Tim Bradford
REVIEW
Ethan Paquin. Accumulus. Salt Publishing.
The Violence. Ahsahta Press.
More words seldom do justice to the original, so I am increasingly convinced that reviews should consist solely of a link to a soundtrack and would have done exactly and only that if my technical expertise and today’s inane copyright laws had permitted it.*
The Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” would lead off my aural review of Ethan Paquin’s Accumulus and The Violence, followed by Erik Satie’s “Trois Gymnopédies,” “Noël,” “Préludes flasques pour un chien,” and “Le Piège de Méduse.” The resulting trance would then be shattered by Circle Jerks’ “Golden Shower of Hits” and “When the Shit Hits the Fan,” and this ribald humor and slow-burn anger would then morph into the pure sorrow of Billie Holliday’s “Gloomy Sunday” and “Solitude.” The technical expertise and eloquence of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” (ideally Glenn Gould’s second and final recording) would follow, and the soundtrack would end with John Cage’s “4’33”.” The resulting collage would convey the bewildering range of tones and aesthetics utilized by Paquin, and ideally the aural strains would sufficiently haunt the listener until they tracked down both of Paquin’s books and sounded out his own post-postmodern music, a soundtrack itself for the lived experience of the postmodern world now and the coming experience of the post-postmodern world in say, five minutes to five years. Paquin exhibits not only a thrilling range of poetic approaches but also this kind of foresight, something akin to Ezra Pound’s assertion that “poets are the antennae of the race.” So what are those so gifted with antennae picking up nowadays?
As Bill Brown, Chair of the Department of English at the University of Chicago argues in his recent essay “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)” (PMLA May 2005), the attack on and collapse of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center, not the implosion of his Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in Saint Louis, marks the beginning of the common, lived (as opposed to theorized) postmodern world. Yet the world of writing and art strives to remain a step or two ahead, in the position of the avant-garde, a world of post-postmodern aesthetics where, as Rick Moody succinctly puts it, “Everything is permitted.” Thus the grandchildren of the Atom Bomb and Holocaust, mother and father of the postmodern world, arrive in the works such as Paquin’s Accumulus and The Violence, poetry collections that accumulate modern, postmodern and post-postmodern strategies with an attitude of conscious violence toward them all. Paquin’s poetry conjoins the saucy, sharp stance of the metaphysical poets, the intelligence and play of John Ashbery and James Tate, and the terse lyricism and sorrow of Robert Creeley and Wallace Stevens, yet the resulting hybrid successfully resists the mere imitation of all these poetic giants through various strategies, including its own fragmentary, abused quality as pointed out in “Post-Post Poem:”
and the critics
are right, my
poems are not
poems but they
are evidence in
a really dinky
box in a murky
corner of the
chain of human
stuff that will
soon be burned
like shit by sun
when trumpets
sound and poets,
whose work meant,
will be lifted and
saved while I will
pay for abusing
the only thing i
ever knew how
to use except my
penis and burn
Here we have the entire “chain of human / stuff” that informs much of Paquin’s work: the elemental worlds of excrement, sex, and weather, the attention to form characteristic of modernism, evidenced by alliteration and strong enjambment, the ironic and self-deprecating voice of postmodernism, and the shift back to a post-postmodern world of final value judgment by the ending of the poem. In fact, allusions to Revelation and other eschatological visions abound in Paquin’s work, yet the sense is never one of an actual End of Days but rather the perpetual end of days (and subsequent beginning) that we all experience, both literally and figuratively.
I say “Paquin’s work” even though this review covers two separate books because a similar diversity of forms and tones reigns throughout the collective two hundred and twenty-four pages. (Accumulus actually conjoins two manuscripts, The Makeshift, published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Stride Books, and Dead July, previously unpublished as a collection.) Sonnet, ghazal, sestina, paragraph, free verse, open field, and even horizontally-oriented poetry--Paquin cultivates as many different poetic approaches in these two books as many poets cultivate in a lifetime, and he could continue in this variegated fashion for the rest of his lifetime without boring this reader. As for tones, consider the following three excerpts as examples of his range:
The rain is angry today.
I’ve done her wrong, she hisses.
No matter.
It’s enough to hear her hiss,
enough to hide in the shattered mirror
of black, black that is this,
a particularly cold evening, (“Having Learned to Sing, I Find it Difficult”)
May I take this opportunity, reader,
to tell myself: Don’t take your life
so seriously? Be more like the red
spontaneous devil-bug of Australasia. (“When I Don’t think of this World”)
through an infernal ____________________ and sea
where were you
through rainless orange seasonal
where were you
through burn cycles and fealty
where were you
through plant and reap and germinal
where were you (“Where Were You”)
The first excerpt comes from the opening poem in Accumulus and exhibits a sorrow-laden but lyrical voice, something very akin to early Creeley, an obviously important influence on Paquin. The second excerpt, taken from near the middle of Accumulus, seems close to the direct address moments in Walt Whitman’s and Rainer Marie Rilke’s poetry, except instead of encouraging the reader to “stop this day and night with me” or to “change your life,” the voice here simply asks for permission to remind itself to remain humble and close to the earth, like a bug, even if that bug exists only in the mind of the poet. This excerpt also possesses a certain post-confessional stance in its admission of fault and mid-poem attempt at purgation. The final excerpt, taken from near the end of The Violence, speaks in a language that borrows equally from The Book of Job—“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?—and Language poetry.
