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Number
286
September October 2000
Words, I's,
Worlds:
The
Duplicity of
Language
RUSTY MORRISON
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
THE FATHER OF THE PREDICAMENTS, by Heather
McHugh, Wesleyan/University Press of New England,
1999, 96 pages, $19.95 cloth
RAVE, POEMS 1975--1999, by Olga Broumas,
Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington,
1999, 364 pages, $16.00 paper, $28.00
cloth.
With so much fevered pronouncement these days
decrying the state of poetry, and so many fractious
articulations of what a poem is and isn't, of what
it should and shouldn't do, it is encouraging to
note how many poets continue to bear brazen,
delicious, if decidedly hybrid, fruit---despite (or
perhaps because of) the weedy chaos of our
cacophonous garden. Many demonstrate an uncanny
ability to reflect our chimeric period's
philosophic and aesthetic lineage, yielding work
which manifests both the leonine grace of Wallace
Stevens's position that "poetic truth is an
agreement with reality" and the slyly serpentine
slither of Jean Baudrillard's revelation that "it
is now impossible to isolate the process of the
real, or to prove the real." It is exciting to see
the diverse strategies poets use to expose the
artificiality of such notions as simple narrative's
'manifest destiny', or the 'authenticity' of a
'constructed' speaking subject, in their attempts
to produce an enlivened, enlivening poetry, what
Lyn Hejinian engagingly describes as restoring our
sense that "this is happening."
As Jane Miller puts it, we have
…a contemporary poetry with a propensity
for intimacy and real time that attempts to include
many versions (recollections) without, finally,
losing the time of narration.…[an] the
intentional roving voice willing to disassemble
itself, fragment, collapse if necessary, and not
necessarily recombine or resurface as the same, or
slightly more enlightened, self.
(Working Time, page 7)
Here are two such poets, each in her own way
incorporating the use of an intimately experienced,
albeit unorthodox 'I', in her efforts to press the
boundaries, not only of simple recounted narrative,
but also of the many other systemic confinements
which we often accept without scrutiny---be they
personal, societal, grammatical. While each poet
examines in her own way the limits of perception,
the deceptions of memory, the gap between
experience and mimetic representation, each grounds
such work in the circumstances of life, whether
intellectual, sexual, social, or political.
Of particular interest to both Heather McHugh
and Olga Broumas is the examination of 'word's'
limitations at expressing 'world'. Such questioning
makes a powerful search engine when fueled with the
nitty gritty subjectivity of lived lives. As
Broumas says in one of her end notes in
Rave, we live "in the lugubrious,
cacophonous chaos of the imperial globe absorbed in
its Babel complex" (page 361). Both McHugh and
Broumas recount experiences which make apparent the
duplicity inherent in language, even as they
reflect that language is our only link to knowing
each other, and ourselves. Such experiences are as
disruptively disturbing as they are immediately
recognizable, reminding us of how often, in the
midst of our own life crises, language has failed
us. How easily, in the midst of crisis, word
dislodges from meaning as we have understood it.
Often the only 'language' of such inexpressible
experience is our silence, an absence of words
which becomes inscribed in our memory of the
events.
It is just such inscription, the markings of
such 'silences', that McHugh illuminates in the
long poem beginning The Father of the
Predicament. While the death of a beloved
friend and mentor is the poem's subject, from the
outset we are aware of McHugh's overarching
intention to show the ways that meaning can
withdraw from language as mysteriously, as
fearsomely, as life can leave the dying. Everywhere
in McHugh's collection we find this awareness, even
in simple statements like this poem's title: "Not a
Prayer." Such apparently straightforward phrases,
when presented by McHugh, often twist in the midst
of our voicing them, turning to opposite intent.
Changelings, they remind us that nothing may be
simply what it seems. Phrases like these, which
McHugh is a master at drawing our attention to, are
of course ubiquitous in common speech, yet we
rarely catch the multiplicity of implication in our
own words. In this title, the simple, elegiac
resonance of a 'denial of prayer' shifts ironically
to sound the darker, sardonic cliché that
expresses 'not a chance'. Such shifting ground,
both of tone and intent, open the reader to
experience directly, not only the type of
conflicting emotions that losing a loved one can
evoke, but also, as McHugh has said in her prose:
"the evasions, displacements, substitutions, and
detours language affords the sayer." (Broken
English, page 61)
We enter this multi-sectioned, fifteen page poem
through a short section comprised of two tightly
wrought tercets. Though rich with interior
close-rhyme and assonance, the meter jars the ear,
reflecting an experience not unlike the edgy nerves
of anxious travelers.
