American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  FROM Alaskaphrenia

  Comprehension Questions

  What kind of phantom is the ship?

  Where does the girl hide her great distances?

  Accordingly, what is the rate to multiply by to find the intense sensitivity of minor characters?

  How do the men abandon the ship?

  Why do they trouble the forest with their strange butterflies and huge suns full of complete daylight?

  What role does the dog play in developing catastrophe?

  If the setting permitted biological time, would red shift through the captain’s mirage?

  What dark authority lurks among the unpruned spruce?

  Whose foreshadowing crawls out and what sets it off?

  Do you believe the wave is not a girl in furs?

  Is this a comedy or a tragedy of secret motions?

  Why should a zephyr so rarely intervene?

  Does the stormy girl’s beauty suggest something about the captain?

  Why do his arrows ricochet wildly just before the target?

  Meanwhile, what does the girl’s fear become when she turns around?

  Which constellation best fits the story?

  Though the captain arrests the ice horse, what fantasy freezes the dark around him?

  When does it matter? When can you deceive?

  Why do the men take the tusk and shank inside?

  Does the narrator gain sight by his frustrations, humiliation, torture, and debt?

  Which prophesies help the girl court the ship?

  Is anything more grotesque than the face of human ecstasy?

  Hume’s Suicide of the External World

  the hanging man wandered out of a moonshine dream

  smuggled dope in pelts and gold in a game of Risk

  that cheated his confidences by the dozen

  time being, Moot’s pond compressed the blue

  a brand-new pond began to self-destruct

  morning jackhammers fed underground ponds

  their kinetic fury melted down the pubic, exposing another

  there he found a pass in alien rain and dragged ass

  kicked himself out of himself said the note

  weighed one miracle against a fifth

  soft spiders criss-crossed the night interference

  liquored the branches

  asleep, he fell out of hours on fire

  its wings stabbed him angry

  he walked out on the roof reshod in tin cans

  electromagnetic blue lure

  outlandish blue of his tongue and palm

  threw an ambsace and a score of dreams rolled

  if he had an eye for every eye on deck

  I want to shoot a gun

  I want to come down

  his speech had left him overly alert

  renaming the domain and its potent pheromones

  he saved some sounds that had wanted to die in his mouth

  and listened at the other end of deserve

  headless, out of the state blue

  out of its panic grass shook out his hologram

  signed Asphyxia, signed Arctic Cat

  his walking stick made stars along the scavenger’s path

  touching off oil fires in the dice’s outcry

  their music confused him into affection

  for a dynamite belt and Zero pond

  time tranced and put him on a ship

  a black-voiced bird recognizing his torture

  signed his full name on the slanting shore

  he weathered genital waves to quit having a curse

  then a blue man crawled out from under a horse

  whose rusted bit hushed his greedy depictions

  his haunches were meat, signed Nitid Piss

  and no dragoman staggered out of Candyland looking for him

  he had never mouthed something so dead sweet

  signed Sugar Melted on a Sidewalk

  the chalk outline of him thieved the looks off a bottle

  another coast unhung the spectral blue

  to drink seas water, coat your mouth with bird fat

  to look down from the sky, use ataxia

  wrote his note on the wrapping of the rope

  vendetta-tethered, his telepathy crested

  he left a note in a mailbox abducted by mudflats

  the consequence continually shifts

  once the map locked, he tripped out of a torn place

  his head full of broken asphalt

  during a mistake he walked out of my forehead

  making my own mind very hard for me

  dragging its chain of islands insane islands insane

  FROM Shot

  I Exhume Myself

  When we sleep in the barn under thirty heavy blankets, I am never coming back.

  I sleep naked with a knife in the down.

  A knife is too short to stab any vital thing.

  The night we met, my eyes no longer cut me in two.

  I grew knives and slept on them, expanding.

  I grow weak eyes where the knives had been.

  From the ceiling I stared at, vertigo spilled down, hid, ripped into mind.

  Waiting for morning is not the same as sleeping.

  A dream is a naked idea snapped awake.

  The backward splashes of your feet running through rain.

  Singing bye bye baby gauntling, Daddy’s gone drinking.

  (You are not there where I have looked.)

  When I raise the manhole lid, I am dead on my feet.

  None of the babies come out alive.

  When you come home with a live bat in your hands.

  I look for a window, but go under the sheets.

  I could never sleep at the back of my mind.

  Dreaming is a blindness that looks back.

  Walking out from a dream in the wrong direction.

  Under an electric blanket on high in August.

  Crawl into a bad dream backward over dirt to find a way home.

  The whole family jerks awake realizing we are coverless.

  Love rips into mind, hides in its own smoke.

  Wait in the dark for your mother to return.

  Walk into a dream where autistic wires cry you out alive.

  When each night waking leaks a new ghost.

  When I woke in the unadulterated dark of our car.

  I woke bombing inside the race dream.

  Awakened, but not yet there.

  When night pushes me down its huge eyeball.

  Everything apt inches toward failure.

  My eyes grow backward to replace the future.

  Your mother insists we take her high, stiff bed.

  The ceiling crack’s habit of looking like a rabbit.

