Matthew Henriksen
about The Talk
I can wish for a cause to fit my longing, a reason to write rather than to be. I imagine that is what Roethke’s madness (and use of interior dialogues) was about, and what he is talking about when he announces (as if to himself), “I, who came back from the depths laughing to loudly,/Become another thing.” In a sense, or I would prefer to say from a certain locus of sensibility in the brain, we have the tendency to “admit” that all we have is hope for and talking about. My course has backtracked, however, and here I am making assumptions about my own poems, when Nate had in mind that I talk about sequence.
Sequences have allowed me to improvise out of various centers. In the case of “The Talk” that center is a farcical dramatic situation: a father imagining how he’ll explain sexual virtue to his sensually awakening son. The father imagines the beloved, which he generalizes into “angels.” While trying to conjure a substantive religious argument, his slippery and digressive language inevitably turns to the physically alluring. I had a great time writing these because the situation allowed me to embellish in purple passages and spacious meters. (Oh, lets hope that last sentence enraged some troglodyte in denial! It is the animal mmpf I’m after!) I don’t hope to convey anything specific; I simply set out to explore the crevice in the psyche where the agnostic pontificator demurs to the sexual spirit but only after unspeakable self-refusal.
Nate sent me part of his Winter Constellations. My co-editor at Typo, Adam Clay, has been long working on Nodaway River, which has moved from a few closely tied poems to a book-length work, and my favorite from Typo, Anne Boyer, has sent several sequences I adore, one of which we published in Typo 6. Tony Tost, Ben Lerner, Aaron Kunin, Eleni Sikelainos, Maurice Manning, Geoffrey Hill, and Allen Grossman have recently written long sequences in which I have indulged rapturously. To what effect does such indulgence (for writer and reader) come? The long form allows us to do things we otherwise would not have attempted, and for me that’s justification. It’s up to the poet to work within the form to make it good—to make it Old and New all at once. Without the long sequence, I could not have adopted the posture of the father in “The Talk,” though inevitably I have found myself wearing the masks of personae not on my face but in the interior.
from The Talk
An angel hung by her own hair harkens the music of harp-like flesh. The boy will love this angel with ethereal carnality, and in such an inconclusive circus he shall inherit the folly of prescient ironic wit, or inter an entertainment of his consolatory itch that will continue in a sensation shaped like the Eiffel Tower if you can imagine its scaffolding ad infinitum. But I won’t imagine it because, as I will tell the boy, even when she hangs there we can see the cornucopia of her breast, the she shell, the shield of her booby shouting A Nous, la Liberte, and though she stops breathing with the scales of justice tomorrow, armored lizard shrieking now.
An angel unlearns the libel of exhilaration. I once took the boy to a movie about bicycles, He fell in love with bicycles. He fell upon his bicycle, and from. Upon the thorns, he bled. He learned his lesson not to learn. The elocution of that vine evinced the fastened module of esoteric remonstration. So he blew his nose and made roses of his cheeks. So the coward died. Lost his bicycle, he. Forever turning, the film of desecrating never ends. Amen.
Went down to the river, that angel. So the boy dreams azure is blue is sky and nightfall not a verbosity of electrocution. His sister screams. There’s a numinous ring that’s been bleed clean and found allergenic, the mainstream disaster of our era, a doorway into the peephole to the girl’s locker room where the fortitude’s innocence meets the laundry of indulgence. And beat off. Cried “Azure, behold me!” I belong to the sky. In other words, the boy’s cognizance is breeched at the abortion of daylight, static nightscape stillborn on the neighborhood’s lawns, an oozy frieze of potential memory. Could only the boy read signs. However, his symbolic acquisitions equate to a rhyme representing the quantitative semblance between fishes and birds, if you catch my drift.
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