The Post National Poetry Month Bold Projects Post: Cristina Garcia's THE LESSER TRAGEDY OF DEATH

THE HISTORY OF POETIC biography is a spotty one--especially when it comes to one's own family.  What is, after all, the distinction between biography and excavation?

Sharon Olds has written movingly and revealingly about her own life, and in particular, her parents.  Sylvia Plath, sure. We know her stance on one of her parents.  David Ray's heartstraining homage to his son Sam, who died at a far too early age, (Sam's Book) is an unforgettable tribute to a child.  

But, poetry books about siblings are harder to recall, save Wordsworth.  Perhaps because poems about brothers and sisters are not as immediately dramatic as those about parents and offspring we tend not to think of them as wearing the same fabric but yet, most of us are siblings--in fact, maybe there are more siblings than parents.

Cristina Garcia's The Lesser Tragedy of Death does important work in this regard because it stands as a model of what an honest, aesthetically figured book about a sibling might look like. 

Known for her culturally and politically rich novels like Dreaming In Cuban, Garcia has never been coy about family (at least not in her fiction).  Her first book of poems, though, takes familial confrontation to a whole new level.  The entire project is devoted (and I mean devoted in all of its many meanings) to her brother's main devotion--addiction.  Searing, angry, compassionate, probing, and, ultimately forgiving, The Lesser Tragedy of Death is a bold book about a frightening topic--the loss of a brother (which also means the loss of a part of the self) to crime, addiction, and despair.

Divided into three sections, the book traces, chronologically, Garcia's brother's map of personal dysfunction.  Beginning with his childhood and moving through adolescence, adulthood, and into the present day, Garcia alternates moves, deftly, from investigation to indictment to inquiry.  In "Mugging," for example, we see all of these and more:

It was a cold night in New Hampshire and you
were looking for an easy mark.

An old woman, head to toe in black, a widow
maybe, hobbled down the street.

What did you imagine was in her huge, black
purse with the tarnished clasp?

A just-cashed Social Security check? Her month's
allotment of twenties?

You didn't expect her to put up a fight and when
she did, you dragged her ten feet.

The poem ends with an observation, free of commentary, that gives the reader a glimpse into the complicated dynamic of the brother and the family: 

You called our father from the county jail to bail
you out, but he didn't.

None of us did.

One of the many fascinating aspects of Garcia's book is the degree to which the poet seems to shoulder some sort of responsibility for her brother's life.  Or, if responsibility is too strong a word, suffice it to say that the poet often feels implicated.  In the riveting poem "Twelve Years Ago," Garcia recounts a time when she was newly divorced with a young daughter and her brother came to stay with them.  The stay causes her daughter deep anxiety (she "defecated on the kitchen floor. Wouldn't sleep alone. / Had nightmares when she did") so Garcia makes the brother leave.  The poem closes with a couplet that seems to speak not just about the immediate removal but older, more profound forms of abandonment:

Perhaps you never forgave me.
Perhaps you never could.

The companion poem, "Fried Rice," begins in and ends with harrowing statements that are connected by the most real and most perplexing of questions. The poem begins, "You tried to hack off your arm with a butcher's knife" and closes with "Your history is mine too."  In between those lines lie two great questions many of us with siblings have no doubt posed:

Why can't I remember more
about you? The tens of thousands
of hours you've been my brother?

I love that realization--that the history of violence the brother has enacted upon himself is also Garcia's history.  And I love that the answer (or at least the potential answer) to so many questions is, like the brother, unreachable, unrecoverable.

Based on what I've quoted, the book might come off as ultra-violent (it's not) or self-indulgent (it certainly is not).  In fact, it's far from it.  Rather, The Lesser Tragedy of Death is a groping.  It is a mining expedition.  It's a kind of personal excavation, a search for the mineral of understanding, the gold dust of revelation.  

And, what makes it artful and memorable is the marriage of style and story.  Her history as a fiction writer comes in handy here.  The book feels like a novel.  And yet, it moves like poetry. Garcia's language is precise, her insights marvelous.  Her line breaks startle, and the way she uses stanzas and form actually helps propel the story.

