Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
/Scarecrone
Melissa BroderPublishing Genius 2014
The Living Method
Sara NicholsonThe Song Cave 2014The New Testament’s Book of John begins by glossing Genesis. But whereas the first book of the Bible indicates that things began with God, John 1:1 muddies the waters a bit by telling us that “in the beginning was the Word.” And well – spoiler alert – the Word is God, and Jesus in particular, the Word made flesh.But what is flesh? Flesh is stink and struggle and need. It’s the clash of tooth and claw, necessarily ending in death, that most untoward punctuation. It’s certainly nothing holy (although, from Christianity’s perspective, that was the point).Melissa Broder’s new poetry collection troubles the Christian narrative (and particularly the Catholic Christian narrative) of the redemption of the flesh through language, through the unification of tongue and spirit. Scarecrone offers a separate, particularly female mythos of the body and the making of meaning. An early poem, “Astral Locket,” posits a pre-word, pre-flesh idyll:
She went into the silent roomand in the silent room there had never been a wordonly the breath before the wordand she was deep within herselfher own breathing and the breathing of the wordthe Earth swelling and pumping. . .and it felt good to be bodilessin this pre-word vanishing
The advent of the word into this silent space calls a different world into being, one where death cannot be transcended. In the final verse of the mythic “Power Animals,” Broder writes of the limits of words’ power:
Horses are made of wordsYou can assemble a mare or stallionYou can make an ocean in the bedroomI ride an Arabian down the bedpostI nod at my dead husbandHe rots on the carpetI say make it grow make it growHe says no
In describing this limited, irredeemable world, Scarecrone engages a breviary’s vocabulary. The book is rife with words like liturgy, ritual, judgment, church, resurrection, commandments, saints, consecration, ceremony, salvation, soul. There are multiple rounds of angels. Jesus shows up, as do St. Francis, Satan, Azazel, and Mary Magdalene. There are a couple of references to Eastern spirituality – Buddha, sutras – but these come off as throwaways. Broder’s book is not a gloss-cum-rewrite of just any creation myth, but The Greatest Story Ever Told, with capitals.Yet the religious vocabulary stands in contrast with the poems’ many “mouths,” “holes,” “tongues,” “fucks,” and verging-on-the-relentless “cocks” and “dicks.” Reproduction is the flesh’s poor substitute for immortality, for the eternal salvation that words cannot offer. In “Satisfy the Desolate,” Broder writes “I call it sex/ because I don’t know/ how else to say/ terrified of dying.” Broder is not the first, and she’ll hardly be the last, poet to express thoughts of this nature, but in these poems, there is no beauty in physical intimacy. The flesh united with the word is an insatiable monster of gross need, attempting to distract itself from death:
What does it mean to be so sickwith want that you create ritualswhich lead nowhere? Only to behuman, I think, and less okthan animals.
Animals, at least, don’t indulge in existential despair. They don’t reflect on their desires, on the whys and wherefores of their needs. They don’t weigh their own worth in the balance and find it wanting, as Broder does:
I have wantedmany unfair things.What is most unfairis that the Earth is still okaywith me being hereI think, and evenencourages it.
In the courts of human law, at least, it is said that justice delayed is justice denied – denied to the victim. But Broder’s poems read as those of a criminal asking for the sentence to be handed down post-haste, if only because waiting around is worse than anything that judgment might bring. To stave off death is only to be stuck in the body’s cataclysm of need, preventing a return to the wordless, bodiless void. Cornel West, glossing Heidigger, has called us “beings toward death,” and for Broder, despite the terror, death is a worthy goal. In “Light Control,” she writes:
Teach me to die teach me to dieI want to create a beautiful dyingThe end will need to be dark and softLike walking home to your real mother
Life is a way-station wherein we can only err; death is the lesson by which we learn all that’s worth knowing: “I think you learn by unbeing/ Like first you die and then go oh.”
I am actually still decidingif I am going to stick with language, its tongueand teeth are so peopled and I feelthe universe is trying to ask mesomething else . . . .
