Reading Review : V. Joshua Adams and Chelsea DesAutels
Past Lives, by V. Joshua Adams (JackLeg Press, 2024)
A Dangerous Place, by Chelsea B. DesAutels (Sarabande Books, 2021)
On a rainy Monday night in November, I ventured out to Magers & Quinn Bookstore, in the Uptown section of Minneapolis, for a poetry reading. Both Chelsea DesAutels and V. Joshua Adams were fine, articulate and friendly readers. They kept the actual reading portion brief, and then engaged in conversation – first with each other, and then with the audience. Their personal charm and brevity, along with the unusually good poetry, resulted in a thoroughly enjoyable evening. And so I bought copies of their recent books. What follows here, then, is not a full book review for either of them : rather a few scattered and inchoate personal responses.
We are already well into the 21st century, as I must sometimes remind myself. My frames of reference crawl backward, scorpion-wise, 30-50 years. We are long past the American era of the poetry wars, between advocates of either “mainstream personal lyric” or “experimental, avant-garde postmodernism”. And we are just now, it seems, moving past the charged atmosphere of identity politics, which characterized the first of this century’s decades. Yet both Adams and DesAutels – in almost diametrically opposite ways – seem to be acknowledging and still reckoning with the enigmas rooted in the yoking of those two words : “personal” and “lyric”. Lyric as a poetic mode has always, or at least since ancient times, presented as characteristically, ineradicably, personal : the question is, as Robert Frost put it – “what to make of a diminished thing”?
Chelsea DesAutel’s A Dangerous Place takes “personal lyric” to its own absolute ground zero. This is a survivor’s testimony – transcribing, by very elliptical, evocative, changeful, and de-centered literary means, a kind of triple-whammy of personal suffering : the shattering ordeal of a simultaneous fusion, or confusion, of childbirth and cancer. There is nothing more isolating, more singularly personal, than the experience of dying or near-dying.
One of the most impressive aspects of her book is way it balances very deft, almost playful stylistic variations, from poem to poem, with a rock-hard plainspokenness. The poetry is viscerally direct about the utter disorientation, the extreme physical and psychological pain it records. The poet lives in Minneapolis, but this is definitely not a demure or cheery version of “Minnesota nice”. It’s more Minnesota gritty, Minnesota adamant. She applies mythical, natural and landscape symbols – from the bleak, rugged plains of Midwest and West – in a moving, desperate effort to survive : to find her balance again. There is no room here for euphemism or comforting banalities. The narrative framework of the sequence adds force, as illustrated in this short poem, “Nearly Enough”:
Black-capped chickadees singing their morning song.
The sun rising over the notch.
How many times have I sat on this bench and watched the sky above the pines forge from orange to blue?
Past the bend, French Creek pushing dead leaves through a beaver’s dam.
The book’s framework here helps you sense the speaker’s tentative pleasure in the perception of calm, ongoing nature – and, at the same time, the vast distance, the hollow detachment she feels, as she slowly recovers.
I ought to be as forthright and honest as Chelsea DesAutels : I had preliminary reservations about her book. We seem to inhabit an era of “poetry-as-trauma” : a literature of witness, testimony, documentation; the recounting of painful personal biography. Of poetry as a source of healing for same. And there can be pitfalls of melodrama, or exaggeration, when the focus is narrowly centered on the poet’s own life-experience. By melodrama I mean the over-dramatization of one person’s suffering – its transmutation into a kind of metaphysics, or myth. There is a chance of obscuring, with the charismatic force of one’s own story, the reality of common, ordinary, everyday suffering : the manifold and sometimes mortal pain we all endure – continuously, communally, to one degree or another.
But this is part of the burden, the enigma of lyric poetry in general. And it relates to the challenge each poet confronts, as they learn their trade : how to find an approach capable of weaving together the personal and the universal. My quibbles here should not be taken as a mark against Chelsea DesAutels : she has a tremendous, fearsome story to tell, which no one else could possibly articulate. In A Dangerous Place, her grip is powerful, honest, blackly humorous, and frankly ingenious. The outcome, for the reader, is moving indeed.
