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J.E. Pitts. The Weather of Dreams.
David Robert Books 2007. $17.00
Review by Tom Pynn
Are words enough, will
they ever in their smallness
be enough?
--from "The Amnesiac, Learning Slow"
Mystics, artists and other cultural dissidents down through the ages have all informed us of the inadequacy of language either to express or communicate the full range of human experience. Words can neither fathom the deep mystery of things, nor can they hold still the shifting surfaces of timespace. Yet despite the inadequacy of language, what has been consistent with poets and mystics is their copious eloquence. One thing that mystics and poets tell us is that we expect the wrong things from language; we naively expect our words to hold things fast and bring stability and order to the fluctuations of phenomena. This shows that despite the various uses we have for language, our language is first and foremost an embodied language. Perhaps this accounts for our reliance on nouns; we often lean on the solidity of nouns hoping that they will anchor us in a tumultuous world. J.E. Pitts' first book of poetry in part asks us to reconsider our faith in language especially in those instances when the body unexpectedly fails us. At the same time, however, poets like Pitts are engaged in the time-specific task of shaping in language our lived experience of time. Pitts ends "Approaching Babel" with an observation about the limits of not only a private language, but also the sleepwalker’s tendency to take language for granted and reduce it to the thinnest veneer of signification: platitudes, clichés and banality. He writes,
but we are still trapped by our speech,
like cornered dogs know they are trapped.
Even in translation
the sounds we make are
only guttural songs of wicked chatter
and scurrying underfoot.
When the poet attains the relative surety of his feet, the words sound an existential song of what we do rather than what we are. As William Carlos Williams wrote in his essay "On Measure--Statement for Cid Corman (Origin, 1954), we no longer live in a world that corresponds to fixed formal structures of measure. Instead, "We have to return to some measure but a measure consonant with our time . . . a new measure by which may be ordered our poems as well as our lives." Williams' unique contribution to American poetry is his development of an American objectivist idiom (somatically) spoken in the form of a triadic line, but what's important to note is that it is a line in which form follows content. That is to say, the new American poetry is composed in an existential measure, a measure founded on a "relatively stable foot" one that flows from the beliefs and values of our age rather than attempting to fix a world into a immovable frame. It is in this sense, then, one hears Pitts struggling toward a measure in this time. Pitts relies upon leitmotifs in The Weather of Dreams to give his volume a shape that might otherwise float off into space for want of a relatively stable foot.
“The Weather of Dreams” opens the volume and it is in this poem that we are presented with four of the main leitmotifs that will form the cohesive structure of the book: dreams, chiaroscuro, corners, and the human body. In dreams, Pitts writes, no one thinks to look up. Why not? Carlos Castaneda has Don Juan say (The Art of Dreaming, 2004) that in dreams, no one looks at their hands. If they did, they would have a lot more control over the distorted frenzy of dreaming. Pitts asks, Who sees those clouds? Here’s the rub: we sleepwalk in dreams much like we sleepwalk through waking consciousness. Though we tend to navigate our way through the field of our experience by the body sensory apparatus, we take our body for granted. In short, we seldom notice anything, whether in dreams or in waking life. We all share a numbness when we sleep--/ skittish, we plod along the same way in dreams--. One way Pitts imagines the background of our sleepwalking is mind obstructing illumination, seeing as (we would like them to be) rather than seeing that (things are):
Light is filtered
through a net
the mind constructs—it makes
an addled soup.
As any artist knows light is inseparable from shadow. The corners fill with shadows, continents, and fog. The corners not only form the liminal edge of experience, but also play a subversive role in memory and everyday life:
What jumps out is what
stays—
we remember the jolts, the stops and starts,
not the polite words, the pause for tea.
Events tend to shatter the complacency of the everyday thereby exposing everydayness in its banality. Hence, the background overshadows the ordinary and gives the everyday a prominence that only serves to limit our consciousness of all that goes on around us whether we dream or wake. Whether we realize it, Pitts concludes, The weather of dreams . . . is always there.
Pitts nearly blasts us with light in the first couple of poems, but with the poem “Young Hawks” what remains in the dark is no longer relegated to the corners. Like the warning on our vehicles’ rear view mirrors, the darkness is closer than it appears. What we anticipate though cannot foresee, is the nearsightedness we all share: All of us trying not to think of / all the things, just ahead, / that lie in wait. Though we cannot foresee what is anticipated, there is nonetheless an anxiety to our waiting: things lie in wait for us; an anxious uncertainty pervades this collection. The anxiety permeating the edges of experience quickly makes its way into objects themselves. “In the Amish Orchard" raises the conventionally Western symbol of decay, a “worm” housed in an apple in a sunken brown valley. Anxiety and decay are parallel to the disjunction between youthful exuberance—You will be a baseball / for a short time in our field—and anxious adulthood, the whispers of the women / who skitter about. Neither the apples, nor the home baked pastry of the Amish women can keep out that hint of / horribly bulging pies.