Well, it’s the thought that counts and, anyway, Broder is “only in the hotel of bodies/ temporarily.”About two-thirds of the way through the collection, a “mustardseed of okayness” develops; Broder’s narrator flirts with the last stage of grieving: acceptance. A particularly feminine fear of aging (of becoming less beautiful, less desirable, and thus less everything), as described in the angry “Haul,”
Hello porn video.Hello scarecroneon the train.You know we got old.The young are devilsin our dream.They are made of rotten sugar.We are holding onto one carand the car is named tightlike a baby. Call me tightlike a baby.
morphs into “Letter from a Crone,” with its sense of serene dignity:
When you get old the autumns comebearing black pistachiosWhich are not more delicious than green onesbut they are very good.…You were despondentwhen you were no longer youngbut now you are hooked up to a river.
But don’t get too comfortable. Broder’s soon enough back to insisting that life is a cheap trick. Everything that’s born is doomed to die: “Vitality comes/ with too much skull/ and an evil rose on its lips.”It would be easy, I think, to put Scarecrone down after a few poems, to find some excuse to avoid the rest. The book is about something very uncomfortable (the reality of unavoidable death), takes a disquieting view of its subject, and mostly does so in the most direct way possible. As such, it’s hard for me to tell whether the poems I liked most are more successful than others, or just come as a relief. Poems like “Power Animals” and “I Preach a Convincing Sermon” read as allegories, not addresses. The sharpness of their rhetoric paradoxically makes them easier to take than some of the other poems – they are clearly made things, things of art. From “I Preach a Convincing Sermon”:
I say The bodyis a coat. It is a very dark and heavy coatbut worthless. Mother Mary nods from the pews.If I give Mary all my atoms she will plant themin a garden . . . Neither can you make a garden stay. Don’t even try.Every plot becomes a dark city over time.I have collected so many dark ideas over time.I have so many ideas they are a second coat.
For all of us, the word is flesh in a very practical way. We speak with our mouths. We hear with our ears. We read with our eyes and write with our hands. Our minds (or souls) might be able to think words at themselves, but if anyone else is to know what we mean, the medium is the body, the flesh. As Broder posits it, this flesh is caught up in a spiritually painful and ultimately pointless ritual – frantically dashing off messages on its one-way trip toward oblivion, regardless of “the dust/coming and coming.”Whereas Scarecrone put me in mind of an old Spanish cathedral, framing gilded and graphic depictions of St. Lucy with her eyes in a dish of blood, Sara Nicholson’s The Living Method recalled a petri dish handled by the gloved, sterilized hands of a bride of science. Its retelling of language’s origins is a sort of Darwinian corrective to Scarecrone’s religious account. It could be narrated by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, with a similar sort of quiet, rationalist triumphalism:
Language, that reconstructed bird,impresses us with its materials—it sleepswithout skin or description.Made, it is manufactured by no one.
Richard II invented the handkerchiefand he felt very small on that daywhen he waved a red squareat a bigger, more ineradicable blue one.
The book is organized in four sections, each corresponding to a sort of evolutionary epoch in the history of speech. Where Broder eschews poetic diction, Nicholson revels in it. Metaphors pile up against one another, alliteration and assonance are on display, and phrases are sometimes constructed not so much for sense but sound. There were times, particularly in the first section, where this delighting in language grew tiring, tending toward word-salad. “The pluperfect forms of summer” has a nice ring to it, and an air of nerdy mysteriousness. But follow that up with “a swerve of apples,” “a wealth of hieroglyphics,” and the frankly baffling “Io in shrubbery/ an oar mistaken // for a winnowing fan,” and I will be forced to conclude, as Nicholson herself does in the poem from which those latter three examples are taken, that “Whatever’s left of sound exhausts me.”But just as that implies, semantic clarity is not, ultimately, the aim of some of these first poems. Rather, I came to think of them as a kind of primordial soup (to go with your word-salad) in which phrases, like combinations and recombinations of DNA, vied for success. Consider the short poem “Of Matches”:
Unheard within muttonhe makes ballads over the sinkand we hear them, I hear, I felt those in themand all the trees petrified like laceIt is warm
I won’t pretend to know what “unheard within mutton” means but there’s something primeval in the repetition of “we hear . . . I hear,” and viscerally visual in “the trees petrified like lace.” That last “It is warm” is both partial and full of yearning, like a fragment out of Sappho. As Nicholson writes in the later poem “Imaginary Prefaces,” “[t]o call a line a fragment/ is to have faith in the invisible whole[.]”Meaning is in process here, in the act of being made. Language, in The Living Method, is evolving, testing itself against its conditions – and we evolve with it. This may be no more plausible a mythos than one in which language itself is God, and God manifests language as flesh, but it is certainly a positivist (and positive) one. In “The Song of Songs,” Nicholson states:
We will spellthe words we wouldn’t spell,define what appears to us as a song.We is skeletal flowers. The close of nightis dawn dawn dawn.Artifice: the note that wanders.Art: the outer limits of the dark.
