Erika Howsare
Reading as Ritual
Jennifer K. Dick. Fluorescence. University of Georgia Press.
“[M]y gaze pairs off with colour, and my hand with hardness and softness.” —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 214.
“What holds the body” is the title of the long poem at the opening of Jennifer K. Dick’s collection Fluorescence, and being unpunctuated, it leaves itself open to being read as a question. In one way, many answers are here: the body is held by a lover’s hands, which remember and confirm a physical presence (“I want to ask/ how we got here. And I finger your face, your nose// to be sure we are.”). It is also preserved by dumb luck, a tiny thing spared by larger forces (“I count the minutes between our entry into the building, the apartment, and the explosion.”). Between the former sense of “holding”, which is quite everyday, and the latter, which seems extraordinary but is in fact constant (until it isn’t), there is the act of publicly and deliberately opening oneself to a sustaining reciprocity. In Dick’s poem, a tightrope walker performs this role:
The heads tilted up cannot turn away for fear that the gaze
is what holds the body. Tent a lung sucking deep
inwards until even the blue fades into the white around iris
around the figure of
And what would make it fall?
In this subtly rhythmic scene, lack of investment by the performer’s audience would precipitate descent—into meaninglessness, if not an actual plummet to the ground. This is the participatory nature of ritual. Why risk spectacular death in private? It is no different with the poet; the artist and the daredevil share a need for witnesses to complete their work.
Thus, in another sense, what holds the literary body exists elsewhere, outside the book, between the book and the reader, as color exists “paired off with” the eye. When Dick alludes, in the same sequence, to suicide, and lists reasons one might permanently remove oneself from existence’s hold (“…too many cubicles, a lack of ice, nightmares, the ozone layer melting, because it is a popular way to go, to hold up traffic, the wind over the bridge calls you to the edge and then…the curiosity: would it work?…”), the implication is that to be suicidal is to have already severed one’s life- and meaning-giving connections. A poetry which is sealed, impervious, already perfect, is a suicidal poetry.
This mostly lovely poem does die a certain death when, on its last page, it drags out that all-too-familiar poetic darling, the “butterfly” illustration of chaos theory: “one wing’s flutter creating a tidal wave/ on the other side of the world.” The poem has already, to this point, accomplished a portrait of global interdependence; the overworn allusion is unnecessary because it denies a certain agency, and a sustaining role in the literary ritual, to the reader.
Similarly, a few of Dick’s shorter poems seem compelled to wrap up their fractured imagery with an overneat last line: “Contained.” (52) “The way language means. Signals.” (59) Why conceive of the page as a space where completion is necessary or desirable, if the world itself is given as shifting and destabilized—especially when Dick shows herself to be exquisitely sensitive to the possibilities of a broken grammar, an open-circuit language? This work is most successful when, like a filmstrip, it offers a series of images that are granted coherent motion through a viewer’s sensibility, not only through the poet’s guidance.
Fittingly, throughout this book is a body continually measuring itself against its surroundings, taking spatial and narrative form through contact with color, geometry, architecture, event. Space is a liquid medium in “As in, beginnings”: “She kicks the rip in the wall, day less certain than the harbor.” (48) And the body has shifting boundaries in “In the Garden”: “Turns her back in sleep, closes the vast plains like musk. Herself mixing with his.” (43) In the series of poems united by the repeated phrase “small girl,” Dick circles around and through the trope of a woman remembering her childhood and gauging the presence of sexuality in all stages of life. Categories of knowing and innocence, adulthood and childhood do not explode so much as melt. “She is fascinated by the cherry-apple-sized insect and takes a bite of it. In the tunnel, two innocent women.” (44)
Reading these lines often engenders a delicious and twisted bodily reaction. But the logic of narrative is Dick’s concern too. Two neighboring poems are typical of Fluorescence in their murky inter-relations. In “Drift,” an unlocatable “she” seems to be caught in a vaguely nautical danger: “She coats the back hand with yellow wax, in the right bees tenderly stinging. Her body swells in the histamine or on waves.” (60) On the next page, “Rescuers” has the feel of trying to reconstruct a seaward memory from a grounded present: “The signposts voyage over arms, body, a grapevine of bowed wood circling a grey fog.” (61) Yet over and above the distinct time-settings of these watery narratives—one an event, the other its remembrance—is the present fact of the reader: making connections, building a web between facing pages, coming to awareness of a tenuous language-based narrative moment, “a tale of a long (k)now” which is a ritual in itself.
These, like many poems in this collection, are formed as prose blocks, but occasionally Dick uses the field of the page in order to more graphically invite the reader between her work’s seams, as in “Passages”:
“ ‘No,’ she protests. Pressing away hands, fingers
pressing in down into
The bowl, somewhere, clattering to floor. Her wrists”(66)
“Passages,” with its careful swift pacing, follows an epigraph by Michael Palmer: “As if the question: lovers, prisoners, visitors,” and opens with this line: “As if the answer were his palm sliding over belly…” Its visual and grammatical gaps are open to the reader’s imaginative contribution and to an overarching conversation between Palmer and Dick, the “passage” between his question and her answer, even sonically between “Palmer” and “palm”.
The poem is reminiscent too of Cole Swensen’s more fragmentary work in that, like a planetarium, it is only sensical from within, an illusion that one must inhabit to perceive. The sense is that such a poetry might function differently depending on the reader’s location and approach—i.e., it is the enactment of the ritual, not its description, that lends it meaning. In the best moments of Fluorescence, reader, body, book and setting exist in an enjoyably fluid—thus generative—relation to each other, to the author and to her surroundings, literary and otherwise.
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