium. She has served as a Poet Laureate—the first African American to have been appointed under the title. She’s also the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; now, countless collections later, Dove teaches at the University of Virginia. (I’m a little bit of a fan, if you couldn’t tell.)
The point is this: if she can pull off three exclamation marks in a brilliant poem, what are the rest of us doing? Are we looking at exclamation points the wrong way?
Let’s just take a moment to look back over the poem. The use of each results in remarkably different effects, but all are used for tone.
EXCLAMATION #1
“One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful / flowers, one unlike all the others!”
How is it perceived? As the first line of a poem, it’s there to make a statement. It’s proclaiming a fact, a hyperbole claimed to be true. The exclamation point colors in this exaggeration while maintaining a semblance of satire on Dove’s part and wonder on the subject’s behalf. After all, it must be one hell of a flower to get Persephone to stray from her mother’s warnings.
“It is finished. No one heard her. / No one! She had strayed from the herd.”
This one brings a sense of finality and disbelief, especially following the scene of Persephone’s fall, captured by Hades. It’s less sarcastic. It’s there for a longer pause to let the reader catch up. It’s there purely for effect. But then, you could ask, couldn’t a line break create the same pause? Probably. But would it fit the poem? How would it alter the already superb line choices?
EXCLAMATION #3
“Remember: go straight to school. / This is important, stop fooling around! / Don’t answer to strangers.”
Here we get voice. As soon as your eye lands on that exclamation mark, you can just hear your parents reprimanding you in their best strict voice, can’t you? This is the part of a sonnet where a shift occurs. A voice takes over and the tone changes, strengthens in its purpose. Without the exclamation, that shift is much more subtle, almost to the point where it is no longer successful.
A proposed challenge: Replace each with a period or semi-colon or line break. Does it still work the same way?
Before starting this blurb, I was among the exclamation haters. They’re excessive. They’re for performance. They don’t belong on the page.
I know that remains true for some poems—I’m sure we’ve all come across one before and grimaced, especially if there happens to be the double!! or triple!!! combo—but when I began researching, I found more good than bad. Just look around, they’re used by big names and small names alike. When used properly, the exclamation mark can create some effects in your poetry that are unmatched by other punctuation.
It’s just a matter of pride and a new perspective.
Welcome to I.P.A.M.
I have decided to deem January as International Punctuation Awareness Month—IPAM for short. May the odds of poetics and periods be ever in your favor.
Kidding. Sort of.
But strangely enough, the biggest debates I’ve had in workshops have been over punctuation. It was less vehement in fiction and nonfiction classes, but in poetry—all hell would broke loose when we came across a semi-colon, or a pair of dashes, or—god forbid—an ellipsis.
Which leads me to the real point of deeming January as National Punctuation Awareness Month—is there a standard for punctuation in poetry? I mean, sure, poetry still needs to be syntactically correct, right? Though, with the OULIPOs of the literary world, does syntax really hold up? Or does it just function in another way?
I don’t really know. I’m just asking the questions. All I can say is that I’ve noticed patterns in thought when using certain punctuation over others—I’ve even seen peers make up their own system when the official stuff doesn’t suit their style.
All these random questions and half-expressed examples finally clicked within some strange part of my mind—hey, I’m a poet, not a neurologist—and I found my next set of blurbs for the blog. Punctuation. The new, the faux, the unbelievable.
So, without further ado, I present to you: International Punctuation Awareness Month for poetry and hums.
B.K. Fischer: The Triple-Threat Allusionist
St. Rage’s Vault, B.K. Fischer’s second poetry collection, is an ambitious project. The entire book is devoted to ekphrastic style, its forty poems broken into three sections to recreate pregnancy trimesters and tie in the themes of art, creation, and motherhood. Fischer’s writing habits lean on allusions in order to convey meaning for such an abstract work—in fact, even her diction is obscure. Rather, the reader is impelled forward on a momentum built through the repetition of sounds, phrases, or syntax. For such a high-reaching collection, Fischer accomplishes much through her style choices; however, between the themes, structure, and allusions, she may be asking too much of the reader for the book as a whole to be truly successful.
