After The Hard Living

In the spring of 2006, Wave Books, the Seattle-based independent poetry press, celebrated the publication of its first three titles with a reading at The New School in New York. The books were Shake by Joshua Beckman; Moongarden by Anthony McCann; and Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems by Noelle Kocot. The reading was held in a ballroom and attendance was well above 100 people. I was a first year MFA student (studying fiction, but never mind that now), still fairly new to the city and to the lit world. As far as I was concerned, this was Woodstock. I remember that Kocot read last, and that she didn’t say much by way of preface. She may have said nothing beyond “Hello, I’m going to read two poems.” I’m not sure now what the first poem was, but the second was “Poem for the End of Time.”

For about a half-hour, Kocot broke the seals of apocalypse, plunging us into a world of destruction and loss, salvation and grace, death and rebirth; a complex, wretched, ecstatic doom; a whirlwind of references, motifs, and formal approaches that one could spend an essay unpacking and analyzing. A passage in the spirit of Ginsberg might suddenly yield to an almost inscrutable meditation on the mystical properties of the number 4, while elsewhere a succession of phantasms—a “Viking Man,” or the gay martyr Matthew Shepard—marched through the streets of Brooklyn, where Kocot grew up, and to which, at the time of the poem’s composition, she had recently returned. She saw the word “Brooklyn” itself ablaze: “The B on fire the R on fire the double O on fire like breasts / Pulled apart by burning clamps …”

Though the poem ranges wide and wild, it returns recursively—indeed compulsively—to key phrases, such as “It was weird and cold and dark there,” “On apocalypse waves of scalene dreams,” and “my neighborhood.” Multiple crises unfold and worlds collapse as personal and social, private and public, existential and supernatural disasters jostle for priority in the poet’s mind and in her lines. At heart, they are all the same crisis:

America your poets are flocking to my neighborhood
They are sick of your insane demands my neighborhood
They take jobs at dry cleaners
They take jobs at Starbucks
They take jobs in editorial offices getting their asses pinched by
          washed-out Medeas
They take jobs cleaning the apartments of drug dealers
They take jobs that come with cellular phones
They accept vocations of Ultimate Holy Envy […]
They take jobs licking the blood from the grasses of cemeteries
Sowing their seed in the whore of the Bloomberg
The seven-eyed monster of the binary code.

If this was Woodstock, Kocot was Hendrix. I have been to countless readings since but can think of only a few as unexpected, memorable, and moving. I wandered out of that ballroom gobsmacked and inspired. I’ve been a fan ever since.

***

God’s Green Earth (Wave Books, 2020), Kocot’s new book, is her eighth full-length collection, and her sixth with Wave, which has also published Poet by Default (2011), a chapbook of her translations of the Symbolist poet Tristan Corbière; and Damon’s Room (2010), a pamphlet catalog of her late husband’s music library.

Normally, one resists drawing a reflexive equivalence between the author of a poem and what we’re taught to call “the speaker,” but Kocot has never made any pretense that her work is narrated by some fictive lyric “I.” In fact, over the years she has consistently discussed her work in autobiographical terms, which is why I’ve done the same. I mentioned Ginsberg above, which necessarily (I hope) suggests Blake, but one might also invoke Anne Bradstreet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, José García Villa, Frank Stanford, and (if you squint) Jack Spicer. These poets don’t share a common style or faith but rather a receptive orientation. Each is concerned with the spiritual or esoteric; each evinces some understanding of poetry as a transmission received from a place of radical alterity (an inner depth or an outer reach); and each develops a precise yet hermetic language with which to record and then relay the messages received.

We could also consider Kocot a confessional poet, heir to Lowell, Sexton, and Plath. Sometimes I suspect that her strongest precursor (not to say influence, necessarily) is John Berryman. She can sound a bit like him, as in the new collection’s “Parents and Children,” which begins “Cocktails & reindeer, the divine is / Really lost. We are more alive and more / Dead at the same time. No one likes / To talk about this.” Or in “Gift,” where she reminds us, not unhappily, that “When thought goes to sleep, poetry is the only // Currency you have.”

Kocot did her undergraduate work at Oberlin College in Ohio and her graduate work at the University of Florida. In the late 1990s she married the composer Damon Tomblin. The couple moved to Brooklyn, where the next few years were full of brutal ups and downs. In 2000, Kocot suffered a series of mental health crises, culminating in admission to Bellevue Hospital, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed psychiatric medication. (Plath, Lowell, and Berryman are believed to have suffered from some form of this condition.) As she later put it in her poem “Lithium”: “I have my finger on the pulse of something. / My mind is a sea that eats me, […] And Affliction cannot speak to non-affliction, / Counting its wounds on the abacus of time.”

