A poem from YOUR OX-HEAD MASK AS PROOF by GEORGE KALAMARAS

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

“Affirmation” from Your Ox-Head Mask As Proof by George Kalamaras

(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, NY, 201O)

Affirmation

Charles Mingus was one-third Chinese.

He, too, came to the study of bones

His bass was a bone. His toe was a bone.

He’d sit and pick chicken groans from his soup.

Yesterday I was thinking how a woman with preferential breasts could derive such

     pleasure just from drinking milk.

I was half expecting Lorca’s lobster and a mandibular insignia in my throat.

I lay belly-down on the naked sheet. What would himself if he heard an unnecessary

     detail?

Where might his mouth and his opium dividend derive?

The coffee pot is brewing a functional family holding hands.

Someone has asked to borrow the car to retrieve frozen okra from the furnace.

The way an executioner marvels at the hood.

The way a falconer continuously returns for fresh meat.

I dreamed bees entrails alight with cosmic fire.

They were smeared across the walls of a cave, hung to decorate the cavity of a

horse’s chest.

I am deeply calm, courageous and at peace.

I am deeply calm, courageous and at peace.

*

In these “reviews”, which to be honest are not reviews, but readings, I have written a bit about the narrative drive. I have written about narrative as if its only form was story. It’s time now to add that there’s a type of narrative I might call affective narrative, one which is driven along by affectivity. Perhaps this is dependent on some subliminal logic of imagery.

And I could add that there’s a narrative that’s made by music. No story, just the tunes, the beats, the syncopations, the dance of the syllables.

I’d “classify” “Affirmation” as musical-affective rather than story-driven. It’s very image-heavy, very tuneful, very driving. Here’s the review: it works for me.

Let’s read:

Charles Mingus was one-third Chinese.

He, too, came to the study of bones

His bass was a bone. His toe was a bone.

He’d sit and pick chicken groans from his soup.

Since people have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc, it’s very odd to be classified one-third anything. So there’s a slight strangeness from the beginning. In fact, Mingus was one-third Chinese, born to a black father and Chinese-American mother. But the accuracy of the statement doesn’t disturb the strangeness of it.

“He, too, came to the study of bones”: the “too” is a gross racial exaggeration on the one hand, since how many Chinese actually study oracle bones, yet on the other hand a re-affirmation of Mingus’s oddness and atypicality.

In spite of its semantic strangeness (how is a bass a bone? Chicken groans?) The next stanza makes perfect sense to anyone familiar with Mingus’s music. He could apparently extract, no, discover, the soul, the bone-truth, of anything. 

With the next stanza the poem leaves Mingus and moves into new territory:

“Yesterday I was thinking how a woman with preferential breasts could

 derive such pleasure just from drinking milk.

I was half expecting Lorca’s lobster and a mandibular insignia in my throat.”

This looks a lot like surrealism but I don’t think it is. Surrealism is an actual specific politico-artistic state of mind and creative “method.” I think this makes use of surrealist-style imagery but I don’t think it’s actual automatic writing, or anything like that . It’s the kind of writing that Joy Katz calls a bit into question in her recent piece in Pleiades, http://www.ucmo.edu/pleiades/current_issue/documents/SymposiumonSentiment.pdf “When ‘Cold’ Poems Aren’t”, in which she writes things like

We don’t want to be naive, and we want to write in our time. So how can sentiment work now? The dis-ease many contemporary poets continue to feel about narrative, epiphany, and the one-to-one correspondence between cities, landscapes, and physics in the real world and cities, landscapes, and physics in poems — all the old trappings of poetry — accounts for a pretty ubiquitous distrust of sentiment. Sentiment is feeling, and we feel with our real bodies in real time. Sentiment is sincere. That’s one reason for the mass of poems on the ironic end of the irony-sincerity continuum, many of which feature surrealism. Surrealism distances the world. It is as compelling a strategy as any in poetry, but it’s easier, right now, to write poems with dance floors full of water torturers wearing lingerie than it is to find a non-icky way to feeling.

