Stategy Response, Week 12

Brigitte Byrd's collection, "Song of a Living Room," exhibits poems that seem more often than not obscure. Upon several reads through the collection I was having a frustrating time with finding the work accessible as a reader. What I also found frustrating was why was I less engaged in this work that tends to be more surreal, cryptic, rangy, and invested in word play when those tactics are usually my points of interest in female poets. Clearly Byrd is interested in the politics of poetic narrative not only evident with her prose poem structure, but with the content itself: "There was futility in the narrative and her voice broke" (Perhaps The Season Was Really That), "Same book to open. Same page to find. Last / line to break" (Something Like nobody coming Something Like went instead), "After days of rampaging through dreams she noticed a shift in the / narrative" (The Way He Stumbled On Air), etc. What occurs continuously is the comment on "breakage." Again, we return to the feminine politics of a patrilinear narrative in poems that female poets find the need to drift away from. By writing cryptically, and perhaps even cyclically, Byrd can defy the mundane traditions of the "same book" and the "same page." Why then do I in particular have a difficult time becoming involved in this collection? One element that I have noted that lends to my confusion is the heavy use of Byrd's abstractions or what I would also consider "half-abstractions." One example of this usage comes from a line in "Variation For Mushrooms And Pomeranians":"Although she had already cut through the genre with alarming ferocity this exhausted subject was splendid." Words and phrases like "alarming ferocity," "exhausted subject," and even "splendid" all strike me as half-abstractions or full abstractions. In that one sentence we do not get one Williams-like "THING" and possess no grounding in what the poet is attempting to convey. Perhaps this highlights something in me as a poet that I was not fully aware of--that being that as much as I experiment with and pleasure in the reading of word play I do need some grounding in "THINGS" to move the poem along. Is may represent a conflict boiling in my poetic feminist and patriarchal interests--that I do desire some thread of coherent narrative. Perhaps I can leave Byrd's collection with appreciation to this enlightenment to my own poetic investments and reconsider how much I let word play and narrative balance in my own writing.

Free Entry, Week 12

I carve out motives
and you carve out a chunk
of your knee on the sidewalk.
If it wasn't for all the snow
the fall would have been less
bloody. I find it hard to believe
you didn't cry. The skin peeled
like a sunburn and twinkled
with flecks of cement, but the snow
doctored it all. I take my scarf
to tie off the hole in your jeans
and cut the draft from running
up your spine. We have no privacy.
We have only this display
of winter that melts with our
every step. You ask to stop.
We are only two blocks from home
when you tell me that I failed
to mention the bluejay that flew
over head when you stumbled.
It's my favorite bird you say,
how could you not see it?

Free Entry 1, Week 12

The more you talk the more I unplan
our drapes and oriental rugs. I can hear
you fumble through boxes in the next room.
You drain them of their sinking suspicions,
our parents’ warnings. I’m experimenting
with you to find the exact coordinates.
All that I unbury is more talk, your vibrating
voice that sounds best when you’re at work.
If we were actors all the lines would be forgotten,
you reciting Hamlet when we’re performing
Macbeth and I playing Blanche Dubious.
Last week you screamed from the roof
of the house that you could see the hospital
six blocks away. This is a sign of your dependency
on sterility. I should wear you like a lab coat
just to shield myself from possibility of hands.
Your hands carry in one more box from the truck—
kitchen wares, it says. Have you seen the blender?
You ask. I begin to say no, but then I realize
if I say yes then you might believe I want you here.

Improv 2, Week 12

(THE WAY HE STUMBLED ON AIR)

After days of rampaging through dreams she noticed a shift in the
narrative. The night was broken. The air was accidental. The earth was
immutable. In this version of the story there was an obscene sun and
her words caught fire. She said What else is it but magic, that chasm
/ between things and their names and she pointed to his hands on the
outline. He painted sadness on her dress with a weeping stone. There
was no color on her tossed glance. There was no one on the road either.
They took off their eyes to rinse out ashes of sounds and for a moment
the screen was empty. He said Boredom / like an ill-fitting / speech bubble
and went on to adjust her belt. By that time it was clear that she brooded
over their setting.

