JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews
“Permanent Water” from Mercury by Ariana Reines
(Fence Books, Albany, NY, 2011)
Permanent Water
You just texted me two cock pics
It used to be more artful
The way you did it, the composition.
Like last week. It just stopped raining.
I have a cold quicksilver feeling.
I could put this in a place where you could find it
But I am hiding it here.
It used to be more artful
The way you did it, the composition.
Like last week. It just stopped raining.
I have a cold quicksilver feeling.
I could put this in a place where you could find it
But I am hiding it here.
One time
I wanted you to call me
So I held my blackberry to my forehead.
I wanted you to call me
So I held my blackberry to my forehead.
Why am I so stupid. Do you know why? World,
Nothing could possibly be said of you that wouldn’t
Be true. Sometimes I think about the internet
And what it means to be ugly and my fantasy
Of transparency like a see-through Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Transparency, gift
Of love that would be an ultimate, total greatness
When I look into the smooth floes
Nothing could possibly be said of you that wouldn’t
Be true. Sometimes I think about the internet
And what it means to be ugly and my fantasy
Of transparency like a see-through Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Transparency, gift
Of love that would be an ultimate, total greatness
When I look into the smooth floes
When you tell me
You love me
And I have
To believe you.
You’re gonna
Get sick of me
You said, standing
On my bed.
All that is said
Just because
It is said
In a climate
Oppressive
In its equivalencies
Is not so little
To be only
The equal
Of itself
I say
To myself.
You love me
And I have
To believe you.
You’re gonna
Get sick of me
You said, standing
On my bed.
All that is said
Just because
It is said
In a climate
Oppressive
In its equivalencies
Is not so little
To be only
The equal
Of itself
I say
To myself.
I went to a store to return some shoes I bought on a day I felt confused.
I exchanged them for some cheaper ones that made me feel
Like a new woman even though the store
Made me feel like dying and I should know
Better and I do know better
But still. If there were nothing
But the slightest aspiration in my flesh toward a heaven
I would love you people just the way you are.
Instead I will dress up like a woman of a certain type
For you.
I don’t want your love or to be good
To you at all and I don’t want to feel
The way you are.
I exchanged them for some cheaper ones that made me feel
Like a new woman even though the store
Made me feel like dying and I should know
Better and I do know better
But still. If there were nothing
But the slightest aspiration in my flesh toward a heaven
I would love you people just the way you are.
Instead I will dress up like a woman of a certain type
For you.
I don’t want your love or to be good
To you at all and I don’t want to feel
The way you are.
I read the sonnets
Of Shakespeare today. Not all of them are great.
It made me wonder what it was like at night
For him, or Isaac Newton or whoever he was
Or they were, but the name of him. I sort
Of think either he wrote them all drunk
And one in every fifteen or twenty was great
Just effortlessly, or he was in some kind of sick
Brooding obsession with his own ugliness
Wishing he could just look beautiful and not have
To say so in the light of his man, whom he nags
In more ways than one to make babies.
The permanent decrepitude of authors
Dying on the breast of fugitive beauty is a subject
I shall not transubstantiate. Basically it’s too
Gay for me. Maybe not. I bore
A hole in myself at the thought of my lord you.
Go with me. Drag me down
To your level, just do it. Try. If we ever get there I swear
To you I’ll be faithful
Of Shakespeare today. Not all of them are great.
It made me wonder what it was like at night
For him, or Isaac Newton or whoever he was
Or they were, but the name of him. I sort
Of think either he wrote them all drunk
And one in every fifteen or twenty was great
Just effortlessly, or he was in some kind of sick
Brooding obsession with his own ugliness
Wishing he could just look beautiful and not have
To say so in the light of his man, whom he nags
In more ways than one to make babies.
The permanent decrepitude of authors
Dying on the breast of fugitive beauty is a subject
I shall not transubstantiate. Basically it’s too
Gay for me. Maybe not. I bore
A hole in myself at the thought of my lord you.
Go with me. Drag me down
To your level, just do it. Try. If we ever get there I swear
To you I’ll be faithful
*
I’m a bit intimidated, writing on Ariana Reines. She’s such a star. And she was born the year my son was. What of myself (and my geezerhood) will I accidentally expose?
