“Ambiguity,” said John Ashbery in a 1983 interview with The Paris Review, “seems to be the same thing as happiness or pleasant surprise. I am assuming that from the moment life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible, and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions.” Ashbery’s words, spoken in his Chelsea apartment over soda and tea, move us from the 20th-century critical perspective of difficulty as pleasure towards ambiguity as pleasure, as surprise or happiness. Ashbery’s philosophical premise, “from the moment life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible,” shows us the aesthetic gain of ambiguity in poetry. Not ambiguity for its own sake, but for the pleasure of it.
Ish Klein’s newest book, The New Sun Time, returns readers to the pleasure of ambiguity and surprise in poetry. The collection’s first poem, “Satanic Rites of the, Uh, Dracula,” concludes with three lines that break from the poem’s five-lined stanzas:
Everything tangled — the edges of images —
It’s like they play hide and seek with us,
old lands do on their way to the new.
While these lines describe “everything,” there is also a tangled, hide-and-seek quality to Klein’s poetry. As our daily news fills with social crises and political corruption, there are arguably not enough moments for us to escape our lives; Klein’s poems —invitations to eavesdrop on scenes, dramatic dialogue, celebrity gossip — are glinting windows into exits both old and newly imagined.
An example of old worlds touching the present is the poem “Trials,” in which animals are taken to court and punished for various offenses. The poem opens, “Friends, in 1386 a sow is executed in the public square / dressed like a man. It is written. People swear.” There is something immensely relieving about encountering these specific troubles of the historical past, rather than reliving our present ones. Take a 1587 case against beetles “ravaging vineyards”: “Bring them in to hear the document. / It says, leave our district — we give you three days.” To slip into this old world of trouble, rather than our own, but also: to be awake to social problems of the past, to a larger world than the thin slice we live. “All communicating old world, can you see me?” asks the poem’s speaker. Past trials merge into the background as the poem blurs into questions, images:
Are you a Leyden jar?
Are you just? The Leyden jar —
capacitors and visuals.
Bees, bees awake.
Protective shape — the crescent moon.
The wave of the shape, the wave of the sound —
what? Who shot a wild black rabbit? That was our grandma.
There is a little latch in the mind that swings open when one is not following a strict narrative logic, when there can be “tangling” and “hide and seek,” the pleasure of images and sounds abutting each other. Klein’s poems wrap around themselves, spin a polyvocal story, then drop into musing poignancy, such as:
The G will change to C. Please note — it can be
if you had a chance — if there is somewhat a chance to care
beyond you that’s your chance
now that you are gone but for want —
who do you care for when you think about it, chrysanthemum?
Please tell the court and be clear.
Concurrently concrete and mythical in their touch, poems such as “Buildings of Tomorrow Today” fold 1970’s architecture (“mobile homes / were stacked vertically. The frame / was from the so-called third world steel”) into the same stanzaic space as the lines:
We’re not a house anymore. We’re
an apartment in a building.
This apartment is collapsing.
Top floor? Course not. More collapsing.
That we are in the vast middle;
like the cashier said, “nobody.”
Klein’s work is as interested in the overheard as it is the spoken — that is, the collaborative, performative space of language. To return once more to Ashbery’s interview, and the moment the interviewer wondered aloud:
INTERVIEWER
You have often been characterized as a solipsist, and I wonder if this isn’t related to your reputation for obscurity. The way the details of a poem will be so clear, but the context, the surrounding situation, unclear. Perhaps this is more a matter of perspective than any desire to befuddle.
ASHBERY
This is the way that life appears to me, the way that experience happens. I can concentrate on the things in this room and our talking together, but what the context is is mysterious to me. And it’s not that I want to make it more mysterious in my poems — really, I just want to make it more photographic.
Ashbery’s desire to make language “more photographic” corresponds with Klein’s work, whose book holds poems like scenes while the names and dramatic dialogue of actors, artists, musicians, comedians enter and exit the text. There is, too, a parallel generosity in the intentional stepping-back of the speaker and the narrative in Ashbery and Klein’s work — both poets have poetry that is more photographic, more filmic, more interested in the way the experience happens, and less interested in the overtly confessional, lyric-I. Both Ashbery and Klein have something important to show in their work about consciousness in language — that its mostly patchworked together, overheard, historical — and that it can lead, potentially, to surprise, even happiness. “Let us stroll among the windmills out here (my mind),” Klein’s speaker recommends.
I want to say something about the permission Klein’s The New Sun Time offers its reader — permission to sit in the sun, during a pandemic, and enjoy poems. This is not a little thing. In reading these poems, I felt like a weight had been lifted from me. It seems we don’t need to talk about “the Confessional” overtly in American poetry just now because confession is the current itself — it’s the very water. So to open a book of poetry not dependent on a confessional-I, and less wedded to a traditional narrative, opens up the air and lets the reader breathe. There is plenty of narrative and speakerly introspection in The New Sun Time, but Klein’s poetry moves differently than the majority. There is delight in both the ambiguity and the historical touchstones throughout The New Sun Time.
The New Sun Time’s final, long poem “Every Animal is Your Mother,” is a litany, a wandering list that works by way of six-lined stanzas and interruptions. It’s the crown of the collection — expansive, journalistic, cohesive in both its circling reasoning and its moments of eruption. It begins:
There’s a park in the West where
Grizzly Bear is eaten
by no one. They will eat
rodents, insects, elk, calves,
carrion, pine nuts, large
mammals, berries, roots and
grasses. They are ready.
rivers wish to take the rings.
The poem moves syllabically through its recounting and recording of animals and what they eat: black bears, elk, red foxes, beaver, bighorn sheep. It makes a claim for a poem’s and poet’s diversion, for fascination — “I remember what I love,” one of the monostichs declares between stanzas on the dietary habits of the Bighorn Sheep and the Mountain Lion. As the poem collages and records, it interrupts itself with declarations like: “We don’t exactly know how / the brain works.” Yet, its interruptions and layering of different speech actions (description, declaration, statement, poetic repetition such as “Independent, independent” and “situation, situation” show us how the mind swerves as it investigates natural phenomena. The monostichs between stanzas grow more overtly philosophical as the poem progresses:
Is loving a freedom state?
…
All material has will.
…
From Light my mind starts again.
…
From Light I remain myself.
The reach a pitch at a line that plays with voice and dramatic repetition: “Trust. Trust? Trust! Trust — Trust …”
To which the next stanza replies:
It’s important for health.
We must learn how the brain
works. Manage emotions.
The Glaciers are out there.
How near are we to them?
Our brains are in this earth.
Long poems have the physical space to create a slow burn, and Klein uses stanzas and monostich interruption to great effect in “Every Animal is Your Mother.” The speaker and narrative have room to think because they have room to wander and wonder — because they give themselves the chance: “The Glaciers are out there. How near are we to them?” We might never learn entirely how the brain works, but we can ask ourselves questions like this one. Perhaps such a question of positionality may lead to jettisoning notions of separateness when it comes to nature and our own human functioning. “Our brains are in this earth,” the poem acknowledges. How lucky the reader is to have a companion like Klein’s The New Sun Time, to remind us of ways we might play and think and live during ambiguous times.
[Published by Canarium Books on May 2, 2020, 96 pages. $17.00 paperback]
John Ashbery’s remarks are quoted from “The Art of Poetry XXXIII,” The Paris Review, Issue 90, Winter 1983.
The collection’s first poem, “Satanic Rites of the, Uh, Dracula,” alludes to the 1973 Hammer horror film; Klein is also a filmmaker.