Kate Greenstreet : Bridge

(Learning the Language, pub. Etherdome Press)

Watching a movie in which I'm in a hospital, being experimented on. They tell me it's like a dream (my idea, that I'm being experimented on) — that, really, I'm blindfolded.

The blindfold is so light, they say I can't feel it. (This is part of the treatment.) But I go to the mirror and scream: "I can see myself!"

The doctor says yeah, that's a funny thing.
How you think you can see.

Where there is injury
Where there is doubt
I am melting, or
being flattened by the peach cotton pantsuit,
the saxophone
saved for a new life,
turned into cash

Stopped
to learn what is meant by:
a nice ass (braying) good
sex (boiling) liquid hours (stirring
with an iron bar, eating from your hand)

Stopped
to read a few things
from: the file Ideas/Old Dreams
(his "eye" unseen,
the particular valuelessness
of a dead man's eyeglasses,
contact lenses)

Where there is despair
"Since the first log fell across water"
it happened like this:

"Doesn't anybody have the real potato salad?" Wandering from one (imaginary) picnic table to the next. The impulse to get under the table. The answer, in a way, is yes.

@

This is from Kate's latest book, a chapbook printing from Etherdome Press. Kate's book comes with one of the more beautiful covers I've seen in a while, a single-color affair (left) whose bold, even lines contrast with the murky photocopied photographs that appear inside.

I picked "Bridge" to look at from the book not because I think it's the best poem in the collection, although it's very good, but because it resonated with the kind of work I find myself writing recently. After a long dry spell which I blamed, in part, dear rhubarb readers, on your insatiable demand for more and yet more critical writing, over the last month I've written nearly a dozen poems, a record for me; I mailed the last off today.

The word of the hour, both for my own writing and for reading Kate here is apophenia, the seeing of patterns in random noise. It's a natural human inclination; in fact, the presence of noise as far as I understand is actually helpful to human perception. A blurry photograph is easier to see in the presence of grain; a quiet noise is more easily heard on a scratchy phonograph than a perfect digital reproduction.

The role of apophenia in poetry is I think underestimated by those who have so thoroughly learned the poetry of the past that they see it as natural, as noiseless. In a way we can never read Keats the way he should be read because his language seems, appears, to be correct, appears perfect: what is missing is the dislocation, the noise, the static, of what we don't understand.

As poetry grows up and education becomes widespread and, importantly, as the audience for poetry, the assumed audience, becomes both educated in poetry and actual, we seek for louder and louder noises. It's no longer possible to set up a rhyme scheme and break it: we don't read it as noise anymore, we don't see patterns in it, we just see skill or, today, irritating New Formalism perhaps.

This is all a roundabout way to get to Kate's poem here, which is a poetry of noise. Prose competes with linebreak; description competes with quotation; narrative competes with nonsense ("the real potato salad".) In a sense, I am presenting a metareview -- an explaination for people who, like me, deeply enjoy this poem.

Kate is indeed a master of creating the necessary meaning-laiden noise here; just take, for example, the slide into poetry in the third stanza:

....I go to the mirror and scream: "I can see myself!"

The doctor says yeah, that's a funny thing.
How you think you can see.

That second linebreak feels like the dead air of a college radio station, pregnant with static, with air-clearing, with the kind of noisy silence that apophenia works with. How to fill in those gaps, how to understand the transition from prose (and very workman-like prose at that) to poetry. And another noise source:

Stopped
to read a few things
from: the file Ideas / Old Dreams
(his "eye" unseen

where here the noise is not the quiet of static, but the blare of words piling on top each other, accentuated by that slant rhyme things/unseen. Ideas, Old Dreams, from the file: these clichéd snippets accumulate in the ear until we have no choice but to read them, not in the sense they have separately, not, in other words, as separate clicks or ticks, but as whole thoughts, submerged just below the waterline of sense.

If the direction of the poem is towards increasing noise, then it is the final stanza that makes this noise into a blare, that real potato salad. I was ambivalent about this ending when I first encountered it, it seemed too jarring, too far of a switch.

Indeed, it made me read back and doubt the sincerity of the opening medical scene, and the reading I'm giving here is in a way an attempt to make it work, an attempt to figure out how to enjoy the poem, how to get into the sincere frame of mind that Kate was in when she wrote it.

And I keep going back to the guideline, the sense that the noise surrounds, which is that final affirmation: "The answer, in a way [again, the cliché], is yes." I have the sensation that the poem works, that it fits, and I can't explain why it does. I'm left instead with the feeling that I've been had, been taken in, and enjoyed it along the way.

A kind of folie a deux, then, similar to James Merril's, or, perhaps better, to the people who believe, tragically to the outsider's eye, in the pseudoscience of EVP.