American Poets in the 21st Century
Page 19
4.
The “Gender Fables” that open Milk & Filth feature poems about La Llorona, Guadalupe, Malinché, and Phaedra, among others. In this sequence, Giménez Smith reoccupies the marginalized, peripherized, or perjorized female figures of myth, literature, and historiography.32 A species of cultural counter-conquest, these poems are less monumental than “Parts of an Autobiography” or the Mendieta sequence, yet they continue a project of lyric reimagining that has been in place throughout Giménez Smith’s career. The volume Goodbye, Flicker almost entirely occupies itself with a denatured fairy tale. These poems read both like orthodox feminist interventions and as a way to reimagine the self on a series of dark-lit lyric stages. In the poem “Where,” for example, the poet casts herself as series of “natashas”—“natasha wet. natasha deterred. natasha equipped. / lithe natasha. craven natasha. natasha upon a pine tree.”33
Giménez Smith’s penchant for these lyric restagings is so distinctive across the volumes that one begins to feel that it is the adventure of the commitment to art itself that she is staging and restaging. This seems indicated when she reinhabits Emily Dickinson’s poem 41 (“Split the lark / you’ll find the music”) in “Finding the Lark,” from her first book, Odalisque in Pieces. In the fairy-tale mechanics of this poem, the speaker and mother fight a kind of duel that casts them as artists, antagonists, and co-creators: like Anne Bradstreet, the speaker writes poems in which “I burned down / our modest house”; the mother “scribbled me a picture / where my mouth should have been.”34 Later, a lark appears at the window as the figure of Art’s annunciation, singing “Arson is Invention” and “pointing to where her silvery heart smoldered.”35 This lark wears a female pronoun, and her presence in some way allows the speaker to be constituted both as a body and as an artist: “I grew my mouth / kissing that window.”36 Female figures invent each other through Art, but it is not an easy collaboration since it implies the threat of being supplanted; such is the consistent threat of the fairy tale, deployed across Giménez Smith’s work. In the penultimate face-off between mother and speaker in “Finding the Lark,”
She found the photo I took of the lark.
I adorned it with pearls. In it the lark sings
a song I tried to learn
from the cleft of her mouth.
I once pressed the photo to my face
like a mask, but nothing.
This my mother took.37
In this passage the female pronoun is mobile as a bird, and doubles proliferate. Does the song mentioned in lines 4/5, the song through which Art is communicated, arise from the cleft of “her” (the lark’s) mouth, or “her” (the mother’s) mouth? When we learn that the mother “took” the photo, does this mean she confiscated or made the photo? Does the mother in the last line mirror the daughter in the second? Who originates or precedes whom? Who makes which image? This is a modeling of the problem of the womb as a site of reversals rather than origin, which we see so dynamically deployed in the Mendieta sequence; here, it is the daughter and mother who are continually locked in a counter-conquest of each other. Speaker and mother de- and reterritorialize each other even as they are de- and re-territorialized by Art.
5.
In Dickinson’s exhilarating original, to “split the lark” is both to “find its music” and to eviscerate it: “Loose the flood, you shall find it patent, / Gush after gush, reserved for you.”38 Art for Dickinson is visceral, as for Giménez Smith and for Mendieta. (Giménez Smith: “Anyone can enter my work because it’s about viscera, and I’ve got wounds into it and they’re little windows into the workings of me.”39) To write her most ambitious work, Bring Down the Little Birds, a title that overtly references Robert Duncan’s “My Mother Would be a Falconress” but seems to covertly reference Dickinson’s lark, Giménez Smith shows herself willing to split apart the lyric itself to let its visceral essence course across a book-length, extensive, lyric form—in this case, a lyric memoir-in-pieces.
This lyric memoir is preoccupied with gestation—its ground situation is the gestation of the speaker-poet’s second child, a daughter—and is thus preoccupied with a series of inversions and reversals we can now see as characteristic of Giménez Smith’s body of work and also as the signature dynamic of the womb where “the call for reversal is native.” The womb of the woman artist and the womb of the book itself are constantly twinning, replicating, spinning, reversing. As with the mother-daughter artists in “Finding the Lark,” Bring Down the Little Birds entails a co-constituting of mother and daughter as artist figures, and the opening passage of the book stages a number of mirror images, mother-twins, inversions, and reversals:
I daydream that I’m thirteen sitting in an attic in my mother’s wedding dress. I discover a notebook, in it the evidence of my mother’s secret life. I write notes from her book into mine, which is, years later, discovered by my son.
From my mother’s imaginary notebook: a sketch of dancer, sketch of cabaret singer. I engage in gluttony and wild behavior.
I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet.40
This opening passage is intriguing and ambiguous. The speaker casts herself, through daydream, as an adolescent, dressed in her mother’s wedding dress. In this daydream she finds her mother’s notebook, and imputes to her a desire to be an artist, thus casting herself (the speaker-poet, an artist) as her mother’s imago. Thus it is the daughter who spawns the mother. This reversal and twinning of mother and daughter is further borne up by the speaker-poet’s act of writing—the speaker-poet “write[s] notes from her book into mine,” both scripting and co-opting the mother’s authorship. The speaker, in effect, supplants the mother by inventing her in her own (the daughter’s) image. She also performs a counter-conquest, re-authoring the mother tongue, enacting her own power takeover. It is in the daughter’s womb—of dream, of book—that the call reverses itself, that the mother is recreated as an artist. Finally the tract that she imputes to her mother—“I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet”—is also co-opted, this time from the foremother of Anglo literary feminism, Virginia Woolf. It seems that this speaker-poet is capable of many counter-conquests.
