-esque : Camille Martin

(Eratio Postmodern Poetry)

i.

reworded morning, full
of threshold. one is still hungry,
evoking ends between wake

and memory. one connects the night
moment by moment, at times when the public
rights of day overwhelm the body.

to be the warmth of another
produced only from the instant—
a pure perception

strengthens a self in plots of
the mind and its trees transmitting
thoughts unproblematically

transparent within itself. many persons
gently fall to feel the night, each wave
of relatedness at morning a song

without words in which one conceives oneself
to emote, walking in a private field
where no amount of object

denies the soft, speechless center. the
street, the threshold transcend ordinary
categories in the presence of a replica. even

when one is alone, brief, adequate behaviors
blur their own edges formed from objects
of daylight one can no longer know

in the common life of us. even though
one loses color in scenery, consciousness entangles
a self in the idea of another,

disappearing onto paper. identity requires sensing
many sensing the defects of the mid-range
and splitting to produce a frayed

potlatch. reactivated moments
on an inexpressible roadmap do
the experiencing of many persons.

these initiate the constant movement in plots.
still, within finite self and moment,
no gesture can ever be familiar enough,

and the body is once more poised to claim
one's private rights.
one is still hungry.

ii.

elementary harmony knows the particular type
of any given sound degenerating into the first light
gold rush: an evolutionary tumor in a well-shaped

melody. a strong force of melodic continuation
allows the soft core of reason a frictionless way
into the resolution. one determines the intrinsic meaning

of the future with glue. there's still something
natural left over, a digestible and lenient syntax,
the incompleteness of elation toward something.

an urgent image's ghostly and regular cadence—
its geography, its ectoplasm—dangles
oblivion over the final chords, the earlier parts

having been resolved, pleasing unsuspecting ears
in a desert. oblivion in the first measures
could have been written as the fullness

of soldered fragments. the final chords exert the
pressure of remembered words influencing the future
with no nothingness. musics of fragments

occur in the everyday listener, pouring smoke over
a grid of circuitry. the arrival of pure background
can be a closer unity in another culture. sky

reflected in mud. a lapsed yet invigorated
wordlessness sounds a believable resting place
within a norm of expectation. one foiled sequence

of the opening motif creates a gap in the audience
so they may imagine escaping into
the previous consciousness of a soldered melody.

the listener will hear the final chords as an everyday
matter, contagious building blocks exhibiting
different degrees of closure. it is through such gaps

in structure that intrinsic meaning and expectation
process the sky from below in an ongoing
musical development of quicksand.

iii.

remember spreads from each pocket a story and confusion
faint of knowledge. it is used exclusively for the numerical tendency
to read like particles of ocean. one compares many forms the dark of ocean

would not be likely to balance. one hardly ever sees a passing
natural motion. the parallel succession of variety reads
like a struggle secretly lost in the haze. lovely bodies in a story

sleep, warranted by everything assimilable. i'm convinced
of their physical conditions with strict geological sense. a many-
bodied silence spreads from one another. their cells are ready

and swift as they land, aware how charged the eye, how polished
shapes, barely invisible and shrill, withhold exemplary fables.
there is with reason a very little identity beneath every part of a draft,

parts of new phrases all the same relative position at once loose
in the world. the world oftenest gives rise to the ductile and wavers,
withholding nothing. architectural powers of jetsam

and barren islands consume their glacial efforts
at separating into layers. what is a broken condition if there is not
a piece of storm. the wastes, moreover, do not like to be checked

by a repeating place. one doesn't know wastes if one is likely
to strive to light, not be checked by and in the window,
sing at premeditated distances from the climax of evidence. if

again there is with the dodging earth a repeating place,
an individual whisper, wasted children, it dooms them
just because an accidental self calls the many forms

one doesn't remember, funereal snow. i don't remember spreads
from one another. the room, the elapsed time, no wonder
all the climate is with the structure, the head a distance

of sleep, and photographed wind like a broken condition
dissolved by a bird into separate enslavements. this is
a repeating place, on which they make all their feet when

