Alaska is a construct in this book (an Alaska of the mind or an Alaska conjoined with mental disorder), populated with weather, animals, settlers, and apocryphal lore.6 It consists of multiple paths radiating outward and sometimes ricocheting and reflecting back: “Your past pitches up quipped in levity / and trips the infinite part of you, fathoming” (A 31). Hume’s Alaska zone has much in common with what Gaston Bachelard calls “intimate immensity.” He states, “Since immense is not an object, a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness.”7 In other words, contemplation of that vastness is possible by turning inward, within ourselves.
The first poem in Alaskaphrenia, “Comprehension Questions,” poses a list of questions resembling study questions about an unknown text, which include “What kind of phantom is the ship?” and “Where does the girl hide her great distances?” and “Which prophecies help the girl court the ship?” (A 5–6). These interrogatives (or half of a catechism) introduce the quandary that Hume faces: in order for the “girl” to make her journey into the vast geography of memory and imagination, some guidance and directions are necessary for her “ship” to continue, despite the fact that her journey is indirect and its destination fluid and indeterminate.
The poet then embarks on an exploration into a past of her “imagining consciousness” mapped with shards of family lore and historical and sociological mythos. She’s assigned herself the task of making the space and making it up, inventing the rules and procedures along the way. Often, Hume’s method is to insert into her frontier laboratory rhetorical frameworks, such as directions, study questions, and items listed in pseudo glossaries. And while she invokes these parochial forms, she simultaneously subverts an impulse toward stability. The words signaling the imperatives are stable, but the poems’ substances or “insides” create a disjunctive logic with individual words refashioning themselves as they go, often slipping out of their typical contexts.
In “Lost on the Horizon,” for example, she disrupts the initial expectation of a disciplinary directive and sets in motion imagistic gestures that suggest an alternative realm: “Clean it up nice with a fleet of meteors and torch hands. Clean it for its cleanliness will make the rain happy” (A 17). In “Dos and Don’ts about Fur,” she poses a list of warnings:
Don’t edge the hide under the presser foot until it bites hard enough for you to see free-floating numbers.
Don’t hem in bed.
Don’t hang fur gently.
Don’t let it wear you inside-out or walk you backwards: you’ll require red to satisfy your nervous system. (A 36)
Here the instructions (reminiscent of Lady Wilde’s omens and superstitions) have to do with making a garment, and the sewing and care of the fur as fabric, as well as the protocols involved in domesticating or holding the wild captive, while also suggesting possession of the erotic female body.
Hume states in an interview, “Instructions, maps, advice, litanies of caveats offer a sense of expectation, which becomes part of the actual experience, not necessarily a master-narrative onto which one’s experience is grafted, but a more fluid interchange and alchemical complication.”8 The poem “Day Tour of Your Glorious Birds” contains a litany of twelve named hours suggesting a bird-sighting ledger. This record of nature implies a “way of looking” that is not representational but, like Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” more about expressing a fluid moment, a moment that might indeed be an exchange that transforms and “complicates” an experience: “Hour Even: A crow shoots from cumulus, catches your breath. Such / reaches stir in you your cue, cue. Say the whole word” (A 44). Hume pushes her wily language against these pedagogical structures and frameworks with an electrical force and grants it unsettling permission.
In reference to her first book, Musca Domestica (the Latin name for the common housefly), she describes the importance of the fly, a recurring figure in the book, and defines to some degree the beginnings of the practice of her own poetics:
The fly catches in our bonnets, ruffling the surface of meaning. It whispers harebrained a-has!, naked nonsequiturs, paralogical postula—showing us a way out of our habitual givens of sound and sense. The fly lures us into an echo chamber of a world outside, becoming the ghost of language’s agitations, an audible ghost clanking about in the attic. The sure, insistent rhythm and buzz that often kicks a poem into being, also helps it build its own order, its “meter-making argument.” Poetry shows us how to keep the sound going, to see how many sounds can open up possibilities beyond first impulses and snap certainties. The accrual of design (sonic, imagistic, rhetorical) also allows for electrified mistakes that shake down our dictions, make us dangerous to the predictable.9
Rooted in the primordial “hum,” we might say that Hume’s guiding forms and “schooling” structures also attempt to assert what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a “circle of control.” Their idea of “territorialization” claims that the expressive frame of refrains in a song establishes a point of order, and through the refrains’ repetition helps inscribe “territory.”10 Confronting, however, Hume’s particular “habitual givens,” or territorial inscriptions, are injections and insertions of decentralized and unpredictable usages resulting also in “deterritorialization” or disorder—circling back to the chaos of the hum. Hume’s fences achieve an illusion of guidance, but cannot restrain the starry thicket of her ungoverned linguistic wilderness.
The poem “A Million Futures of Late” from Musca Domestica exemplifies her compositional practices of self-mockery and self-conscious sound-play:
I’ll be wind-rattled and listen
to the window’s answering racket.
I’ll watch flies manifest from glass
rub the runt and ruthlessness off.