It’s also difficult, since I’ve read in an interview that she composed these poems, then she reworked them to make a book. So once again, I may well be doing some injustice, reading out of the context of the whole. But, as noted above, I found this poem at a website, standing solo, so I think it can also be read all by itself.
That said, balls to the wall.
The first thing I want to note is that, in my reading, she puts paid to a distinction some are trying to make between “postmodern irony” and “post-post-modern sincerity.” I think that distinction is childish. 1) Art is performance; it’s rhetorical. I mean rhetorical in the ancient sense. Therefore, irony and sincerity are equally poses. 2) Which may be another way of saying the same thing, as Lacan notes, language precedes us. This isn’t anything mystical. It’s just to say that we are born into it, and are therefore more or less determined by it. Which means that, at our most ironic, at our most sincere, we are saying what we’ve been given to say. It would not be going to far to say that we are written as we write.
To quote Johannes Göransson, slightly out of context,
Last week, I wrote about Joy Katz’s Pleiades article, arguing in favor of the “realness” and “sentimentality” of a “personal narrative” aesthetic, and against the artificiality of “surrealism.” [JBR: for surrealism, read any sort of more or less obvious artifice] Her (very pervasive) model of art: The author communicates his/her “emotions” to the reader. The art itself is strangely made into an obstacle of this communication, as if the artifice isn’t in fact highly affective, as if the medium itself wasn’t what drives art.
Johannes Göransson, “More Gaudy Possibilities: Gothic Ornaments vs. Sincerity”, at http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2518 Montevidayo, 13 Feb 012]
I won’t even mention Spinoza.
When I read Reines, the distinction that isn’t a distinction simply evaporates. I think that’s one reason for her tremendous success.
To the poem:
You just texted me two cock pics
It used to be more artful
The way you did it, the composition.
Like last week. It just stopped raining.
I have a cold quicksilver feeling.
I could put this in a place where you could find it
But I am hiding it here.
It used to be more artful
The way you did it, the composition.
Like last week. It just stopped raining.
I have a cold quicksilver feeling.
I could put this in a place where you could find it
But I am hiding it here.
Right away we are in what could be a real situation. People do text cock pics. I take her “It used to be more artful / The way you did it, the composition. / Like last week” as a way of saying I’m less into you than I was a week ago. The next two lines add to the verisimilitude: “It just stopped raining. / I have a cold quicksilver feeling.” What is a cold quicksilver feeling? I don’t know exactly, but it carries an affect, which at this point in the poem seems to follow naturally from the weather and feeling about the cock pics, if I am interpreting it correctly. Perhaps it is the opposite of a warm and solid feeling. I am well-enough convinced by this interpretation by the next two lines, “I could put this in a place where you could find it / But I am hiding it here.” I read these as a way of saying that the you, which I am assuming is a he for obvious reasons (the cock), a) doesn’t read her poems, which could be a metonymous way of saying that he doesn’t read her, either. She’s putting herself in plain sight (even though she’s using rhetorical devices to do so: metaphor, metonymy, just to mention two). Dude’s obviously obtuse.
The second stanza:
One time
I wanted you to call me
So I held my blackberry to my forehead.
I wanted you to call me
So I held my blackberry to my forehead.
She obviously always was not so cold quicksilver as far as he was concerned. She was so uh passionate she resorted to sympathetic magic to draw him to her.
The third stanza is more meditative, and not a direct apostrophe (another rhetorical device! More art! More artfulness! Does this make her insincere? Yes and no. This is a crafted poem).
