Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Mary Kasimor's THE LANDFILL DANCERS (BlazeVox)

by Jefferson Hansen


Mary Kasimor’s difficult, but rewarding, poems often create buried narratives, where a story is hinted at but never fully fleshed out. The poems track the perchings and turns of attention on top of these narratives, in forms that emphasize visual process. She uses a variety of poetic techniques—from in-line spacing, to surprising line breaks, to idiosyncratic capitalization—to goad words and phrases into a meaning only poetry could grant them. What’s more, a spirit of experimentalism leaps off the page. Kasimor plays with and in language, moving it into unique and specific witticisms and quiet surprises, all with an eye to visual enactment.
            In the poem “found on page 78” Kasimor explicitly mentions story:
                      found on          page 78
          the story has
                               a toothache when
          they looked           at the corners
          finding bruises
          blue
                        escapes a name          wandering
          skeleton covered           with skin 
The story is “found” on a seemingly random page in a magazine or book, probably in regard to a photograph. This is one of the few places where Kasimor addresses what she’s up to, and even here it is elliptical. For her, stories happen everywhere, are tied together with loose, but exact, strings in the complexity of experience. We don’t know precisely what is going on; bits of insight and guess are as far as we can go. These poems hover in the moments before provisional discernment, before a pattern can be identified or an insight had. They hover in ambiguity, but not ambivalence. They are sure footed, well crafted, even exacting. They have a sheen. So Kasimor writes of the unfinished, the raw, the prior to in, paradoxically, careful and fully formed language.
            In this she is similar to William Carlos Williams, with one crucial difference. In a poem such as “The Red Wheelbarrow” Williams gives us both an abstract statement—“so much depends/upon”—and a patterned series of images—wheelbarrow, rain water, chickens—that form and comment on a definite scene.  While the implications of the poem are vast, we have a clear sense of where we are, and we have directions for abstracting an interpretation of it.
            Kasimor inhabits a place in consciousness at a more primal level than that in “The Red Wheelbarrow.” (I am making a simple distinction, not a claim for quality or value.) She implies in “found on page 78” that so much happens on page 78 without explicitly telling us. She lets her attentions show what matters to her, but she rarely, if ever, offers something like a unifying abstraction. It is very difficult to tell what this or any of her poems is about. Indeed, they seem to be about their own visual enactment, the etching of moments into form on the page. It is as if stories and meanings inhabit all places, as if we are almost overwhelmed by what to make of it, that we can only make something of the small, the unfinished, the pregnant.  All we have are small moments, and the making of these particulars into an abstraction is, to a degree, a violence to their multiplicity and particularity. Moments, and the inherent drama within them, do not disclose their secrets, but only flints and specks, the sense that something profound and meaningful is at stake, but exactly what is beyond our ability to comprehend.
            The buried narratives occur because to Williams’ “so much depends/upon” Kasimor responds with, “Oh, yes, and so much also depends upon this and this and that and that, too.” Experience is replete with meaning, story, and drama, and Kasimor celebrates this complexity in poetry that moves and breathes into and with the layers and multiples and ambiguities of language:
            another       Pattern
            rules    the     other
            and               secret
            Escapes           The
            mind making itself
            up  But   the  mess
            lost a chicken (59)
Here, the relationship between the particular—“a chicken”—and the abstract—“Pattern,” “mind”—is not even hinted at. Kasimor places the abstract and concrete on the same level. They are both, after all, moments of attention, places where the mind perches for a time, before moving on.
            Lorine Niedecker and Barbara Guest are important poets for Kasimor. She says so in an afterword to her 2008 collection silk string arias (BlazeVox). Both these poets make a similar move on Williams as does Kasimor. All three poets write from a more primal place than does Williams in “The Red Wheelbarrow.” But Kasimor moves even further back than either Guest or Niedecker, into a terrain that risks falling into a mere list of words and particulars. (See “organic fairy tale” on page 66.) But I’m willing to go with her, up to the very point of incomprehensibility, because of the formal process she creates. Indeed, it is visual form that lends coherence to this poetry. In conversation, Kasimor emphasized to me that her poems are not scores for reading, but visual traces that mark the movement of a mind through a field of meanings.      
            Especially innovative is Kasimor’s use of spacing and capitalization. Some poems, such as the one quoted above, use intralineal spaces to separate words—and sometimes even letters. She believes that such spacing, on a visual level, creates alternate meanings, i.e. two words placed next to each other mean differently than the same two words placed apart. She does similar things with capitalization:
            SOIL’S blood in the wheat & corn
            Lying in uneven RowS
           dangles A reproduction painted LARGE (15)
The capital letters are not intended to encourage sonic emphasis. Rather, they mark the materiality of language, a place where the reader is forced to slow down, to ponder, to make something of what is made on the page. While Kasimor hardly adheres to the notion that every reader is free to make whatever she wants of her poetry, she clearly uses language’s materiality to invite openings and movement for readers that can be highly idiosyncratic. At her most extreme, the visual experiments approach the incomprehensible:
            a m ongsh ado w liv e sand cr acke dfe e tli ke
            mu don t hi stilt in gear tho f ho l ywa tersha (46)
In the three poems like this, in which Kasimor leaves the buried narratives behind in favor of sheer language play, Kasimor puts spaces between the letters of single words and often collapses the space between words. The quotation above, spaced conventionally, reads “among shadow lives and cracked feet like mud on this tilt in gear th of holy water shapes.” Kasimor makes us work for this, and once we get there she offers no easy conclusion. Indeed, these poems are about the experience of working through the reordering of language.
            And this gets at the heart of Kasimor’s process.  This is a poetry of profound and celebratory skepticism. If language can’t add up to legitimate insight and abstraction, what can it do? It can hint and veer, touch on and then glance away, build and then diminish. We live amid meanings, flecks and flints of insight, and possibility. And we can be witty. For instance, “found on page 78” celebrates our silliness, the way we are such small beings reaching for grandiosity, for identifying the “so much” that “depends.” And it sees the humor in how a photograph, most likely, on a nondescript page can send us reeling into wonder, a wonder that is not singular but multiple, full of starts and stops, perchings and flights, ending where it begins but so much richer for the process, the means of getting it down. Her faith, it seems to me, is not in the finding out, but in the unfurling care of process, of celebrating the wit and accidents that are the warp and woof of human life.

            The book ends “pigeons relax/when nothing is personal” (67). This is neither personification nor surrealism, though it contains a bit of both. Rather, it is constructivism, the making of something new amid the meanings we live among. It is akin to Wallace Stevens’ belief in the power of imagination. The difference is that Kasimor never directly addresses an entity as vast as imagination. I don’t think it’s in her to do so. She is too focused on the unacknowledged world to legislate it into anything other than its many, many dramas. It is appropriate that she end here, in a witty line that celebrates the way we make in language and in life. Our constructs are tentative, emerging, dissolving—and that is okay.

__________________________

Kasimor will be reading from this book on Thursday, November 6 in Minneapolis. See this Facebook page for more information.

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