Vexations

“There were living and nonliving ways of being,” observes the speaker in Annelyse Gelman’s book-length dystopic poem, Vexations. The poem traces the journey of a mother and daughter in a world where “The word impending no longer prefaced collapse” and “it was cheaper / To buy a new watch than to fix it— just as, for the cancer / It was cheaper to throw you away than to treat it.” Gelman’s speaker reports in sestets ripe with return and interjections that become refrains, from the textual—“Creamy, someone wrote,” to voiceovers prefaced by “Over the PA” that move from mall announcements to cliches, to the entreaty “Please, no, not my son.” 

The collective “People” haunt throughout, dying in battles and by suicide; engaging in tender everyday acts, “People marked their children’s heights on doorframes”; and acting upon nature:  “People went over waterfalls in wooden barrels. / People built a world straight through the base / Of the oldest living tree in the world.” Midway through the book, “people” become objects rather than subjects, as the poem builds to a crescendo of gun violence in a bowling alley, department stores, offices. Still, Gelman keeps turning, keeps juxtaposing:

People practiced saying vowels while a therapist touched their
   mouth
People put their hands around each other’s throats and had
   orgasms
People marked the box that said they would give away their
   organs

Gelman notes the poem is a “text score designed to accompany Satie’s music.” Composer Erik Satie’s 1893 Vexations,itself a mere half-page long, bears the note: “To play this motif eight hundred forty times in a row, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, through serious immobilities.” Rather than repeating text in full, Gelman’s Vexations moves in organized disjunction through a winding narrative that insists and compels.

The speaker admits,

It was difficult to speak honestly
Because it was difficult to think honestly
As for the islands of trash in the middle of the oceans
Sometimes I thought about them, then I thought about the
   next thing
Because it was difficult to speak honestly
It was difficult to think, honestly