I have several problems with what she writes. I will leave aside her (apparent) complete lack of understanding of what surrealism is (probably the most engaged type of art practice of the last 100 years) and her conflation of it with a kind of surprising image-intensive writing. What’s important to contest, I think, is the false dichotomy she makes between the “sincerity” of sentiment and the “artifice” of what she calls surrealism. In art, forever and for always, sincerity has only been made possible by the highest artifice. I think she is led to her false dichotomy, I think it comes about because of her desire “to find a non-icky way to feeling.” I think she gets herself in trouble by privileging the “non-icky”. Which seems a particularly odd thing to privilege, given the utter ickiness of the time in which we live. I don’t say it’s impossible, I just don’t understand why it’s necessary to privilege it. As Aristotle writes in another context, “Being can be said in many ways.”

I only bring this up to suggest that Kalamaras is in no way avoiding sentiment; he’s also refusing to avoid the “icky.”

“Yesterday I was thinking how a woman with preferential breasts could

 derive such pleasure just from drinking milk.”

I don’t want to go deeply into all the possible meanings this line might have, because in this reading I’m more interested in the affective than in digging out some sort of story. But it’s pretty obvious to me that there’s some hint of autophagy here which gives that author / narrator the creeps, which I, the reader, can pick up on. There are cultural references (“preferential breasts”), which somehow make the creepiness even creepier, as if some female celebrity lunching at the Ivy were to forego the meal on her plate and to begin to suckle herself on her own breasts …

The next line, syntactically connected the this one, continues, and deepens the strangeness and creepiness:

“I was half expecting Lorca’s lobster and a mandibular insignia in my throat.”

Lorca’s Lobster? I quote Wikipedia again (the article on duende):

According to Christopher Maurer, editor of “In Search of Duende”, at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding him that “ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head”; …

Somehow the reverie of the (autophagic?) woman transports the author / narrator to a deep realm where awareness is heightened … I assume that the mandibular insignia is the mark of the lobster, who, standing in for a sudden psychic chill, has clutched him by the throat …

The images grow creepier and creepier:

I lay belly-down on the naked sheet. What would himself if he heard an

 unnecessary detail?

Where might his mouth and his opium dividend derive?

Whether the naked sheet is bed or paper, I don’t know. But it’s followed by two question that, while suggestive, don’t even make sense, except affectively. (And yes, the “opium dividend” could be this poem …) The strangeness and unpleasantness of the imagery continue to build. I won’t attempt to trace how all this happens, or what may lie beneath the images the way I did with the lobster, except in one case:

I dreamed bees entrails alight with cosmic fire.

They were smeared across the walls of a cave, hung to decorate the cavity of

 a horse’s chest.

This is clearly a version Judges 14:8. I won’t refer to the Bible, I’ll refer instead to Reverend Gary Davis’s “Sampson and Delilah”:

Well old Samson and the lion got attacked
Samson he jumped up on the lion's back
So you read about this lion had killed a man with his paws
But Samson got his hand in the lion's jaws
He rid that beast until he killed him dead
And the bees made honey in the lion's head

Good God!

If I had my way
If I had my way
If I had my way
I would tear this old building down

If I had my way
If I had my way in this wicked world
If I had my way
I would tear this old building down

I refer to this version to make it clear that the story of the bees and the lion still carries a lot of emotional and political weight. But Kalamaras twists it, so that instead of a lion, we have a horse’s carcass. I am reminded of the screaming horse in Guernica, the eels in the horse’s head in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, of the horse’s head from The Godfather, etc.

“Affirmation” builds to a climax of sorts with the last two lines:

I am deeply calm, courageous and at peace.

I am deeply calm, courageous and at peace.

But this climax is not the end. This is clearly a mantra designed to control agitation. It’s pretty clear, I think, that is highly unlikely to be affective for (to put it mildly) quite some time.

Now, I don’t want to harp on Katz, but this poem (and many others I can think of) is one that utterly destroys the distinction she is trying to make, between sentiment and surrealist-like imagery. It destroys it by refusing to care about the ickiness factor. It simply takes what it needs to build to the appropriate affective effect. I think that this is an important lesson for all poets, all artists, to build the work out of the necessary materials, and to damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. 

*****

[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.