Kirsten Kaschock
REVIEW
Lara Glenum. The Hounds of No. Action Books.
Meet Lara Glenum. Her premier collection, The Hounds of No will not allow you to forget her soon. The first time I met Lara, over coffee in Athens, Georgia, she seemed not unlike and yet unlike a sweet, helpful, strangely-brilliant librarian. Soon, I read her work. When two or more disparate, contradictory elements force themselves to hold contiguous space in one’s mind—one might call this surrealism, or, alternately, negative capability. Lara Glenum’s work certainly obliterates considerations. Yet, it does not simply frustrate expectation or prevent dismissal. That would be coy. These poems are not coy. One cannot make the relentlessly playful horror of her poems jive with any picture of the poet less complex than the work itself. An author’s photo is not helpful, her biographical details—less illuminating than the violent-ly-rical I of her poetry:
I said: I am several diseases singing in polyphony. I said: I am being
slobbered on by the Hounds of No.
from “Marxism will give Health to the Sick”
So, having accomplished the introduction to the author by alluding to and then dispensing with it, let me say this book hurts me. The I of Glenum’s poetry is a sharpened candelabra—multiple in form, multiple in its uses as weapon. The speaker can be an historical, hysterical or mythical persona (as in “Marlene Deitrich’s Letter to an Unidentified Admirer,” “Hermaphrodite Sock-Monkey,” “Medea and the Snow-Angels”), but whatever voice the speaker takes, it uses that voice to thrust, stab, parry, burn and illuminate. In these poems, Glenum alternately brandishes her voice against itself, eviscerating it, and against her reader’s intellectual torpor (never have I felt so personally implicated by a collection). Sometimes, she tables the voice to civilize a dinner conversation, as if the voice were not hers at all (which of course it isn’t). The voice of this latter type of Glenum poem is The Voice, voice of objective reality which, during the first course of the dinner, starts unraveling its light—revealing the consommé to be prisoner’s gruel. Take, for example, “A Treatise on the Affective Origins of Female Hysteria and Schizophrenia (ca. 1880)” This prose poem contains three sentences, four footnotes, eight proper nouns, and nine quoted or italicized phrases. It begins thusly:
Women, who have frail “Happy Way Bus Routes,” who are easily carried
away by the Quilligan Quail, by the lively movements of their own Key-
Slapping Slippards, are more often attacked…
This speaker, a syntactical academic, is undercut by his own (the disembodied voice is by default masculine) Seussian references and bawdy euphemisms. In his world women are “attacked” by nervous diseases; this turn of language is just as ludicrous as Glenum’s conjured jargon, yet the usage of the discourse of conquest for illness is of this world—my world. And it is language I rarely question.
This is an example of Lara Glenum’s estranging brilliance. Her illumination by a sublime/abject juxtaposition. Surrealism-reincarnate by the relentless parade of the sexual and the dead—the only states that still have the power to shock, if only when in abundance and in contexts unseemly, as in “The Adela P. Kerduckian School for Well-Bred Young Ladies”:
…A drill
sergeant barked out orders: Always leave a calling card when attending an
afternoon massacre. White kid gloves should be worn at a funeral and should only be
taken off to toy with the corpse. A jewel-encrusted abortion kit is always a fashionable
gift for a female relative…
In Glenum’s hands, taboo again becomes taboo; it is a conservative trick—to bring a numb audience out of numbness. I was happily stunned to realize that it is still possible to go too far, that there are yet areas that make a reader, this reader, unbearably uncomfortable, even if they are areas of conflation: the religious-war-mongering-sexually-deviant-corpse-places—and only when they are inhabited by schoolgirls of the patent leather variety. It is a conservative trick with anti-conservative results. Glenum shows that what horrors exist are the ones still masquerading behind propriety, in institutions and in the language of those institutions which is their internalization—the institution within. I wish books could still get banned. This one is deserving.
In the Appendix to this collection, the “Manifesto of the Anti-Real” offers up the uncompromising stances which make the play of Glenum’s poetry always sacrificial play— play with stakes so high I would joyfully fling myself from a bell-tower to be impaled on them:
3. Realism is the bordello of those who would have their perceptions affirmed rather than dilated. When the door of fascism is opened, Realism will be seen lounging like a whore in its inner sanctum.
4. The Apocalypse is a way of thinking. Only the Apocalyptic clock announces from atop the grotesque pile of refuse, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is now.’
5. Irony is not a device. It is a state of being.
This manifesto states, among other things, that Surrealism does not go far enough. The Anti-Real (resurrection of Dali’s limp-Jesus-on-the-cubes into a raging Shiva or Quetzal Quetal), by comparison, “displaces causal logic with a totalizing logic of violence.” Ending a collection of poetry with a statement of aesthetics is asking to be reamed with it. Yet, skewer these poems as I might with their accompanying manifesto—I am left with all the images that from page one have not only been complicit with violence but begged for shattering: “a diamond axe,” “gray amniotic sacs,” “silvery leaves & cuckoo colonies,” “a glass ramp into the mouth of a statue of jackal-headed Anubis,” “my crystalline nerve-coat,” “a black velveteen parlor littered with anesthesia canisters,” precocious vulva &/outrageous marble erections,” “the cyst wall,” “the sky’s pearl-throttled/engines,” “a white hyena/with genitals of ice.” These poems love the crush—the implosion—of imagery into language, enough to hemorrhage with it.
If I have not made it clear that Glenum’s book concerns itself with illness, oppression, the reproductive body, dream and morbidity and the very real possibility of rebellion—let me do so now. These poems function within the sincerest mode of irony. They efface. They accuse. They know their reader exists complacently in the world, yet they recognize that all language—theirs included—is produced from within a system it cannot outrun, no matter how diamond-tipped the shoe. In “Pornography” a lotus speaks:
The lotus says: No exit.
No exit from these hieroglyphs
on the pavement of non-meaning.
No exit from a life circumscribed
by flame.
(I say: Like Hell.
And so she does. Glenum uses poetry to vault out of the terrible material of poetry and into something else entirely: its terrible infrastructure—poetry’s arteries, ovaries, and levees. Her About the Author page states that “Lara Glenum was raised in the gothic South.” If you read autobiographically (which you should never, ever do), you might expect her to know, then, that hell is not a fire but a swamp. And so she does. In The Hounds of No impossibly incongruent worlds float half-submerged but exact, and they collide—their chandeliers and wicked isotopes and sock-monkeys. But Glenum never retreats into the obscurity of image and voice that such a generously decomposing space would allow. Instead, she “[plays] the leg-bone trumpet out over the fertile swamps/of our collective misery.” (Emphatic imperative now.) Meet Lara Glenum. She will be vehemently conducting your baptism. You may trust her to take you under.
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