I’ll have my lapses into slapstick
of accent and stutter, girl and mother. (MD 26)
Here, her “electrified mistakes” strike against the stacked litany form with force. She musters the heavy alliterative and blustery “w” and “r” sounds, the “lapses” and “slapstick” rhyme and the off-rhyme of “stutter” and “mother,” which calls out the hidden sound mutter (“mother” in German).
We also see tactics like these displayed in Shot, Hume’s third collection, in which a cosmos swirls with a lexicon related to sleep, sleeplessness, and the frontier of night, replete with Dantesque beasts and creatures. The immensity of these conditions and spaces seems to be held in, once again, by rhythmic devices, such as anaphora and repetitions of phrases and single words. The nocturnes and chants possess language that is torqued with galvanic and performative urgency, triggering physical responses of incantation while also upsetting linear expectation. Consider “Night in Ypsilanti,” where the speaker sends out a string of invitations:
Meet me inscrutable in your prefab tragedy, nodding out in the needle garden, muffed in the dugout. Meet me under the water tower, head stuck in a starry bag. Meet me love at the money tree, in the burnt-out memory bank. (S 26)
In this passage the speaker beckons an interlocutor and evokes a constellation of depleted and damaged locales by foregrounding the textures of language. With the rough sounds and grunts of “muffed,” “dugout,” “stuck,” and “burnt-out,” Hume creates an atmosphere of menace and inevitable abduction into the afflicted areas.
This dynamic aspect of Hume’s poetry illuminates J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, which addresses the question of what language does rather than what it means (an approach outlined in his seminal essay How to Do Things with Words).11 For Austin, ordinary language is always performative—words do things to produce meaning—while in Hume’s poems, the word repetitions with their rhythmic potency and hypnotic effects undermine logic and rob the words of their mundane usages. The echoes and cumulative sounds behave as saboteurs infiltrating the real and representational, and in turn attempt to access an otherworldly or occult realm. As in a charm, by uttering certain words, a bond develops in which
an action or alternative outcome becomes possible. The circuitry of the utterance inserts itself into the listener’s and speaker’s own nervous system.
The poem “Car Interior Reinventing You and Her as the Predictable and the Undetermined” conjures a scene by incanting scraps arranged in two vertical columns. The second column reads as charm and unravels down the page with a beseeching, anaphoric “let”:
Let
the secret pulse
of snow, let it
pick glass
from my lap;
let the delicate
be bearable;
let moving through
complete me (A 25)
A few pages later the poem “Reversal of Fortune” appears, and its first column reverses that earlier charm by going backwards:
finish me
let moving through
be bearable
let the delicate
out of my lap
pick glass
from snow let its
secret pulse (A 29)
Here, it’s as though the poems behave as aural and visual devices in which the latter poem loops the other way to reveal an alternative narrative to undo fate. Reliance on methods of acquiring knowledge or fabricating un orthodox knowledge for her own identity formation is a condition we see carried through all of Hume’s books.
Another “schooling” form that Hume incorporates is a catechism (from the Greek, meaning “oral instruction”), a summary or exposition of doctrine that consists of questions and answers. It calls for two parties, usually master and student, or parent and child. It was designed as a practical method to rehearse and pass on knowledge and instruction. In the poem “Interview,” from Musca Domestica, the questions of the catechism prompt answers in a delirium where body parts and attributes stray and transform:
Were you a child?
I am the same all over. My head, a dark spot, in front of a lamp’s glow is an areola and a marrow—itself, a map of the universe. (MD 28)
In “Incubatory,” from Shot, Hume posits a dialogue between mother and unborn child, which dwells in a dreamlike or supernatural realm. We hear a being who cannot speak answer, offering knowledge of the unknowable:
Can you open your eyes?
My looking does not bound back to me. It wanders
further circles of eon in attempt to put the moon out of my moth-mind. (S 2)
Hume’s catechisms exploit the tendency to probe knowledge that is out of reach, yet also feels intimate.
Finally, let’s compare Ted Hughes’s poem, “Examination at the Womb Door,” which shares with Hume a common preoccupation with its relation between auditory textures and atavistic revelations. His poem, also in a question/answer format, likewise dwells in proximity to the unborn. Although this poem from Crow is starker than Hume’s work, it does suggest schooling, perhaps even an ordeal that must be endured, set in a realm of hard-to-reach or near-impossible recollection:
Who owns those scrawny little feet? Death
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death12
Like Hughes, Hume risks listening in and teasing out secreted sounds from dark, primordial spaces. This practice takes many forms in Hume’s work, including her readings and performances in which she duplicates or approximates these unsettling echoes and exchanges by including audio recordings of other sounds and voices to accompany her own voice.
“Unravel the Signal”
How can we trace the currents in Hume’s “electrified mistakes”? Where do her wayward signals go? How are we to make the connections between words while recognizing their tendency for redirection? How might we initiate ourselves into this reading experience? Lisa Ruddick’s instructions for reading one of Gertrude Stein’s prose poems may be useful in considering Hume’s poems: “there are words (across sentences) that belong to the same lexical universe, so that one can spend time with the poems, linking these words and seeing if they might add up to a series of thoughts ‘about’ something.” But Stein, Ruddick continues, “simultaneously destabilizes or multiplies meanings of each of these words, so that their apparent unity or connectedness seems simply the effect of one (limiting) perspective on them, whereas another perspective—equally limiting, were one to use it exclusively—points to the spiraling off of each word into the free play of language.”13 Certainly, Hume’s language connects, conducts, and forms networks in a given poem, while, at the same time, it demonstrates its own feral capacities to resist containment and tethers.