*
At that long-ago bifurcation described above – between a generally realist, descriptive, personal lyric, on the one hand, and an “experimental”, post-modernist approach on the other – V. Joshua Adams took the latter route. Thus this Monday-night reading in Minneapolis featured both sides of that American coin. His playful, elliptical, witty poems fold back into themselves : they are primarily art, not argument or testimony. There is a strong echo of the New York School (Ashbery, Charles North, et al.); behind that, one senses the faint affluence, the so-called “dandyism”, of Wallace Stevens. Stevens sounds in the mischievous titles (“Discourse on Method”, “Kitsch-Value”, “Confidence Man”). And I hear (perhaps mistakenly), at the end of the book’s closing poem (“The Way Out Is the Way Through”), something in one of Stevens’ valedictory pieces (“The Planet on the Table”) :
Nothing of yours remains either, unless
someone catches here something of themselves,
lingers long enough, and before moving on
and forgetting it for good, as you will,
thinks it might be better this way,
to be no one worth knowing.
And while we’re hunting for echoes : I was struck by the tripartite design of Past Lives. The book has three sections, titled First Life, Second Life, Third Life. Each of these parts exhibits a slightly different style and emotional tenor. And I was reminded of the larger, lifelong tripartite shape to the oeuvre of Italian poet Eugenio Montale. His early work (Cuttlefish Bones) is suffused with an element of nostalgia, both personal and stylistic. His central work (The Storm and Other Things) pulses with strong emotion, suspense, riveting drama. His later poetry (Satura, et al.) is an “old man’s poetry” – ironic, satirical, downbeat, intentionally minor (provocatively so).
The opening section of Past Lives is shaped by a speaker who disrupts every kind of realism or “truth value” with a kind of ventriloquism – a voice comically deflected away from any “statement” by absurd non-sequiturs and surrealist imagery. There’s a strong whiff of John Ashbery, except that – unlike Ashbery – beneath these poems’ hilarious and self-defeating scenarios, there’s a kind of obsessive constancy : the expression of an emotional, and philosophical, dilemma. I could go on about this, but here’s a random example, from the poem “Nautical Maps” (which incidentally perhaps nods to Elizabeth Bishop) :
Beaufort, South Carolina is a small, picturesque town
in my memory. A girl who lived there
was once the person I most wanted to resemble.
She had red hair, tending to pomegranate,
and there were seashells tastefully arranged
on the shelves of her living room.
Not to mention the nautical maps, painted with sailboats
full of philanthropists and the otherwise insured.
They were wearing too much plaid for my taste,
but my taste doesn’t count. I haven’t been on a sailboat
since the nineties, when I dropped a widget overboard
into New York Harbor, and the Coast Guard renewed an interest
in my uncle’s career as a smuggler of rare birds.
The central part of the book (Second Life) registers a shift in both style and emotional tone. Paradoxically, just as we suddenly hear the muffled voice of a real speaker – perhaps the poet himself – the verse becomes more pared-down, gnomic, mysterious, darkly lyrical. To repeat : the atmosphere is suddenly quasi-Dantean, or Montalean. The voice is that of an actual someone – who is in fact attracted, by emotional magnetism, to someone, some specific other person. Here for example is the poem “Untitled” :
I follow the scent
of your seashell dress
into the bed of nails.
It jiggers the skin.
Hair like weather covers
my face. Breath is the now,
need is the when,
entwining our wrists.
Under the arch,
sliver of lace:
we float on the brim,
under bottomless skies.
The closing section (Third Life) is like a soldering-together of the first two parts : the diffident, ironic deflections of the first return, but this time in a world-weary “old man” costume. Here is a stanza from “Dora” (a Montalean name, indeed) :
I had been reading “The Sea and the Mirror”
while waiting for her to decide what to do with me.
The first question she asked was, “Who reads Auden anymore?”
Her chest and neck were warm
but her hair, still wet, threw off a chill.
I picked up ripeness from synthetic and went to it.
Holding her hips, I thought
was she an heiress? Had she run away to avoid marriage
to a sensitive, but boring, athletic type?
Were we inside of a novel, and if so,
was I a character or merely the narrator?
Finally, as another example, there is the poem “Aria for the Watchers”. To me (to me, anyway!) this sounds like a response, a mimicry, a widerruf (cf. Celan) of T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” combined with “The Hollow Men” – as late Montale might have written it (“Dora”… “Aria”). Here are a few lines of the opening :
If I could just
stay on this bus
‘til the end of the street
end of the day of the week
end of the need
for the shape of the seem
Could if I could
bus the street clean […]
Nothing in this elusive, autotelic poesie-der-poesie is direct or explanatory. But the fragile, transparent outline of a three-part step which I have described (or perhaps merely imagined) here – a turn, a whorl, a dance – offers a masqued, mysterious personal presence, under the veil of so much absence.
Nicely done, Henry. I don’t know desautels’ book but I really enjoyed Past Lives, and wrote a long message to Joshua about it. Great stuff!