Why am I so stupid. Do you know why? World,
Nothing could possibly be said of you that wouldn’t
Be true. Sometimes I think about the internet
And what it means to be ugly and my fantasy
Of transparency like a see-through Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Transparency, gift
Of love that would be an ultimate, total greatness
When I look into the smooth floes
Nothing could possibly be said of you that wouldn’t
Be true. Sometimes I think about the internet
And what it means to be ugly and my fantasy
Of transparency like a see-through Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Transparency, gift
Of love that would be an ultimate, total greatness
When I look into the smooth floes
The “Why am I so stupid” clearly connects back to the failed magic, to the notion that she could bring him close via magic. But it also connects to what follows, which is a explanation of sorts for her stupidity: “Do you know why? World, / Nothing could possibly be said of you that wouldn’t / Be true.” Now, this is a bizarre explanation, unless it’s a way of saying the opposite of itself. I mean, perhaps her “heart” believes that. Perhaps her heart believes in the efficacy of utterance, i.e. if I say he loves me, or I love him, that makes it so. But it’s clear by this point in the poem that she knows that many things can be said of this world that aren’t, and won’t be, true. The following lines adds some weight to my interpretation that she knows that it’s her “sentimentality” that has her in so much (emotional) trouble:
Sometimes I think about the internet
And what it means to be ugly and my fantasy
Of transparency like a see-through Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Transparency, gift
Of love that would be an ultimate, total greatness
And what it means to be ugly and my fantasy
Of transparency like a see-through Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Transparency, gift
Of love that would be an ultimate, total greatness
These lines go in many directions. I’ll try to follow a few of them: “Sometimes I think about the internet” may tie in to the erstwhile “california capitalist” myth that all this connectivity would set us free in some sense, which it clearly hasn’t (as Buckaroo Banzai once said, “wherever you go, there you are”). She’s still herself, the world is still itself, etc etc. This line is perhaps amplified by the following phrase, “And what it means to be ugly”: but perhaps I shouldn’t stop here and should continue to the end of the sentence, “And what it means to be ugly and my fantasy / Of transparency like a see-through Jean-Jacques / Rousseau.” It is obvious, to me at least, that Reines tries hard to be ugly in her poems – but only as a means of making herself transparent – and entirely known. Like a 21st-century Rousseau, author of the myth of the “noble savage”, author of the onetime notorious no-holds-barred Confessions, which are now known to be extraordinarily artfully and consciously composed.
“Reines” the narrator / poet knows all this. She’s obviously brilliant, and obviously no fool. In the next line she recognizes that “the Transparency, gift / Of love that would be an ultimate, total greatness” is indeed something to be desired, whether or not it can be achieved, whether or not her belief in it is what makes her “stupid”.
Personal note: I do believe it is the job of the artist to open and open and open, no matter the cost. And I also believe that total openness guarantees nothing. It’s kinda like enlightenment: you still gotta carry the water and chop the wood.
It’s hard for me to know if the last line of this stanza, “When I look into the smooth floes”, is connected to the preceding lines, and if so how, or whether it leads into the next stanza … for all I know it’s the screen image on the phone with the cock photos.
The next stanza consists of very short lines, which makes it read fast to me:
When you tell me
You love me
And I have
To believe you.
You’re gonna
Get sick of me
You said, standing
On my bed.
All that is said
Just because
It is said
In a climate
Oppressive
In its equivalencies
Is not so little
To be only
The equal
Of itself
I say
To myself.
You love me
And I have
To believe you.
You’re gonna
Get sick of me
You said, standing
On my bed.
All that is said
Just because
It is said
In a climate
Oppressive
In its equivalencies
Is not so little
To be only
The equal
Of itself
I say
To myself.
In fact, this stanza goes so fast I find it difficult to parse; I think it’s her art at work, actually, I think the jumbling syntax is intentional. The first half of the stanza is pretty simple. He knows their relationship is doomed. I suppose a better reader than myself could interpret the following somewhat incoherent sentence with some precision; I simply take the incoherence to follow from his statement, call it the effect of that statement on her composure, on her unwillingness and/or inability to hear it at the time.
She seems perhaps to admit this in the next stanza:
I went to a store to return some shoes I bought on a day I felt confused.
I exchanged them for some cheaper ones that made me feel
Like a new woman even though the store
Made me feel like dying and I should know
Better and I do know better
But still. If there were nothing
But the slightest aspiration in my flesh toward a heaven
I would love you people just the way you are.
Instead I will dress up like a woman of a certain type
For you.
I don’t want your love or to be good
To you at all and I don’t want to feel
The way you are.
I exchanged them for some cheaper ones that made me feel
Like a new woman even though the store
Made me feel like dying and I should know
Better and I do know better
But still. If there were nothing
But the slightest aspiration in my flesh toward a heaven
I would love you people just the way you are.
Instead I will dress up like a woman of a certain type
For you.
I don’t want your love or to be good
To you at all and I don’t want to feel
The way you are.
