Together Into the Blue But Unbroken Perishing
This doesn't happen often, but there is a jacket-blurb so perfect, I
have to quote it: "Somewhere between screenplay and screen there is a
zone of thought that Blue Hour conjures up. A trail of luminous
images and scenes, personal flashbacks, the politics and literature of
the 20th century float toward the inevitable
ghost-past-ghost-future. In transit, in half-turnings and rushes of
syntax, the true state is a film state in this fascinating book" (Fanny
Howe).
These "rushes of syntax" are the run-on fusion of subject and
predicate, reminiscent-though more fragile, more tremble than surge-of
Allen Ginsberg's catalogic pile-up lyricism in Howl. But whereas
Ginsberg thrills with "the impulse of winter midnight streetlight
smalltown rain", the less confessional nature of Forche's work elicits
"Objects in the room grew small grew large again", "An iron bridge
railing one moment its shadow the next", and "It lasted as long as a
dream it was no dream."
Grammar might seem an unusual thing to admire in poetry, but here, the
run-on contradictions and transformations, fragmented near-closures
("Until the derelict house offered its last apparition", "And the cries
were those of gulls following a seed plough"), and chants of wordlists
("Flour-sacks, school-chalk, a coherent life, "Refugee,
relic, reverie") tend to heighten tension by a kind of rhythmic
peeking-into, through the flickering pulse of the line.
More importantly, and more fascinating, the narrator (and there is one,
just not the standard, seemingly-stable first person, or a falsely
omniscient third) floats through the fleeting, and in the process
presents us with the primacy of visual and sonic images.
This is especially evident in "On Earth", the forty-six page
alphabetically arranged chant of images and phrases, based on ancient
Gnostic hymns. Robert Boyers calls it "a transcription of a mind
passing from life into death", similar to the long poem "Mural" by
Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet Forche has recently translated.
"On Earth" is the poem that will almost undoubtedly get the most
attention-and deservedly so-its momentum is slow, hypnotic, gorgeous,
and at times frightening. An interesting characteristic of this poem,
are lines both "in" the poem as well as "towards" the book, lines
crucial to the poem, but also descriptive of what we're reading, sort
of teaching us how to move through and look at the work: "a litany of
broken but remembered events", "sparks of holiness", "our hymnic song
against death", "a chaos of microphones", "a message deflected by other
messages."
Here is a stretch from early on:
as for children, so for the dead
as gloves into a grave
as God withdrawing so as to open an absence
as he appears and reappears in the unknown
as if a flock of geese were following
as if there were no other source of food
as if to say goodbye to his own mind
as if we had only one more hour
as if with the future we could replace the past
as in the childhood of terror and holiness
What often happens here is an enactment of the remarkable possibilities
of form-in the same way that Mark Craver's "Index", a 26-poem sequence
of 26-line abecedariums, allows things to be said that could not be
said outside of that form. At its best, explicit form is not only a way
to harness the energy of a poem, but a way to create more
energy, images that seem born from mere momentum, lyrics drawn up out
of a well of chanting, a frame that chisels its own body.
Turning back to Howe's remark, some believe that film is the ultimate
medium for artistic communication, and on one hand, this book might
reclaim that herald for poetry. On the other, at the very least, its
procedures and effects are filmic, like the later, shorter stories of
Marguerite Duras: a hybrid of language and vision, and the swells of an
eerie yet elegant momentum built on narrative pauses, gaps, and
reelings.
The title poem is particularly like this. Autobiographical
episodes-beginning with a mother nursing her infant son in Paris during
an hour of pre-dawn called "the blue hour", leaping further back to the
mother's memories of her childhood, back to Paris-take turns voicing in
a cyclic, waterwheel-like rhythm.
Just before "On Earth" is a kind of prelude, and what might be my
favorite poem here. "Prayer" has a relentless calm of declarations: "Say
goodbye to everything. With a wave of your hand, gesture to all you
have known./Begin with bread torn from bread, beans given to the
hungriest, a carcass of flies." These are instructions for prayer, as
well as prayer itself, giving voice to that moment of acutely conscious
solitude -- so characteristic of Forche -- where word and action are one.
In a recent interview in Phoebe, Forche remarks:
I believe that the acceleration of the velocity of our
experience has eroded our capacity to sustain contemplation...it is not
only a question of time, but of the fragmentation of perceptual
experience. Blue Hour doesn't tell stories...My poetry doesn't
tell stories, but it does trace a kind of luminous web of obsessions
and psychic and actual events.
This book is a great fusion of Forche's previous work, and an opening
as well. While "On Earth" recalls the polyphonic "symphony of
utterance" of The Angel of History, much of the subject matter
turns back towards the intimacy of her first book, Gathering the
Tribes, and that is precisely the luminous web of obsessions,
psychic and actual events she refers to.
There is something new here, too -- something both deeply personal and
passionately of-the-world, without the at-times-obscurity of The
Angel of History or the passive poetic conventions of The
Country Between Us. The only thing I can call it is the awesome
balance of art and life. As for "the acceleration of the velocity of
our experience" and "the fragmentation of perceptual experience",
Blue Hour offers the fragmented speed of our lives the possibility that we can in fact make sense of ourselves and this world, but it must be through something quieter and more independent than mass media or "word from the top"; it must be through the contemplative space of literacy, conscience, and individuality. In a phrase, this is
what place art has on this earth.
— 6 May 2003
