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I once wrote a book backwards to be read forward in time. The book was about my mother’s dementia. I kept the blog form in which it had first been conceived (where you read from present back to past) in an attempt to mimic the confusions involved in communicating with a demented person. Effect before cause, pronoun before name. Crime solved before it’s been committed (as in Columbo). This exercise has inspired me to read other books backwards. An anthology of spiritual writing by women worked best that way, because I know contemporary spirituality better than I know ancient; selected poems work backwards because I’ve most recently read the author’s later work, not their early books. We work back to moments of first perception, when a line might become a life’s work, a passing interest might stick to the mind like gorilla glue. Reading these books backward offered me some surprises. I found Norman Fischer to be a (Buddhist) poet who has always (paradoxically?) had a deep interest in money and labor. If you wonder why he’s writing about pins in his most recent book, consider that he reads Adam Smith. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s mode of “knowing what you’re resisting,” a phrase she used at her and Fischer’s December 1, 2022 Chax Press reading, operates throughout her selected. Later, more discursive poems set the stage for her earlier reversals of mythology, where Eurydice has the power to be written as, not about, as subject, not muse. (I owe a debt to Jim Berger for helping me get there.) Her later discursiveness gives way to an early concern with the sound of the lyric poem. That her later discursiveness feasts on wordplay makes better sense to me now.

Norman Fischer’s most recent books, not covered in Selected Poems, 1980-2013 (Chax Books, 2022), are titled Men in Suits (BlazeVox, 2022), Museum of Capitalism (Talisman, 2021), and There was a clattering as … (Lavender Ink, 2021), all written in the dark shadows of COVID and the last presidential election. Fischer mimics the prose of Daniel Defoe (who chronicled a plague year) and Gertrude Stein (for whom words were coins). He writes a map of our predicament, our cultural and political dysfunction. These are not poems like the earlier “Upheavals in Feeling,” with its “To refer to a life in poetry / I am living or leading / Somewhere under the carpet, in the quiet[.]” That is a lyric poem, a zen priest’s unsurprising description of creation out of quiet. But turn one page back, and you find this “Prayer for Laborers”:

May all who labor with their hands

Those who clean and cook, make beds and remove garbage

Those who fashion the things of this world

As you have fashioned this world …

Things like shirts or spoons or shoes,

Carts, pins and paper, buckets, rope

May all who make these things

Received from you special blessings and extra protections

Because they are noble

And deserve the best of your care

I am reminded that zen priests are laborers — they clean and cook, make bed and remove garbage — but Fischer’s prayer indicates that labor (and the laborer) are sacred to him. The word “nobility” belongs as much to labor as to Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths.

“It is Possible to Exist Without Money One Day” finds Fischer acknowledging that it is probably not possible. This poem, like many of zen poet Albert Saijo, is at once an excoriation of human failures and a gesture toward utopia. While Fischer begins from “I think it is possible to exist without money one day,” he acknowledges the problem (by refusing it): “There is not an ounce of human flesh not a drop of human / Feeling smeared over and blinded by greed or / Ideology.” To live without money is to cast off identity, live like animals: “It may be possible to exist without / Money one day providing you don’t mind a loss of / Identity can live like an animal on the simplest of levels breath / And beat of heart and say it’s not enough or not say / Anything at all.” The final lines of the poem are written like many of Norman Fischer’s best — composed with short words, they offer the complicated simplicity of contradiction. You have to carry them around in your head, let them jostle about:

Back behind you to be summoned or even feared

You can plant feet firmly aground only below the level of thought

As if that place existed at all possibly

One a day that it was finally evident you could exist without money.

That last line suggests pure possibility, albeit as a kludgy translation of John Lennon’s famous song. But the penultimate line is something else, indeed, with its “as if” and “possibly” framing the verb form “existed,” not in the past but in what’s left of the subjunctive in English. Norman Fischer, poet and priest, cannot write such a poem or deliver such a dharma talk without money, and he knows it. He realizes that those professions least engaged with money most require it. His labor may be thought, but it’s labor, nonetheless.