Perhaps the day she bought the expensive shoes was shortly after the day he stood on her bed and told her they were doomed. I don’t think it’s culturally insensitive to note that many women I know use shoe-shopping as a sort of dope. There are good reasons for this, which belong in another essay. Nevertheless, she (“Reines” or Reines, or my last duchess, for all I know), exchanges the shoes, feels better and worse at the same time. At this point she is no longer talking to the you that sent her the cock pics. She’s speaking to all of us. Were she a saint, a particular saint, actually, the Virgin Mary (who else gets to go to heaven in the flesh?) she’d love us as we are. But she can’t and she won’t . The only way she can find to relate to us (the people of the world) is to dress up and behave as a cold-hearted whore.
Not uncommonly, the broken-hearted put on armor.
So we come to the final stanza, which is a meditation on men:
I read the sonnets
Of Shakespeare today. Not all of them are great.
It made me wonder what it was like at night
For him, or Isaac Newton or whoever he was
Or they were, but the name of him. I sort
Of think either he wrote them all drunk
And one in every fifteen or twenty was great
Just effortlessly, or he was in some kind of sick
Brooding obsession with his own ugliness
Wishing he could just look beautiful and not have
To say so in the light of his man, whom he nags
In more ways than one to make babies.
The permanent decreptitude of authors
Dying on the breast of fugitive beauty is a subject
I shall not transubstantiate. Basically it’s too
Gay for me. Maybe not. I bore
A hole in myself at the thought of my lord you.
Go with me. Drag me down
To your level, just do it. Try. If we ever get there I swear
To you I’ll be faithful
Of Shakespeare today. Not all of them are great.
It made me wonder what it was like at night
For him, or Isaac Newton or whoever he was
Or they were, but the name of him. I sort
Of think either he wrote them all drunk
And one in every fifteen or twenty was great
Just effortlessly, or he was in some kind of sick
Brooding obsession with his own ugliness
Wishing he could just look beautiful and not have
To say so in the light of his man, whom he nags
In more ways than one to make babies.
The permanent decreptitude of authors
Dying on the breast of fugitive beauty is a subject
I shall not transubstantiate. Basically it’s too
Gay for me. Maybe not. I bore
A hole in myself at the thought of my lord you.
Go with me. Drag me down
To your level, just do it. Try. If we ever get there I swear
To you I’ll be faithful
In the beginning of the stanza Shakespeare (and Newton) are, as Burroughs said about teaheads, “unfathomable”, but about midway through she has identified with Shakespeare as herself and vice-versa (the real clue, for me at least, comes with the lines “Brooding obsession with his own ugliness / Wishing he could just look beautiful and not have / To say so in the light of his man …”). She too is a makar, trapped in a hopeless relationship:
The permanent decreptitude of authors
Dying on the breast of fugitive beauty is a subject
I shall not transubstantiate. Basically it’s too
Gay for me. Maybe not. I bore
A hole in myself at the thought of my lord you.
Dying on the breast of fugitive beauty is a subject
I shall not transubstantiate. Basically it’s too
Gay for me. Maybe not. I bore
A hole in myself at the thought of my lord you.
By the last of these lines she is even parodying Shakespeare’s language. But the you here is not Shakespeare, nor is it “W.H.”: it’s the original you of the beginning of the poem:
Go with me. Drag me down
To your level, just do it. Try. If we ever get there I swear
To you I’ll be faithful
To your level, just do it. Try. If we ever get there I swear
To you I’ll be faithful
She’s not quite ready to call it quits, though she knows how bad it is for her to not do so. In fact, I believe that she does call it quits even as she claims she’s be faithful. It’s the absence of the full stop at the end of the last line that tells me so.
Let’s assume for a minute that the narrator is Reines herself, and that this is indeed sincere poem. It seems obvious to me that this sincerity is achieved via the use of every trick in the book. Which is why I started this by saying that those who dichotomize between sincerity and artifice are making a false distinction. I would just remind them to reread their Deleuze and Guattari, who insist that it’s never an either/or, it’s always “and … and … and …” ad infinitum.
*****
[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 have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other and, to facilitate this type of reading, I will put at the bottom of each review a “NEXT” button that will take you to the next review. To wit: NEXT. 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.
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