Acts and effects that occur consecutively in a poem exist simultaneously in the psyche of the poet. This is why narrative is a useful concession poets make to the persistence of history and rule of time. But the poet knows that the true impulse to create is the brisk pleasure of putting the moment of one’s mind in order. It’s an audacious aspiration because everything in the world fights against the poem, including the poet, whose mind is disordered by design. William Meredith wrote, “What makes art valuable is the gravid pull of emotional life against which any artisan or artist struggles to keep a work of art from being pulled routinely down.”
Aaron Coleman’s first collection, Threat Come Close, is striking for several of its attributes, perhaps especially for how vividly it illuminates this dynamic struggle and how consistently and variously the work beats the odds placed against succeeding. In these poems, the unabashed desire to speak out must contend with the inundating, fearsome powers of both history and emotional life – even as Coleman fabricates forms to contain the flood. “I am made of what I am afraid to remember,” he writes in the book’s short prose introduction, “Very Many Hands,” which alludes to the flight of an enslaved people from Mississippi to Detroit and points beyond. For Coleman, then, to remember is to experience in one merciless flash everything that bears upon himself, and it is almost too much.
The first poem, “St. Inside and Not,” is a chanting repetition of “being,” a daunting catalogue. It begins:
Being tornado, being wind-struck,
Being swamp-swallowed and forgotten, being
Gangster-gone-ghost. Being leaking
And prohibited. Being rugged
Smirk and gut exposed, stone church
Roof removed, ivy-spindled throat. Being
Forever-far from coasts. Being echo clang and
Shale-sick grease rag. Being trundled down
The conveyor belt, the wound wound river being
Time-tight, squeezing and seething
And flooding …
Although these lines refer to a harsh history with onerous conditions, they could be describing a present moment – and indeed they do. But throughout Threat Come Close, Coleman implies that each of us could bring everything in the world to bear if we dared. The term “swamp-swallowed” evokes the Great Dismal Swamp, which comes up again in a poem with that as its title, and these final lines:
Echoing death
is a kind of survival. Worn down, we are thankful;
those who hunt us end always raptured
in mosquito gospel. Commit to memory the quieted
hate, what punctures the enveloped body: one grown human
given over before the morning, but after we witnessed blood
turn slicker than forgetfulness, branch shards buoyant inside
the wooden dark. Caught in trees, living unbearable angles. Go
back where you came from white man, contract, bloodhound,
we’ll camp in the grease-mud, the humid underside of silence.
The imperative at the end, “go back,” tells us to whom (among others) this poem is spoken. Then one understands the urgency of “Commit to memory.” Coleman’s diction forces the aggressor to pause and listen, making sense. When the aggressor pauses, of course, he gets bitten by the bugs, which quiets or diverts the hate. The swamp provides a passage to freedom – but what kind of liberty is accessed there?
I could not proceed beyond this point of Threat Come Close without reconsidering the notion of “the freedom of the poet” as I’ve encountered it through the years. There is John Berryman, for whom freedom entailed assuming identities, self-transcendence through identification with others, bounding over the limitation of oneself. There is Robert Pinsky, who writes, “A poem is free, and it shows its freedom by establishing its own principles: the unique physics and chemistry and atmosphere of a new planet.” There is Susan Stewart who in The Poet’s Freedom says, “In the beginning to make a poem, we claim some measure of freedom from the context of the situation – that is, the situation itself is undetermined … To make the work is to free such making from the very context that proposes it.”
Certainly, Coleman is driven to establish poems with their own principles. But he cannot be so easily freed or detached “from the context of the situation.” This condition hikes the odds against the poem. His hyper-response is to confront the context squarely – and rely on his expressive instincts to exploit the hand dealt to him. He finds a way, in poem after poem, to push back against ”the gravid pull of emotional life” and project a newly created presence that out-speaks its undying antagonists. So while memory, anxiety and apprehension are his materials, his metier is desire itself. What a relief it would be to evade forever the hounds that hunt us all. Coleman isn’t above using a little word play to spell out our situation: “AMERICAN CIVILITY Outside the body: We are two different people. We are too different people. We are two different people. Inside the body: We are two different people. We are too different people. We are two different people. We are too –- We do not believe in one.” His self-portraiture is declarative yet inquisitive, searingly personal but poised and thoroughly considered. And a model of eloquence.
