Ron Slate on Lexicon by Allison Joseph
In a 2019 interview at Lunch Ticket, Allison Joseph said the following about her emotionally abusive father: “Only after his death could I speak my own individual truths about him. In a sense, I had to turn him into a character, a figure I could control through language. That’s why so many of the poems in that book are formal—those forms gave me a way to control and confront the ‘character’ of my father as presented in the book … I needed formal tools to achieve that confrontation.” The meticulous quatrains in her poem “Dinner Hour” in Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen, 2019) offer a cooling habitat for such seething sentiments. I mention this for two reasons — first, I’m still hooked on this collection even as her new book, Lexicon, calls for attention, and also, Joseph’s restless search for and reliance on form extends through Lexicon — where the looming figure of the harsh father reappears:
Another Childhood
Our kitchen smelled from frying fish.
My mother wore her nursing shoes.
My father made my sister wish
she could escape our house, his rules.
My mother wore her nursing shoes.
My sister turned her music up —
she could escape our house, his rules
that way. I dropped another cup.
My sister turned her music up.
My father yelled at her to shut it off
right now. I dropped another cup.
You clumsy child, my father scoffed.
My father yelled at her to shut it off.
My mother told him not to shout so loud.
You nosy wife, my father scoffed.
My mother lived mild, my father proud.
My mother told him not to shout so loud.
He’d raise his fist at her, he’d threaten wrath.
My mother lived mild, my father proud.
I’d struggle with my homework, hating math.
My father called us worthless, stupid girls.
My father made my sister wish
for college far away, another world.
Our kitchen smelled from frying fish.
There is a grievance in this poem — but “Another Childhood” is not a poem of grievance. It is not a poem that demands one’s respect and approval simply because it has a grievance or an aggrieved tone. Joseph’s kitchen of childhood may have been an oppressive constriction, and her critique of the father, though oblique, is clear. But the poem retains the smell of frying fish and the blunt regulation of behavior, even while finding its breath in the “mild”-ness of the mother. The poem competes with the past as yet another type of constriction, on its own terms.
Joseph is one of our most circumspect poets, even as she takes up our most nettlesome issues. Her work is profoundly humanistic — but she seems wary of the impulse to assume a position of moral superiority. Her poem “Looking Is For Poets” ends by praising the “caustic, crucial visions” of poems, but her tonal poise and patience evoke a person who lives among and close by the hurts and blunders even as she critiques them. An articulate participant within the court of public opinion, she does not stand to the side and carp.
Lexicon, as the title suggests, is also a book about, and often a defense of, language, poets and poetry. A poem is not op-ed: “You read a poem not just to understand, / but more to let its language overwhelm / your breath, to let new words in air proclaim / their pulse, a beat that ravishes and soothes / at once.” To inject force in a poem (to “overwhelm”), we often employ elliptical language, fragmentation, and so forth. Joseph does not — so it is legitimate to ask what exactly may overwhelm us in her work. For me, the force issues from her solitary intelligence, her “knowing what you have to say / has nothing to do with anyone / but you.”
In “Token Black,” she addresses a white teacher of her past — and evens the score. The poem begins, “Somehow you thought enough of me / to let me in this classroom, as long / as I sit quietly, not uttering a word” — and ends at the beginning, “You’ve let me in, offering me a chair, // a glimpse of the knowledge I can win, / as long as I sit behind this marred desk — / my face quiet, mouth a wooden slit.” The core of the poem is its confident utterance, the mastery of phrasing, the command of situation.
I adore the severities in Joseph’s work as when, at the conclusion of “Grief: A Complaint,” she writes:
I hate the bitter commerce of funerals
and cemeteries — rituals of burials
and rites of remembrance
that I war to forget as soon as they
are over, casket lowered slowly
into its trench, my heels sinking into
the just-turned mud of recent departures.