In 2001, Kocot won an NEA fellowship and Four Way Books published her first collection, 4, which had won the publisher’s Levis Poetry Prize. The poet and prize judge Michael Ryan praised Kocot’s “relentless semantic invention, syntactical bravura, and occasional laugh-out-loud humor,” as well as the “emotional urgency that informs genuine rigor” in her work. You see a glimpse of that humor in her NEA fellow statement, in which she wrote, “Now I can take the little trips that inspire my writing without worrying about money, I can dye my hair, whatever.” Four Way Books brought out her second collection, The Raving Fortune, in 2004. That same year, Tomblin died of a drug overdose.

In 2000, poets Matthew Zapruder and Brian Henry founded Verse Press and quickly built an impressive list that included Dara Wier, Caroline Knox, Matthew Rohrer, and Arielle Greenberg. Verse was well-loved but operated as a nonprofit and by 2005 had run into dire financial straits. Zapruder and Henry brought in Charles Wright (a philanthropist who had also served as director of the Dia Art Foundation) as the funder and publisher of what was now Wave Books, with Joshua Beckman—already a Verse author—as the second founding editor.

I asked Zapruder how Kocot first came onto his radar. “We were both living in New York,” he told me, “and our first books came out around the same time. Her book 4 was completely singular, not at all ‘fashionable’ with what was going on in the poetry scene at the time. It was more lyric, visionary, and felt completely unmediated by any sense of what was popular or cool. So I really loved it. Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems was the first book Wave did. ‘Poem for the End of Time’ is an absolute work of genius. It has the quality of a poem that will be emblematic of a certain time, but also outside of it, like the few great works that last.”

When I heard Kocot perform “Poem for the End of Time” in New York, and for many years after, I understood it to have been written in part as a response to 9/11. I’ve talked to other people who believed the poem was primarily an elegy for Tomblin, because he is its dedicatee and also appears as a character in it. These two readings are hardly exclusive—the intersections of public and private tragedy are among the poem’s central and most urgent concerns—but it turns out that neither interpretation is correct. By Kocot’s own account, she wrote the poem in January of 2000, and it was first published in the Iowa Review in 2003. “A lot of people think I wrote that poem about my husband’s death, but I didn’t,” she told the Boston Review in 2013. “There was nothing particularly wrong with him at the time I wrote it. The poem was a vision of things to come, including his demise, though I couldn’t make sense out of what it meant when I wrote the poem.”

About the composition itself she is candid: “It was all just before I went into Bellevue and got diagnosed with manic depression when I was actually in a mania, and I had all kinds of strange visions when I was writing ‘Poem for the End of Time.’ I wrote it over a period of about eight hours, and was frantically writing and writing, all over Rockefeller Center, where I worked in finance. […] I wrote what was ‘dictated’ to me—I say dictated, because there seemed to be zero conscious thought in writing that poem.”

I think again of Zapruder’s remark that the poem embodies the moment of its creation but also exists outside of that moment. The closer you look, the more markers you see of fin de siecle culture: the animus toward Starbucks, the recency of the Shepard murder (1998), the phrase “cellular phone” instead of “cell phone” or just “phone.” The poem is so capacious in its vision that it seems not simply to have anticipated certain tragedies but to have endured and elegized them before they occurred.

To frame the future as the past is a mainstay of writing in the prophetic mode. Whether this rhetorical choice constitutes the given work’s aesthetic or anagogic register is something readers have to decide for themselves, based on their faith or on the poet in question. What strikes me about Kocot’s description of the poem’s composition is that she apparently wrote it in a single day and didn’t revise it, which means that whatever else the work is—elegy, prophecy, dreamscape, nightmare, prayer—it is also a documentary of its own creation, and for the reader a highly mimetic experience, not just of the visions Kocot had but also of the minute-to-minute and line-to-line experience of being the person who had them.

***

Of Kocot’s 2009 collection, Sunny Wednesday, Charles Wright wrote that her “stunning images often function by tour-de-force, simply blowing away the rational impulse to reject what seems non-sensical.” Wright went on to describe Kocot’s work as “sensory to the extreme, long on sound and images, short on philosophical detachment,” as well as “written from the point of view of one who has no intellectual distance from the pain of loss.”

Indeed, Sunny Wednesday is a book of mourning, as dark as its title is bright. (It was a “sunny Wednesday” when Tomblin overdosed.) Wright’s observation is borne out by poems such as “Entry” (“The luckless perambulator whistling down this street / The mollycoddled volcano X-ing out its mysteries”), “To You, the Only” (“A Xanadu of icicles dripping into our hearth of years”), and many others. Yet Kocot remains capable, even here, of embracing formalism, as in “The Poem of Force”—a sestina based on her reading of Simone Weil—or “Death Sonnet,” which delivers exactly what its title promises.

