American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  Knew it was alive because you beat it.

  Tongue growing a new tip and ornery. (S 80)

  Compound word constructions, such as “Ear-deepening” and “Bird-nerves,” along with a four-beat line, such as “Tongue burrowed a hole for feces,” recall these early forms.

  It may be helpful in seeking precedents for some of these auditory practices to reference a poet with whom Hume—perhaps unexpectedly—has much in common: Theodore Roethke. Particular attention should be given to Roethke’s Praise to the End!, about which Neal Bowers states, “The word has power that goes beyond its connotations and denotations. [Roethke] knew that the mind has an intuitive as well as rational side to which these sounds could appeal. By manipulating the sounds in his poems and at the same time confronting the reader with insoluble verbal dilemmas, Roethke hoped to subvert the rational mind and elevate the intuitive faculties.”15 Roethke himself contends that he wanted to “catch the movement of the mind itself, to trace the spiritual history of a protagonist.” He goes on to say that “these states of mind were to be rendered dramatically, without comment, without allusion, the action often implied or indicated in the interior monologue or dialogue between the self and its mentor, or conscience, or, sometimes, another person.”16 Roethke doesn’t shy away from passionate declarations while immersing himself in his own dark reaches:

  Melting at the knees, a varicose horror.

  Hello, hello. My nerves knew you, dear boy.

  Have you come to unhinge my shadow?

  Last night I slept in the pits of a tongue.17

  Roethke endeavored to create what he calls a “psychic shorthand” reflective of the protagonist’s “mind when it is under great stress [and] roves far back into the subconscious.”18

  For Hume, roving back and exploring the psyche opens up layers that contain chaotic and destructive properties. She retrieves a dense lexicon, which in turn displays the Germanic roots to which she is constantly drawn. While listening to echoes of her early models (Roethke, Hopkins, Celan, and Plath), Hume divines a storehouse of language from the compost. Her inventive hoard is especially rich with compound and portmanteau words: “grotto-boned” (S 22), “thunderstalk” (S 25), “gallopbark” (S 47), “limedusk” (S 50), “crunk-dumb” (S 65). These word-geodes create new linguistic behaviors and energy forces that can attract and repel at once, and then assist with the immersion into the sources of her own formation. Hume delves into the mire of distress and malady and endeavors to stir the body and its apprehensions.

  Causae, Curae, and Lullabies

  Positioning herself at the brink between sleep and wakefulness, Hume repeatedly turns to an early acoustic memory: the lullaby. In her chapbook Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense, Hume accumulates assertions, adages, definitions, and lore concerning the lullaby. We read down the ladder of mostly one-line, unpunctuated phrases as she traces how we are delivered into a world of music (“You are born into vocal rhythm” [L 4]). At the same time, the rhythmic songs are thrust into us in a kind of reverse birth: “Lullaby heaves its lead body into your bones, its feathered body” (L 8). Hume considers the lullaby a primary source of rhythm, language, and world making—our mother’s tongue. As Marina Warner asserts in her book No Go the Bogeyman, lullabies are the “very first utterances directed to babies as persons.”19 For Hume, this constitutes her first exposure to the origins of poetry.

  Symptoms of an arduous search for intimate connection and “vocal rhythm” provided by the mother’s voice resonate through many of Hume’s poems. She revisits and examines the need to explore a stage of development in which the mother acts as an “acoustic mirror,” a term that Kaja Silverman describes in her influential book of that title:

  The mother performs a crucial role during the subject’s early history. She is traditionally the first language teacher, commentator, and storyteller—the one who first organizes the world linguistically for the child, and first presents it to the Other. The maternal voice also plays a crucial part during the mirror stage, defining and interpreting the reflected image, and “fitting” it to the child.20

  As Silverman explains, the child hears itself initially in the mother’s voice; therefore, the mother inaugurates the child into selfhood by fashioning its primary “auditory sphere.”21

  Acknowledging the mother as shaper of our early development, Hume’s subjects find themselves in the throes of incompletion and longing: “Until your mother returns, you are waiting to finish your thoughts” (A 38). In the context of the dangerous and unknown “Alaskan” wilderness of Alaskaphrenia, the mother becomes distant—an inaudible figure within the landscape: “Your mother’s voice would unsnow you if you could hear it” (A 39). In order to recover the vital presence of the mother who assists in the acquisition of language, apprehension of the world, and individual subjectivity, it is crucial to hear, absorb, and echo her voice. This education must be fully completed, despite the fact that the cooing comfort of the lullaby voice often harbors perilous and frightening scenarios.

  Hume reminds us that “the ear is the original vigilant animal” (L 5). The ear in the wilderness remains alert to the sonic reassurance from the mother and, at the same time, it stays tuned to possible dangers. Close proximity to the mother is a necessary factor as well, even as the mother plays the role of an illusion maker who enacts a complex aural performance, while initiating and seducing her listener into a shifting choreography: “Listen toward the fantasy of total comfort and you hallucinate” (L 4). The lullaby could in fact be thought of as the bridge that leads us away from the orientation Julia Kristeva describes as chora, that “which precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality.”22 Kristeva goes on to explain that the chora is “analogous to vocal or kinetic rhythm” put in place through creative collaboration.23 We can think of this murky and oceanic space as a domain where only primordial traits of language can be discerned.