In addition to this dynamic range of forms and influences, a strong appreciation for the environment and a sense of humor distinguish much of Paquin’s poetry. Yet Paquin manages to distort these familiar elements in surprising ways. A ghazal in Accumulus uses “dust” as its ending word, but this is not your average dust. Instead, we encounter “prodigal dust,” pellicle dust,” “‘Miracle Dust,’” “oracle – dust,” “follicle (dust),” “cacodyl dust,” “Halical dust,” and “caracul dust,” which gives the ghazal a proper repeating sound beyond just the final word and most readers’ dictionaries a dust-off. In this poem and in many others, unlikely word pairings and the continual eruption of the human-made world check any gesture toward a purely “natural” world and any potentially resultant sentimentality. In the poetic sequence “Owyhee” from The Violence, human fear undermines the lyricism and images of nature in the first section. Then, a meditation on the work of Italian expressionist sculpture Medardo Rosso interrupts the natural setting of Owyhee Canyon in the second section, and the final section ends,
Today in 2086, the year I will die,
things will be much worse—
the wrong Gods seated,
minor plagues in blue or . . .
like, a violet not quite invented,
not quite ready deveil\ed so
Caesar Vallejo’s trope of predicting one’s own death gains new life in Paquin’s hands.
Paquin’s sharp sense of humor often checks the sense of sorrow and despair that runs as deeply through both these books as the Owyhee River flows through Oregon and Nevada canyon lands. In the poem “Laughter is X, Laughter is Y,” a poetic sequence concerned with aging, the first section ends, “; those becapped men we’ve know to frequent the strip, / who claim there’s nothing to top the sensation / of denture cream down there,” and the fifth and final section begins,
There is a grove in Oregon that supplies walking canes
for 90.3% of Americans.
There is a grove further north, in Alberta, that supplies
canes for 79% of Canadians.
The grove is the loudest grove you’ve ever seen.
The entire poem out-ages before old age T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock with more humor to boot. Or consider Paquin’s conjoining of environment, humor, and instructional language in this excerpt from a paragraph in “Terrarium, a Quincunx:”
“None of us were born there,” Suze said of _______. She could have been talking
about the fishbowl. It teetered on the sink as Herve filled it with fertilizer—dried
rabbit shit, which can be had for a song at any local rabbitry. The finest is that of
the New Zealand rabbit (the white kind), which incidentally suffers hock-scurvy
very easily. Care must be taken to wash its feet daily.
Often the humor comes in the linguistic games invented by Paquin, as in this couplet from “The Mandarin:” “When glancing you in sleep, any taph / is fair game: bio, ceno, oro, epi,” or these instructions at the front of “Detritus:”
(#) = single space denotes a holding over of last hard consonant sound from the
end of the previous line, or a drawing out of the last vowel sound from the end
of the previous line.
(##) – double space indicates the sound of inhaling must be emphasized between
end of previous line and start of new line : reaffirm life of the poem, life of
silence, life of the recital.
(*) – inflect “—“ as a question.
I tried them and fell flat on my uvula.
However, in other poems, it feels as if sorrow clearly wins and the world consists primarily of rain, dust, and suffering, as in the opening poem in The Violence, “[people are/wherever there’s clouds/starry curvature]:”
people are killed out here, wherever there’s clouds like
this
you hear it in the rain you glean it in the glare the dust
what whisper whimper hasn’t of it ever been said
The Western predilection to interpret the Sanskrit word shunyata, a central concept in Buddhism, as “emptiness” comes to mind. As a translator once explained to me, the word could just as easily be translated as “openness,” but the earliest translators set the standard that has been adhered to ever since. At times, and despite a much appreciated sense of language play and self-deprecating humor, the voice in these poems seems similarly stuck on a “translation” allied to despair and sorrow despite the immediate potential of other possibilities. Paquin himself addresses this issue as exemplified by the previously cited lines from “When I Don’t think of this World” and by the following lines from “Poetry Is No Cure:”
How does it feel to live in a sick world?
Aw, Christ, the neighbors will say as we finish up the unpacking process,
not another bunch of cynics. Ma, do we really need them damn cynics
movin’ in next dur? Lots of sentences in our neighborhood have been left
incompleted. For it to be any other way would depend on a quick solution, the
like of which poetry does not promise.
The incomplete sentences that abound in Paquin’s work do not solve anything in and of themselves, but their infinitely open quality, in a sense, does, and one wonders how such a bravely experimental revision of tradition through grace and violence as found in Paquin’s poetry could lead anyone to call him a cynic, least of all himself. These poems inspire life and language, even if marked by radioactive half-lives, and exhale slowly, like Dexter Gordon playing “Don’t Explain.”
* My sincere thanks to Constance Squires for inspiring this concept through the excellent mix CD she made to accompany James Joyce’s Ulysses.
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