We sleep inside a bullet ---
cheek to cheek, in public
anonymity---and then we wake. We do
not speak. The sun's
a red-eye, and the earth
a fast blue rushing underneath.
(page 3)
The images of "bullet," "red-eye,"
"earth…underneath" suggest an arrival by plane
in a clipped tone of short-tempered cynicism. The
sentence order of the tercets and declarative
intentionality of "We do not speak" imply the irony
of 'sharing' the intimacy of sleep with strangers,
as well as the attendant discomfort in the
awareness that such experiences can be more, rather
than less, isolating. But inextricably woven into
the scene is the Plath-like resonance of a larger
metaphoric intent: that for all of us, whether we
are asleep to our "public / anonymity," or awake to
our dilemma of alienation, we merely go on: "We do"
endlessly (a telling break, not only of the line,
but also for the division of tercets). But despite
our 'doing' we cannot find the means to speak to
each other, to attend to each other and be heard.
We live suspended, even as a plane is suspended,
between a "red-eye," an image of sun that offers no
semblance of any heavenly benevolence, and an
"earth," described in the last line's appositive
without even a concrete noun to solidify it. There
is only the slippery subject of that last line,
which is either the gerund, "rushing," or the
color, "blue." Either way, it's all searingly
construed movement, no ground.
Observing and recording just such inexorable
movement is in fact central to McHugh's project.
The irrevocable movement of the dying toward death
is what the reader first apprehends in this poem.
But underlying that is McHugh's purposeful tracking
of the relentless movement of mind itself, a
movement which is of course acutely pronounced when
mind is under the pressure of such terrible loss.
This movement is embodied, rather than articulated,
so that the reader's intimate experience of
mind---her own, as well as McHugh's---is
foregrounded. Most obviously, McHugh manifests this
by repeatedly reconstituting the internal
consistencies of each section so as to resemble the
quality of mind's lightning quick shifts of mood,
pace, and attention. Sections might include prose
blocks, recounted dialogue, interior asides,
tightly crafted lyric. Also made evident is the way
that mind breaks through its sense of time's
linearity during such periods of crisis. Snatches
of experience kaleidoscope and reconfigure as
McHugh moves briskly both back and forward in
time---reconstituting experience based on the
resonance, the magnetism that one event has for
another, its essential emotional valence, rather
than any strict chronology.
Here is the second section of the poem, which
leaps forward to present the chronological end of
the experience by offering an image of the corpse,
even as it brings the dying woman vibrantly,
poignantly to life through her words:
"You've come into my life," she says. And
then
"I want for you to understand." A night
and a day and a night from then,
I'll understand all right, helping to hook
around her corpse's chin and ears
the strap that keeps
a speaking-place from gaping.
(page 3)
We are immediately apprised of the outcome of
this journey: death and silence. In this way,
McHugh begins with the tragedy complete, stealing
from us the vicarious thrill ride of a narrative's
climactic crescendo, and thus making plain that her
project is not to attempt simple verisimilitude.
Here too she clarifies that whatever understanding
the speaker will glean from these events will
culminate only through the physical act of keeping
the "speaking-place from gaping," and through
having lived the experiences which bring her to
that act. Such events are not containable,
translatable in words, just as the death of a loved
one cannot be reduced to the artful explication of
it in poetry. Yet McHugh's poem is rich with the
experiences that we can glean from it, our direct
experiences of the impact her language has upon us.
Here, despite the fact that her words tell us the
mouth will be finally closed, McHugh's description
craftily ends with the image of that terrible
openness, split off from the previous stanza,
leaving it firmly, actively in our minds. It is a
continuous "gaping" without even the particulars of
words like 'lips' or 'mouth' to preoccupy and
protect us from its wide emptiness, which reflects
the irreconcilable gap between life and death, as
well as between every word uttered and the meaning
it cannot contain.