“In the Field” continues the images of anxious anticipation, the awaited looming on the horizon. Even the warmth-giving sun swings over us like a / sickle shaving young wheat. Harvest, that bounteous time of thanksgiving and abundance cannot bear the weight of what lies in wait. The harvesters
Filling the baskets
and buckets to
go into the pantry for winter,
gearing up for the time
when it will all go bad.
Yet we go on. As in “
We do what we can with
what is given,
with what is drawn up from the twilight,
taken drop by tender drop.
The figure
of the body dominates the second section of the volume entitled "The Body
Electric." While one may hear the ghostly footsteps of Walt Whitman in the
title, it soon becomes clear that this is no attempt to out sing the master,
but is an ironic twist on the Transcendentalist presentation of the body. Instead of crossing the
I could not tell her
that when the kidneys fail,
so do the nerves,
the limbs grow numb,
the balance swerves,
the tendons die,
the motor slips,
the neurons soon have wings so clipped.
I could not tell her
how
I had limped along
and then started to drag.
In the midst of trauma, light retreats into corners--what little light we have made in our lives leaves us. They do not say, Pitts writes in "Rejection Episode," how the body is a prime assassin, / how it can turn in on itself to destroy / what didn't come standard. It usually wins.
Yet "Rejection Episode" also resets the volume on a similar track of the first few poems. Light returns, although this light is not centrifugal but centripetal: the bright energetic crowd tries / to save your life for a second time. Despite the fact of the body's unpredictable and inescapable fragility, it is nonetheless resilient. Furthermore, though we sometimes feel betrayed by the body's susceptibility to the thermodynamic laws of nature it is our body that is our anchor in the world, our natal pact with life itself. This is the basic fact of our experience that also links our seemingly separate and distinct life with others. In "Members Only" what appears at first to be another routine trip to the outpatient clinic where people are "electrified" not by our natural intercourse with things, but like Odysseus, patients are lashed to the beams of an ancient ship, / a squat white model / brought out when digital was new-- / beep bop boop the sounds shriek out, / the gauges rise and fall, a tormented sailing through the Scylla and Charibdis of artificial lifelines and corporate medicine. Yet for all the impersonal and surgical details of the body's failures, the second section ends in two significant ways. In "Fistula" the same blood that is characterized by its traumatic entry into the body, is also
this curling knot that yokes my life
together with the world.
The yoking--think of the Sanskrit yoga and the Latin religio, both signifying our bonds with this world and higher worlds--reestablishes, albeit tentatively, the poet's faith in the body.
The section's final poem, "Last Thoughts," is a mythic re-emergence from the belly of the whale. This re-emergence is marked by that small first burst of dawn / to race like lightening to the sea. The poem marks the return of light, an ancient symbol of a change in consciousness:
I stand in the dark
and ask myself
What was it meant to
be--what did it mean?
I get no answer in
reply.
I don't wonder why.
Nothing will slow
me, I think,
to race like lightening to the sea.
When we emerge from the initial shock of experience, poets, mystics, and philosophers all tell us that it is appropriate to ask the question of meaning: What was it meant to be--what did it mean? This questioning is the appropriate response to a call heard, however faintly, in the dark. The response to the call, posed as a question about meaning, signifies a new life, that small first burst of dawn. It is clear that something has happened, but what?
While several poems in section two turn us toward the question of linguistic limitation, it is in the volume's final section that the poet presents an awe-filled wonder and an awareness of the difficulties of language. In "Letter to Charles Wright" it is the accomplished poet who steers the vehicle of language toward meaning. Those of us who are less accomplished can only stand in awe of how poetic acumen forms words into polished gems. This laudatory sentiment is reiterated in "Letter to Charles Simic" when the ability to fashion and refashion language is likened to magic, but a real magic not the kind of superstitious magic that most of us are familiar with, walking under ladders, loving black cats. The poet's magic is one that opens the heart:
These bits of language
you send out
squawk like silver birds
that wing to the earth just long enough to
peck us in the heart and then are gone.
Despite what the poet may think of as his own insufficient range of language, this last quatrain is one of the book's finest uses of language, a use of language that, however fleetingly, penetrates and illuminates the lovely fragility of life lived in language. Pitts also conveys that ability poets all share of being able to construct lines that chip away at the barriers between the individual mind/body and connect us to the larger world of which we are part, and that also embodies the universal in the flesh of particularity.
Lest we think the author has finally clarified and resolved his relationship to language, "Approaching Babel" reintroduces the ambivalence toward language that is the tension poets live with. Not only is this tension within the poet's own practice of poetry, but is also an antagonism the poet experiences today when language is debased and trivialized by the propaganda industry: advertising, mainstream news, and public relations. The darkness around us is indeed deep.
. . . we are still trapped by our speech,
like cornered dogs know they are trapped.
Even in translation
the sounds we make are
only guttural songs of wicked chatter
and scurrying underfoot.
Lest we think that the poet has put the body's fragility,
its unavoidable rising and falling with the rest of the world it is part of,
behind him as the book winds down, we read "
I'm wondering if the
past is ever going to stay hidden,
or is it going to continue to cause problems
like the dust we sweep under the rug
just as the dinner guest ring the front bell.
As in Bobbie Ann Mason's short story,