But turn the page, and there’s Joseph’s humorous candor, or her generosity, or her precise sentiments. (In “My Muse” she writes, “what if I / let her down, anger her, displease her / with gooey sentiment, abstract diction?”). There are several splendid anaphoric poems (through 2018 she maintained a blog called “The Rondeau Roundup” — “A blog for the exploration, appreciation and publication of the rondeau, rondel, roundel, rondeau redouble, rondolet, triolet, and ballade”). But my favorites include the couplet-shaped “Ruined Things,” and “Why I Love Sleep” which begins, “In my dreams, everyone owns and loves Joan Armatrading records / while Taylor Swift slaves to earn a living wage / at a Hoboken Howard Johnson’s.”
I think of Allison Joseph as, at least in one way, the complete opposite of Walt Whitman, whose poems suggest a love of people but not especially of persons. Joseph’s refrain, in “People: A Ballade,” is “people disappoint you again and again.” Joseph is a most discreet poet living among vast indiscretions and measuring up to counter all of them. But she also measures her own responses and, I think, is careful about going too far. Nevertheless, she has a way of stiffening your spine even while poking fun at herself, as in “Given Names” which starts, “I could never be Wendy — Wendys / have pert noses, even perkier / breasts,” and goes on to reject self-naming as Tatiana, Marci, Cindi, Grave, Charity and Maria (for various reasons). In the end, she throws a jab at Elvis Costello:
… Instead, men walk up to me,
singing “Allison” — and I curse the sarcastic Brit
who wrote that song, a song where the singer
hates himself for loving a woman
like me, still claiming his aim is true
as the instrumentation fades,
though we both know it never will be.
[Published by Red Hen Press on April 27, 2021, 104 pages, $16.95 paperback].
* * * * *
Rachel Mennies on If This Is the Age We End Discovery by Rosebud Ben-Oni
In the Talmud, Jacob — on his way to return home and confront his brother Esau, whose blessings Jacob stole from God — wrestles with an angel, or else a man, or else both at once. This parashah serves as origin point for numerous Jewish fables and restrictions — like so much of Genesis does — but before all the commentary and history arrive, there is the struggle: Jacob, alone and grappling in the dark with a being whose form and provenance alike remain unknown to him.
If This Is the Age We End Discovery, Rosebud Ben-Oni’s second full-length poetry collection, wrestles with physics, and also with illness, and also with God, pinning us to moments where we must confront the unknown, holding our attention on uncertainty and questioning without granting us resolution’s rest. Through period-bulleted fragments and sprawling, page-full stanzas, we’re never still — we’re caught in the act; we’re wrestling, too, with why — and how — we exist, with why we suffer, with how we love. “[W]hat brought us here,” declares the collection’s opening poem, “Poet Wrestling with the Possibility She’s Living in a Simulation,” “is all / the same horse. So I have some questions.” Instead of answering these questions “for us,” If This Is the Age We End Discovery raises more.
At the collection’s dark core lives Efes, “Modern Hebrew for ‘zero’” and simultaneously, within the poet’s fluid, dazzling imagination, the force “responsible for Dark Energy, vampire bunnies & insomnia; insatiable lover; enemy of mathematics & elegant equations; Creation’s Twin …” and on — a shifting, unstable null at the tail-point of each of the collection’s question marks. Efes ghosts the many poems in this collection whose titles begin “Poet Wrestling with ____,” the force driving the speaker’s search for understanding that often lands instead on the unknowable, or else the contradictory, as in the first stanza of the poem “Poet Wrestling from Zero (to the Power of):”
It’s amazing how we won’t let each other die silently.
If there is no death {then I’d rather die.} I’d rather die.
Then. I’m in love with you. Air never sleeps. The air
dies infinite
{-ly} alive …
Here, the principle of Efes transforms the poem’s opening declaration into a riddle — how can we die if there is no death? How can air die infinitely alive? Inside the “black hole,” where the rules of life we’ve come to understand disappear, sense and order no longer serve us: instead, “Voids are luscious and we’re looking. Hard … Nothing, after all. / Is. Our language.” The act of reading Ben-Oni’s language itself becomes a part of the riddle — “I don’t need words,” the speaker says as we read on, “even these.”