The most vividly demonstrated enactments of the
gap between words and their meanings come in the
sections which present the speaker's attempt to
understand her dying friend's speech. In each, the
larger implications of such failures are
inescapable.
"Yesterday yesterday I was [and here she
falls asleep for seven minutes]
yesterday I was full of new [she falls asleep
for three] new life new life
but today but today new life but today [she
falls asleep eleven minutes]
I am full of full of yesterday I was [she falls
asleep] was full of new life
but today I am full of of [come back, come
back, I tell one of her sons,
the sentence has a structure, when she falls asleep
she's not forgetting]
but today [she falls asleep, he can't believe
me] I am full of but today
I'm full of [somebody is calling him from
somewhere else and then
he's gone] but today I am full of…
[now she'll tell me, now I'll know]
…I'm full of finished…"
[Full of finished? is the last word AFTER
the ellipsis? should it be
attached to how instead of what, she meant? which
parts were talking
about talking, should I put some
quotes in quotes? some kind
of mind inside the mind, some
time inside, or out? or what? This bracket
is the writer's. Who
are you? are you? are you?]
(page 5--6; all ellipses are the poet's)
Here McHugh manages to directly, even
humorously, expose the frustrations of a writer's
thwarted attempts at verisimilitude. But this
repeated interrogation, "Who are you?"---which in
its repetition comes to implicate the reader as
well---moves us to one of the central issues of
this collection: the question of being, and our
flawed explication of it through words. In the
section immediately following this one, McHugh
further develops this issue by introducing the
phrase "the father of the predicaments":
Her husband is her caretaker, and he's
half-deaf. The conferences he
ought to whisper with his sons, about some
undertakerly details, turn
out to be a yelling kind of telling---she can hear:
her eyes snap open.
Leaning fast into her frequencies, I chant
some species of a muffling song: "Don't worry,
everything will be OK,
everything will be OK," the hymn I used when my own
mother
wept, my father threw his plate against the wall.
The father of the
predicaments, wrote Aristotle's translator, is
being. Yes, but nothing
you can translate can be true. So when the powers
of the universe have
got
the future all wrapped up again, I lean back
from her ear and repossess
my listening-spot, here at the foot of her chair,
at the tip of her hand.
She wets her lips. She's saying something.
"Everything," she says.
(page 6)
McHugh makes it clear that one can trust no
translations---not from word to word, nor by
implication, from actions to words---including her
own. With her "hymn" of "everything will be OK"
McHugh presents a child's inability to translate
for herself the meaning of adult behavior, as well
as an allusion to her distrust of religion's
ability to offer anything beyond a placation of
life's anxieties. As is often the case in human
interactions, McHugh shows that this speaker's
words, "Don't worry…," are aimed to give
comfort, not clarity. Here they prevent the dying
woman from hearing more than she needs to know. But
McHugh, as poet, is attempting no obfuscation when
she suggests that the antecedent to all our
troubles with understanding each other, and
ourselves, is 'being' itself---a state that we can
neither fully comprehend, nor express, nor escape,
at least not in this life.
If the father of the predicaments is being, then
perhaps it is fair to suggest that the mother of
the predicaments McHugh offers to us is movement,
particularly movement of mind as it attempts to
realize itself in the act of being. Of course
neither being nor movement can be reduced to words.
Movement can be described, but all description is
inevitably a static facsimile, a failed container.
And the idea of being encompasses so completely our
experience of everything that language---which
must, by its nature, point and limit---cannot
express it. As Umberto Eco in explaining
Aristotle's thinking tells it: "Being is the
horizon, or the amniotic fluid in which our thought
actually moves." There is no way to embrace its
circumference with our understanding. Yet, as Eco
points out, the inexpressible everythingness of
being is at the core of our Indo European
"subject-copula-predicate structure" of speech.
"Being is that which enables all such subsequent
definitions to be made." Even when we try to talk
about nothingness, we bring it into our experience
of 'being' by using the copula 'is'. Being, which
is at the core of our ability to speak at all,
cannot itself be defined, cannot be spoken of.