  Walk with me out of the evisceration dream.

  False moons swerving.

  Can you turn them out?

  Light twisted tight like a sheet.

  When fog invades my leaving-you dream.

  I stick my finger down night’s throat.

  We paint the bedroom Bird of Paradise.

  In the hotel bed’s bleach-stench, staring at the ceiling.

  You see the same things no matter what is in front of you.

  Three-chambered synaptic headless moons.

  You don’t know the half of it.

  You were outside hanging all the moon’s faces: kicked out,

  tensile, tricked, eclipsed.

  The goathead eyes photos of the dead.

  When you wake, I am asleep and digging at my own throat.

  In the day you say one thing, in the night you own another.

  You say, look out the window.

  And years later we go back, stand there.

  Look at what you have given up to be with me.

  I wake with red scratches on my neck.

  I tell you I am in love.

  You tell me you know.

  But what you know is something else.

  Marks like tracks down my neck.

 
I don’t root down into your dream.

  I will not dig a fetus out of my throat.

  My hands will never find it.

  Digging a pit like it was something else, and singing.

  Both of us stare at the same ceiling.

  You explain this to me.

  I almost disappear when I am in the pit.

  Morning comes in the middle of night.

  We dig at something lodged there.

  I wake up missing want.

  Induction

  Nine stitches and liquid morphine cannot keep it closed

  Lunar halo runs circles more hollow than forgot

  Steel birds fly from clocks

  Striking the same hour in rounds

  A freak disease tears across the vista

  You’ve been told this is the year of medicine

  Lunar halo must bother you tonight with some life

  Stronger than satellites with strong melancholies

  The situation of radar gone deaf

  War shine and flare lit in the lips

  A ring of unknown men waiting

  To think of it is a tourniquet

  Embracing you to the point to the point of

  Sugar awake in the animal disaster

  Vaccinations break and they bother you

  The situation of its waves

  Puts catheters in blather-mouths

  Time for you to ride

  Even when it acts hypnotic or botched

  Tornado hanged in example

  Eye sticking to its guns

  It must bother you with oblong torment tonight

  Between your deserts and escaped stars

  Messes of radial spoils steal on you

  Recognize your continuous tattoo

  Lunar halo casts your face in harassments

  It dissolves former weather in your ear

  Takes up with your hexes

  Ice becomes gas blasting into a foam hole

  Out of which zodiac carcasses crawl

  Under lunar halo, anyone who waits

  For sleep waits to be seen to

  POETICS STATEMENT

  Hum

  There’s Ransom in a Voice

   EMILY DICKINSON,

         #1300

  Hum

  When I read to myself, I listen. A silent voice sounds the words, audible and internalized, incapable of shutting up or of being heard. This is not the voice of conscience, but a shadow voice that lets me be author and audience. When I write, I hear this voice, too, but it won’t live outside my body. I cannot launch it into the audible world. Try as I do, what passes through me is cluttered, unlit, wadded, swamped, splintering, indigestible. My attempts to reproduce the shadow voice are all hostages of paradox: unfathomable source, surplus effect. As a visual image, the word “shadow” embraces paradox too, but it makes the voice concrete. It makes a ghost resound, its vibration tests fathoms. And as I read this to you, a shadow passes through my voice. My voice makes an orphan of me; it is no longer mine. It makes me into a bad impersonator of something human. I throw my voice into pure materiality. I try at least to relay the rhythm of it, but stutter, blurt, tongue-trip; I eek or tic. I am expressing time with my body, then; I am expressing the struggle of writing, but not the writing itself.

  The public sound of my writing—my voice attempting to read aloud what the shadow voice said—always fails to reproduce the private sound of it, but perhaps these voices should be strangers. Doesn’t everyone hear voices in their head? We hear audible ghosts of whoever has spoken to us, reimagined, misremembered, hybridized, heard without being spoken. My mother’s voice left an impression, searing itself into my unconscious chatter. I absorbed her talk—I learned language at the same time I learned to think—as if it were my own. I became its source through feedback. I ripped myself a mouthless voice.

  Hum

  To hum is also to sing with closed lips because you don’t know what the tune carries. It carries on beyond the words, beyond thought, beyond speech, leaving you—where? You want to ward away the feeling of uncertainty; you want to travel the songlines. In the ocean, in the world, on the page, you are lost. But hearing is bound more strongly to time than space—minutes and millennia empty into your voice. The aim is not to sing the words, but to materialize a personal acoustics, to block out the prosaic commonality of ordinary song.

  Hum

  When I turned twelve, my family moved into the woods. There, becoming something alone and overripe, my throat emptied easily. A tiny, high diva voice emerged in soft spectacle, barely audible and tuneless. Mostly I did not know I was sounding until someone called my attention to it. My hum asked for no answer, yet my mother and brother noted the leakage in annoyance; sometimes strangers with a worried look cocked their heads at me; some acted trapped inside the sound. The hum’s ambient sonority—mimicry of a local wasp, fly, or bee—led me further into the woods.

