The Mind, like the Night, Has a Thousand Eyes

A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems, by Lawrence Joseph.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00.

If ours is an age of anger, then Lawrence Joseph is our unacknowledged poet laureate. This might come as news to many readers and yet his relative inconspicuousness is more than suited to the role, given that chroniclers of downfalls typically go unheeded in their own time. “So where were we?” Joseph asks in the title poem of his previous collection, an apocalyptic state of the union of sorts:

                                 The fiery
avalanche headed right at us—falling,

flailing bodies in midair—
the neighborhood under thick gray powder—

on every screen.

While these lines describe the 9/11 attacks—Joseph lives a few blocks away from Ground Zero and was forced to evacuate—this portrait of a US citizen freeze-framed in the horror of the hyperreal could just as easily serve as a eulogy for the imperium as a whole, or at least the idea of itself it still clings to. Even the book’s cover, the New York skyline absent the twin towers against a technicolor sunset, conjures inexorable decline. “I don’t know what//I’m going to do, I heard a man say”; the poem continues, “the man who had spoken was myself.//What year? Which Southwest Asian war?” The sense of historical confusion—which war are we waging again?—is palpable. After all, as an early boomer, Joseph has spent his entire existence in the shadow of Eisenhower’s nightmare and its endless wars.

A son of Detroit, Joseph’s A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems, collecting work drawn from Shouting at No One (1983), Curriculum Vitae (1988), Before Our Eyes (1993), Into It (2005), and So Where Are We? (2017), takes us on a tour of episodes from the author’s own life and recent history, from the Detroit race riots of 1967, to the moment when Joseph’s father was shot during a robbery in 1970, to the unwinnable war in Vietnam and two decades of conflict in the Middle East—all the way to the Great Recession and austerity. Joseph’s first book, Shouting at No One, was haunted, as most debuts should be, by his background, in his case Catholic and Arab American, and its poems are fueled by an appealing blend of Parnassian doom and confessional clarity, as evidenced by lines like these from “There Is a God Who Hates Us So Much”:

There is a God who hates us so much:
we are given ears to hear ribs kicked in,
we are given eyes to see eyes close
before a city that burns itself to death.

Father shouts until his throat cracks,
the river stops in its sludge,
I pray to know what to pray for:
there is a God who hates us so much.

Descended from Lebanese Syrian Catholics who emigrated to the US before WWI and settled in Detroit, Joseph was born in that city in 1948, at the beginning of its infamous economic decline and white flight, and Joseph’s work is indelibly marked by the agonizing tailspin of one of the world’s great industrial cities over these last seventy years. Joseph’s city is a place where even the fog says, “Who will save/Detroit now?” and while Joseph relocated to New York in the early eighties, where he has lived ever since, every book he has published to date has usually contained some meditation or other on the city of his birth, which he has called a “shadow” that’s “strapped” to his back:

I remain many different people
whose families populate half Detroit;
I hate the racket of the machines,
the oven’s heat, curse
bossmen behind their backs.
I hear the inmates’ collective murmur
in the jail on Beaubien Street.
—From Curriculum Vitae

                                            The decay apparently
has frightened the smart money away. Metaphorically
underwater—more is owed on properties in Detroit than
they’re worth.
—From Here in a State of  Tectonic Tension

              My baptism by fire
in the ancient manner,
at my father’s side in a burning city,
nothing sacramental about it.
—From Sentimental Education

“By the Way” conjoins his family’s and city’s histories by recalling his father’s near death in January 1970, when Joseph Joseph, owner of Joseph’s Food Market, was shot by someone robbing the business.

                The bullet missed
the heart and the spinal cord,
miraculously, the doctor said.
Everything eventually would be all right.
The event went uncelebrated among hundreds
of felonies in the city that day.

However, Joseph’s anger doesn’t stop itself there. Taking a Dantean turn, he reminds us, before bowing out: “In the lowest circle in hell the Republic/has been betrayed, by the way,” pointing a finger to the rudderless mismanagement that plunged the city into racial strife and unplanned deindustrialization. It is unsurprisingly pleasing in these politically disappointing times to read a poet who always knows exactly whom to blame: “Flint is what it is./Knowingly to force the poor to purchase and use toxic water/isn’t a form of chemical warfare, isn’t a form of genocide?” (“Is What It Is”).

Make no mistake: Joseph is one of the angriest poets you will ever read, and not only does he have reason to be, I also fancy his odds in persuading his readers to side with him. If there is a stand-out early poem of his, it is likely “Sand Nigger”:

“Sand nigger,” I’m called,
and the name fits: I am
the light-skinned nigger
with black eyes and the look
difficult to figure—a look
of indifference, a look to kill—
a Levantine nigger
in the city on the strait
between the great lakes Erie and St. Clair
which has a reputation
for violence, an enthusiastically
bad-tempered sand nigger.

While sublimating his wrath into exquisite lyricism, Joseph nevertheless routinely finds himself forced to confront the scholar-observer’s inanity in the face of  limitless malice:

And what do you think you’re doing when you want the names
and the years of the history, who begot whom and who made
which flesh which words that hate for which particular reasons
that compel the pride of the horrors of the oppressed?