(Eco, Kant and the Platypus, page
17--24)
Yet it is McHugh's dexterity at demonstrating
this failure of language to express what is
essential to its nature---and, by extension,
essential to our lives---which makes her poems so
irrepressibly lively, so chock full of the
paradoxes of 'being' in the act of being. Not only
her words, but even the breaks between stanzas, and
spaces between sections, inevitably speak to us.
Their instances of implied emptiness open our
awareness to what has inevitably gotten "all
wrapped up" in McHugh's expression of so much
failed translation---an experience of the absence
behind the 'everything' of being itself, which is
as irrefutable as it is inexpressible. As McHugh
has explained in her prose: "All poetry is
fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every
turn. It is the very art of turnings, toward the
white frame of the page, toward the unsung, toward
vacancy made visible, that wordlessness in which
our words are couched." (Broken English,
page 75)
It is this ineffable, untranslatable
wordlessness which McHugh makes vividly palpable.
One can sense it in the open spaces of this poem's
text and in the all inclusive meaninglessness of
words like the one that the dying woman finally
speaks: "Everything." Such resonant, satisfyingly
paradoxical moments are McHugh's trademark. In the
midst of her depictions, she reminds us of how
little can be contained with depiction; in the
midst of such limitations, she shows how
apprehending such limitation offers a sense of the
movement of awareness itself.
Maurice Blanchot has said that
…in imaginary space things are
transformed into that which cannot be
grasped. Out of use, beyond wear, they are not in
our possession but are the movement of
dispossession which releases us both from them and
from ourselves.…this space is the poem's
space, where no longer is anything present, where
in the midst of absence everything speaks,
everything returns to the spiritual accord which is
open and not immobile but the center of eternal
movement.
("The Work and Death's Space," page 141)
It is this order of 'transformation' that McHugh
engages in, relentlessly unhinging our structures
of knowing, particularly our faith in language to
mean, even as she links that awareness inextricably
to our experience of living in the world. For this
reason, these poems do not leave us bereft.
Instead, they infect us with a desire to open
further into the paradox which we recognize as
being, and in observing ourselves in the midst of
our own acts of observation, to catch a sense of
the endlessness of such movement, which is perhaps
a glimpse of eternity.
McHugh's most insistent strategy for drawing our
attention to the slipperiness of such activity is
by attuning our ear to etymology. Often she plays
us with her lightening quick diction shifts: from
eloquently witty to a gritty, humorous realism.
"For Raya" begins
We were presumed
from humus, then exhumed;
we were the human kind,
dirt always clung to us.
(page 33)
Such lines typify McHugh's ability to apprise us
of how little awareness we usually bring to the
language we use. "All it turns upon / / is us"
(page 33), and McHugh will not let us forget it.
"Not Unterrified" (page 21) by her canny
explorations, we nevertheless cannot turn away from
her wily demonstration of the ways in which we use
words to hedge against truth, to obfuscate meaning.
Yet, McHugh just as emphatically expresses how much
"we need the binding / stitcheries of / syntax"
(page 21) even if we fail to bind up with them what
we intend. Relentlessly, through her turnings of
language, McHugh asks of us "what's bolted, after
all? / / And what is fast?" (page 22) And there in
the language of the very question, she demonstrates
the 'quick escaping' of intended meaning, since in
"bolted," and in "fast," we find the meaning of
'safe holding' as well as its opposite.
Again and again, as in the poem which takes as
its title the phrase "The Father of the
Predicaments," McHugh presents the vividly realized
experience of a self struggling with the
predicaments of being. In this case she offers us
instances of the conflicting agencies, internal and
external, to which one owes allegiance, even as she
exposes the suspect nature of language in
expressing such experience.
He came at night to each of us asleep
And trained us in the virtues we most lacked.
Me he admonished to return his stare
Correctly, without fear. Unless I could,
Unblinking, more and more incline
Toward a deep unblinkingness of his,
He would not let me rest. Outside
In the dark of the world, at the foot
Of the library steps, there lurked
A Mercury of rust, its cab half-lit.