landing. there, different distances within a lagging dream watch
edible plants rank and bend the wilderness of their own form.
possessed play becomes neutral within a steady nocturnal sentence ripe

for good standing with the forms one must be checked by.
even if one is continually changing slowly in the dark,
ripe for intermigration in the same position relative to the blue

view brimming voice, the forms one hardly ever sees throw off
their inhabitants. potent activity lost in form remembers, spreads
from one function to a web of sleep and opens the wastes. because

a piece of simplicity germane to one function, to the open ocean,
would not be likely to confound one another. the shifting process
cuts its purpose, scouts tomorrow's fable measured by fine gradations.

@

After reading Tim McGrath's review of Eratio, I had to go in and poke around to find something to review. Eratio, as expected, is both witty and smart, and I found Martin's stunning long form piece, the longest thing I've yet considered for review on RiS. I know it's long (at 38 stanzas), but it is so full of felicity that it would be a shame if nobody other than myself actually sat down to read it. This is a great poem, one of the best of the thirty of so I've reviewed so far.

I've written, when talking about Xue Di's work, on the liminal poem, and -esque brings us straight to the most canonical case of liminality, that is, the aubade, waking us up and drawing us out. In an important sense, just as in Di, Martin refuses to cross the threshold she constructs; if we are looking for a reason why -esque belongs in a self-titled "postmodern" journal, it is perhaps in the poem's ease in this state, its refusal to construct a narrative out of waking. (It is also, I think, a reason why -esque is a difficult work.)

This same liminality manifests itself in the flatness of affect; if emotion is, as Nussbaum and others suggest, a response to a changing condition of the self and its eudaimonia, then -esque has -- and does not -- experience and protect itself, it only recalls, to project up to us, the concerns of memory and expectation: "to be the warmth of another / produced only from the instant."

Again, I have to keep coming back to the cascade of words here, the way in which Martin piles up aphorism into meaning, meanings which surface and submerge: think of this set of lines: "identity requires sensing / many sensing the defects of the mid-range / and splitting to produce a frayed // potlatch." The light touch of diction recalls such a range of associations here: the "mid-range" (anticipating the musical theme of ii? Or of the 'mid-range' of a department store's offerings? Or of some other middling kind of register?), the "potlatch" (taking us backwards by association to "frayed," the sort of dusty museum images of Native American customs, and taking us forward again to the contemporary 'sharing' of televised emotion.)

This kind of delayèdness and 'light touch' of meaning reminds me of Carole Maso's work, which I've been reading recently, both Ava and Aureole, which contains a preface centered on just this kind of delayed sensicality and its relation to the erotic. And in the tenderness with which the speaker confronts dawn in stanza i, there is just this feeling of the erotic -- a voice of desire where what spills over is not the wanting, but the consequences of being super-saturated with wanting, so that the wanting itself becomes a metaphysical question: "walking in a private field / where no amount of object // denies the soft, speechless center."

Well, there we go, well over three paragraphs and hardly a whit into the core of Martin's poem, which, we see, hitches its wagon to music, to a contemplation of music. Perhaps because of such words as "frictionless," I think more of J. S. Bach than anything else. If Martin is going to falter, it is here, where the strain of analogy begins to wear on a poem that, in the end, wants to free itself of just that kind of device. Perhaps, indeed, it is best not to read this as analogy, but in the same way we read the first stanza's invocation of morning; because, while I do occasionally wake up before noon, I am not a concert-goer, the experience remains strange to me and a criticism of this stanza might better be written by someone with more experience.

One of the reasons I'm not such a fan of some of Adrienne Rich's work is that I believe a great poem should be able to acknowledge its greatness, while Rich it seems sometimes has a -- perhaps politically educated -- need to undercut a poem's self-regard. Martin has no such doubts as she ends, in a distorted picture of plain speaking, thus: "the shifting process / cuts its purpose, scouts tomorrow's fable measured by fine gradations." In the -- technically dazzling -- evocation of the first stanza's dawn, we recover also an ars poetica of Martin's style.