Karyna McGlynn’s first book, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, won the 2008 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2009. She’s published several chapbooks, including Scorpionica (New Michigan Press, 2007) and Alabama Steve (Destructible Heart Press, 2008).
The Animal: Prose Poetics
Louis E. Bourgeois
BlazeVOX [books], 2008
Can it be an accident that Louis E. Bourgeois’s book The Animal is about bourgeois boredom? OK, that’s not fair—throughout The Animal everyone (not just the bourgeois) is bored with their lives, the world, God, and fireworks, which ultimately are all the same. In fact, Bourgeois suggests boredom is the quintessential human experience, though people may not embrace it as such. The struggle between eradicating boredom and accepting it, which becomes a struggle between believing that the world is created of something or nothing, is at the heart of The Animal. You could call this examination the book’s raison d’être, but only if you still believe such a thing exists by the time you’re done reading.
Bourgeois examines these issues through the prose poem, tending to rely more on the prose part of the form. At times the poems feel more like vignettes, as he introduces a series of characters and scenarios, building whole communities that communicate and overlap. Bourgeois’s lack of lyrical lines or attention to sound, and an overall avoidance of conventional “poetic beauty,” emphasize the prose aspects and leave the reader with a straightforward, nonchalant voice throughout the collection, whether the poem is in first or third person. He practically spells out his reason for this lack of lyricism in the poem “Statements Against Existence,” which lists four numbered thoughts, ending with “All beauty, all lyricism, will end and turn into skepticism—skepticism is the final stopping point before annihilation.” Indeed, each poem places its speakers on the brink of annihilation, skeptical of their purpose and in a world without obvious beauty. This lack of lyricism gives strength to the poems, as it resists sentimentality and highlights the surrealism of the characters, scenes, and images.
The reader can see annihilation encroaching on Bourgeois’s world as each character realizes that his or her worldly and spiritual pursuits are pointless or boring—in most cases, boring because they are pointless. This dilemma plays out in the poem “Bone Gatherer’s Blues.” The three-stanza poem opens with the image of a neat stack of 1,000 bird skulls “boiled and bleached” in a ramshackle cottage, collected by the bone gatherer over the course of her life. This image is captivating, creepy, and beautiful because it exists with no poetic tools gussy it up. The second stanza delves into the bone gatherer’s conflict, and here the book’s central struggle with boredom is on display:
But one morning, pallor spread across her whole body and she wanted to die. She thought, I have spent all this time killing and boiling and it has come to naught. I could have had a normal life; husband, child, dog, house, car. I have wasted my life on a mystical pursuit that I thought would bring me enlightenment, instead it has only bored me—the bones mean nothing.
In Bourgeois’s world, even an activity as strange as killing and boiling birds is boring—just as boring as a “normal” bourgeois life in the suburbs. However, what really matters is not that the bone gatherer is bored with her life, but the cause of the boredom. When she realizes this once-mystical pastime really has no meaning, she is bored. Replace “bone gathering” with something like “writing” or “religion,” and the last line could be said of any worldly pursuit.
In fact, in the poem “Faux Dieu” (French for “false god”), Bourgeois presents a new creation myth, told in the first person by the Faux Dieu, that explicitly expresses the meaninglessness of existence. Faux Dieu says he first created the stars, planets, and moons because he was bored, nothing else: “I was creating in order to amuse myself, not out of any virtuous principle whatsoever.” After being admonished for this act by his father, the implied “real God” who is nothingness, and his mother, “Eternal Night”—another kind of nothingness—he can’t help but continue to create, and so life and time come into existence, a sheer accident. The Faux Dieu says:
And now I have created all this life, and I am remorseful because the poor living entities were somehow—from my sloppy alchemy—imbued with Purpose and Hope; they suffer in such a way that I will never comprehend.
His one consolation is that his father—nothingness—will wipe out the creations soon and it will be “as if they never had existed.” Through this humorous, dark poem, Bourgeois lays out the central cause of suffering throughout the book: existence simply does not matter. It is ironic, however, that the Faux Dieu began creating out of boredom, seeing this grand act as a simple pastime, whereas the humans have the opposite problem, taking trivial things and imbuing them with importance, only to become bored and suffer.
With its nonchalant treatment of absurd and surreal events, the voice throughout the book is reminiscent of Zachary Schomburg’s The Man Suit, which itself is reminiscent of James Tate’s work. Though the matter-of-fact treatment of strangeness is similar to Schomburg’s, Bourgeois’ poetry differs in resisting beauty and sincerity, choosing to depict violent scenes and apathetic characters. In this way, the content of the poems recalls the work of Maggie Nelson, particularly her collection Jane: A Murder, though Bourgeois’ speakers keep a distance from the violence, in contrast to Nelson’s. The combination of casual voice, strange violence, and prose poem form makes The Animal read more like twisted parables than poems: Aesop’s fables meet the Brothers Grimm, but in the 21st century.
Such violence can be seen in the poem “The Fourth of July,” which opens benignly enough with a town watching a July 4th fireworks display but unable to feel affected by it. But the poem immediately takes a violent turn:
Someone finally piped up after an hour of interminable silence in the crowd, “Is it just me, or do you feel like going home and putting a bullet in your head?”