As the book proceeds, this procedure of reversal is witnessed everywhere the speaker-poet casts her gaze, as in the fragment “The lives of my students and their mothers’ parts in them.”41 “Parts” here may refer to the “influence” of the mothers on the students, but it could also refer to an uncanny reversal of gestation—not the “parts” of the embryo inside the mother, but the “parts” of the mother inside the child, as if the child could gestate his or her own mother. The speaker sees this relationship in her own toddler son: “He understands what me means, although when I ask him who he is, he says, Mom. Because we are the same thing.”42 At that point in time when the child is learning the mother tongue (English), which is not, in this case, his mother’s mother tongue (Spanish), the mirror can reverse at any moment around the syllables “me” and “Mom.” Such a reversal is given a further turn when the speaker’s mother develops a brain tumor. An ultrasound is performed, and it’s as if the speaker and her sister gaze on their own prenatal scans:
It’s in its own sac, the thing in her head.
We wish together, my sister and I, for the brain to absorb it like a fetus absorbs the homunculus. We also try to imagine what it’s like in there.43
Through the ultrasound, the speaker gazes along a system of reversals and doubles: the mother’s brain doubles for her womb, while a tumor doubles for a fetus “in its own sac.” When the format switches to italics, we realize that this is meant to fictionally render the mother’s writing, transcribed into the speaker-poet’s own book. Unsurprisingly, this scripted mother mirrors the daughter’s preoccupations: “A doctor on TV says that a baby girl is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have. Me with my mother all her life and my children all my life with me. A woman’s story begins. I tell stories for the ghost of a girl inside me, a mother
on the outside.”44
But where the mother and daughter truly mirror each other is around the central mirror term of the artist, whom both, as cast by the daughter, resemble: “I once had an artist in me. Who knows where she is now? Still inside? I think it may be that my memory is acted upon by the hidden artist.”45 First, the daughter casts her mother in her own image, as an artist who keeps a notebook. Then she goes further by casting this mother as imagining “an artist in me.” Does this refer to the mother’s interior wish to be an artist, her idealized (but unrecognized) self? Or does it refer to the fetus of the speaker-poet, gestating in her mother’s womb, the hidden artist? In the dementia-affected mind of the mother, the speaker-poet has never been born but also never absorbed. She is still in the womb, affecting the mother’s memory—and simultaneously the opposite of this, outside the mother, gestating this artist-mother in the womb of her book. This might be the ultimate counter-conquest or power takeover; the daughter wields the mother tongue by giving a voice to the mother. Such a paradox can be sustained only in the self-contradictory, fusing, and splitting body of Art. The end of the book and the end of this reverie happen simultaneously; death is imagined as a birth: “My body will crack open, out will come what I’ve left inside for so long, covered in jelly and blood. Out will come, finally, my real desire.”46
6.
The dramatic, expanded, and (non)fictive form of Bring Down the Little Birds allows Giménez Smith an unprecedented amount of space to stage the theater of affiliation and rejection, though as I’ve shown, we can see this theater playing itself out in the space of long series, brief lyrics, and even individual stanzas and sentences. Yet even this expanded vista reaches only to the brink of the future tense, with the double mother-daughter speaker just looking on death, just looking on “my real desire,” where it cannot yet be known or come into presence: the book cuts off here, wielding white space as effectively as in a lyric poem. If there is one signature energy to this body of work, it’s this commitment to reconfiguration and revision—yet, ironically, these retrospective assessments allow the speaker (and the poet) to keep moving forward in the hope of reaching toward an uncompromised future, “finally, my real desire.” Actual arrival is probably impossible, which may be why it occupies such a slender place in the cosmography of Giménez Smith’s oeuvre. But the forward motion itself—toward the future, toward death, toward political empowerment—is not impossible. Rather than mellowing at mid-career, Giménez Smith has doubled down on the radical intensity of her poems, opening the throttle of affect and enacting a precipitous momentum. Her latest sequence of poems, “Be Recorder,” three of which are reprinted in this volume from the forthcoming collection Be Recorder (2019), often plummets down the page with narrow lines and a tonally weaponized speaker who speeds each poem to its ending. The fuel for this flight is anger, while the method of litanizing a system of disavowals that are not, however, entirely cast off or “left-behind” is this poet’s signature, paradoxical, and cosmic method:
Once I broke into pieces
now I break into wholes
outside the coil I’ve learned
the most from the cracked
even the larks we go on
Lastly I escape the grim
pilgrim’s burlap sac
swinging the animal into
the heavens before
launching it into the river
after the seizure of fireworks
on that independence day
I had long entertained the idea
of anger as my primary survival
gift: such a robust promise of afterlife47
In this volley of unpunctuated phrases, each reaches for the last and for the next even as it is swung “into / the heavens before / launching it into the river / after.” While the successive quality of the phrases implies cause and effect, it in fact entails an anti-Heraclitan, fungible everytime where every phrase touches those around it and temporal indicators are flung down next to the nouns they can hardly explicate, as in the “river after.” Finally, the speaker collects herself to “narrate” the final three lines in an archly literary tone (that is, “I had long entertained the idea”), even as she delivers a set of ringing, orbiting, and incompatible juxtapositions: survival and afterlife being, in fact, opposites, and anger being the vehicle for both. In this final robust gesture, paradox opens a portal and Giménez Smith’s speaker pushes through it into a white page. This is why, for all her radical energy and the range of forms she deploys, Giménez Smith may be termed an essentially lyric writer. Lyric form, with its stanzaic brevity and its convention of broken lines, is a small-scale figure for that ultimate paradoxical system, constituted as it is by conjoined opposites: absence and presence. In Giménez Smith’s oeuvre as in the lyric itself, every would-be terminus is in fact a threshold onto an unwritten and indescribable future.
