Amy King : Truth Be Told

(from Antidotes for an Alibi, pub. BlazeVOX)

I'm learning to give disappearance an honesty.
Cigarettes, fiction tells itself, paring
down. Familiarity fused with novelty
could be one labyrinth to this planet's
Heaven, I tell myself. Of course, "a child
with the blank face of an egg"
enters the picture, messing with directions
on the drive back, turning the spotlight
off. Vehicle apparatus veers.
That's where we landed for several hours:
Pennsylvania ditch in dusk-colored
day turned night.
My initial impulse was to love a woman
I had never met faraway
in Iowa or France somewhere but
I hate flying.
Aviation strings pawns of the sky
along with single-serving towelettes
and a flight crew telling in-jokes to themselves.

@

This is the opening poem of King's new book that she sent me over the New Year; I'm happy to have the chance to look it over more carefully now. I've reviewed King once before; the nature of rhubarb is that I often change my mind about a poem multiple times as the original review sits on the web. While I liked her previous poem, her work here in Antidotes I actually like a great deal more and that previous poem has worn less well on me over the months since I reviewed it.

King's work here has really opened up to include a much wider range of responses than what I felt was a sort of bebop inspired skate across language. Ron Padgett has blurbed the book saying that reading King leaves to you "find yourself happy to be pleasantly addled"; I think this is an underestimation of what's going on: there is addlement, sure, but there is also resolution, and bringing-into-focus.

King now wants to put the I in and make it a recognizable, human I, as in this clip:

I am the envy of nothing less
that no one, not even
the carburetor of my playdough heart.
(Up and Down Stone Mountain)

and, in another, you can see the rhetorical modes of her play taking new forms, including paradox:

In Warsaw they live as if within
Poland, a large city nestled in valley
(The Bees of Ants)

The opening of King's "Truth Be Told" above is another opening out, beginning with a tone of an artist on display -- appropriately enough for the first poem of a book. That line sits at the fulcrum of, on the one hand, art-talk (I am reminded of Woody Allen's character in Manhattan, making fun of Diane Keaton) and on the other a more general gesture towards a kind of ahuman word-combining. It's where we begin, but far from where we end up.

Perhaps the best way to look at King's poem here is to focus on its sense of motion, because the poem is in part a dramatic script (the baby "enters the picture") and in part its filming. This mode of reading I advocated recently for Henry Gould's very different kind of poem, but I think both King and Gould are picking up on a very fundamental aspect of poetry, which is its ability to generate a sense of motion, a kind of synaesthesia whereby language and, in particular, the flashing of images, generates a sense of lurching, reeling and, in general, moving.

Of course, an entire poem devoted to just the generation of motion would be perhaps more of a set-piece, an exercise, and King breaks out of this: most strongly in the Pennsylvania ditch, where the camera is replaced by the voice and instead of being a handmaiden to the generation of images, it becomes a vehicle for expression, for longing:

My initial impulse was to love a woman
I had never met faraway

It's a kind of longing that must emerge from an ironized space: "my initial impulse", King writes, as if beginning a deposition to the insurance company. But it (thankfully) doesn't remain there, moving outwards to become real, backed-up, irrevocable, and when the irony returns ("I hate flying") it is a wounded kind of irony, one breaking down.

The finish here is a kind of resolution of the camera and the voice; we are brought back to the earlier pleasures of feeling driven around (and wiping out on the highway), but we do so as part of an apostrophe. The planes fly over us in good Hollywood fashion, but they are also being spoken to, even accused. These things are quite far away from the kind of conscience-less strumming of the nets of language, and they function in the poem here as powerful, human moments.