It would be difficult to be more forthright in staking a claim for language’s redemptive power (in an Einsteinian cosmic-religious-feeling kind of way) than this section from “I Don’t Know You”:
You had the dream of terrestrial airout of summer, chordata,pink ether treading in a sphere,The sounds that the planets reservefor themselves,the wind discharging itself of the waterit brings, a sentence, a single wordcarved out of the alphabetis enough. One letter is enough.
Scarecrone trucks in a liturgical vocabulary; much of The Living Method’s comes straight out of a grad-level linguistics seminar, with a few SAT words thrown in for good measure. (I, for one, will never actually be able to remember what “prolegomena” means, and thus its use in any text is for me a by-word in erudition, or at least pretention to it). Still, as they present their linguistic allegory, Nicholson’s poems consistently return to words that the first users of human speech might have favored: mountain, sky, trees, sun, birds, stars. There is also an emphasis on song and on music, from which human speech may have evolved. As Nicholson writes in “Contra Nostalgia”:
If there were no trees, there would be no memories.Minus flowers, the referents would plummet.
And in “Paradise,”
The mother of the sentenceDoesn’t modify the sun.She walks through a forestWithout meaning to.…Language is only a formLike the symphonic earth.As for the mother, she breathesWith us upon the garden.
In the third and fourth sections, the book moves on from simple words for simple concepts, and into a more contemporary scene. Nicholson begins to reference JPEGs, computer languages, and Google searches: “No results found/for ‘the commons.’ Did you mean commoners?” As that quotation suggests, The Living Method’s happy rationalist narrative grows fraught. It’s easier to feel wonder at how our ancestors managed to create and be created by speech than to navigate the troubled waters of current discourse, as “The Art of Symmetry” indicates:
My laptop shushes the awethat others feel whenthey look at the sky.I know no songsor dances, just this operaof the plague yearsOther peoplecultivate their gardensI try to think of anotherSpelling of auto-da-fe.
One sign of this troubling of the waters is how wordplay is used in the book. There’s a comparative absence of it in the first two sections of The Living Method. You’ll find there one instance of “grammar” doing a pas-a-dos with “grimoire,” and a cute couplet relying on “phlox” and “phalanx.” But that’s about it, and I was mildly surprised at this on a first reading, given that the book is otherwise so concerned with language as such, stating that “{c}omposition in the abstract/ is what we’re after.” But if puns, homophones, and similar devices are rare birds in the book’s first sections, they become common as robins as the book moves into contemporary time. Here, too, I think Nicholson is on to something.Although the The Living Method’s diction maintains a rationalist distance throughout, irony creates a second type of distance – one that disclaims responsibility, shielding speakers from embarrassment or identification with their subject. Wordplay in The Living Method appears to enact this ironized distance, showing up most frequently in poems where Nicholson confronts language that is meant to obfuscate, to distract, and to manipulate. The language of politics and advertising, in particular, turns the “lyre” into a “liar,” and fractures the reliability of analogy and metaphor:
Birds who disappearbehind the Wal-Martno more embody ourmaterial desiresthan that hyacinthand/or burritoI see them eyingover there in the trashEre I crawled alongthis parapet, in searchof a languagethat could give voiceto the marvelous, Iunderstood the gistof imported fabricsfor the first timeI knew fear
Uh-oh. Much more of this and Nicholson and Broder could sponsor a panel discussion entitled “Language: EPIC FAIL?” And in fact, The Living Method ends on a dark note, with references to the very Satan that its scientific underpinnings should deny, and language itself succumbing to spiritual disease:
The devil writes Latin with one handand Greek with the other – A sicknessfor me, a sickness for you.
Scarecrone and The Living Method ultimately both express a profound ambivalence regarding the purpose and value of words. Maybe we can become immortal through them. Maybe we can express the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Or maybe those things are more than words can bear.____Maureen Thorson is the poetry editor of Open Letters Monthly. Her first book of poems, Applies to Oranges, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2011.
