Nancy Kuhl : Open House

(The Wife of the Left Hand, pub. Shearsman)

The neighborhood approaches
a watery balance, simple
ebb and flow; its women

cultivate a cold enthusiasm
for the overheard.
A cipher in the slanting

afternoon sun, reason revolves
like an instrument.
Moss climbs the walls,

greens the perfect
day-filled kitchen.
Familiar path of

clock hands: a close room
and roses and too much
conversation. Relentless

charm leaves the housewives
translucent; they turn lovely
backs towards the door.

Ears burn, heels of hands wear
red half moons where fingernails
wouldn't quit. November's

violence will erase lines
from skin until each becomes
smooth as an egg. And their

seeking mouths gape,
empty sweet and aching.
The wives twist in their tea cups,

screw slender black heels into plush
carpet. A camera lens turns open
wide and wide to eat more light.

@

Nancy's book, which arrived in the mail yesterday, has a sort of uncertain provenance: a British publisher, British Arts Council funding, American spelling and apparently a printer in the United States. It also has an uncertain allegiance: blurbs from both Ann Lauterbach and Alicia Ostriker. While both are firmly lyric-I poets, I think it's fair to say they also have radically divergent languages.

But what's going on in the Open House? In some ways, the instabilities of the exterior packaging lie also in the work itself, which, magpie-like, picks at devices from a range of traditions for its effects.

There is that distinctly avant garde ring, for example, of the "lovely / backs towards the door." Lovely? One could not imagine anything further from the pseudo-Poundian school of "vivid arresting nouns please" than that flat "lovely", but the manipulation of such empty content is a hallmark of poets who are enamored of the deconstructionist idea of language-as-shell-game-of-presence.

Yet on the other hand the light "slants", the room is "close", and so forth: there is also an aspect of the language here that aims at very traditional notions of poetry-as-vivid-description. My own biases, of course, don't like these moments: the light "slanting" has been done so many times by so many poems that it is beginning to empty out itself in the close -- ahem -- little world of University press journals.

Nancy, in the end I believe is really an avant garde writer, somebody who is interested, in her particular case, in not animation but reanimation, somebody who feels post, who comes after language has been commodified, reified, turned-into-tool, after the dream of the poet-as-rhapsode has been lost.

But not completely: reading Nancy is a disorienting experience in part because the sound and sense do not follow the expected rules. If the sense -- those translucent housewives -- is estranging, the sound is simplified, paced, measured out in "lovely" little feet. There is not the usual breathlessness and stuttering that one learns usually accompanies this kind of practice.

I think, in other words, that it is fair to leave the question of Nancy's position up in the air, a kind of displaced term in the usual oppositional politics of form.