Aaron Winslow on Marie Buck's Confronting of the Horrific With Beautiful Poems

At Jacket2, the brilliant Aaron Winslow reviews the work of the brilliant Marie Buck--specifically, her new book, Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya, 2015). The sense, here, is less doomed:

But Buck’s poetry doesn’t promote a politics of revelation, a political strategy held, perversely, in common by both conceptualism and the political lyric poetry of the radical left. There’s a world-building function to Buck’s poetry that gives it a serious affinity with the project of science fiction as Samuel Delany understands it, which is to create fictional worlds that refract and clarify our own through a fantastic defamiliarization. For Delany, all writing is inherently about the present, whether it wants to be or not, the minimal difference being that some works recognize this capacity of language and thus use it to maximum effect. Portrait of Doom is one of those works.

"The Liberty of Horrors," as Winslow has called the review, comes from a poem of Buck's, “Feathery Shapes in the Rock Pile”:

On my face sits a stain: representative CEO child. All move me along to the liberty of horrors. I had to work very much and very hard. The sweat was running down my skin, my hand was shaken by the extremely decaying body. (54)

Before his beautiful alignment of the book's functionality with the horror movie As Above, So Below (2014), Winslow continues this close read:

The speaker’s freedom here takes the form of onanistic liberation, a carnality that does not even appear pleasurable, merely desperate. The speaker of this poem actually does get out of that cage later in the book, in the poem “Dark Dungeons,” but it’s a short-lived victory at best:

It worked! I’m free, I’m like everyone else now! Then, come, join us, join the rebellion! Before I decide what to do with my life, I must first learn to be alive. (87)

Sure, this is obviously a send-up of wishy-washy, self-centered, New-Age liberalism, but it’s also the author castigating herself. After all, what can be more complicit and consistent with the age of “care for the self” than writing poetry? The behaviors learned while imprisoned are not so easily unlearned, and the book’s narrative arc, its bildüng, hinges precisely on this attempt to escape from the prison of the body and its narrow pleasures, and an attempt to expand and explode them in utopic, even revolutionary, fashion.

Indeed, despite the grotesquerie and horror of much of the book, Buck doesn’t leave things in a state of nihilistic despair. Even when these poems are at their most sinister, there is still something strangely utopic embedded within them. The book ends on just such a tenor when, in “I’ve Got a Few Tricks Left,” Buck writes:

I ate through your flesh and wore your dried skin like a hood until your poison hit my guts just as I emerged better than bug broth, better than my odd tastes opening my mouth to the clouds. (113–114)

Bodily mutilation, mutation, affect and intimacy, magical realist imagery, a strange syncopated rhythm to the syntax — whatever you want, this poem has it. The myriad images, which are illogically connected to begin with, ultimately unfold, deconstruct, and transform as they progress deeper and deeper down into the mire of the fantastic. It’s at this lower level, in the truly terrible and profane — that moment when “your poison / hit my guts” — that Buck gestures toward some form of radical uplift, which is the very taste of the poison inside one’s own body “opening my mouth / to the clouds.” The deepest, gnarliest level of the self ends up “opening” skyward, a gesture indicative of the aesthetic and political strategy of the entire book.

Read it all at Jacket2.