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Number
288
August/September 2001
Ravishment
CHRIS
TYSH
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
THE PARADISE OF FORMS: Selected Poems, by
Aaron Shurin, Talisman House Publishers, Jersey
City, New Jersey, 1999, 142 pages, $14.95 paper.
Available from Small Press Distribution.
Like a handsome stranger you bump into at a
cocktail party without exchanging a word, Shurin's
writing has hailed me with its mysterious grace for
years, always leaving behind that unmistakable
longing. Dang! you say, this stuff is good.
Perhaps, a tux, in any case, evening clothes,
suave, chic, intimate and yet something's awry,
ever so slightly, a small detail gives it away, an
intimation of private tenebrum, some penalties
levied for so much beauty,
A hooded countenance that offers the jetty of
romance.
(from A Possible Life, page 36)
Or maybe I'm dreaming of the perfect
crème brûlée: burned on top,
crispy sugar I take tiny bites of, breaking through
to the smooth creamy perfection below.
Aaron Shurin's book The Paradise of Forms
is about ravishment and the interminable sweet
wrenching music box of the heart. Not that the
poems which span two rich decades grind out their
stuff like a hapless traveling hurdy-gurdy man but
rather because the lyricism they evince is the
admission of man's pleasure and its inevitable
loss.
As the jouissance they proffer can only
live in words, the poet finds himself held in the
compulsive logic of both marking and surviving that
loss. Like Isis recomposing the beloved's body,
Shurin must rebind what has been spilled on the
sheet; revive the stoppered pulse, each time he
faces the black and white measures of his art. Such
is the imperial movement of voluptas.
swallowed on purpose to make the taker have
bliss, all the world are nothing like lips, hairs,
cheeks. in the breath hear speak faith, make love
groan in swear my judgment in deeds. full star
ushers in those eyes; become then heart for me in
every part. me from myself taken and my next self
of him, keeps my heart his guard and that is me.
Under that bind beauty all to use, more than enough
shall in others shine, receives in abundance me
that I come so near. And, admitted there, fulfill
untold hold. know best to be anchored in common
place, this world is simple truth in seeming trust.
age have years to justify tongue; use power: tell
love outright (from Artery, page 55)
Although Paradise includes a generous
selection from at least six different manuscripts,
one poetic form seems to impose itself as being
particularly suited to the author's concern.
Developed by a number of Language-associated
poets----and at times it looked as if taking their
cues from painters who did everything but paint,
poets had forsaken the 'poem'---the prose stanza is
here a key player.
Supple yet muscular, lyric yet analytic,
irregular yet rhythmic, capable of both movement
and stasis, this unit of composition justifies
Shurin's predilection for it. Shurin's stanzas have
the impudent charm of a pin-up and the falsely
unstructured elegance of style. As the Beau
Brumells of the world will tell you, if you can
define it, you don't have it.
appearances, after all, may be only
speculations; identities are of the real. hold me
by the hand, that is subtle air, impalpable,
curiously words hold untellable, reason confound
us, sense surround us, he travels to me and these
are the shining things I perceive. I walk in the
fable of a man, charged with points of view, skies
of colors, densities, and something yet to be
known…
(from City of Men, page 60)
What we do see with a surveyor's sense of
clarity is a landscape etched, "Cut, tattooed,
& hot-belted / across the middle," ("Raving
#25, Vernal Equinox"), whose language draws up vast
enigmas, tracts and ravines, calling the desiring
machines by name, singing their amorous disorder as
if one could fathom the depths, "the difference
between you and me," ("The Wheel," part III), as if
one could countersign such ruination, burn out such
a wound. Among the temptations and the continuous
thunder of bodies, Shurin carves out a poetics of
male subjectivity that is infinitely complex,
prodigal and sublime for the way it deals with the
gay imaginary, and for its radical song that has
both the intimacy of a love letter and the daily
plainness of public address.
I lie in your arms. I kiss your mouth. Use your
nails, creature. Our roles---the crown, the
infractions---inhabit this sanctified place to the
point of fanaticism. I have to get my hands on the
world.
(from "Human Immune")
And it is precisely this urgency "to keep the
body forward," as Shurin wrote in 1988 in the
Postscript to City of Men, and to touch "the
split field of / darkness & light" ("Raving
#25, Vernal Equinox") that gives Paradise its
material bedding like a river we come to after the
siege.
Each reader will enter these pages with a
different retinue wanting to kill the messenger or
take the hill depending on his/her plat du jour but
no one will be blind to the unnerving beauty of
stepping into this fabled realm, like a rare
hybrid, half Fellini, half Genet.
The road, night, rubble: are you
sleepwalking?
(from "Sphere")
In this lyric heaven, the poems drape themselves
over the risers like somnolent divas in various
stages of undress, the words' shapes and sounds so
extravagant in their polymorphous truths, one is
tempted to hush all the rest: "a child is building
a dream house" ("Reaching Particle").
In a culture deadened by surfeit and a permanent
déjà-vu aesthetics, Aaron Shurin has
cut a path which not only links him to the likes of
Robert Duncan, John Wieners, and Jack Spicer
(though I also detect the sexier than sex aura
of l'incomparable Monique Wittig, sa
soeur) but lets him claim a prominent place in
contemporary American letters. His is a language
steeped in the revolutionary inventiveness of the
seventies and eighties, and the liberatory
practices of his generation. The Paradise of
Forms becomes the indispensable record of these
tumultuous decades where the search for poetic
forms has been parallel to the critique of norms,
bourgeois values and canonical texts. The paradise
in question posits a Rimbaldian elsewhere, away
from the repressive conformism so that a new
language might engender a novel, yet to be dreamt
of, world.
I return to the passage, for example, without
time and the weather being fixed, to see for a
second the opaque body that gave the plain little
phrase its secret longing. (from "The
Ingredients")
Chris Tysh teaches Creative Writing and
Women's Studies at Wayne State University in
Detroit and serves as Poetry Editor for
UnderWire, an electronic journal
(www.underwire.net). Her newest book is
Continuity Girl from United Artists.
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