(Two worldly forms who huddled there
Knew what they meant. I had no business
With the things they knew. Nor did I feel
myself
Drawn back through Circulation into Reference,
Until I saw how blue I had become, by virtue
Of its five TVs, their monitors abuzz with
is's
Etymologies…)
Whether those buzzing "is's" call to mind
the hissing of a certain snake who, by tempting
Eve, began us on our paradoxical, irresolvable
quest to know, or whether they resemble a certain
buzzing insect who is as well known for its honey
as it is for its sting, one has to admire McHugh's
virtuosity. How artfully she illuminates language's
endless movement away from us into abstraction,
even as she makes the experience intimately, even
frighteningly concrete and recognizable.
•
Olga Broumas may be best known either for her
unabashed, irrepressible expression of lesbian
sexuality, or for her melodious, evocative
lyricism. However, in reading Rave, which
includes poems from 1975--99, one cannot deny that
she is also a poet who, like McHugh, explores and
explodes prescribed boundaries, whether they are
societally imposed standards of social or sexual
correctness, or aesthetically imposed limitations
regarding the use of language and syntax. Rave
gives its reader the pleasurable opportunity of
tracking Broumas's constancy as she returns again
and again to cultivate, to further articulate her
relationship with the subjects of primary concern
to her---sexuality, social and intimate relations,
nature, and myth. But constant too is her
determination to recreate herself as poet, to
reimagine the limitations of her poems' previous
formal constraints. As if her experiences of
political repression in Greece, her native country,
forged in her the desire to free her craft from
each previous system's tyranny, she allows no
structural experiment to become calcified and
restrictive. In fact, much of the later work's
expression of language's vitality and
suggestibility is due to her irrepressible
experimentation with the limitations of form.
As an immigrant, a non native speaker of
English, a lesbian, Broumas has no doubt had the
dubious opportunity to experience directly many of
the countless ways structures can be used against
her to limit, to exclude---language structure being
only one. Yet in even her earliest work published
in this country, she demonstrates her ability to
turn her awareness of such limitations into one of
her great strengths---to make the poem a powerful
site not only of apprehended cultural repression,
but of transformative change. In "Caritas," the
first poem included in Rave, we see a
sensual reclaiming of the word 'cunt'. Here it is
transformed from pejorative street slang to the
language of sacred ascent:
…flashlight in hand, I
guide you
inside the small cathedral of my cunt. The
unexpected
light dazzles you. This flesh, my darling,
always
invisible like the wet
side of stone, the hidden
hemisphere of the moon, startles you
with its brilliance, the little
dome a spitting
miniature of the Haghia Sophia
with its circlet of openings
to the Mediterranean sun.
A woman-made language would
have as many synonyms for pink / light-filled /
holy as
the Eskimo does
for snow...
(pages 5&endash;6)
Here too one can appreciate Broumas's agility in
this bracing synthesis of subjects. She moves
seamlessly from specific, personally identified
experience to a sensually alive 'internalizing' of
myth and sacred symbolism, reclaiming that
landscape's power as her birthright. From there she
draws us to an insight born of such courageous
reclamation---that of language's genderedness,
suggesting the ways it limits a woman's full
expression of experience. Such journeying within
the confines of the poem resembles the odyssey of
development Broumas has undertaken in her years as
artist and seeker: ever more subtly to reach
through experience in order to grasp the otherness
in self, the self in otherness. But given Broumas's
light fingered dexterity we sense not only what can
be held, a heady sensuality and a spirituality rich
with reclaimed myth, but also what she points
toward, which remains just outside language's
ability to confine it.
Reading Rave from beginning to end one
sees the ways in which Broumas has pressed beyond
each level of her experience of language's
limitations. We see her incorporate the rhythms and
intonations of jazz, the paradoxical wealth of
simplicity in Zen, the physicality and compassion
of body work in her questioning of form in relation
to substance. Many of the later poems offer a
sensuous lyricism which rushes like wind or breath
through the reader, allowing her to experience a
flow of meaning beyond reason, a breezy,
associative dance of sensory image and resonant
sound.
A child, born of the word, walks through the
sash offering its
small round hand touching everything, a blur of
brief imprints
suffusing the blood. Such sudden whiteness in
the cells of
the body like sleep overcome by gardenias. Like
milk cooling
in the pail on the stone floor of an unused
room…
("The Contemplation," page 297)
Also apparent in Broumas's choice of poetic
projects are her iconoclastic inclinations.
