Nightboat
Review by Laura Mullen
“These days walks are my cinéma vérité… // Walks are my party. My cinéma vérité. Nameste.”
--Mónica de la Torre
At a poetry festival recently a young poet called the poems she was reading “nonfiction,” a puzzling term (we rarely define things by what they are not) widely used, usually with the prefix “creative,” to describe prose essays. Most poetry is, if not exactly nonfiction, rooted in truth: while Keats’ “Endymion” is an imaginative romp around a Greek myth, his “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” no matter how vividly the static images are set in dreamed motion, depends on the British looting of Greek artifacts which allowed the poet his ekphrastic experience of an actual object. Sappho’s fragments, “O Western Wind,” that ancient anonymous poem expressing desire for an absent love, and most Haiku could also be called “nonfiction” if we felt we needed to wave a “this really happened” flag over the line breaks. What’s interesting is the fact that we don’t seem to feel that need, but tend to believe poets are mostly speaking truth that comes out of the world they inhabit and an embodied life. For poetry with a serious commitment to the actual, however, the term in current use is “Documentary Poetics,” which evolved from both cinéma verité and previous literary movements (Objectivism, Beat poetry, and “the New York School”) where telling it like it is—politically, socially, emotionally, sexually, etc—became urgent and admirable. Examples include Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust, which uses the Nuremberg and Eichman trials as source, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (written in response to the 1931 Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster in West Virginia) and the later works of Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Citizen, and Just Us), along with Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument, Mark Nowak’s Shut Up, Shut Down, and precis by José Felipe Alvergue, among other examples. Intense interest in a shapely and direct presentation of life-records, archival materials, and current events is manifest throughout contemporary American poetry: Michael Leong’s Contested Records (University of Iowa) offers a superb overview of the growing body of work and how it functions to expand the reach of attention and empathy. None of which you need to know, but all of which you might want to know as you reach for Mónica de la Torre’s rich and engaging new collection of poems, Pause the Document.
Rigorous yet casual, funny and fierce, intimate and formidable, Pause the Document invokes the documentary impulse and turns it back on itself in ways that are seriously playful and deeply enjoyable. The poems gather disparate materials, voices, and various languages (sometimes with translations—and nuanced considerations of translation’s complexities); you’ll also find formal innovations, delicious sonic resonances, research on trees—and botanists—an elegant Abcedarium poem, and the uninterrupted pleasure of moving through place and time with what the poet Theodore Roethke called “a lively intelligence”—because de la Torre is a knowledgeable and beautifully present guide. Speaking succinctly to the poet’s ‘nonfictional’ activity, where life is becoming art, the title of the book almost—so I learn from an interview—had a comma after Pause. Removing that comma lets the noun shimmer into verb: so that a documented pause potentially becomes an imperative pause in documenting. In this collection the poet is questioning her medium and her own activity, and different kinds of pause are overlaid: “There’s / intermittent eroticism,” the poet tells us—describing New York, but also her book—“the erotics / of intermittence, and dead ends.” Breaks and checks in form and content, explored with an exemplary balance of emotion and intellect, are revealed as indeterminate and active. The pauses de la Torre considers include perimenopause (a phenomena half the world experiences and almost no one talks about), the life pause caused by diagnosis and undisclosed illness, and then the pandemic: for this collection tracks an experience “we want / to forget or the one forgetting itself.” In lockdown, as the author notes in an interview: “I had to put everything on pause. Euphemistic pauses kept appearing in other contexts, in discussions about possible ceasefires in Ukraine, in Gaza. Climacteric times, both personal and global.”
Other pauses would include the Sisyphean effort of the protagonist to escape a single, horrible, reiterated day in the 2020 film Palm Springs, the “freeze” of the lost (in the zoom call) internet connection, when, “You’re in a slight panic trying to reconnect before you lose everyone for good and find yourself alone with your thoughts,” and, throughout the book, “breather” moments of contemplation—of nature, often of trees—which are restorative but brief and uneasy. A New Yorker who seems, like the poet Frank O’Hara, more at home on the streets than in a garden, de la Torre is still able to beautifully acknowledge the communications of the nonhuman, and the limits of language: “Wind gusts rustle the foliage of surrounding trees. They speak to her for the first time, yet she can’t put what they say into any of the words she knows.” Or (in another poem): “When you speak through scents, pheromones, toxins, / and electrical signals only, the arc is harder to follow.” This openness to other kinds of connection, and questioning of understood ways of proceeding, is part of what makes this collection so fresh and exciting. “I’ve often been tempted to engage in documentary modes,” the poet tells us, “But then I’ll go down a rabbit hole from which I can only escape by turning the whole enterprise on its head.”
I read de la Torre as upending or widening the documentary impulse by surfacing the role that subjectivity plays in the collection of material—“If you don’t remember a name, / does it mean you don’t care to remember…”—and bringing a relentless awareness about what the urge to “track,” or record, does to lived experience. She reminds us that every “document” is also a translation. Gathering information from a wide range of sources, including dreams, and giving herself room to record responsively in a montage of swiftly changing foci expands the Documentary, as does the daily surrealism of contemporary urban life:
… Across the river
we get stuck in traffic on 42nd. A truck
driver keeps his cool, plays a flute
between lights. The wax museum’s
reopened. Minnie takes a breather, mouse
mask dangling from neck, face mask
over nose and mouth. Another
river over, American Dream,
a mammoth new complex,
remains empty in new Jersey.
Dramatic shifts of scale, for de la Torre handles her images with a cinematographer’s skill, also shift the documenting impulse, so that—for instance—“micro-grated Parmesan cheese dangling / from the dinged edge of a bowl covered in oil”—dominates a stanza about a dinner party. But perhaps the largest way the poet transforms the idea of document is by—in the book’s final poem and last word—bridging the gap between archive and oratory, reminding us that each document is also an “offering.” “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” the philosopher Simone Weil suggested, and Mónica de la Torre’s work reminds us of the truth of that claim. Our intense, fully present, attention—not least when it moves into research—transcends the academic or bureaucratic insofar as it transforms the one who attends, opening breathing room for all of us who, at one and the same time, need to both document, and pause.