To whom — to what — do I belong
The mind in night spreads out like fireflies – impatient
lilting over flooding water, nowhere to land now
that they can see, each makes me still look back.
Who reached? – I wanted to be the fateless
cave where someone, you, could lose the world, slip down
its drowsed mind, spread like night around impatient fireflies –
What has my life been laced with?
Needles, threats, amphetamines, insides skitter and pound
though they see nothing. I look away and in and back
and forth, what pulls or lulls or lies stagnant
floods and anchors all I am. Stone sure, I am an edge. Now
night becomes my mind, moondark, impatient, looses fireflies
in this broken trickle through what won’t remain, this pit
an open mouth, a living hole, breathing in the end out
more than taking in, like eyes I’ve watched, like where I look
and hate to look at. Faith, let me be rootless, fluent
as pain and change-slick water. I am you and falling through
darkness in my mind, soft spill of dying fireflies, impatient
in this body, this brink, scheme, see: in here I can’t look back.
Here’s what Denis Donoghue writes in On Eloquence: “The dancing of speech is eloquence: the aim of the dance is not to get from one part of the village green to another, it is to create and embody yet another form of life beyond the already known forms of it … It is commonly assumed that eloquence is a form or a subset of rhetoric, a means to rhetorical ends. That is not true. Rhetoric has an aim, to move people to do one thing rather than another … The main attribute of eloquence is gratuitousness: its place in the world is to be without place or function, its mode is to be intrinsic.”
This is how Coleman conquers context: his language embodies “another form of life beyond the already known forms of it,” just as a truly accomplished poet is sometimes able to pull off. Poets, like everyone else, may want people “to do one thing rather than another.” But their poems aspire and exist “to be intrinsic.” To go deeper. Consider “St. Who” — in which eloquence takes the poem’s rhetorical aspect in hand.
St. Who
Who is not callous, not cattle
moving in sequence, a cataract of time,
of blue-grained lusciousness
a green scythe illumined in moon –
who is not night corkscrewed, not chrysalis tearing into
what we will call heavy in an eye.
Who is not moon moving
in sequence clobbered by time blue or grain heavy
green lusciousness – or night scythed a cataract
of cattle illumined in corkscrews, chrysalises
tearing into what
we will call callousness.
Who is not blue and heavy with time
moving in sequence mooned
or green grain cattled
amongst scattered chrysalises corkscrewed into
night called will scythed, called lusciousness tearing,
illumined, called what we will.
Who is not lusciousness corkscrewed
in time, cattle scattered,
a sequence scythed, illumined like grain
clobbered in moonblue, called a heavy chrysalis
of will, a cataract, tearing
green night, calloused, you and I.
Coleman’s generosity is located in the space he provides for us to respond to the four questions of “St. Who.” He resides among the questioners, opening up to the sounds that expedite potential answers. Each of us resembles this speaking presence, a “sequence clobbered by time.”
Threat Come Close is dense with a recognizable world, even as the collection’s formal variety and virtuosic phrasing tend to foreground the attempt to picture that world. The poet is earnestly at work, adept at pitch more than tone, and seemingly feverish with invention. Sometimes it is as if he is addressing phantoms in phantom-language. At other times, the devotional and prayerful take over: “Then let me be / that music that consumes midnight. Let me make / chords with what comes from this blood.”
Denis Donoghue also says that eloquence “does not represent the real, it replaces it with its own voice … It is the charisma of speech, claiming to transcend the properties of law, custom, and reference: an inspired grace, a favor, like the gift of tongues.” Coleman’s eloquence will not allow his world merely to be itself. He may intensify it, he may condemn it, he may widen or tighten the perspective on what he wants us to see. But in all cases, he enhances the world in view through an agility with language that dares to take on both the tenacity of history and the quaking of his own emotion.
* * * * * *
[Published by Four Way Books, March 6, 2018. 96 pages, $15.95 paperback]