Rachel Mannheimer’s first book of poetry, Earth Room, selected by Louise Glück for the Bergman Prize, begins on the moon. That is, its first poem, “The Moon,” begins in a virtual reality installation — lunar craters, “a giant solitary rose made out of moon-rock” — that Mannheimer finds “dazzling and hateful.” You could make an interesting anthology of dazzling, hateful poems about the moon (“I hate the moon,” writes David Baker; “Fuck the moon,” writes Amitava Kumar, and Michael Robbins, and probably many others). In that collection, Mannheimer’s poem would seem more diffident than dissenting, closer to a shrug than a shriek. “People say poets love the moon,” she writes, “but I got into poetry because I liked words and small things / and lacked the imagination for fiction.” She finds the installation’s imaginative fictions (“there were ghostly dinosaurs on the moon”) less engaging than the “passive section of the experience.”
She’s there with her partner, Chris, also a poet. The poem concludes with a series of earthly visions, both otherworldly and everyday. Will she experience a moonlit reverie? Here, inspiration is displaced onto — or shared with — Chris:
Outside my studio window, dirty snow is piled up
around a pool of ice. When I arrived, it was liquid,
but it will be an ice rink soon —
I’ve seen them work, they hose it down to smooth it.
Now it’s night. Two men climb into cars on either side, their headlights
meet across the ice. Now two visitors approach on foot.
Tenderly, and not with their full weight —with one foot each — they test the ice.
The moon is far away for all to see. I’m imagining the poems Chris will write.
You could read that final sentence in terms of gender, romance among writers, the history of women partners as backseat amanuenses to macho scribblers, but I hear it foremost with tenderness — the tenderness of stepping out together, wondering what the other will make of things — and humor. It’s funny, after all, to end a poem with an invocation of another’s unwritten poems (“Sing through others, muses,” the bard of deferral proclaims). It’s also moving, since we’ve heard about the narrator’s lack of imagination. What a generous, receptive pose. She can’t imagine. But she imagines him imagining.
There are similar dynamics of orbit and affinity at other moments when Chris appears. “I watched Chris up ahead,” Mannheimer writes of running on a track, “now turning, now waiting, jogging in place.” These instances are candid and touching. They chart the ordinary choreographies of a relationship: “Chris listened to something in the other room”; “Chris was struggling in my sister’s house”; “I called Chris to come pick me up.” But the book, overall, is less about a particular relationship than about the peculiarities of relation. That’s clear in the ending of “The Moon.” These aren’t emblematic, spotlit lovers, but two figures under a moon that’s there “for all to see.” In her inspired lecture “Poetry and the Moon,” Mary Ruefle notes Paul Auster’s suggestion that “a man can’t know where he is on earth except in relation to the moon … A here exists only in relationship to a there.” The moon, in other words, offers scale. It defines us. In Mannheimer’s poem, as elsewhere in Earth Room, points of reference — like the moon, or major historical events —more often serve to collapse scale. Points of reference don’t define us; they risk reducing or erasing us:
Your name, it sounds so German, the ticket woman says.
German Jewish, yes, I say.
Huh. I’ve never heard it, shakes her head.
The implications of the exchange above, set in Frankfurt, gesture to the more literal erasures of the Holocaust, as do several other poems. But identity throughout Earth Room is frequently doubled and disputed in more subtle ways. The self is troublingly general; its specificity also leads to elisions. By accident, Mannheimer texts “the only other Chris in my phone.” A friend tells her about a woman who is “a ‘more feral’ me,” who “screamed” when “she found out who you were.” Elsewhere, Rachel and Chris meet a couple “around our age / and white and wearing shoes / we also owned.” The other woman introduces herself: “I’m Rachel.” In other poems, she tells us that her “double would die young,” she worries about holding onto “a version” of a friend that “she’d never wanted shown,” and she describes “adopting Chris’s intonations.”
A person isn’t just porous in these representations, and this is not a Whitmanesque containing of multitudes. Rather, the self is both peopled and potentially displaced by its interactions. The book is concerned with the legacy of land art and related movements, and Mannheimer refers to Robert Smithson’s notion of the “nonsite.” He wrote, “Let us say that one goes on a fictitious trip if one decides to go to the site of the Nonsite. The ‘trip’ becomes invented, devised, artificial; therefore, one might call it a non-trip to a site from a Nonsite.” The self, in Earth Room, might be comparable to a “nonsite” — it is devised, through the artifices of everyday performance, constituted through shifting roles. Passages like this one could serve as scripts for private, conceptual rituals:
I take the napkin
and, every day, wrap the cake to smuggle out
and deposit it
in a public trashcan. Every day, as I walk,
I end up eating most of it.