Fischer opened his half of the Chax zoom reading on December 1 with the first poem in his Selected, “My Father.” He outsourced the selection of his selected volume to Denise Newman and Monica Heredia, but I presume he chose his own playlist for the reading. By accident or intention, this poem is central to my reading of his work. He begins from the exhausted labor of his father, who also made things by hand. “My amazement was – my father fashioned a birdhouse out of nothing with a sloping roof. First nothing, then the birdhouse. (Amazement.)” But what sticks in Norman’s memory now is how hard his father had to work, and under what stressful conditions. The prose poem’s — nay the book’s — opening is this: “Now that I am an adult I have the distinct recollection that my father each day after work came home and fell asleep on the couch after dinner. His boss was atrocious. Someone always was needed by him to remain until the bitter end, the factory closed and dark, the people gone, the machines quiet, and in the high ceilinged room a tight feeling of total despair prevailed and this person was my father.” The factory Fischer’s father worked in manufactured children’s snow suits. We tend to think of children playing happily in their suits, without imagining the labor that went into making them. “My father produced snowsuits for children to wear out in the snowy weather. These were sorely needed. Now that I am an adult, with my own children who smile and sigh in the night, and am repeating, inevitably, the life my father led, I can see that. Eventually, in any given place, snow falls.” (Even on Mauna Kea.) Fischer’s book, Men in Suits, would come many decades after this poem about the man in the business of making suits.

At his best, Fischer writes a poetry that is both tangible and figurative. The snowsuit of this poem had a maker, and that maker suffered. But there’s always snow, with its invitation to play in the cold. And that’s also a thought, and a thought is labor, too. (That it’s also play shows in Fischer’s wit, his wordplay.) He knows that any conception of life without money requires it, that any poem about labor requires that labor have been done. His Selected is the story of a man who lives in two worlds — the one with labor and money and the one without either one. The one world is inevitably two, the two one.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis read from end to the middle of her Selected Poems, 1980-2020 at the Chax reading. It makes sense that she read back, because reading takes on several prepositions, which inevitably become propositions: there’s reading back at (myths, histories, old critiques) reading back in or into (memory, writing as autobiography of reading), reading back as (the alternatives, Eurydice, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf), and always there is the reading back that is a writing forward, layered over the ruins of an old canon. Yes, her poetry is full of critique, but it fills in the gaps it points to. This is what, as a small press editor, I called “positive critique.” Find the gap and fill it. Or find bad myths and replace them.

DuPlessis addresses everything in her poetry, as Tenny Nathanson noted from his zoom room. “Plethora is a big deal,” she responded. Nathanson also referred to both poets’ process of “piling and unpiling,” making and unmaking in their poems. Beauty doesn’t matter to DuPlessis, she says. It’s that it’s made is what matters. What’s been made needs to be unmade and then remade. Penelope is her adventurer in exile, not Odysseus. There is a “secret topos of gender” in all her writing, she said after the reading.

The first poem she read comes late in this collection. It’s from Days and Works (Ahsahta, 2017), a reversal of Hesiod’s Works and Days. This really is a poem about everything: climate, water quality, sexual feelings during “corpse” position in yoga; it’s a collage of various texts (which makes sense for a poet who also creates beautiful visual collages). “How can so many things occupy the same space?” she asks. The answer comes in the last line printed here: “If you see ethics, say ethics.” All of these items — climate, water, sexuality — involve ethical choices. Rachel’s work, like Hesiod’s, often doubles as didacticism, a how-to manual on how to think ethically about the world. Many of her most important poems are called Drafts, acknowledging incompletion in the way that “essay” does for prose.

So back at. In Draft 109: Wall Newspaper, she rewrites Eliot’s The Waste Land, drawing out its documentary and didactic elements. Writing this from Hawai`i, I can’t help but notice that, as the poem opens, a volcano is erupting (that volcano may have been Eliot’s poem itself, which Williams called an “atom bomb” before the fact).