Ben-Oni’s energetic dexterity with the poetic line, in particular her juxtaposition of short-short sentence fragments with margin-spanning lines, further emphasizes If This Is the Age We End Discovery’s ongoing grappling: we leap and pause, sometimes, in the same moment, a lyrical feint that precedes the collection’s vastest revelations. In the poem “{To Zero, with Strange Love},” the lines sprawl as they fragment, moving us both quicker and slower simultaneously — yet another seeming contradiction made reality:
Loving you means I’ll never bear. Witness.
Yet. Having a taste. Of creation. Gives. Way
to weaknesses. I know.
Pausing after “bear’s” caesura, we wait to learn what it is we must bear — and it turns out to be annihilation, for to love Zero, or Efes, undoes us by definition. But as the poem continues — and further splinters — the speaker calls us to join her within this nothingness: “wouldn’t we not / be a cool bloom / the sweetest of sweet / nothings”?
Ben-Oni raises the stakes of this nullification in the moments If This Is the Age We End Discovery’s speaker grapples with illness: its mortality-binding, embodied dangers. “I’m a little numb these days,” the speaker discloses in “Poet Wrestling with Every Night She’d Crucify Herself:” “On my left side. It’s not metaphorical.” And in the collection’s eponymous poem, she shares that “I’ve forgotten / When I wasn’t in hospital beds & the nurses unknowing / The grace of it all / As they stroke my head: She’s gone out again.” Here, the wrestling called forth takes everything the speaker has to keep engaging, the title pointing us to a new fear: the end. A certain, uninhabitable answer. While we dive deeper, and more wildly, into the void as the collection continues, these early moments in the book ground our exploration by reminding us of the fight’s territory, its staging ground: our bodies and our safety.
If This Is the Age We End Discovery ends (spoiler!) with a fragment that holds the whole book within it:
{what if}
It’s a question I ask myself at the beginning of life’s most exciting moments, or else life’s most dreadful — an utterance that opens the door to uncertainty, ready to fight it to earn passage through it. But Ben-Oni doesn’t pose “what if” as a question here. If This Is the Age We End Discovery instead offers us the radiant possibility of accepting this articulation as a sort of mathematical proof, or else as a prayer: one to sustain us as we reach out that first arm to the shoulder of the unknown.
[Published by Alice James Books on March 9, 2021, 100 pages, $17.95 paperback]
* * * * *
Heidi Seaborn on Girl by Veronica Golos
Memory itself can take on the narrative shape of a Grimm’s fairytale — what we choose to illuminate and what remains in the shadows. Our darkest memories contort with time, taking on the sheen of impossibility. Perhaps we attempt to bury dark experiences beneath happier memories or remake our story as Disney would into a technicolor fantasy. Veronica Golos understands fables and mythmaking, and she understands truth-telling. Both are at work in her latest collection of poems, Girl, as they were in her most recent collections, Rootwork: Lost Writings of John Brown and Mary Day Brown (3: A Taos Press), and Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press). But this time, in Girl, the mythology and truth are of her own making, the fables and facts of growing up girl.
With the opening poem, “Rougedwoman: Prophecy,” Golos leads the reader through the at once familiar, and completely foreign, wooded path of Red Riding Hood. The speaker is girl, who is at once within the wolf and free of him. But in this long lyrical poem, she is never really free. The wolf is always waiting to consume girl and to be consumed by girl. The wolf is a man who will rape a girl in a horse stall as she curries a pony, the wolf is a brutal, unpredictable mother, an abusive stepfather, the wolf is beauty, the wolf is one’s own danger and desire — “Then the Wolf / Will raise one word, / And that word shall be Girl / And we shall be / Inside Him, again, / Whole.” All these wolves await the girl who walks through the woods of childhood.