“On Floating Bodies,” in Alaskaphrenia, consists of word correspondences related to fissures, fractures, and shifts. The poem beckons and woos: “Come to the lip and windlift” and “strike-slip / says the fault foundering. Slip into something more / pealing more unmattered and rude” (A 30). It seduces the reader into a geological chamber of semantic erosion and, at some points, alludes to a catastrophic event—perhaps the earthquake that hit Alaska in 1964 and caused a Tsunami: “Now blow / to the banks where what’s space-sick holds ground away” (A 30). Words suggest shifting ground: “strike-slip,” “vertical rock,” “rictus.” Linkages occur by rhyming and punning: “slip,” “lip,” “quipped,” “trips.” And the heavy throat sounds of “gorge,” “gushing,” “gutting,” and “guts” proliferate with phonetic likenesses, while “gush” and “slip” relate both to geological movement and to speech gestures. Hume’s self-conscious sound-play and suggestive meanings also ignite a recurring strategy of triggering latent memories by exerting pressure on the subject, thus invoking geological and anatomical trauma: “The mind parts you leaf and eyelid. Every eye is an eye / headlocked and numbered” (A 30). Forceful assertions such as these, which resonate with interconnectivity, are not meant to eclipse the experience of uncertainty and unintentionality, or, in Hume’s case, accidental revelations.
Catherine Daly has discussed Hume’s “lexicographer’s lyricism” and how her poetry turns “reading into re-wording.”14 Hume’s alchemical practices and creation of word networks enact the visceral struggle performed by the speaker who often seems subsumed or abducted by her etymological landscape: “the brain looks for its own bloom in the brain-water” (A 15). The speaker is often caught in wayward currents, then searches for a way into the future, armed with her verbal arsenal:
The scars you’ve cultivated steer you. There you will be a bellwether bomber, you dream-bomb the last place: a dogsled dream, campfire dream, pioneer dream, pioneer, lynx lynx lynx. (A 17)
Here, chain-reactive phrases generate associative meanings and cataloging of types. The incantation finally exhales into the single-word chant—at last, clicks of a switch providing a sound simulacrum that activates a resolution or perhaps stirs up a new current, a potential future. A mutable self, present in all three of Hume’s poetry collections, voyages persistently onward, buffeted by affliction, lust, and perilous dilemmas. Hume’s linguistic wilderness, with its “electrical” properties, animates the quest and in turn bestows the self with agency.
In Shot, the prose poem “Self-Stalked” enacts a dramatic scene in which the speaker, a Diana-like huntress, stalks the moon, her counterpart or doppelganger:
I looked in all eight directions then spread out my tiger’s skin. Before the public mind kicked in, I surveyed an inner shore. Its facets operated on me. I lost my lights and began my midnight thus: mental feet, mental lake, little mental pines, mental mile around the muzzle. I aimed my automatic at that outlandish organ hanging in the sky like a dazed stone […] (S 15)
Here, words constellate with connotations of combat and hunting: “muzzle,” “automatic,” “harpoon,” “quiver,” “tackle,” and “beat.” The moon is described as an “outlandish organ” with a “creamy mouth.” The speaker yearns to grasp this elusive being with her mental powers: “tried to tackle it with a million mental muscles” (S 15). She tries erotic coercion in a swirling whirlpo
ol invoking oblique references to Moby Dick: “Its sea expression wet the evening; I captained the tempest there. Looking too long into the distant human pupil, I sharpened my harpoon.” By employing sonic devices that heighten the effects of the scene, such as internal rhymes, alliteration, and anaphoric phrases, Hume supplies a mapping method enabling us to expect and anticipate. Finally, in a culminating assertion, she nods to Elizabeth Bishop’s love poem “The Shampoo”: “The more I battered that moon, the more I could be it” (S 15). And with “be it” we hear “beat it” and perhaps even “beatify” (to glorify), thus bringing together transmutation and vanquishment.
Hume’s tones can veer from dark solemnity to ballsy confrontation, while her voice (or tongue) can perpetrate or sabotage a given situation. Prosodic features, such as heavily stressed lines reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon verse, rear up at moments, stimulating physical and emotional responses in order to alter consciousness and activate intuitive responses, making room for perceptions beyond logic or before logic. We hear these textures, along with bawdy echoes of an old ballad, in the poem “Leash,” which traces the exploits of a rangy and misbehaving tongue:
Ear-deepening dark flashes and seeds.
Tongue burrowed a hole for feces.
Crack it if you want to see yourself.
Your daughter beasting out.
Bird-nerves stirring up the yard.
Children who won’t be sorry.
American Poets in the 21st Century Page 29