Thursday, May 10, 2012

A poem from KEY BRIDGE by KEN RUMBLE

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

“8.october.2002” in Key Bridge by Ken Rumble
(Carolina Wren Press, Durham., 2007)

8.october.2002


#1 with a bullet

a constellation of chalkpoints

(don't put body-bags in the poem

--

Live free

--

broken geometry proofs broken ideas girding space broken angles
exponents
variables
length
width
angles

my city, my geometry, my broken (my flawed

cosine

now the gunman
one plus one equals
this geometry defining space that separates
space by definition
by focus:  coarse, fine

I don't know what to say here.

the tragedy we make
the tragedy we are

 *

This poem was written during the Washington DC Beltway Sniper’s killing spree. The first DC shooting took place 2 October. By the time this poem was written 10 people had been shot, 9 fatally. As the name “Beltway Sniper” implies, the shots were all fired from a distance, leaving the city and surrounding area locked down and terrified.

So this is a “poem including history”, epic and lyric at the same time And, since it was written in media res, it begins and leaves off where? Up in the air, so to speak. We can expect no beginning, no end.

This is about/a representation of/and attempt to come to grips with terror. It is important to recall that 9/11 took out a section of the Pentagon just a year before, and a week after that DA (among other places) began to under Amerithrax, as the FBI’s case file called the still-possibly-unsolved outburst of anthrax attacks.

I don’t imagine that, in 2002, stress levels were higher many places than in DC, expect in Afghanistan, which “the coalition of the willing” had invaded beginning October 2001.

With that background, we can begin to read this poem.

“#1 with a bullet”. I can find nothing specifically tying this to the Sniper. Perhaps this is a reference to the Kool G. Rap & DJ Polo tune of the same name, which was first released a decade before. Lyrics do tend to stay in one’s head. But they’re one thing in a song and another when reality is what they represent: The last time I caught a body it was recent / Gimme a HK, four banana clips, and I’ll take on a precinct / Yeah, the murder rate is on the rise, with niggaz like me / steady poppin niggaz are droppin like flies / To get em up when I hit em I hit em hard, there’ll be no get well card / Niggaz straight to the motherfuckin graveyard / 

I don’t know how likely it is that the poet / narrator had this tune in mind. But back in the day Kool G Rumble was huge. And hugely influential on the East Coast scene. So it’s not ridiculously unlikely, either …

By the way, this line is repeated in the poem headed “14.january.2003”, in relation to Lee Boyd Malvo, the young man who was the Sniper’s accomplice (I don’t know what exactly to call him). So it is a refrain of sorts …

 I feel safe in assuming that “a constellation of chalkpoints” refers to the places where the bodies dropped, and to the “design” made by connecting positions. We’ve all seen the chalkmarks, of course, unless we don’t watch television.

“(don't put body-bags in the poem”. This strikes me as an attempt to NOT conflate the DC-area dead with the dead soldiers already coming back from Afghanistan. I think the poet / narrator is concerned that none of the dead come to be seen as symbols of “the dead in general.” But it’s an attempt that fails, of course, because 1) he does put “body-bags” in the poem, and 2) because how not conflate them? (It’s worth noting that Saddam Hussein is mentioned in “#1 With A Bullet”). Too much death, and what’s singular about each death diminishes in the imagination of the observer (tho not, certainly, in the experience of the families and friends of the dead individuals, who remain individuals for them).

“Live free” has its own section. I think this brief sentence points in two directions. First, how live free what a gun could be pointed in your direction at this very moment. Second I think it’s a reference to that ridiculous slogan “Live Free Or Die”, which has no truth value to it, tho a great deal of affect. The slogan is broken short here, as if the “Or Die” has become “And Die” instead.