It makes sense for the collection to have a foreboding mood and I would argue that it could be characterized as so. With the poems structured as the forty weeks of pregnancy, there is suspense building throughout as the reader’s expectations for the “birth” (the big finale) grow. In this way, Fischer’s style accomplishes much—within each poem, the reader is pushed forward by a momentum constructed by repetition. There is repetition of single phrases in some: “Week 39 (Blue Nudes)” for example, incites suspense by using this technique with as if she were. In a poem with no full end stops and long lines, the phrase works as a source of grounding. It reminds the reader of the subject and the uncertainty immediately juxtaposed. The repetition serves as an echo that haunts. It forces the subject—woman—into the foreground, only to make her an object, trapped and defined by her own body. The repetition works similarly in her syntax. The tone of “Week 26 (St. Rage’s Vault)” is foreboding due to the construction of lines; as the poem progresses, more and more sentences begin with command verbs. In fact, the last stanza is created solely with them.
Grope as they did in Waco for the buried school bus
with a week’s worth of air. Offer suet to the sparrow.
But cut the whimpers. For the love of God, Fortunato,
bellow with rage, become aware of the smell of your
own breath. Go ahead, try, rub me back into the lamp.
(64-68)
The verbs grip the reader, with word choices like grope, cut, and bellow. The undertones of the poem are expressed through the commands, the growing rage bursting through with finality in these last lines. The diction of the poem overall conveys violence, with phrases like “pressure valve” (4), “hundred needles sunk in your gut” (9), “sandy scalp” (50), and “rancid sweat” (62). But these images only hold connotations. The tone is really created by the command verbs, which act as an aggressor. They are the outlet for rage, whereas the images are mere results and therefore less immediate. The syntax does not let the reader rest, thus accomplishing the feeling of helplessness or waiting that runs through the collection.
B.K. Fischer’s strongest form of repetition yet, however, occurs in her use of sound. Part of her choice to use elevated and demanding diction is also to sustain the right sounds and it succeeds this purpose. There are rarely end rhymes unless they are slanted. Rather, she is more fixed on internal rhyme, assonance, and consonance to repeat specific sounds. The rhyme is used to draw the reader’s awareness to emotions and ideas expressed in areas. For the most part, the sounds echo each other. The sibilance mimics the hush made by a mother. The assonance of the hard “i” replicates a newborn’s cry; the low “a” and “o” imitates coos; the consonance of “c” completes this idea of cooing. “Week 3 (Arachne: Recent Memory)” is dependent on its sound. The content of the lines weaves from science to Jesus to spiders, but the theme of motherhood—which is emphasized in the last stanza—is upheld through these sounds, as seen in the excerpt below.
though cool space speculums don’t come
. across on cloth—a sketch of men astride
inspired by a horse race in Dubai,
. some footstool embroidery
(13-16)
The only consistent consonant is the hard “c,” paired with the repetition of “o” and “a” in the words space, race, cool, come, and footstool. When juxtaposed with the “i” in astride, inspired, and Dubai, the poem sounds like a mother soothing a crying child. The repetition aids the reader in distilling the tangent-bound piece, reminding him/her of the focus without having to explicitly use the word motherhood; thus, it is possible to distinguish the truth, the mother’s fear of bringing a child into such a caged, ambitious, lonely, and dangerous world when she might one day leave him/her “pour[ing] to the corners / while the mama shrivel[s] small” (58-59). It’s the fear all parents face: the day their children move out of reach, the moment they can no longer sooth them with simple cooing.