NOTES
1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2. Carmen Giménez Smith, Milk & Filth (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 40.
3. Roberto Bolaño, “First Infrarealist Manifesto.” Available online at launiversi-daddesconocida.wordpress.com.
4. A sixth volume, Be Recorder, will appear from Graywolf Press in 2019. Carmen Giménez Smith, Odalisque in Pieces (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009); Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); The City She Was (Fort Collins, CO: Center for Literary Publishing, 2011); Goodbye, Flicker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); and Cruel Futures (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018).
5. Giménez Smith, Milk & Filth, 39.
6. Ibid., 34.
7. Ibid., 33.
8. Ibid., 34.
9. Ibid., 34.
10. Ibid., 39.
11. Ibid., 37.
12. Ibid., 36.
13. “Errorism” is derived from the neologism “errorist” coined by Don Mee Choi in her poem “The Morning News is Exciting,” in The Morning News is Exciting (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2010), 28.
14. Giménez Smith, Milk & Filth, 40.
15. Ibid., 39.
16. Ibid., 36.
17. Ibid., 38.
18. Ibid., 34.
19. Ibid., 36.
20. Ibid., 40.
21. Ibid., 34.
22. Ibid., 39.
23. Ibid., 35.
24. Ibid., 40.
25. Ibid., 34.
26. Ibid., 34.
27. Ibid., 37.
28. Quoted in Olga Visa, Ana Mendieta: Earth, Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–1985, exhibition catalogue, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2004), 90.
29. Giménez Smith, Milk & Filth, 57.
30. Ibid., 59.
31. Ibid., 63.
32. Ibid., 7–22.
33. Giménez Smith, Goodbye, Flicker, 43.
34. Giménez Smith, Odalisque in Pieces, 13.
35. Ibid., 14.
36. Ibid., 14.
37. Ibid., 15.
38. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 412.
39. Giménez Smith, “Parts of an Autobiography,” Milk & Filth, 35.
40. Giménez Smith, Bring Down the Little Birds, 1. (Italics in original here and hereafter.)
41. Ibid., 3.
42. Ibid., 7.
43. Ibid., 39.
44. Ibid., 41.
45. Ibid., 94.
46. Ibid., 95.
47. Giménez Smith, “Be Recorder” (originally titled “Post-Identity”), in Angels of the Americlypse, Readings and Colloquia, Institute for Latino Studies and the Creative Writing Program, University of Notre Dame, October 28, 2015, youtu.be/mzyx0_yXFns.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Carmen Giménez Smith
BOOKS
Odalisque in Pieces
. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009.
The City She Was. Fort Collins, CO: Center for Literary Publishing, 2011.
Goodbye, Flicker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.
Milk & Filth. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.
Cruel Futures. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018.
Be Recorder. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, forthcoming.
MEMOIR
Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010.
CHAPBOOKS
Glitch. Kingston, RI: Dusie Kollectiv, 2009.
Can We Talk Here. Brooklyn: Belladonna Books, 2011.
Reason’s Monsters. Kingston, RI: Dusie Kollectiv, 2011.
EDITED VOLUMES
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales. Ed. Kate Bernheimer and Carmen Giménez Smith. New York: Penguin, 2010.
Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing. Ed. John Chávez and Carmen Giménez Smith. Denver, CO: Counterpath Press, 2014.
ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE
POEMS
FROM Off-Season City Pipe
The Change
For All the Sharecroppers Behind Me
Thirteen years ago, before bulk barns and
fifth-gear diesel tractors, we rode royal blue tractors with
toolboxes big enough to hold a six pack on ice.
In the one-hundred-fifteen-degree summer
heat with air so thick with moisture
you drink as you breathe.
Before the year dusters sprayed
malathion over our clustered bodies, perspiring
while we primed bottom lugs,
those ground-level leaves of tobacco,
and it clung to us with black tar so sticky we rolled
eight-inch balls off our arms at night and
cloroxed our clothes for hours and hours.
Before we were poisoned and
the hospital thought we had been burned in fires,
at least to the third degree,