The next section continues all the way to the end. It begins:

broken geometry proofs broken ideas girding space broken angles
exponents
variables
length
width
angles

my city, my geometry, my broken (my flawed

cosine

now the gunman
one plus one equals
this geometry defining space that separates
space by definition
by focus:  coarse, fine

This is barely coherent. But it does reflect the media and police and perhaps citizen fascination/obsession with attempting to determine exactly what is happening. A complex reality is being turned into a Euclidean abstraction, a series of equations. The city is now the equivalent of a certain geometry of terror, as is the Sniper. It is no wonder that the next line reads “I don't know what to say here.”

How could anyone?

But the author / narrator does find a few more words. They are completely ungeometrical, unless one is thinking in terms of Aristotelian tragedy, which clearly the author / narrator is not.

the tragedy we make
the tragedy we are

They could conclude any poem, really. But they are particularly appropriate here, given the lines above, where in spite of everything, there is mention of the body-bags. Given what has transpired in DC (and the world) since 9/11 (and even before, of course, going all the way back to, say, 30,000 BCE), no one gets off the hook.


*****

[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days.  While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another.  So if you didn't do so already and have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other.  And an afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!]


John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.


6 comments:

  1. Hey John,

    Thanks for the thoughtful response to the poem -- I only have one small explanation/elucidation/etc. etc. as they say:

    somewhere in my heart of hearts I hope that in the depths of a readers mind they might hear a distant, faint, almost unnoticeable echo of the word "cousin" when they read the word "cosine" in that section -- for whatever it's worth.

    cheers,
    Ken

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  2. Hi, Ken. First, sorry this reading is so full of typos. It has to do with my proofing abilities, not the care I took reading the poem. Second, I didn't hear cousin, but that doesn't mean the echo's not there. But that leads me to a question (I always say that and I always have more than one): is that echo supposed to let the reader know that you in fact lost a cousin (either in the wars or in the sniper attacks)? Or that some people did? Or that "we're all cousins now"?

    Glad the reading seemed thoughtful.

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    Replies
    1. Hey John,

      The typos are no big deal -- no worries. As for the "cousin" question, it's mostly your last point there -- that we're all related. I was thinking a lot about spatial relationships while writing the book and relationships generally -- how arbitrary political geography is (city, state, nation lines) and how arbitrary definitions are in general -- or perhaps more about how mutable definitions are and some vague Wittgensteinian notions about how language makes and divides objects -- at any rate, the language of geometry is "scientific" and for most of us (forgive the generalization) unemotional, but the objects and people of the world that geometry defines / represents is (obviously (?)) one full of emotional attachment love and fear -- so I wanted to (in general in the book and in a very small way in this section) call forth the language of geometry in a context in which (I hoped) it could carry both scientific / objective weight and more subjective / emotional ideas. I have a great deal of love for and faith in scientific methods and language; my efforts weren't meant to undermine the validity of that mode of thought / language (like "how can you talk scientifically about the melting point of steel when there are 1000s of people now dead?") Really, I just think there are lots of threads (sometimes contradictory) through various language types beyond the "official" ones, and to me, that makes language and life exciting and magic, and that those threads within language are like the threads between and around people.

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    2. Hi, Ken. Thanks, and wonderful thinking around and thru the poem - and beyond it as well. I may not have emphasized it enough in the reading but (I hope it came thru) the poem certainly does carry the weight of the ineradicable threads linking the so-called objective and the so-called subjective. Nothing is undermined.

      Three comments on your comment:

      1) "language makes and divides objects". While I don't particularly tie that notion to Wittgenstein, it's certainly an important issue for poets. The only objects and the only relations between them and the only judgements about them in our poems are made of language. Fortunately or unfortunately, the language is only a fraction ours, so no matter how precisely we wield language the reader brings her own language to the reading too. I ONLY mention this not to beat on the obvious but just to say that your cosine/cousin pun was just too tactful for me, whose brain sometimes feels like a blunt object.

      2. "how can you talk scientifically about the melting point of steel when there are 1000s of people now dead?" is perfectly put. I'm not sure which threads are official and which are not but this is one of THE problems for poets, I would think. How to incude as many threads as possible all at once.