March was the month when fissures opened.

It was a completely clean hallucination. It all made a kind of sense.

Larger rifts were earth wide. Smaller were local hairline cracks. There were multiple

scales of events, unsorted, uneven.

Dickinson never saw volcanoes, although I wager DuPlessis has. In Hawaiian culture, the volcano god is Pele, a wrathful, passionate female character. When she erupts, locals try to determine what she’s angry at. Is it the geothermal plant? The thirty-meter telescope? The military training ground? Or is she simply adding land where once were tide pools and houses? But for this poet, the volcano stands in (erupts?) for an apocalypse invented by human beings. This is the climate: floods, droughts, nuclear waste, you name it. It’s also poetry, of course, because for this poet the ars poetica is all: “Poetic autonomy never existed. In a few weeks, a dead zone had to be declared. / Any yeast that’s left will take decades to work, / The instruments are ghosts of themselves.” Her lines are like strobes, flashing back to earth’s climate, even as they address the climate created by Eliot’s important poem, born out of the apocalyptic post-World War I era. Her poem is not without its moments of humor, however. What had been closing time in the pub (“HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT’S TIME) becomes the rather more parabolic, “CHAOS BECAME A WAY OF LIFE.” But that second alert reminds us of the first, of how little time we have left to act.

I don’t have the space to do a close reading of this “Draft” and the way she adopts and then adapts Eliot’s use of the vernacular as well as his tendency toward the vatic, if appropriated, statement. Let’s just say she isn’t simply writing between the lines of that epic; she’s writing on top of it. “Slowly I leave a much-loved place I probably won’t return to. / What is the target genre? ‘Stony rubbish.’ / This is a textbook case. Hold on tight.” No Marie here, but us, the readers who come after Eliot. With her third (and fourth and fifth), DuPlessis wanders across this deserted plain, pausing for sections (like “By Water,” like “By Thunderstorm Dawn”) that echo Eliot’s headings. The poem flirts with autobiography as she cites her own poems, but ends with its beginning (how Modernist!), which is also a rewriting of the end of The Waste Land:

begin with any letter. Swallow and disgorge

“the rrrr    to be a river?

“rien    n’aura eu lieu    que le lieu”

“She carries a book

of the unwritten volume”

that fills and empties pulse and surge.

Singing the exergue

nmnmnm — going backwards

half-hazardly mn and nm & utterals from

the knotted self …

“Wer, wenn ich shriee, hoerte mich denn …”

   “We have constructed ruins

to be reborn out of.”

To shore meaning against your ruins requires ruins; DuPlessis is happy to de-construct them. To be reborn requires going back, erasing what you’ve written. But like Eliot, DuPlessis does footnotes. The last note to the poem takes us from Robert Duncan to Stéphane Mallarme to Rainer Maria Rilke to Lorenzo Thomas. It’s fascinating that this lineage is so masculine, though men’s voices channel through her, the poet, the one about to be reborn. The Fisher King is transformed into a Fissure Queen. (I see I have punned on my own review.) We who live near them know that volcanoes are not simply destroyers, but also creators, with craters.

Moving back, “Draft 98: Canzone,” refers to Dante and his use of literary criticism in his poems. “I now open the book backward, as if shifting poles, and pass into a mirroring account of alphabets. Every off chance is the index of what has already been articulated, opening onto the same scrubby field. The master poet trembled … I thought it plausible to write of the intersections, so that others might recognize their fate in mind as well as mine in theirs.” As into plenitude we cast ourselves, DuPlessis takes us from house guests to working without a contract to a fear of not finishing “what I define as ‘my work.’” To be reborn is to move back. “I could begin again backwards, moving from the end to the beginning.” That is her Vita nuova, reborn as poet and as mother, employee, and critic.