In Rootwork: Lost Writings of John Brown and Mary Day Brown, Golos imagines the correspondence between the famous abolitionist John Brown and his wife. She takes the reader deeply into the contours of this relationship as they wrestle with their historic actions and the dailiness of life. Golos creates an intimacy not only between her characters but with the reader.
Reading the poems in Girl, I was that girl. Golos’ voice became my own — her poems of childhood riven in the imagery of my own childhood imagination. It is easy to slip into these poems, to inhabit them as a sheep’s skin. Her language is strongly evocative in its description of the playgrounds, streets and markets of New York City, “the sea-slick gray-green East River” and of the lives encountered, “those boys / of glorious tendon. / ribs. rebellious. proud hyacinth cool. sunbrown.” Each precisely chosen word muscling into this reader’s psyche. For me the very act of reading a collection of poetry cover to cover is an act of intimacy. I feel the poet’s breath on my neck, our fingers tangle, as I am drawn deeper into the world created one poem at a time.
With Girl, my entanglement with the work began with the enticement of the first line in the first poem, “What I know is more than thorn” and carried through to the last line “She / wouldn’t ask, no, she wouldn’t ask.” It is a question of knowing throughout. What the speaker knows, doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know become the revelations and disguises of Girl. A professor of mine questions the knowingness of a poem — does the poem know where it is going, is there an inherent sense of uncertainty in the landscape of the poem?
In Girl, that uncertainty lives in each poem, but also in the journey through the collection. Golos balances suspense and mystery with a nakedness that heightens the drama and vulnerability of her work. She accomplishes this through her use of beautiful, searing language but also through space. The reader is forced to hold her breath, gulp, exhale through these poems. In “Poem, Because,” lines race and zig zag across pages like a child running away, and unnecessary words disappear like mittens in the snow between lines. What remains are stark images, the marked footprints of a girl. Golos is as deliberate about form and shape as she is about every word chosen. The precision of her craft providing emotional heft to the work, even as it lightens the visual weight of poem on page.
I have lived my own version of Girl. And isn’t that the mark of poetry that works — poetry that works its way under the reader’s skin before slipping into a vein and beelining for the heart? Girl achieves this through the mythology of twisted fairy tales, the magic of a child’s imagination and the rootedness of an often-wicked reality. Initially seduced by the poet’s use of fable, even as it eludes the expected, then caught in the web of childhood rendered as a teeter totter of pain and power, I fell for Golos’ subtle punches to the gut. Have I been here? Yes, I have been here. The girl that still lives inside of me is a wolf too.
Playground, New York Circa 1957
i
she arrives early,
alone. to swing weightless.
into a shine and sheen
of early morning,
a thievery. this being
by herself, in the quiet, and yet,
the same small gods
enter the park with her
to open and shutter
the greening light. them;
ii
each time
they return heavier
by the weight of where
they have been.
if not gods, then the scar of them.
a future harboring inside;
inside where she is, as if
she stumbles into a world set ablaze;
iii
you have to know the gods’ use of her —
she stands as promise, arms akimbo,
the icarus link
between the (uncoupling) of worlds;
iv
her voice
sweetwater.
v
Then the park floods with children like a flock of goldfinches in the warm buttery
light and the girl is happy surrounded by the noise of play the other children flinging
themselves back and forth on the swings sliding down slides and jungle gyms sandbox
sprinklers spuming water in the crisp morning air she enters into this teaming grace
she is just another child running and the gods back away leave her to have this for later
for memory’s sake and always during these days the girl knows what is coming as she
draws hopscotch in yellow chalk on the concrete ten boxes in all this ancient game and
tosses the white pebble into the third box and suddenly
silence even traffic pigeons water spray
halted mid-air the almost wild hush and too
soon the jumbling chaos jangle of this world falls falls all over over all the children
of the park.
[Published by 3: A Taos Press on October 20, 2019, 89 pages, $25.00]