Everyone in the crowd agrees, even the children, and they feel “a great sense of euphoria” at the thought of mass suicide, until “some jerk” says they should all keep living, just for fun, just to see what will happen. The townspeople follow this man’s advice, go home, get drunk, and wish it were the end of history. Mass suicide, children wanting to die, and euphoria for death—all of these are violent and even gruesome, yet in Bourgeois’ straightforward voice, they’re also funny, especially since “some jerk” prevents the violence. Once again, Bourgeois returns to his examination on the meaninglessness of life without becoming tedious. Even in lamentation, the poems are fierce and alive.
The Animal remains unsettling and unapologetic throughout, as Bourgeois forces the reader to consider grand questions without the comfort of beauty or sentimentality. This must be how a collection that revolves around boredom manages never to bore.
Rebecca Guyon holds an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, 6×6, Octopus, Parcel, Strange Machine, cold-drill, and more. She has reviews published or forthcoming in The Hollins Critic and Galatea Resurrects.
Dismantling the Hills
Michael McGriff
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008
I grew up with the smell of work. Sometimes that smell was hot metal from the powder metal factories where my father and my brothers were employed. Sometimes it was the paper mill drifting down the river on foggy mornings. Most of the time, however, it was the lumbermill two blocks from my home. I can honestly say that the smell of burning wood and sawdust wafting into my memories is the first reason I fell in love with the poems found in Michael McGriff’s Dismantling the Hills, winner of the 2007 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for a first full-length collection of poems. In a world of wood dust and debris, McGriff finds both loss and hope in the towns of the Pacific Northwest.
Many contemporary poets divide their books into sections, but McGriff resists this trend, and after reading the whole book, it’s easy to see why. Every poem is carefully crafted from the Pacific Northwest landscape, almost as if the poet himself is whittling stories and characters from wood. There is no need for sections offering different explorations of one specific theme. Every piece is a rustic work of art, and from the very first poem, it’s apparent why the poet knows his craft so well. In “Iron,” we see a narrator who struggles to leave a place that simply won’t let him go:
My blood fills with so much iron I’m pulledto a place in the hard earth where the windgrinds over the ridge bearing the wheels of tanker trucksoiling the access roads, where deer ruin the last of the plums,where the sloughs shrink back to their deepest channels,and I can turn away from nothing.
As readers, we should be glad that this narrator only made it “as far as the county line,” for it is through this careful eye that we see not just the physical world of the Pacific Northwest, but its people. Yes, there are dust roads, lumber piles, mill ponds, but beyond the physical landscape are the people who live and work in this world.
Some poems are stories of families. In “Seasons Between Night and Day,” we see the narrator’s family in the moments of his father’s last day at work:
My mother sleeps. Somewhere between her and the stars,my father and hundreds of other menpunch out of Georgia Pacific’s sawmill forever,the forklifts behind them at half-mast,other machines chained to bargeswith Japanese namesbefore the workers file from the alien yard.
And then, lines later, this same young boy watches his father in the bathroom shaving: “this morning I enter the kingdom / of my father’s hands as they scrape away / one face for another.”
Other poems show people dealing with transitions in their lives. In “Entering the Kingdom” a blind woman with eyes “the milk of blue granite” sits in her living room thinking of a visit earlier from a lawyer “who came with a letter / from the city, a letter / condemning her three and a half acres / for the new pipeline.” In “My Uncle Would Visit,” a relative “who never left / Oregon or the town limit” visits his family from the state hospital, and tells stories of “the skies / of Kansas City / how they would fill / with carrier pigeons.” At first glance, it would be rather easy to put the characters found in McGriff’s collection into two categories: those who long to stay in a world where there seems to be little help, and those who long to be someone else, but are trapped.
But McGriff is doing more than merely recording stories of others. Each poem incorporates a narrator who not only details this world, but adds insight. For instance, in “The Last Temptation of Christ” we hear a voice that proclaims, “I read the Bible literally,” and then, a few lines later, rhetorically asks, “Why wouldn’t I?” before explaining his beliefs:
I’ve watched my father
rip lumber with a Skilsaw straightas a table saw with a fence. Every winter
watched men put in weeks of double shifts
at the mill. My mother working untilher wrists had to be cut open, the tendons
rewired.
McGriff, with his attention to a struggling world, reminds me of contemporary poets Sherry Fairchok, whose Palace of Ashes looks at the Anthracite region of Eastern Pennsylvania, and Paula Bohince, whose Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods follows the ghosts of a rural Pennsylvania farm. (Yes, these two choices are a bit biased – I’m from Pennsylvania myself.) His harsh world is not without hope. With every poem, he reaches beyond a seemingly ruined landscape to find beauty and solace. Certainly this is a collection where the reader will understand the comfort of home in any kind of world. As for McGriff’s world, if you do not shake the sawdust from your hands when you are through with his collection, you have not read hard enough.
Karen J. Weyant’s most recent poetry can be seen in 5 AM, Barn Owl Review, and Slipstream. Her first chapbook, Stealing Dust, was published by Finishing Line Press. She lives and teaches in western New York.