That’s how the brain talks, evil in its wakefulness.
—From Rubaiyat

We are presently witnessing the very idea of  labor being altered by automation on our handheld screens, and Joseph’s poetry is a necessary education. After all, he is a lawyer specializing in labor and one is likely to recognize his reality: one ruled by “absolute principles of profit growth,/of value accumulation” (“In Parentheses”), where the real question posed by the Third Industrial Revolution,

                                 is who owns and controls 
      the data. That’s what we’re looking at, labor cheap, 
 replaceable, self-replicating, marginal, contracted out 
      into smaller and smaller units ... 
..........................................................................
      sooner than later, one way or another, they will simply
die off.
—From Visions of Labor

The core of Joseph’s wrath these days seems to be his belief that everything truly human about our world appears to be “progressing/toward the economic value of zero” and that should frighten us all.

___

A Treatise on Stars and  Empathy by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
New Directions, $17.95 and $16.95.

“I was living alone in northern New Mexico,” Mei-mei Berssenbrugge reminisces in this new edition of Empathy, first published in 1989, “I started to feel my way toward an intuited subliminal wholeness of composition. I wrote from note to note, without thinking of form. I allowed emotion to glue sentence to sentence. I was exploring abstraction as lyric.” Thanks to this reissue, readers can now revisit a key turning point in the creative life of one of the most difficult—and rewarding—poets of  her generation, whose work is as ferociously intellectual as Joseph’s, her contemporary, albeit utterly different in terms of  both style and intentions.

“There is your ‘dream’ and its ‘approximation,’” Berssenbrugge begins in “The Blue Taj,” the first poem in Empathy, moving on to describe time spent in the house of a client, whose blue walls crack on cold nights, painting a traditionally confessional scene:

Your client vetoes a roof garden, often
because of money, or he likes to kiss you at dawn
and you want to sleep late. Sometimes a person 
holds out for the flawless beveled edge, but might
end up with something half-built, its inlay
scavenged long ago.

While exquisitely wrought, “The Blue Taj” is a fairly misleading start given that it is a perfect indication of what the rest of Empathy will not look or sound like. Indeed, Empathy, Berssenbrugge’s sixth collection, represented a radical departure as she definitively abandoned the brief lyrics of her youth; trim, shapely stanzas were swapped for looser structures and long lines that carried across the page. Following “The Blue Taj,” the lyric ego fades to reveal sprawling narratives that, while appearing rambling at first, actually constitute a vibrant investigation into our faculties of perception, often reaching the conclusion that the source of our knowledge is neither all a posteriori nor a priori, but rather somewhat in between.

It’s not that Berssenbrugge foregoes plots entirely, but that she simply bypasses all linear notions of it, instead opting to make her own intuition the chief engine of her narratives. Indeed, while “The Carmelites” is about visiting a nunnery and “Forms of Politeness” is a dialogue with a woman who hanged herself in an orchard close to her parents’ house, both poems approach their “event” or “moment” with the aim of analyzing our sensory reception of those experiences and how an experience may shape the spectator as it occurs. Take these lines from “The Carmelites”:

Apple trees bloom haphazard in the field around the nunnery.
The atmosphere in daylight poses questions about passing light more difficult than those
the ordinary person in nature, for whom the horizon and amount of light define the limits of  intensity,
has long since dissolved into a sense of spaciousness for things to take place.

 

Or these, from “The Swan”:

She pays attention to absurd and trivial details where her desire dissolved, among
all sorts of things that happened, both in the present and in general, so her focus on absurdity appears
to be a spontaneous part of the desire itself, where coincidence and nonsense merge in a lover,
until the sky would look on you as a composite of video monitors on surfaces slowly disintegrating
into ice swans which resemble, for example, an opera house.

Aleatory on surface, these near-oneiric, essayistic poems achieve a simultaneity of inquiry and expression that will richly reward the reader, albeit not without some effort. They recall the philosophical, wide-angle landscape photographs of Richard Misrach, another contemporary, and their obsessions with how light plays upon objects and their unsparing detail. Much of their success, I think, relies less on the author’s praxis as it does on her sensibility and skill with language. What we see in Berssenbrugge is an ambition not only to show how much of our knowledge derives from the senses, but an effort to craft her own poetics of empiricism: “Like the camera, memory is a device and feeling is a device, or a souvenir” (“The Carmelites”); “The image of reality and mirage are mixed, so you see through” (“Naturalism, 4”); “An idea is a wish/As a descriptive stream or spontaneous reaction to him,/speech serves as a starting point for uncovering a story through translation from wish into desire” (“Empathy”).

While at times difficult to follow, the texture of her admittedly cerebral, epistemological language is nonetheless intriguingly sensual—Berssenbrugge is never far from a romantic aside—which counterbalances the surgical investigations of consciousness that act as the engine of all her poems in Empathy and all of her subsequent collections. A Treatise on Stars, Berssenbrugge’s latest volume, finds the promise of Empathy utterly fulfilled, albeit Berssenbrugge now appears far less concerned with tearing apart the transparency of language than in her previous work. While revisiting familiar territory—including Abiquiú, where she has lived on and off for close to four decades—as implied by the title, this book finds Berssenbrugge lovingly absorbed in the field of astronomy in all its possible aspects—abstractly, linguistically, but especially in terms of the possibilities that it offers. A Treatise on Stars is infused with a delightful hopefulness that one may wish to draw on during these increasingly difficult times. In fact, reading Berssenbrugge’s work occasionally feels like watching a softly narrated science documentary: “A body or galaxy requires continuous energy to maintain, like a whirlpool in a fast stream” (“Scalar”) or “Milky Way is an invisible potential, and I can imagine a wave function for the universe” (“The Loom”). That said, the rhapsodic lyricism that characterizes even Berssenbrugge’s most straightforward work is never too far away: “Subtle, entangled, the gestalt I speak of is between myself and an angel” (“Darkness”).