  The mother’s initial secretions (or secrets) of sound and rhythm provide the necessary, but uneasy collaboration moving us into the acoustic mirror stage. As Warner reminds us, “Early lyrics are saturated in apprehension or even dread: fear writes or speaks the boundaries, and the phantom of death, always just around the corner defines the life.”24 We ingest the fear-laden concoction (the mother’s nourishment) as in the method of homeopathy, where we are given a small amount of the “poison” in order to help us confront the onslaught of the full malady. In this case, that malady is the linguistic world: “Lullaby wants you dead, and lullaby fears your death” (L 7).

  Is the lullaby itself a feral being? As an entity, is it bereft of compassion and empathy, even though it comes from the mother’s mouth? For Hume, the lullaby may in some respects resemble the wind, of which she asks, “Is it just one more feral thing in the wilderness?” (V 38). In her poetic and speculative chapbook, Ventifacts, Hume ponders and investigates the wind and her daughter’s phobia of it. Like the lullaby, the wind is “a mystifying agent, a sonic wish passed from parent to child” (V 29). And we might say that the wind is an unpredictable force that dwells in an external realm while the lullaby resides in an internal one—one generated within the frame of the mother’s arms and mouth. Both of these elusive phenomena enact their shifting moods while simultaneously exposing the instabilities of the world.

  The relational space in which we hear the lullaby is a liminal one where we teeter on the edge of sleep. The song can simulate a journey on a dark pathway of threats and dangers (“A maze through wolves and lost mothers” [L 6]). Simultaneously, since the mother controls the dramatic scene, the song can lull us into a momentarily reassuring space and bestow us with soft armor in order to withstand Warner’s “phantom of death.” In Shot, Hume explores maladies relating to sleep and sleeplessness that tend to weaken her subjects, creating anxiety as they traverse lawless, insomniac landscapes. She evokes Dante’s Inferno in the preface to the poem “Interlude:”

  Wandering clotted woods, you come to a shadowy compound of h
uman organization. Here is a territory between first and second sleep, full of dusk mutter. (S 42)

  In addition to the echo of “mother” in “mutter,” mothers speak in various guises here, including “MOTHER CONFUSION,” “MOTHER-IN-THE-TREES,” and “COLD-MOTHER-PLUNDER,” who says, “I can hear the raw wind nursing your sores” (S 45). The mothers’ roles, at times, seek to assist in overcoming fears by making them explicit; however, in the threshold space of much of this book, equilibrium is precarious: “Night gnaws and unknots the anchor” (S 25). These nocturnal songs can bring torment and anguish. The mother is a distant and unattainable figure: “You and your mother at either end of an ancient static” (S 30). As the speaker progressively loses control, the mourning and haunting intensify: “Each moon each mother each cross-eyed ghost,” until “the future of memory is a motherless force” (S 31).

  Ailments overtake the subject who treks through her struggle in the poem “Apnea,” which refers to the sleep disorder that involves the temporary cessation of breathing:

  Full grown through the thicket

  Come through for me stop

  This once at the thicket

  More ticked than faced, choked up

  At the window bolted out of your weather

  Wolves despise a window (S 63)

  The poem enacts the stutters and catches in the throat with its heavy “th” and “k” sounds and plosive “p” stops, expressing some of the anxious conditions of the sleep disorder. As in many poems in Shot, the implicit bond of trust formed during the pre-sleep zone is arrested in this poem. The remedial process delivered by way of intimacy and security is lacking. The acoustic world is off-kilter. Hume likewise makes mock of sounds in the poem “I Exhume Myself,” in which she reworks lines from an early traditional lullaby. She morphs “Bye, baby Bunting, / Daddy’s gone a-hunting” into “Singing bye-bye baby gauntling, Daddy’s gone drinking” (S 83). This poem, whose title puns on Hume’s own name, futilely attempts a recovery or resurfacing of a lost self from darkness. In fact, the poem tries to unself (or reinvent) a buried self.

  Hume expresses a desire for a return to the ambivalent and often troubling bond and the rhythmic utterances that prefigure her own poetry. Warner reminds us that the mother’s singing is an “act of spell-binding [that] can determine the future (make it come true) by chanting it into being or prevent it through articulating it.”25 The binding act between mother and child needs to be actualized in song, in lyric, even as its content possesses “impossible promises of killers and riches” (L 7). The subject realizes as she becomes a singing mother herself that she is able to have some reclamation: “Singing lullaby, you recover your mother’s pulse” (L 5). She is then able to generate the origins of rhythm and utterances within her own body and bring them to life by transporting the memory of sound into her mouth: “You know the song by heart as it passes through your teeth” (L 9). However, the challenge Hume sets forth is how to incorporate those original rhythms while simultaneously resisting/rejecting the inheritance, in order to establish her own vocal rhythms and songs. Collaboration may be a necessary step, though the forging of her original voice is the ultimate goal. Possession of that early rhythmic knowledge can be a terrifying condition: “It is no wonder no one will ever be able to sleep / Against your body, your whole hair-raising childhood” (L 9). The formative aural ties and their progressions “accrue meaning” (L 9) as the subject finds herself in an unsettling realm “infused with mourning” (L 11).