      3. This comment is as beautiful and wonderful and "exciting and magic" in its own way as in your poem. Which is NOT meant as a knock on your poem, not in the least. Thanks you.

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  3. Hey John,

    Thanks (and again) -- I've enjoyed thinking this through and chatting with you. And re: your points above (in hindsight mostly point 1)...

    1.) Yes, definitely -- and honestly, while I would love it if someone else heard "cousin" in there somewhere, at the same time I don't really expect anyone to (if that makes sense?), and at the same time as I want someone (someday) to hear it, I also kind of like that it's just a part of the book that I hear, and maybe that only I hear, like a little secret room the architect builds but then doesn't tell the owners of the house about.

    1a.) What I think is Wittgenstein-ish about it for me (and I mostly pursue this line of thought because I'm generally eager to have an excuse to think through what I think when I talk about Wittgenstein) is -- as I take it -- some of the stuff from Tractatus I think w/ regards to the apple and then, I think, the cat (?) Like an apple or a cat's tail (if we could achieve some sort of blank slate of consciousness) would not necessarily leap out to us immediately as independent objects -- we might perceive different colors and different shapes at different distances, but we wouldn't necessarily (or immediately) decide that one part of the view that we perceive is an "apple" and another "a tree" and another "a branch." It's like what I've read about people who have been blind since birth who then can see -- they don't really perceive the visual plane as a series of discrete (somewhat) unrelated objects, but rather as (so I've read) an almost abstract expressionistic scene of clashing shapes and colors without name, a unified whole rather than a discrete and divided arrangement of "individual" objects. I also do some pencil drawing, and one of my favorite (though sadly rare) experiences is when -- after I've been drawing awhile -- I go outside and suddenly catch a glimpse of the view that appears for a moment as if it is 2D rather than 3D -- the whole visual plane of what I can see just becomes a flat surface as if the view had become a painting. So part of the division / definition that turns one part of the visual field into an "apple" and another into a "cat's tail" is a function of (or perhaps gives rise to or likely both and backwards) language. So then of course we learn the language for things and thus the idea that our world is composed of discrete and individual (and yet repeatable, a "tree" is a "tree" and an "oak" is an "oak") and compartmentalized objects. I think of that aspect of language and thought as being part of the language game, a functional conceptual system that has an ambiguous relationship to the "actual things / events" that the system describes (kind of, also, like geometry or trigonometry.) So whatever "truth" value our language can convey is only "true" within the confines of the system and, almost accidentally, out in the lived world.

    2.) Indeed.

    3.) and thank you too.

    cheers,
    Ken

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    Replies
    1. Hi, Ken.

      1. I too have secret rooms in my poems I don't expect anyone else to enter. I also have "little joke" rooms, too, that only one person besides me is every likely to enter: the person with whom I shared that joke IRL (at my age it's so much fun to type stuff like IRL!). In the next section of the long poem I am working on now which can be seen as it is written at Zeitgeist Spam I will put in one such joke for you (of course Eileen may also "get it" since she reads these comments, but that's OK, Eileen's welcome anywhere in my poems).

      1a. I didn't get the Wittgenstein ref because I always think Investigations W, not Tractatus W (except the end of the Tractatus, of course, which is classic literature now). I want to add that there's another way to think the relation of objects and backgrounds and how they separate out; that's Heidegger's tool-being, which first appears in Being and Time in the discussion of the hammer. Graham Harman, if you know his work, makes an entire object oriented ontology out of it, which is fascinating. The gist is that the appearance of a separate object out of its background is first made by the use-value of that object for us (yes, I'm using Marxist vocab to discuss Heidegger, how weird is that?). I could get into the whole thing of the broken object etc but I'm sure you can follow up easily enough if you want to. Or we can discuss it, if you want to (j at johnbr dot com). In any case, it's a way to think awareness of the object that precedes language. Which, whether or not Heidegger (or Harman) is right or wrong, had to be the case, because we did have the ability to distinguish objects, long before we ever had language. None of which is meant to dispute a word you say, we learned long ago that once inside language, there was no way out.

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