JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews
“Apologies to the Spider” in The Steel Veil by Jack Marshall
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2008)
Apologies to the Spider
A thread glistening across the archway
blocks my entry to the garden. Should I
duck, or break it? I duck,
and still break it. Would that luck
were otherwise, I get
close up and personal
to a ragged webbed spiral,
as if a galaxy’s thumbprint were set
in silk, and I’m caught
like a thief without anything
to steal but seeds, bugs, and wings,
and left with not much heart
to plead innocence. And I talk
about ambition! – Lean one way,
and see it shimmer lean another, and see
a woven world we move through, break. Look
again: An Angel-hair
plumb-line – anchored fence-top to rose-tip
ten feet apart, (how could it swing so far
out?) – makes it
short of flying through space
in a grid less secure
than thread. My cat Charlie’s face,
as he wobbles toward me, is a blur:
cobweb-whiskers snagged in mist-gray
hedges where webs are thickest. We move,
each on our separate frequency,
on a trellis of nerve-
ends through which impulses cross synapse,
or fall in the gaps.
*
I read the title to this poem in two ways. First, the author / narrator apologies to the spider for breaking his web. At the same time, he is an author saluting another author, as in say, a poem one might write called “Polka Dot Poem: With Apologies to Yayoi Kusama and Damien Hirst”. A poem like this is, in its own way, a spun thread. It is irregularly end-rhymed, making it a structured yet imperfect “galaxy’s thumbprint”, as it were. Is it a poem about poetry, then? In part.
“A thread glistening across the archway / blocks my entry to the garden. Should I /
duck, or break it?” The first thing I note is that the author / narrator limits himself to a binary. This or that. A third option, and there are more than three, would be to forego entering the garden. In my reading of the poem, this does not present itself as an option because the garden is his. He has colonized a bit of the earth, he has taken ownership over it, he has more right to enter the garden than the spider does to spin its web.
But at least he does consider ducking instead of breaking the web. This makes him a liberal: someone for whom ownership of property is such a “given” as to simply have fallen out of thought. Yet someone who, in her/his own way, wants to cause as little trouble as s/he can. This is an impossible bind, of which the author / narrator is unaware.
“I duck, / and still break it. Would that luck / / were otherwise, …” It should be obvious from the above that his blaming luck is really a cop out. All life is suffering, but property-ownership guarantees that more suffering will be caused than otherwise. You will see as we proceed that I don’t mean to claim that Marshall is fully unconscious of this.
“I get / close up and personal / to a ragged webbed spiral, / as if a galaxy’s thumbprint were set / / in silk, and I’m caught / like a thief without anything / to steal but seeds, bugs, and wings, / and left with not much heart / / to plead innocence.” The author / narrator does realize he’s done some serious damage. I think here of the Men in Black movie franchise, and if this were one of those films she/he would have just destroyed an uncountable number of wonders, sentient and otherwise. And for what? “[S]eeds, bugs, and wings”. And what does s/he think the garden is, if not seeds, bugs and wings? S/he never makes any conscious reference to how claiming the right to enter her/his property is the cause of this damage, but s/he knows s/he’s a thief. And s/he’s “left with not much heart / / to plead innocence.”
So to some degree liberals know that they are part of the problem, not the solution, as they used to say. I willingly resort to a cliché here, because I want to point back to another, “close up and personal”, which is a slight reworking of “Up Close and Personal”, a phrase / tv segment that is at least as old as the 1984 Olympics. I think, in some ways, the use of that cliché here indicates that the author / narrator, on some level at least, realizes that the act of destroying a spider web and then realizing what one has done, is nothing new, and that s/he is just one of a long line of humans who leave destruction wherever they walk.
“And I talk / about ambition!” This is interesting, since the ambition is never really described. Is it the ambition to “walk lightly on the planet”? (Yeah, another cliché – intentional again) Or is it a poet’s ambition? The following lines lead me to believe that it’s an artistic ambition, not a saint’s: “Lean one way, / and see it shimmer lean another, and see / a woven world we move through, break.”
This isn’t only a poet’s ambition, it’s the ambition of an “Olympian” poet, one who takes no responsibility for the breakage, at least not here, because it’s simply her/his job to record it. Again, this is probably a liberal position.
(When I write “liberal”, I include “neoliberal” within it – and, hopefully needless to say, I don’t think there are many present day humans without some liberalism in them. Which raises the question: is liberalism a kind of Foucauldian / Deleuzian & Guattarian “fascism”? Something to think on …)
In any case, “Look / again:”, which follows, is an artist’s injunction.
I find the next bit a little confusing, syntactically speaking:
An Angel-hair
plumb-line – anchored fence-top to rose-tip
ten feet apart, (how could it swing so far
out?) – makes it
short of flying through space
in a grid less secure
than thread.
I don’t really understand how to read this as a sentence. I get how the spider silk looks like an angel hair (btw, I don’t think this a reference to the Jon Cott line “Angel hair sleeps with a boy in my head”); I get how … well cut to the chase: I don’t understand how to get from plumb-line to
makes it
short of flying through space
in a grid less secure
than thread.
Oh well. On to the cat: “My cat Charlie’s face, / as he wobbles toward me, is a blur: / cobweb-whiskers snagged in mist-gray / hedges where webs are thickest.” So the cat is a web-killer, too. But that cat is an innocent, at least in the sense that we usually to take animals to be without choice or moral judgment. So if I broke a web, and Charlie broke a web – even more webs than I did – wow – maybe it’s just my human nature, and maybe we can drop the guilt thing.
In a sense, I get it. Especially if this poem is some kind of metaphor for art. Artists can’t afford to be squeamish. But on another level, human nature is the way liberals/neoliberals ALWAYS get themselves off the hook.
The poem ends with a consideration of the similarities between the author / narrator and the cat:
We move,
each on our separate frequency,
on a trellis of nerve-
ends through which impulses cross synapse,
or fall in the gaps.
I note that the brain’s structure is compared to the spider web. I also note that the last line could read as an explanation re: why her/his ducking still trashed the web: it was a brain-spasm. (Well, this is a book about aging and mortality … so a body that doesn’t always do what the brain wants, and a brain that doesn’t always do what it intends, well, they’re what happens …)
I don’t mean to harsh on Marshall, particularly. I read in a review of this book:
Marshall is a poet of great lyrical intensity, but because he is grievously distressed by the political turmoil of our era, particularly by America's savaging of Iraq, the country of his immigrant father's birth, his poems these days have a decidedly political edge. The steel veil of the title is the “steel veil of empire,” and the undercurrent of social anguish, though rarely obtrusive, is never far from his consciousness – the bitter knowledge that old men are running the world / into the ground they'll soon enter. Note the ironic line break that makes the meaning of that image, as it is completed in the second line, something quite different, more intriguing and altogether unexpected. That turning on the line break is a signature gesture found throughout his poetry and creates the sense of a mind constantly shifting, provisional and multifaceted.
(Steve Kowit, “Shaking the tree with fury: Jack Marshall and Julia Hartwig”, at
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080831/news_1v31rhyme.html Union-Tribune, 31 Aug 08)
It’s just being a liberal limits the options one can see. He didn’t NEED to go into the garden; he could have just said, “Dear Spider, this is our garden, not my garden; today I will find something else to do instead.”
*****
[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.
No comments:
Post a Comment