As successful as Fischer’s repetition is in her style, the collection’s dependence on allusions may be problematic. She’s the triple-threat allusionist, delving into etymology, mythology, and art. It takes an incredible amount of skill to make all the connections that she does and to be clear; this critique is in no means lessening that claim. However, based on the intended audience, it may be asking too much. There are some poems in which the etymology is clear, the connotations accessible to the average person. However, more often than not, words send the reader to the dictionary. Fischer’s diction and vocabulary express an interest in pinpointing exact meanings, even if they fall into obscurity. The allusion to the history behind words like “chiaroscuro” (2), found in “Week 40 (Nocturne),” exemplifies this technique. She chooses it carefully, that much is certain, as the dictionary reveals its origin—a compound Latin word, clarus meaning “clear, bright” and obscurus as “dark, obscure”—but the reader’s research interrupts the rhythm. Instead of flowing, reading becomes staccato. Her choices made to capture sound and meaning together backfire, as the sound can’t be appreciated when it is broken up.
Allusions to mythology—most often Catholicism—are more accessible, but become more taxing alongside the etymology and ekphrasis. It begins within the first poem, modernizing the Immaculate Conception. Mary reappears in other pieces, most notably in “Week 33 (Weaning the Christ),” where she is ironically identified with her Virgin epithet, despite the presence of her suckling child. As in other places, the biblical references are modernized; she “works out the kinks / in the plan” (2-3), wondering how she’s supposed “to make him a god-made-man” (10), if she can raise a child properly. “Week 27 (Figure)” uses the Fall of Man to capture women’s sexuality, but the allusion is so subtle that it might be missed if one was not familiar with the Old Testament; the allusion exists in the statement “No globe, no fruit—only / the redundancy of her desire” (1-2). So far, for readers to make the connections necessary to understanding the collection’s intentions, they need to be well versed in the English language and Catholic faith.
Despite having its roots in ekphrasis, Fischer believes her collection can stand alone, apart from the artwork. For some pieces, this may be true. However, for the most part her work is heavily dependent on having the art as a base for content. Without it, the poem dissolves into obscurity, as observed in “Week 34 (Wired).” The diction used is not enough for a reader to visualize the artwork it was derived from, nor is it enough to spur new meanings. The problem is within the first line: “Stare before it shorts out, trips and fizzes” (1). There is no reference point for “it.” The reader is plunged into a subject-less, obscure piece and expected to find enough bearings to gain some understanding of the truths—unless, of course, the reader knows the artwork that inspired “Week 34.” That, then, would clarify the “it”; the reader would know “it” was a dress made of lights and also pick up on the “bride in bulbs” (3) imagery as well, grasping the phrase’s importance as subject rather than quirky tangent, as it otherwise might be dismissed without the artwork acting as a reference. With this misunderstanding, the poem spins into lines and phases strung together in chaos. The reader completely misses the humorous tone, seeing it instead as just what the title suggests: wired. The theme of motherhood, with the burden of the lighted-dress running parallel to the burden of pregnancy, is not conveyed without the knowledge of the artwork she alludes to, and this potential misunderstanding is not limited to “Week 34” but resides in the majority of the collection.
There is no doubt that B.K. Fischer is an incredibly skilled writer; the talent it takes to develop a poetic style with such a distinct voice and techniques of repetition is noteworthy. However, she may not have gone about the structure correctly. Perhaps it should not be a collection of poetry. Perhaps it is bigger than the pages it crowds. Fischer’s poetry is the kind that needs to be heard. With the technology of today, it might have been more successful as an audio-book paired with displayed images of the artwork. That way, the repetition continues to build suspense and the tone of impending expectations which so brilliantly characterize pregnancy and motherhood, without the reader having to be interrupted by dictionary runs, as etymology may lose its priority in favor of the visuals. Furthermore, if the artwork is displayed as the poetry is read, the imagery has something concrete to allude to. The reader does not have to pull himself/herself out of the poem to research the images. Everything would come together as it was intended, instead of collapsing upon the reader as a burden. Rather, Fischer’s poetry would be experienced as it was written—with pleasure.
– ML Wolters
Poetry & Hums 