She still finds humor where she can. The title of “I Am the Arm” references what might be the most gnomic utterance in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, while another poem is titled—somewhat less gnomically—“After His Woman Is Killed, Conan the Barbarian Goes On to Become a King by His Own Hand, with Her Spirit Guiding Him.” The brief and tart “Against Brilliance” is worth quoting here:

The waters are very simple today.
 
Hospital blue, in error of twilight,
 
The sound of one hand clapping in a star-shaped womb.
 
Having never felt twice about the same flecked river,
 
You can either swim or hide your eyes away.
 
I piss in it and eat all the fish raw.

Poems like “Against Brilliance” are outliers in Sunny Wednesday, but their presence suggests a poet unwilling to be wholly controlled by circumstance or broken by tragedy. Moreover, they presage The Bigger World (2011), in which Kocot’s comic mode arguably finds its fullest expression. These 37 “character poems” are loose, lucid, wonderful, biting, and strange. (For some years I coedited a small arts journal that first published some of this work.) There are characters and dialogue here; some of the poems even have plots. They stick to five- and six-word lines, have no stanza breaks, rarely run longer than a page or two, and are almost always told in the third person—the voice of narrative itself. The household gods are no longer Blake and Ginsberg, or Lowell and Plath, but rather Tate and Ashbery.

“For all my / Talk about complete takeover, / I’m pretty humble,” thought George in “Welcome Mat,” which also features a giant umlaut and a three-eared painter. “Rick was a polyamorous shaman, / Who moonlighted as a detective,” begins “Homage.” In “Rainbow Lanes,” a woman named Saskia bowls “a perfect split” then goes to get a beer.

The remedial darkness fell.
Saskia was afraid to look outside.
So instead she looked into the void,
And there were rose petals.

In Kocot’s next collection, Soul in Space (2013), narrative is largely abandoned, but there’s a tendency toward concision that feels like an outgrowth of the time she spent in storyteller mode. Nonetheless, it is her longest collection. As she writes in “Dealing with the Incandescent,” “The sole survivor of yesterday’s wreck // Always has more to say.”  

The book’s title is a double allusion: Kocot was thinking of Randall Jarrell’s poem “Seele Im Raum” (a German phrase that translates to “soul in space,” or, as some have suggested, “soul in the room”), while Jarrell had been thinking of Rilke’s poem of the same name, as well as another poem in Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) that Jarrell translated as “The Unicorn.” Jarrell’s poem draws on both Rilke poems but takes the form of a dramatic monologue delivered by a housewife serving her family dinner. She has left a place at the table for an eland (a kind of African antelope) whose existence she would like to believe in but cannot confirm. Rilke’s idea, which Jarrell extends and which Kocot further develops, is that desire is a form of summoning; perhaps to yearn for what is absent is to draw it toward incarnation. Here’s Rilke in Jarrell’s translation: “because they loved it / One became an animal. […] They nourished it, not with grain / But only, always, with the possibility / It might be.”

Near the end of “Seele im Raum,” Jarrell’s narrator asks, “Shall I make sense or shall I tell the truth? / Choose either—I cannot do both.” In an essay on Jarrell, the critic Stephanie Burt argues that the eland is “summoned into being: it represents not the woman’s soul but her soul mate, not the inner self but the companion whose presence makes innerness knowable.” Or, as Kocot puts it in her poem “Anniversary,” “To create something out of nothing, / Pretty sweet, ain’t it? It keeps you / Coming back, coming back.”

***

According to the jacket copy, Phantom Pains of Madness (2016) explores “a break with reality that occurred a decade and a half ago.” This seems to be the same “break” Kocot described to the Boston Review, which means the period in question must either abut or include the composition of “Poem for the End of Time,” and culminate in the hospitalization at Bellevue.

In an interview with Zyzzyva, Kocot clarified that while the subject of the poems in Phantom Pains was the event in 2000, the conditions of their composition—between December 2014 and February 2015—were also a time of great upheaval and disturbance, albeit for a different reason: she was trying to quit smoking. Nicotine deprivation and withdrawal symptoms pushed her toward a months-long psychic meltdown; nothing on par with what happened in 2000, but apparently close enough to draw the comparison, and to suggest using the latter as an occasion to revisit the former.