The places that provide most of the poems’ straightforward geographic titles (“Pittsburgh,” “New York,” “Berlin”) are similar. Some of them, like “The Car (Montana),” closely recall Smithson’s notion of the “non-trip.” As a tourism poem, its specificity is pretty general, akin to what one could generate with an atlas (“We’d driven through Butte, Wise River, / and Wisdom. There were signs for the Church / of the Big Hole”). Its knowledge seems most precise, most documentary, with regard to the failure of knowledge: “We were in the basin / of the Big Hole River but I don’t know / about the hole itself, whether it was behind us.” Mannheimer regularly foregrounds this kind of unknowing: “for a while, / I learned nothing new about animals,” another poem ends. She may like “words and small things,” but the articulation in such moments favors blunter gestures.
This approach to description resembles the “literalist” sculptures of artists such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd, which, Mannheimer says, following critic Michael Fried, emphasize a “situation.” That is, her poems often present situations, or spaces, more than specifics. “Then we drove across the country,” she writes in “The Car (Seattle).” “I can tell you, geese are everywhere.” The first sentence is general; the second deadpan, broad as a blank billboard. It doesn’t give you an image to see, and it doesn’t give you the sense of one actively seeing, but it summarizes having seen, or having subsumed seeing into summary. The self is comparably inflected, perhaps: Rachel is also Rachel, Rachel is also Chris’s intonations. In “Nebraska,” here in its entirety, the distinctions among films and “who might die,” horses and horses, feelings and siblings richly interweave. That doesn’t dissolve borders; it generates a field, in which we can see the precise ways in which impressions intersect:
There were two movies that summer
about boys and their horses.
In the first, we didn’t cry when the horse was killed,
but near the end. We didn’t watch the second one.
I cried all through the trailer, not knowing who might die.
This before Nebraska, where,
driving to the Hy-Vee, we saw two horses standing side by side
but back to front, so that I thought I’d seen
a single being with two heads. Like feelings —
I could never say which were distinct. I only knew
the names of three and sometimes, like my mom —
top of the stairs, late afternoon — I’d holler the wrong one down.
The effect foregrounds an equality of content as information, which invites a reader to suss out the textures. Mannheimer mentions having subscribed, in college, to an aesthetics of grand scale. She believed that “any piece of art, made big enough, was cool.” But in Earth Room, affectingly, the scale is more often 1:1. Geese are everywhere. Geese are everywhere geese. Everywhere is everywhere and “it’s like anywhere,” as she says of one place. This slippage might sound heady, but the style, as in the passages above, is refeshingly straightforward. That highlights the nuances embedded in casual phrasing (“I’d never experienced virtual reality,” begins the first poem, and I hear a winking implication about having experienced plenty of actual reality). It also creates sparks as Mannheimer shifts among plainly reported information. That concerns the lives and works of artists, as well as equally direct history pertaining to loss, the Holocaust, and the postwar era. “The territory of Alaska had been suggested as a possible refuge for German Jews as early as November 1938,” she writes, and there’s a sense of deep grief — cultural and personal — that might make even this plain utterance feel hard-won. In “Mars,” she relates a wartime story of the artist and designer Isamu Noguchi:
“Noguchi had, in the days following Pearl Harbor, traveled to Washington, DC. There he met John Collier, commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Perhaps, Collier suggested, Noguchi might bring creative vision to an internment camp which was under his direction, located as it was on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. Noguchi picked up his car in California and drove to the desert to help. But when the internees arrived, he became, at once, one of them.”
Earth Room presents history as though it may, also, be a kind of conceptual art, which has both mortal stakes and the structure of a dark joke. Is it decadent or effective for a few performance artists to live in a “three-foot-wide space between two panes of glass” as “inquiry into the potential colonization of Mars, so often hopefully discussed as an option for the continuation of the species after the depletion of resources on Earth”? Mannheimer juxtaposes that description with a passage on cuts to funding for higher education which, though aimed “at defunding climate science,” end up impacting “nursing, social work, construction management, snow machine repair, plant identification,” and more. Here we are, at the end of knowledge. Here we are, at the height of innovation and its catastrophic utopias. (You must be joking.) As fits her forebears in conceptualism, Mannheimer leaves us to mull the poems’ tones and implications. Instead, she presents actions, or ideas as actions, which preserve the intimate, incidental performance art that might, briefly, bring us into scale. The generality of such moments invites a reader to imagine stepping into the situation, its space, witnessing the exhibit and one’s own responses to it, as in this closely observed scene, which mirrors the pair of ice-rink attendants in “The Moon.” Earth Room offers a groundswell of such moments, intent and passing:
Outside a shop, one man holds a window squeegee, double-sided
with the squeegee and the scrubber. He’s washing the window
while another man looks on, either learning how to do it
or making sure the first one does it right. The goal is not to see the glass.
[Published by Changes Press on April 5, 2022, 100 pages, $18.99 paperback]