Kelsey Street | Omnidawn
Review by Laura Mullen
Two books by powerhouse Bay Area writers are reason to celebrate—offering welcome sites of refuge and refreshment. Poets Denise Newman and Norma Cole have given us collections which are remarkable for original and thoughtful observation, exquisite music, attention to language, and associative leaps as large and lively as they are deft. If you’ve been feeling like what Aldous Huxley called the “doors of perception” are fogged, stuck, or barricaded for a psychic shelter-in-place situation, these books might help restore a sense of clarity, freedom, openness, as well as the feeling of being lucky to be alive. While the seeker of narrative might need a minute to adjust (as if, after decades of figurative art, you found yourself in a gallery full of abstract paintings), but the flash of shock lights up energized and transformative joy. If “the story’s / not found here,” as Cole puts it, something wonderful emerges in its absence: an inviting and inclusive “paradise” (to use Newman’s term) of conscious sensual experience.
A multimedia poet and translator who also collaborates with composers, Denise Newman studied at San Francisco State University and teaches at the California College of the Arts: she has been an involved and influential Bay Area presence for decades. In the language we casually use—which is more than usually meaningful here—this poet is grounded in the landscape where she has put down deep roots, and her new collection, “grew,” as the end notes tell us, “out of a two-year poetry collaboration at the UC Botanical Garden” in which Newman—collaborating with the poet Hazel White—talked with the garden’s visitors about their feelings of connection and community with the flora and fauna sharing the ecosystem. Recalling “these unscripted encounters, bits of poetry mixing in the air with pollen and birdsong,” as a “kind of Paradise,” Newman notes their importance in shaping this project: “Sometimes when a person used the word paradise it was tinged with sadness and loss. Was that because, as Inger Christensen writes, ‘The longing was part of it / because truth was never part of it’? Is paradise buried under our despair? … I set out to write these poems to examine our entangled relationship to habitat: might we find a more sustainable course if we changed our thinking about paradise?”
Taking its title from the meditation on exile by Franz Kafka which serves as the book’s epigraph, The Redesignation of Paradise tests the relationship between the language and our embodied reality, while demonstrating how mindful attention can shift understanding through micro and macroscopic changes in seeing and thinking. “Keep looking until you forget what you know…,” Newman writes, “in other words, unhook meaning from definition…” For Newman “Description”—as the poet Lyn Hejinian wrote (in her essay, “Strangeness”)—“is not definitive but transformative.” Dissolving body/mind distinctions, as well as the borders between species, “overflowing man-made bounds,” Newman’s poetry offers a chance to reset our relationship to the world:
In the dream you wake up
As the clear pearl
In a liquid state
Between life and death
You take your time
Growing a new head
And as we find out how “paradise” is seen (by a variety of perceivers) what sounded like a fixed term turns into a creative flow, for it turns out that The Redesignation is an ongoing process: “swimming way out at dusk / to exhaust the tyrant who does not want to die so fiercely can’t even / admit it there I admitted it now we swim back pulling one two one / two at the cold dark water every cell humming in tune with time”
Opening with a question (“what do you see when I say / the word nature?”) Newman’s poetry asks us to consider our experience and the structure of our expectations. This is poetry that can “focus the imagination on something green,” while interrogating both language and desire: “say imagination and trigger longing—why?” While the author’s exemplary curiosity is part of the mindful relation to reality modeled by this work, an interest in what words are doing is a key aspect of the highly innovative poetic tradition which Newman inherits and Cole helped shape. If Newman, in a section titled “Nature Poems,” collapses ideas of order and disorder into “orderdisorder,” it’s a way of reminding us we are also, as she says, “riderdoers.” A homophone for writer, “rider” gets at the energetic momentum of written language and the active, creative, work we do as readers to stay—as it were—upright in the saddle. “We write our reading,” Roland Barthes famously declared (in S/Z): awareness of the reader’s participation in meaning-making informs Newman’s writing—and Norma Cole’s.
A Canadian who has lived in San Francisco since 1977, Norma Cole has been an important figure in the city’s poetry scene for decades. A teacher, translator, and painter, as well as the author of more than a dozen books, Cole brings an impressive skill with the chiaroscuro of obscurity and lit clarity to this sequence of lyric poems whose title (blurring law court and childhood bedroom) references a distancing of body and mind. Treating her readers as present and wakeful co-creators, Cole invites us, in the opening poem of Alibi Lullaby, to, “Take a Look,” connecting observation to both “history” and “power,” where “memory” is part of a “truth cure—” (as the poet notes with characteristic wryness, “it’s a start”). Edgy, whiplash quick shifts of tone and collage-like juxtapositions make this read or ride exciting; if a word is repeated, you’re likely to notice that its sense has changed: “don’t look up,” the poet suggests, “take a history test / give it up.” Cadence and timing are everything, as what Cole calls, “news from / the heart of the meter” keeps a reader on their toes or—the rhythms are so honed, the sonic resonances so unexpected and compelling—dancing in “the glittering light” which “exceeds the framework / unbolted”:
alibi = elsewhere
mirages claim a piece
of evidence
images remember
the cadence
think of others
Giving us a chance to delight in the deliberately undecidable (is that last line an imperative, or a report on the agency of “mirages” and “images”?), Cole, like the artist Lorraine O’Grady—who titled her retrospective Both / And—teaches us to let go of fixed and exclusive positionings. Shared and shifting, the world the poet describes is a place where “sensation” can be “displaced in / the voice of another,” and proximity appears causal: “the bridge in a fog // and the community / of listeners disappears.”
Refreshing our attention to language through play with expected phrases (“LOST DANCE” instead of last, “Critical Miss” instead of mass) there’s a gleeful energy in Cole’s off-kilter echoes, and her impressive ability to keep meaning liquid and loose is showcased in lively enjambments (look at the two poems titled “Mum’s the Word” to see how much work is done by syntax and timing, in very different encounters with the same material). To read Alibi Lullaby is to tumble from one “incomplete” understanding to another, “falling failing,” yes, but also falling finding, so discovery is constant, and constantly destabilized. Oddly enough, the speed of this writing slows and extends the time of reading: where words are (semantically or sonically) adjusted—as in “intention intentionally // lulls suggestion to sleep”—Koan-like moments open, inviting us, for instance, to:
contemplate
incomplete
windlass
suspended
suspense
These poems keep a writer/reader aloft, active and wound up, in an ongoing now in which it’s possible to explore a freedom from desire, and to examine the feeling of being—as we say—up in the air.
So much of daily life depends on our ability to quickly down the hot sense of incoming messages—especially in times of dramatic change—it’s all too easy to forget that the medium matters. So it’s something of a relief to dwell in work which, like Cole’s and Newman’s, requires and rewards slow looking and—in the tradition of Gertrude Stein—resists paraphrase and explanation. Indeed, while the verb “explain” (as in the poem titled “Explain the Gap”) haunts Alibi Lullaby, it’s mostly used negatively: “unstable orbits / explain nothing,” or “nothing to explain.” Something about Cole’s title has me wondering if the pressure to explain the poem is akin to the pressure under which an alibi is produced (“No, officer, I was at home…”): a kind of distancing? One of the great gifts poetry gives is the pressure on and pleasure in presence: the chance to pay attention to the medium, to the process of meaning-making, and our own experience. An opportunity to notice the “leaping rhythm” of our own “pulse,” where “even the / sense / sets beat,” Alibi Lullaby and The Redesignation of Paradise are life-affirming gifts. Don’t explain, enjoy: poems, as Archibald MacLeish noted (in his “Ars Poetica,” published in Poetry in 1926), “should not mean / but be.”