Brigitte Byrd

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(AND WHEN HE WAS GONE)

After days of kicking a bottle cap down the asphalt, from Topeka to Summerset, she finally swallowed the sounds of her own voice. The taste resembled that of an accident, one in which a boy was involved, a boy with an abundance of freckles.
It was obscene. As the newspapers went there was a pick-up, an empty horse trailer, and them, the boy with the freckles and the lonely girl now kicking a bottle cap down the highway. He once ate a hot dog on the Fourth of July and they talked
of a baby. She licked the relish off of his cheek. Your freckles taste
like commemoration, she said, like the sulfur that leaks into the air from every firework. I will name you my favorite taste. It will always end this way, in a vow to never speak. A singular utterance: yes, no, I love you, could lead her back to those words. And him. Every once in awhile, when glancing up from the bottle cap, she sees a horse under a tree, on some farm, down some road, and she just keeps kicking.

Junkyard Quotes 1-5, Week 12

“God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“I don’t have to draw a new line, because Hamlet’s situation is the same as Cinderella’s, except that the sexes are reversed.”
“I’ll hire actors to act out the way the ghost said my father was murdered by my uncle, and I’ll put on this show and see what my uncle makes of it.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
"If limos, chartered aircraft and sex clubs are where they think their donors' money should be spent, who are we to judge?”
-The Washington Post
“4 people, 1 rat and 1 dog. Samuel L. Jackson did not say “motherfucker” even once.”
(refering to the film 187)
www.bodycounters.com
“Shizo Kanakuri disappeared while running the marathon in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. He was listed as a missing person in Sweden for 50 years — until a journalist found him living quietly in southern Japan.
Overcome with heat during the race, he had stopped at a garden party to drink orange juice, stayed for an hour, then took a train to a hotel and sailed home the next day, too ashamed to tell anyone he was leaving.
There’s a happy ending: In 1966 Kanakuri accepted an invitation to return to Stockholm and complete his run. His final time was 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 8 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds — surely a record that will last forever.”
www.futilitycloset.com

Improv 1, Week 12

(PERHAPS THE REASON WAS REALLY THAT)

The following morning she had grown. There was futility in the
narrative and her voice broke. It was a challenge. Like the continuity
of a fallen history like her eyes locked into his like his body locked
into hers like the fear of. Elle est dehors,la Vie, avec ses balencoires, ses
alcools et ses monstres. It was not a theatrical gesture surrealism it was
referential anguish it was just uninspired. She hung over the clashing
format of a limb-crushing performance and his early desire clutched to
paradoxical pleasures. The question was not her emotional modernity.
The question was not the crumbling of the Georgian landscape. He
sensed her resistance to shambling close-ups and there was absence in
their ballad.

Brigette Byrd

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(DARWIN'S BLUNDER OF MARRIAGE AND SCIENCE)

The weekly considering of the barnacle’s sex was his uptight ritual. So much so
that one morning he awoke, head in a petri dish, and discovered his wife’s
favorite question gone. It was a Tuesday. The night before they had roasted duck
for dinner and now he faces evenings locked in the light of his personal science
without the comfort of a overcooked foul. Had he paid attention to his wife’s
facial modernity, seen the freckles inch closer to her eyes, he would have replaced
his barnacle for her hand, however feminine it may be. His wife once hung her arm
over his shoulders and peered into the back of his head—a ritual of hers that meant:
the landscape is ill, you uninspire me, please forget about its sex, but not mine.
He told her he rather hammer his barnacles to wall and use them as coat racks
than forget the nature of his quest, which was to rediscover voice, evidence, and bodies not humans. From this utterance his wife closed her eyes,
letting the freckles wilt into one brown scar, and boarded a train for the inland. She hung over the clanking wheels of the last rail car and forgot all about the duck she was supposed to cook, leaving her ring in the petri dish.