  Hume’s interest in retrieving and examining collaborative enactments, even with their harrowing implications, recurs in much of her work with a profound valence for women’s experience. She replicates the doubling of voices or a “duet” in her readings and performances by superimposing other voices or sounds over her own voice. In her chapbook Hum, she considers the hum as an emission of sound that can manifest “shadow voices.” Therefore, the hum can actually contain multiple voices—interior and exterior ones. The hum may indeed be part of the solution to the desired notion of the body as a site for invention and creation, since the hum “carries on beyond words, beyond thought, beyond speech” (H 2). Investigating the conditions and purposes of the hum, she views it as a phenomenon that can recover “audible ghosts of whoever has spoken to us” (H 1), but also as that which covers or protects: “I hid in my hum’s protective power, which repelled the uncanny by attracting it and assuming it within itself” (H 8). Perhaps the desire in the end is that the hum, as the lullaby, “unselves you” while the subject shapes the future and a “personal acoustics” begins to materialize. Throughout her oeuvre, Hume’s own private radio compels, stimulates, seduces, and, like the hum, “hides data inside vaster pools of mystery” (H 4).

  NOTES

  1. Heather McHugh, “Introduction,” in Musca Domestica (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), xi. Hereafter cited parenthetically as MD.

  2. Christine Hume, Alaskaphrenia (Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2004); Shot (Denver, CO: Counterpath, 2010); Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008); Ventifacts (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2012); and Hum (Dikembe Press, 2013). Subsequent citations to works by Hume will appear as follows: A = Alaskaphrenia; S = Shot; V = Ventifacts; L = Lullaby; and H = Hum.

  3. Chris Glomski, “The Voice of Instinct,” Jacket 36 (2008). Available online at jacketmagazine.com.

  4. Christine Hume, “Interview with Lily Hoang about Alaskaphrenia,” Avant-Women Writers: A Conversation (2008). Available online at avantwomenwriters. blogspot.com.

  5. Ibid.

  6. For in-depth discussion of Alaska as a constructed space, see Susan Kollin, Nature’s State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

  7. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Marie Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 184.

  8. Hume, “Interview with Lily Hoang.”

  9. Christine Hume, “New American Poets,” Poetry Society of America (2003). Available online at www.poetrysociety.org.

  10. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

  11. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

  12. Ted Hughes, “Examination at the Womb Door,” in Crow (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

  13. Lisa Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 194.

  14. Catherine Daly, review of Christine Hume’s Musca Domestica and Tessa Rumsey’s Assembling the Shepherd, Boston Review, October 1, 2000.

  15. Neal Bowers, Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), 103.

  16. Theodore Roethke, Theodore Roethke: On Poetry and Craft (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2001), 23.

  17. Theodore Roethke, “The Shape of the Fire,” in Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 94.

  18. Roethke, Theodore Roethke: On Poetry and Craft, 25.

  19. Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 194.

  20. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 100.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 26.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Warner, No Go the Bogeyman, 200.

  25. Ibid.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Works by Christine Hume

  BOOKS

  Musca Domestica. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

  Alaskaphrenia. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2004.

  Shot. Denver, CO: Counterpath Press, 2010.

  LYRIC MEMOIR


  The Saturation Project. New York: Solid Objects, 2019.

  CHAPBOOKS

  Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008.

  Ventifacts. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2012.

  Hum. Dikembe Press, 2013.

  Atalanta: An Anatomy. Essay Press, 2016.

  Question Like a Face. Image Text Ithaca Press, 2017.

  BHANU KAPIL

  POEMS

  FROM The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

  “In the language we made up one night, the word for lover was the same as the word for neatly folded manuscript you don’t look at for a year. There are many manuscripts.”

  “When she is grown, she realizes that she has forgotten everything. How to live without explanations. How to travel light. How to let the earth go. How skin can see.”

  “The sky is pale blue, darkening to an indigo that contains black, but isn’t black at the edge of sight. At the same time the sun is shining brightly. (The world is everything at once.)”

  1. Who are you and whom do you love?

  2. Where did you come from / how did you arrive?

  3. How will you begin?

  4. How will you live now?

  5. What is the shape of your body?

  6. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

  7. What do you remember about the earth?

  8. What are the consequences of silence?

  9. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

  10. Describe a morning you woke without fear.

  11. How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?

  12. And what would you say if you could?

  “This is a specific example of a hunger that is immigrant, in that you find yourself unable to ask for what you really want.”

  FROM Incubation: A Space for Monsters

  “L is for love which is blood: the gathering speed of a pulse though the person is standing very still in the space before touch there in the darkness which is real.”