Obviously she is happy to drop the mantle of
exclusivity, to sidetrack the drive for further
individual recognition that comes of successful
authorship, since she collaborates repeatedly.
Rave includes poems from books written with
Jane Miller, Black Holes, Black
Stockings, and with T Begley, Sappho's
Gymnasium and Ithaca: Little Summer in
Winter. Their collaborations are particularly
attuned to the multiplicity of voices available in
any voice, as well as to the rich spiritual
connectiveness discernible in the mingling of
voices---" God is of us in the outer lining." (page
343) Few poetics have embodied so effectively
Martin Buber's position that:
Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may
first become word in the brain of man and then
become sound in his throat…both are merely
refractions of the true event…language does
not reside in man but man stands in language and
speaks out of it---so it is with all words, all
spirit. Spirit is not in the I but between I and
You."
(I and Thou, page 89)
Given the virtuosity of the poets involved, it
is no surprise that these poems are not merely
recollections of experiences. Movement along
expected lines of meaning is disrupted as syntactic
relationships between words are opened, explored.
In this context, all structural systems, be they
social, sexual, religious, are ripe to be
questioned. In the collaboration with Jane Miller,
a new mythic is engaged, a mythic of the moment,
which is not intended to ossify into belief, but to
remain as fluid as the syntax suggests, which opens
at times into a sultry ecstatic:
…If we dare, if we are the cage we painted
with an open door, one of the
many like a touch of dust in sun accidentally fells
the outline with
its colored chalk. Little tokens of myth, dream. On
the stalk the
water lily, on its spring the mushroom, such
clamorings on the
white pillow! Pass by...
(page 196)
Such surreal, imagistic slidings and
blendings---which include metaphor ("we are the
cage…"), metonym ("…the white pillow"
which suggests sexual plausibilities), and phonetic
slippages (from "chalk" to "stalk")---are never
presented as leading to any particular, edifying
epiphany. Instead each simply offers its "little
token of myth, dream," then "Pass[es] by."
The delicate immediacy in the holiness that these
poems express is illustrated by such movement. Here
is no authoritative God of hierarchy and ossified
ritual but, the gods that "are never the same but
remain the same body or rather the sign for it,
hearts like pears like beacons. It was only a bird!
skirting the salty bands of sea air. You flew." (p.
197)
Such metamorphoses, which intimately engage the
substance---"pears," "bird," "sea air"---of one's
immediate surroundings, and which occur in the
synergy of mingled voices, experiences, take the
place of the hollow belief structures of the past.
"As legend says nothing, you pick up the sounds and
feel." (page 197) But the intent is not to compose
conclusions or even to solidify the experience into
definitive recollections, "they do not become
destiny" (page 196). Rather, the poems express the
fluidity of life through a language that embraces
its breaks, its slippery edges and openings, while
never forgetting how little of the "unspoken"
language can actually contain. "The garlic and
peppers hang from the ceiling. The honey and lemon,
great nocturnal watches, gold pieces in the other
life, whenever you wish. Not much different from
advancing, you will speak simply, one word in front
of the unspoken." (page 196)
In her collaborations with Jane Miller, the
poems appear in left and right justified blocks of
text which range in length from approximately less
than one to more than two pages. Such density
presses the reader to dive into the richness, to
let the language draw one deeper and deeper into
the rushing, sensual flow of words, to experience
directly a mingling of the 'I' and 'you', of reader
with poets. In the later collaborations with T
Begley, other strategies for uniting poem with page
occur. In the poems from Sappho's Gymnasium,
stanzas of varying length float "Like flocks of
solitudes" (page 314) in airy vistas of white,
virtually free of punctuation. It is of course not
surprising that each new collaboration, with its
many "branches of two humans," (page 307) means a
new alchemical balancing of subject matter, voice,
form in order to manifest the "mirrors for
multiplying light / we serve" (page 307). Regarding
the collaborations with T Begley, Broumas has
written, "We have a poet's passion for this
smattering of knowledges, eroticized by suggested
punctualities or ellipses, verbs in a variable
middle voice, nouns followed by their adjectives
(imagine the object, then color it), time divided
into units other than Western certitudes. A tense
for faith? A tense for dream and trance?" (from
Rave's Notes, page 361)
This ability to eroticize the examining of all
such systemic functioning---one of Broumas's great
strengths---is all the more apparent in her later
work:
If I could offer you
A sensation of grammar
Polygynous plethoric no thought thought
Fondles the mind as a mystery.
