Five Theses with No Conclusion

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Thesis: Disorientation is a delight. Part of the pleasure of these poems (and there is much pleasure to be found) is their unexpectedness, their strangeness. In “Ekphrastica,” for example, the speaker tells us not to bring flowers to a “girl with her hair on fire,” but “[b]ring antlers instead. Bring her your exposed clavicle.” We are then commanded to bring three doors, behind which we must put a horse, our own dark secrets, and “something to hurt.” Where to begin? Do we put out the fire? How does one bring someone doors? In the face of bewilderment, these poems admire action: the bringing of gifts, the thieving of bicycles, the urge to bite down on the hand that feeds us false truths. 

 

Thesis: Not knowing is the truth. The speaker of “Please Try Again” seems to believe (maybe even to hope) that when it comes to Church, “some people get it” and “the rest of us lie”—but I think the poem actually knows that we all feel uncertain and afraid that everyone else gets it. We all pretend to know what the hell is going on sometimes (most of the time?). What am I trying to say about these poems? They keep me guessing. I feel a little dumb trying to describe them. But they really grab me and get me. Like in the poem “Genteel,” when the thief steals the bike and the speaker is “bewildered, confounded how to get to work” and I know that feeling, that befuddlement, standing on a threshold wondering how you are going to get through the day. 

 

Thesis: We seek ritual when in need of meaning (but ritual is often not enough). I love the line, “We returned to the capital C church when Uncle Ed died early of sepsis”— it captures the deep human wish that ritual and tradition might give us direction, might provide a clear path through grief. Action in the face of bewilderment. Yet, in the poem, the church music is “refusing melody like something afraid of itself.” In looking for solace and community, the mourners instead find dissonance. But the acknowledgment of this incongruence brings me into community with this poem— grappling with the conundrum of how we seek answers in moments of pain and end up with a chalk disc and the fear of rock and roll. 

 

Thesis: A “dissertation in the mundane” done with precision and honesty becomes no longer mundane. These poems often have a feeling of being trapped, having no good path forward, no sturdy ground on which to stand. They’re desolate at times, I’d say. But they’re sly, because within the seemingly bleak world view—“her only medicine is to punch”—there is humor and keen observation. And maybe even some reverence for the absurdity. Maybe some tenderness. In the poem “An Apology for Trivial Living,” the speaker belies a cynical stance by keeping “a full lunar eclipse in my desk to remind myself it’s still possible to be stunned by the weather.” There is a powerful imagination at work in these poems and a wry playfulness that is anything but mundane.

 

Thesis: Imagination makes survival of reality possible. Whether it is the invention of a genteel thief or someone picturing a neighbor’s stolen kisses or a list of professions the speaker never became (“neither modern dancer nor pastry chef”), these poems keep pointing us to the imagination as a way through. Wallace Stevens wrote that the imagination is “the one reality / In this imagined world.” I love the imagined world of these poems—the story created from a painting of a girl with hair on fire and how we are commanded to participate, to bring her doors to choose from, how we are commanded to imagine what would be behind them, to hope she does not open the door to our darkest secrets, how we are commanded to find something she can hurt—I spent days wondering, What would I choose?