The poems in Phantom Pains of Madness have no stanza breaks, no punctuation, and only one word per line. Formally, they suggest Robert Lax (whom Kocot mentions in passing in the Zyzzyva interview, and whose work Wave has published) but Kocot’s feverish vertical cascades have little to do with his quiet procedural minimalism. Here’s a Kocot poem titled “Addict”:

Delirium
Sunlight
Teeth
Hurt
From
Chewing
Stop
Give
Back
Stop
Just
Give
There
That’s
The
Way
You
Do
That
The
God-
Hunger
In
Its
Right
Place
Lord
Make
It
Not
For
Me
This
Time

A lot might be said about these poems, but what stands out to me at the moment is that they look like cigarettes. Eventually, Kocot told Zyzzyva, “I started smoking again, because the madness was getting progressively worse the longer I quit.”

Phantom Pains of Madness is a bleak book. Also a terminal one. These poems are stripped bare, raw and exposed in a way that not even the most bereft passages of “Poem for the End of Time” quite reach. Paradoxically, it is a book that presents itself as without artifice even as it is derived from a formal conceit. The autobiographical episode that inspired it is never directly addressed (at least as far as I can see) and so it exists in the form of its own lacuna, which I imagine as the white space through which these narrow poems are forever diving. Or maybe they aren’t diving so much as burning themselves down with each reading. As with a cigarette, you draw the fire toward yourself and the white smoke rises all around.

***

God’s Green Earth finds Kocot in relatively high spirits. It’s a happy title, like Sunny Wednesday, but without the horror of a lover’s death to ironize and undermine it. Lines and stanzas are back. Images of growth—flowers, trees, seeds—and the color green are everywhere. “I have slid from miracles // All my life” she writes in “Autobiography.” In “A Kind of Refuge,” there are “Ruined days, // The forms all passing into nothing,” but even this bleak proposition is followed swiftly by “Lavender flowers and their furious alertness.” Elsewhere we find odes to John Cage, the actor Shia LaBeouf, and Kocot’s many cats. This is from “I See Your Face Before Me”:

                                              All
Can be dazzling again. The world doesn’t
Grow dark with reasons which
Are separate from what we find. What
I think is most amusing is probably
Of the light.

I am tempted to advance a tidy argument about the arc from the devastation of Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems to the Edenic reveries of God’s Green Earth. I am resisting said temptation not because I suspect such tidiness is specious (though I do) but because even if the arc-argument can be made, it would say less about the evolution of this poet’s work than about my relationship to it. Obviously, my memory of that 2006 reading at the New School has been buffed and polished and treasured into a kind of creation myth, never mind the fact that it really happened.

“I’m sending a message // To the past: no one’s home,” Kocot writes in “Wood,” while in “Retreat” she takes note of “The loud sound / Of the clock ticking, the / Forest beyond the seeds.” Once you start looking for them, you’ll find almost as many clocks and radios in this book as you will flowers and trees. In “The Body,” “the sick body (boring)” is contrasted with “the well body,” which “clucks like a timepiece.” In “A Kind of Refuge” “You are the minute that registers / On a screen like the one lit up before me,” and in “The Exorcism,” “Numbers freed from / Their clock tick around irreversibly.” Kocot finds “A dollar in the sand dunes, on Debussy’s / Birthday, no less” in “Radio Stations,” while “Fourth Day Awake,” perhaps my favorite poem in the collection, ends

The harsh elements I have resided in
For almost half a century are somehow a pleasure.
In the middle of the world now, in the recesses
Of love dying out, I will make some music. I
Am beginning to like what I hear on your air,
The silence we tangled in each other’s kingdom.

None of this, by the way, is meant to suggest that everything is peaches and cream in Kocot’s world, or even that the book is primarily optimistic. (I’m not sure what “optimism” would mean in this context, anyway.) “Being in the presence of pure love, then / Coming back, is disappointing,” Kocot writes in “Transitions,” while in “Breakfast in Bed,” she approaches an old theme with fresh perspective:

                                                               We
Know how the universe will end. There will be
Some blinding lights shooting through the Tree
Of Life, and I will have breakfast in bed.

But every apocalypse, however putatively total, generates its obverse or its sequel. Even the end of time is the beginning of something. A radical otherness of being that lies, like eternity, beyond the limit of the conceivable, outside the orders of experience and knowledge that frame our understanding of reality. It’s true: we know not what’s coming nor the hour which it comes. In the meantime, we still have this world to contend with, the “green earth” of the book’s title, which is God’s, sure, but also ours: a world of much suffering and loss, but also of music, radio, cats, trees, and each other. As Kocot writes in “Compassion IV,” “Rain came, but / Also sunlight, and the years of hard living / Dissolved.”