("Charisma," page 182)
How craftily Broumas breaks the expected
syntactic relationships of these ideas, offering
both the opportunity to play with the multiple
meanings available in the last two lines, and to
see a sexual resonance in such play. Here meaning
becomes intimately, actively embodied, opening the
reader to an experience of mystery, not its
explanation.
But Broumas is not one to suggest that
experiences of the mysteries of existence are easy
to live with, nor does she pretend to have any
grand answers to propose in the midst of our
confusions. As she suggests in "Jewel Lotus
Harp":
Nature masses
Always in the image
Of the continuous that is
Always in the long run of the easy
Three quick turns and you're lost
Fragmented into practices.
("Jewel Lotus Harp," page 186)
Broumas reflects upon many of the practices and
systems we turn to in our confusions---systems
which we give our power to, and then find ourselves
lost in. Most horrific are the repressive political
systems which steal our power from us, like those
which have fueled the history of Turkish
subjugation and persecution in Greece. Here is the
beginning of part III of "The Massacre," a long
poem of suffering, helplessness, confusion in the
face of many forms of social and political systemic
failure:
There were bombs in the womb, pulsing
the dark with adrenaline, stunning
the skinless swimmer, fusing
resistance to the bone.
The body of my mother
likewise was carried home
in pandemonium. An even score
of generations swam
through bootcamp to the shore
of first light, freed
to fight or flee
the random detonations
of Pasha or Nazi whim.
(page 242)
Here, the "skinless swimmer," the child still in
the womb, becomes a people who are without skin,
without defense against oppression. The only
possible response to birth, "first light," becomes
reactive, defensive: "to fight or flee."
As the speaker interrupts atrocity with further
atrocity, suffering with other suffering---"The
Palestinian and Boston / homeless split the screen"
(page 240)---the narrative "I" of the poem divides
as well, expanding to include not only her own
people, "The tongue / our tongues were pierced for
speaking" (page 243) but whoever is
disenfranchized, marginalized, all who have been
systematically denigrated as 'other', as belonging
outside a unified whole. It is an inclusiveness in
which the reader, in voicing these words, is
invited to participate:
If I were Black,
which I am,
if I were Jew,
which I am,
Irish, Palestinian,
native or half-breed,
which I am, I am
homeless or disappeared,
immigrant or queer---
(page 243)
One cannot help but be reminded of Muriel
Rukeyser's powerful inclusiveness, as in her
"Despisals" :
Among our secrecies, not to despise our Jews
(that is, ourselves) or our darkness, our
blacks,
or in our sexuality wherever it takes us
(Out of Silence, page 138)
Also echoed in Broumas's poems is Rukeyser's
willingness to raise controversy, to attempt to
enter into questions of grave political import
through the subversive act of committing poem to
page, and, of course, her blatantly sexual language
play. Rukeyser's "Despisals" ends:
Never to despise
the clitoris in her least speech.
Never to despise in myself what I have been
taught
to despise. Nor to despise the other.
Not to despise the it. To make this
relation
with the it to know that I am it.
It is a courage akin to Rukeyser's that poets
like McHugh and Broumas demonstrate. Busily
reframing such relations with the "it" of language,
of experience, of self, they expose whatever
systemic limitations no longer serve, be they
social, sexual, literary, intellectual. They
articulate the experiences of their lives, even as
they question the process of that articulation,
engaging with us in the everything that the "it"
will and will not yield, ourselves.
Rusty Morrison is an MFA graduate of the
Creative Writing Program at Saint Mary's College,
Moraga, California. Her poems and other writings
have appeared in Nimrod, Fourteen
Hills, and many other literary magazines; she
has a poem forthcoming in VOLT.
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