Midrash is a form of writing that interprets texts. “Draft 52: Midrash,” interprets Adorno’s notorious declaration: “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedictht zu shreiben ist barbarish,” or “writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” DuPlessis begins from the words: “Poetry / Auschwitz / barbaric,” and pushes each one to its breaking point. Why poetry? Why barbaric? Part of her critique involves a cut and replace. Poetry is not barbaric, she thinks. “He (We) came from a civilization / thinking this way. This made it barbarous.// That is had the power to enact such / extermination is, we (he) once thought, unthinkable.” How can poetry be unthinkable when the Holocaust was not only thought, but completed, and hardly a poem? She worries these words in section after section of this long poem. She quotes Adorno and she writes “her own” words. She wants to honor him without succumbing to his mandate of silence. She worries about her own writing: “Walking through the dead as partly dead / — it must only be / an impossible draft of half-built, half-crumbled / all-suspicious poetry.” The draft / Drafts are impossible, but here they are. Are they barbaric? No. Are they art? “While a portion of this may be called ‘art,’ / it is difficult to give a name to the rest of the portions.” The poem is rather pointedly “NOT DEDICATED.” Not to Adorno, not to us. To dedicate this poem to anyone might seem barbaric.

Behind all this worry over words, ideas, histories and mythologies, the central question — perhaps — is that posed by memory. To rewrite a poem is to remember it. To take on a theorist’s didactic statement about poetry is to acknowledge its force, re-member it. To rewrite is to remember, put some English (as in spin) on it. But memory cannot be fixed in place. In “Draft 21: Cardinals,” she writes:

          The biggest disorder of time

is memory’s frayed existence;

          “a disorder of memory” is memory itself.

The continuous encyclopedia

          with its categories unformed

its indices unmade

          its alphabets unorganized.

These lines take her to “the backyard,” so full of birds, an interval of presence, once again interrupted by thinking through, or back. She ends the poems with the words of a child, likely hers, waking from a bad dream, but also into “astonishment / in which nourishment collects.” This is what the cardinals offer, a moment of speech that is “half in and half outside the compass of silence.” It is a moment of contingency; life, and the poem, will continue. But her suggestion, not unlike one that might be written by Zoketsu Norman Fischer, is that presence comes to ease our insatiable thinking. In this sense, silence (and its bird chatter) may be enough. And that is enough, for now, before history and mythology overflow their rivers again.

Back to the beginning. In early poems, not touched upon in the Chax reading, DuPlessis goes to the well of mythology. The well might be a more formidable symbol were women in charge of things; the obverse of phallic, it takes things in. The book from which her myth poems are taken is called Wells (Montemora Foundation, 1980). Eurydice’s problem, stated best in section 4., is that “he” (Orpheus) is a singer of songs, not she.

Songs are his,

melody like a great linked chain.

Touch is his, outlining the edge of my dance.

Because “he” is the singer, she is lost: “I cannot find my center / I cannot find my path. / Now he can make me open, shut and open // Now I have lost myself.” She is “silent,” shut down, closed, wanting not to be opened by him, but “to pierce herself.” So she goes to the fissure (that gap through which lava fountains) and enters a cave. “He” wants her to turn, and go back outside. She decides to stay inside the cave. “In the cave / I am a rope held out to myself / silver and gleaming in the labyrinth. / I know the center of the cave.” The pushing outward comes of her power, not that of the man. And so the end arrives as an opening at once sexual and fecund:  “great head, the cave large inside it / great limbs of a giant woman / great cunt, fragrant, opening // seeds of Eurydice.” Eurydice, not her man, is the seminal poet. This poem, DuPlessis notes, was composed in 1973 and 1974. 1973 was the year of Roe v. Wade, of that opening to women’s power over their bodies. We are back in an era of Orphic backlash, alas, making the poem valuable in our present.

Long an important publisher of experimental poetry, Chax Press has done us a great service by publishing the selected poems by these two significant poets. Fischer and DuPlessis are poets of our time who chronicle our bad history, our worries, our difficult labors. If our time is ruin, to rehearse DuPlessis, it’s been constructed by us. Next up: rebirth?