This is a bold project not just because Garcia has the courage to take on her sibling--her own arm she has no doubt tried to hack off--but also because she chooses to do so in poetry.

I found this collection wholly engrossing, often shocking, and, though wrenching, ultimately gratifying

Bold Poetry Projects: Simone Muench's ORANGE CRUSH

I WAS DISAPPOINTED, OF course, when Simone Muench's new book of poems, Orange Crush, turned out not to be about one of my favorite neo-Fanta beverages.  But, I was relieved when I realized it was an homage to one of my favorite R.E.M. songs (I've got my spine . . .).

Wrong again.

Muench's Orange Crush isn't about music or carbonation (when is poetry really about either of these things?  It's about resilience.   It's about how creepy men can be, how strong women can be, and how eradicative history can be.

What makes Orange Crush a bold project is its commitment to ideology.  Or, put another way, its devotion to a rhetorical stance, a positionality that is often missing in contemporary American poetry.  

In 2008, Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Nobel prize jury, bitch slapped (I know, right, the worst phrase!) American writing for its insularity. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

Muench bitch slaps that ignorance with two hands and a hammer, and the result is admirable.  The book's title takes it name from the notorious "orange girls" of the 1600s.   Since most women were not allowed in he theater, girls who wanted to be near the drama of drama, sold oranges (and, in some cases, more) to the kinds of men who buy such things.  Muench's poetic project is to reclaim the lost girls, remember the forgotten lives, exhume the buried voices.  An epigraph by Kathy Acker prefacing the final section of Orange Crush gets at this desire to resuscitate: "All of us girls have been dead for so long. But we're not going to be anymore."

And so, Muench makes girls live.

To this end, she divides the book into four sections--"Record," "Rehearsal," "Recast" and "Redress"--which are grouped either thematically or formally.  For example, "Recast" features a series of prose poems grouped under the heading "Orange Girl Cast" that star the poet's friends.  This 13-poem suite intentionally evokes a cast of beloved characters from stage or screen.  Each poem bears a short title with the name of the actress in the starring role in parenthesis (first name, last initial).  I almost wrote that the poems are "sassy," but that belittles the poems' energy and poignancy.  They are less overtly surrealistic and image-heavy than the lyrics in her previous book, Lampblack and Ash, but still fully Muenchy:  

from 1: the fever: (starring kristy b): Sweet Kristy of the culvert, the ankle turn, the verb imperfect, and sailors' notebooks.

from 12: the bestiary (starring jackie w): O lady of the bossa nova. O girl born of semaphors. Into the moss and phosphorus. Into the salt marsh of subjunctive silence.

In both of these poems, syntax and grammar become part of the of identities of the women.  This is also the case for jessie m, "One mason jar, one wineglass, and a verb" (the ferment) and kimberly l "A girl leans across a counter, edges of her hair flaring neon. She is a verb written on a cardboard mannequin" (outline in neon).  And it is mackenzie c, moving "between syllable & windshield," who "can't see her way out of syntax."  Nietzsche claimed that we are prisoners of a grammar we did not create.  

And so it is.  

But, the language that has been used (and not used) to erase women from any meaningful record, is, after all the language that poetry can refute, rebut, and rename.

The most successful section of the book, "Rehearsal" includes the Orange Girl Suite, in which each poem bears a title from an orange-based entry in the OED.  Here, Muench marries history and herstory (did I really just type that? And, am I seriously leaving it in?) in provocative ways.  Turning on the latent violence directed at so many girls, the poems try to create and recreate female identity and to reclaim beauty ripped from them.

Punctuating the poems about girls and orange girls are more personal poems, including some about her own illness, like the fantastic, "Count Backward Toward a Future with You in It:

     Nothing prepares us for dying,
not even dying. Nothing separates us

from the sun's luminous text,
the way words enter skin in fire spirals

lilting the room into a red vivarium.
Splinter sung our puckered lips.

That's great stuff.  Bold language for a bold book.  

At its best Orange Crush marries the personal with the political, and it's never dysfunctional.  At its worst, it can come off as, perhaps, too rhetorical.  But, even that is a sin of excess, a transgression of looking outward.  If the Swedes think we are too often and too fully gazing inward, we all might do well to commit Muench's kind of sin a little more often.