  Hum

  Streaming through me, this sound owned me; its occupying power may have earmarked my voice for something more than speech as an inrush of language filled my mouth: half-heard phrases slipping into conflicting ideas, gardens of tones gagged with broken slogans, soundbites embedded in flack and facts, muttered accusations thickened with the irrepressible detritus of lyrics. Without moving my lips, in a nonvolitional ventriloquy, I choked up. My mouth became a mine for all sounds, all words at once, flattened and trembling. My mouth clogged with its own recalls. It rang out like an emergency alert.

  Hum

  All through that summer in our new two-hundred-year-old home, where a couple, one after the other, had died of old age years ago, I couldn’t hear. “What?” I said into the phone, “Are you there?” Air filled with the drone of an old school telephone after the other person has hung up. There’s no talking on the phone without imagining a face—lips moving, eyes lighting up, brow wrinkled—and there’s no hanging up without disappointment droning at you. That flat signal plummets you out of your imagination. I was disconnected though my line was still open, bleating into air thick with dust, cobwebs, and disuse. “Can you hear me?” The rural air carried a loss of hearing, it suppressed sound, and my hum was its tinnitus, its dial tone. I whittled out an empty sound that constantly replenished yet filled nothing. With it, I opened another hole for hearing, a widening cochlear sensitivity. Through my own white noise, I reached into unheard dimensions in order to begin again though I had no peace of mind to begin with. No matter how disturbing to others, my astonishingly local noise was an audiopathic cure.

  Hum

  I swallowed speech instead of having my tongue cut out or held. Freud believed, as was cutting-edge science in the early twentieth century, that a woman’s markedly masculine larynx was a sign of queerness. When eighteen-year old Dora came to him with frequent attacks of nervous, spasmodic coughing and no voice, he applied electrotherapy directly to her throat. She sputtered but did not spill anything. Her throat trickled, she coughed her way into existence. I think of her beautiful larynx and wish that everything that issued or didn’t from it were sex rather than sexuality. Then we could never be beyond it. I imagine her coughing as a cousin to my raspy hum, discharging representation, imitation, and transfiguration. We will not claim our mouths. We will never get over it.

  Hum

  “I am not humming,” I said through my hum. Wind whistled high in my throat, cleared a path for breathing. It hollowed out a space to speak through, but it suspended the speaking. That’s self-preservation, and no one imagined it for me. Out the window, I saw the seething forest that tried to be everything, including the doubt that it could be. I sat down humming. I ate my cereal humming, I walked alone through waist-high ferns and did not cry. Once inside the hum, there is no end; there is only more correspondence and reverberation—more sound and more color. When they marble, it’s resonance. I was someone forever coming to herself by resounding.

  UTTER WILDERNESS

  The Poetry of Christine Hume

  Molly Bend
all

  Christine Hume’s first poetry collection, Musca Domestica, won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize in 1999. The poet Heather McHugh, who chose the book, said, “Its range is virtuosic. Its formal and figural vehicles veer here and there in lively inventiveness, velocity, variety.”1 Much of Hume’s work, like McHugh’s poetry, possesses a hyper-alertness to the materiality of words and displays a compulsion to explore the limits of cognition. Hume has published two other collections of poetry, Alaskaphrenia (2004) and Shot (2010), as well as three chapbooks of investigative and meditative poetic prose: Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (2008), Ventifacts (2012), and Hum (2013).2 Her writing navigates a wild and freewheeling terrain in both her poetry and her prose, executing what Chris Glomski calls her “surreally-inflected vivisections of human experience.”3 From the start, in particular, her poems bear witness to the female body in close proximity, but also in defiance of law and logic, performing in the later stages of her work the ecstatic trial of maternity.

  Hume does not fall easily into any camp or group of poets. She draws from many schools of poetry and thought in order to create her distinctive poetic stance. She evokes the dense and layered compositions of poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Medbh McGuckian. She also turns to the speculative mode of Language-based poets, including Rosmarie Waldrop and Lyn Hejinian. In addition, she is vigorously committed to sound performances and experiments, recalling the work of recent poets such as Andrew Joron and Catherine Wagner. In this essay, I will closely examine Hume’s complicated and stormy lyrical practice, with its disjunctive narrative elements, in order to better understand how her works give shape and utterance to various “wildernesses” and frontiers—both physical and metaphysical. I will consider her use of “schooling” devices important to her formulation of identity, her intricate and stunning word “circuitry,” and her abiding interest in provocations of sound, especially the acoustic memory of the lullaby. These concerns result in an idiosyncratic approach to poetic innovation, inseparable from questions pertaining to women, especially as it presents an intimate and integrative model of social engagement rendered from visions of motherhood.

  Schooling

  Look at any book about early explorations and ethnographies of Alaska, and the cover has an illustration of a ship, one that seems to hover in a vast realm of ocean and ice, with mountains in the background. The ship steers its way through the immensity of uncharted territory. Hume explains in an interview with Lily Hoang, “I was born in Alaska, but moved within the first six months so I have no recollection of it.”4 She goes on to say, “If America were a brain and its map broken into phrenological assignments, Alaska would be the place of invention, imagination, and love-of-danger-and-the-unknown.”5 In Alaskaphrenia, Christine Hume’s second poetry collection, her journey moves backward into a memory that is not a memory.