Gina Myers
REVIEW
Brian Blanchfield. Not Even Then. University of California Press.
Not Even Then (2004) is Brian Blanchfield’s confident debut book of poems from University of California Press. While roaming in thought, following chance associations and interruptions, experimenting with syntax and wordplay, Blanchfield speaks with authority, often instructing the reader. His poem “String Theory Readymade” begins: “Number one, draw on your paper your paper on fire. / Get this down. Use this red.” In “Comfort Proviso with Shadow” he simply instructs “Watch this,” and later asks, “Don’t like what you see?” Even though Blanchfield speaks with authority, he doesn’t lead the reader by the hand. Instead he creates a space for possibilities to thrive. If you don’t like what you see, there is always another option, a new set of alternatives. Simply turn over: “It’s built in that you can alternate.”
While the subject matters of the poems are wide in topic and sometimes undecipherable, the book seems to largely concern itself with ideas of continuity, memory and time. Blanchfield rejects the desire for continuity with his constant interruptions. In “Even Funnier than Pretending to Do It Is Actually Doing It,” the director “calls for Continuity to prepare a second take, a mayhem more the same.” In “Thirteen Point Three Three,” Blanchfield interrupts his discussion of continuity with a question of time:
Take away interruption and continuity
has no brink. Icemen dazzle as sons date.
Let’s go over interruption once more.
Continuity, but a policy through the boroughs
(how many stops between time and time2?)
is insistence there be a train, like Cornell’s el,
by bridge hoists and windows breaking light,
idling into the shock, yours, of silhouette repairing.
Here continuity cannot be discussed without interruption. There can be no beginning point if there isn’t an interruption. Of course, continuity is usually conceived of as being continuous, circular, with no end or beginning. Blanchfield is drawing attention to continuity as an idea, (a false idea), and not as an actual thing. Continuity is not the train, but the insistence there be a train.
Interference also occurs throughout the book. While interruptions interfere with thoughts, other interferences are more physical. In “Red Habits,” people are themselves an interference—a veil between the actual and the perceived. “Two Moons” begins: “The moon will all but disappear, which is to say the world is in the way again.” In the same poem Blanchfield asks, “Poor white parenthesis, is everything inessential? Should everything come between?” Although this sounds like a lament, it is not. Blanchfield sees only opportunity here: “I imagine it new, another tournament beginning, an open, an invitational.” The world of possibilities is celebrated. In the final lines of the final poem in the book, “The Living Many Go Down One,” there is no one present “who can keep it singular”—a sort of different take on Oppen’s meaning of being numerous.
There is lively play with language throughout the collection—words mutate, syntax is skewed, reversals and negation occur. The play is usually successful, like in the opening of “To Come True a Thing Must Come Second”:
Once was a story of following following.
Return is rarely the reverse I value or so I
led you like a zero out the zoo,
toured it twice at once from your regard,
and came to understand.
The reader may be disappointed at times if he or she is looking for something more than clever play. The linguistic reversals and negations sometimes cancel out any parseable meaning—the poems become a lot of play with very little content which can create a hollow feeling. For example, actions are cancelled before they happen in “Code Orange Under Love, Part 1”: “Imagine things in sympathy have somewhere touched / or not yet.” In “Infraction,” nothing passes over nothing. Mirror-inside-a-mirror redundancies occur in “Less and Less That is Not a Hotel Anymore” with coverage and coverage of coverage. This postmodern play and attention to language’s failure to express is nowhere near as exciting as when Blanchfield uses language in new ways. Blanchfield employs syntactic slippages to create awkward and wonderful phrases such as “I was wrong around an unfair question to be a boy again” from “Chances at Kill Devil Hills,” and “step rung from sleep’s low rung awake” in “Propeller or Chime.” In “Aerozona Water Letter” words transform based on phonetics, dramamean in the first line later becomes “dream. Amen.”
Generally the poems in Not Even Then are comprised of paratactic phrases created through chance associations. The reading experience is similar to that of reading Ashbery—phrases and ideas come and go dreamlike, but something remains, something resonates with the reader. In “Less and Less That is Not a Hotel Anymore,” Blanchfield describes a small brother, “pressing / his stinging face against one’s harp: / this will have resonance.” Even with some shortcomings—including the seemingly arbitrary section divisions—Not Even Then is a promising debut book, a book that will resonate with many.
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