The poems in Steven Toussaint’s latest collection, Lay Studies, move between examining Twitter phenomena, to considering repercussions of climate change, to proffering the sounds of Gregorians’ antiphons. Within its aura of obsessions, the collection exhibits a far-reaching grasp of literary, artistic, and religious traditions, studded as it is with biblical and mythological allusions and references to the writings and teachings of figures like Ezra Pound and Saint Francis of Assisi.
At its core, Lay Studies is a meditation on the state of perpetual exile, a personal effort in the sense that Toussaint himself has, for most of his young career, led an itinerant existence. Born in Chicago in the mid-1980s, Toussaint did graduate work at Cambridge before emigrating to Auckland, New Zealand in 2011. Consequently, his poems are birthed from the dissonances of expatriate life; his latest collection, in a sense, is Toussaint’s reckoning with the instability of home and the conflicts exile engenders between a worshipful life on one hand, and an age dominated by spectacle, capitalism, violence, and environmental catastrophes on the other. In his work, he locates a spiritual safe haven — a stable home space where creation can take place without corruption.
Toussaint does this in part by giving attention to a melodiousness in his work, despite its thematic discord. One of Toussaint’s greatest debts to Pound lies in his use of melopoeia, a subject Toussaint has studied fore the past several years. It’s a concept that aims to charge words beyond their usual meanings, with an emphasis on musical properties which direct the trend of meaning. Given that Toussaint’s earlier collections — The Bellfounder and Fiddlehead — also showed the imprint of Pound’s influence, it isn’t surprising that Lay Studies advances this interest as well. Fittingly for a poet of such religious bent, Toussaint’s use of melopoeia develops a tension between the nearly sensuous versatility of his language and the strict erudition of his allusions and subject matter — between the musical cadences inhering in his language and the significance buried in the poems that await an almost hermeneutic excavation. The poems demand to be read aloud.
Founded on a prevailing sense of dislocation, the lyrics in Lay Studies reconstruct images only to collapse them in the hopes of creating more exposed and lasting poetic figures in the process. Toussaint’s erudition, relayed in verse of a high moral tone, fosters a similar sense of disconnect between author and reader — initiating, in a sense, a minor crisis of faith. We hear this clearly in “Yes or No,” an examination of the disjunct between a worshipful life and the spectacle of consumerism:
Yes or No
Are you happy
with your service
provider?
Have you contemplated
private
piety’s
competitive prices?
Are you in the market
for something like
but not precisely
eternal return?
Have you been waiting long
in our baffled room?
Did you retain
a trace
of transmigration
somewhere like a scar
inside your
photographic
memoir?
Do you think birds feel
the seism?
Are you reading enough
of the novel
grovelling,
the genuine
genuphobia,
our nationwide
aversion
to kneeling?
Are you still listening
to poets
who listened
to Coltrane
laugh and framed
vocations around that
brazen ascesis?
Is there someone
in your family
we can call
to drive you home,
a flyover town
waiting around
for potable
blood to flow,
for prescription
prices to drop on
crushed up rocks
from the moon?
Are you watching
not a little
terrified
as advertising
bromides
slowly embalm
the once
in a century mind
of your favourite
Thomist
on Twitter?
Can you hear
the siren
everything we ask you
feeds
flatter you now
beneath the waves
of what we need
to tell you?
Are you
sitting down?
In the poem’s opening question (“Are you happy / with your service // provider?”) we find an ironic deferral, the initial existential question of happiness giving way, gradually, to the language of a customer service inquiry — Toussaint’s swift and agile shuttling between the registers of spiritual questioning and consumerist date-collection suggests similarities between the two.
The stanza break between “service” and “provider” adds to this dissonance, the final word suggesting the reader needs material goods in order to live, that he or she must be provided for; in other words, the full weight of market forces is not felt, or revealed, until the final word. Embodied in this divide is the scale of the potential speaker; before reading “provider,” the scale of the questioning is personal. We might be hearing from a server at a restaurant, a mechanic who’s just fixed a faulty brake pad, or even a priest greeting his congregation post-sermon. But when the word “provider” is added, the perspective explodes — suddenly it is the market checking in on the individual. The devotional attention once offered by the church or found in our quotidian encounters with the Other, we’re given to sense, has now been co-opted by the forces of capitalism.
This type of negotiatory questioning, treading the bleeding edge between consumerism and spirituality, continues in the succeeding lines: “Are you in the market / for something like // but not precisely / eternal return?” The punning of “return,” which comes to mean both spiritual resuscitation and financial earnings, points to a fundamental ambivalence in these lines, one that’s added to by Toussaint’s use of “like” and “but not precisely” and that suggests the impossibility of the equation. The reader is forced to hesitate, stumbling on the repeated prepositions that begin each of the two lines sequentially. The languid, smooth repetition of the l-sound in “like,” “precisely” and “eternal” is broken up by the monosyllabic, staccato “but not,” which increases this hesitation and adds a certain harshness to the couplet. A divide opens up in the poem, an epistemic wound that’s perhaps best encapsulated by the ironic contradiction between “not precisely” and “eternal return.” One of the thorniest and most opaque of philosophical doctrines, eternal return has very famously eluded precise description; Toussaint’s phrasing thus comes off as a confidence man’s empty bluster, reminding us that spiritual here is increasingly far away, at odds with the life we know.
“Yes or No” is a poem built on a series of questions, embodying the general structure of the catechism and suggesting, in the process, the way traditional religious instruction is mirrored in our contemporary instruction in capitalism, and the ways we’re taught from childhood to be more effective and appetitive consumers. Just as the catechism embodies a certain repetitive asceticism, a disappearance of the will and ego, so Toussaint’s cascade of questions highlights a certain removal of emotion; as the poem goes on, the lines begins to feel redundant, almost monotonous. There’s a deadening effect that feels at odds with Toussaint’s clever co-opting of advertising’s curious argot—the glitziness of language and its ability to increase our appetites, as well as its later ability, ironically redeployed, to entertain us, are all draining. The gambit of self-awareness and irony won’t save us.
This absence of feeling reaches a peak later in the collection with the poem “Chicago Sketches.” While the series of questions in “Yes or No” works to distance the speaker from the reader, enacting a division that mirrors mankind’s distance from the divine, “Chicago Sketches” functions as an act of sustained emotional projection, with the speaker depositing his feeling into further and further removed subjects, refusing at the same time to associate any sorrow or sense of loss with himself. The speaker spies a series of strangers engaged in quotidian tasks: “An off-duty cop / nodding to sleep … A nervous father / gesturing apology / for his jumbo stroller. // A talkative sophomore / Forensics team.” Intimate moments that might ordinarily be hidden from view are spun up out of the void; feeling is not expressed by the poet, but arises within these vignettes, which circle around the speaker like a series of shrines.
And of course, Toussaint is writing from a place of absence. Chicago, his former hometown, hovers on the far side of the world, a metropolis as distant and abstract as Augustine’s City of God. What salvages the former world are the small moments that Toussaint recollects, images of quiet humanity trapped in language like insects in amber. When he focuses narrowly like this, we gain a greater understanding of his range — the evasive mysticism dissipates and reality is left behind, glinting like an uncovered jewel. It is not the indoctrination into the sacred life that the collection is about, but the return to everyday existence— these are, quite literally, lay studies, attempts to immerse oneself in a life that has come to seem distant, in a mode of living that might almost have been forgotten.
[Published by Victoria University Press (Wellington New Zealand) on July 10, 2019, $25.00]