Chopped Potatoes
Quick
Anne Simpson
McLelland & Stewart, 2007
120 pages, $17.99
Risk is what interests Anne Simpson these days,” or so states the How Poems Work section on CBC’s site Words at Large, in its synopsis of Quick’s opening poem “Clocks of Rain.” The poem depicts a car accident from the point of view of an observer intent on gathering all the aesthetic data she can from agony, like a morbid Midas. The rhythmic punches of ‘stops’ assonantly counterpointed with the also-repeated ‘clocks’ shape a stanzaic veering on the page that works, but the three chunks of text, the last almost an entire regurgitation of the opening stanza, are replete with lax renditions of pain.
Almost everything that’s wrong with Quick is clumped into “Clocks of Rain.” Let’s start with cliché. As she does later in Quick, Simpson uses techniques of superimposed form to convey what language, if wrangled with intently, should accomplish on its own. In “Clocks,” it’s the jarring splat of words shifted out of stanzaic cosiness; it succeeds, like I said, but shouldn’t an equal BLAM be felt in Simpson’s choice of diction? Instead, we read how the victim merely “fall[s] headfirst” and is “pulled from a wrecked car” beneath a “glaze of rain.” Simpson is adept at linking verbal phrases that convey little to a mind questing for an experience of language as a channel for emotive connection. Here, we are stranded, watching the observer watching. Along with such clichés and flattened verbs, the piece fails to enter that ambulatory “throat of darkness.” A fairly harsh moment – “he’s moaning, blood in his hair” – is instantly palliated by a change of gears into the contradictory safety of the car “silkily” veering and the end of things coming “gracefully” with only a “little sound.” No brutal words slamming into our psyches to tunnel us into the tragic. We remain unscathed, hovering above the preciousness of a “bird heart” timorously beating.
Simpson, as in Loop’s “Mobius Strip,” likes to use typographical lines and boxes to mark pivots between personas, to introduce breath meridians or to concretize content. On occasion, it is a potent device, evoking a Bergmanian landscape, as with the placement of the single word “Daughter” on the page beneath a solid black line. Without the divider, the word would swing too loosely in its lacuna; the line tightens the space and intensifies the reader’s sense of submerged familial claustrophobia. However, in pieces like “The Visible Human” or “Skin, Bones,” the concretizing device, in this case boxes of varied sizes, is too obvious an attempt to strengthen the poem’s matter without undertaking the real work of language a poem first requires. For instance, the long, stacked strips in “The Visible Human” serve to render what is already evident – the slicing of a man into pieces for scientific ends – while the poet refuses to mirror the horror and beauty of this act in the poem itself, instead choosing to recount simply the details of an already familiar news blip: “You were executed, frozen, sawn in four, covered in blue gel.” Again, it’s all too easy.
Simpson appears overly concerned that her readers understand her. Apparently, lucidity and a simple vocabulary aren’t sufficient as, upon these potentially effective traits, a redundancy is dumped. In the unique, and occasionally compelling sequence “Bee and Woman: An Anatomy,” Simpson can’t trust her reader with the word “ocelli,” but has to explain what it is – “jet beads” – thus spoiling what would have been the echoey flow of “Even with two compound eyes and three ocelli . . . I can’t see red.” Lovely. If one feels the feverish need to know what ocelli are, one can look it up!
Simpson evidently anticipates an audience that needs common allusions and even straightforward diction explained to them. In “Written in Ice,” a melodramatic history tale, the narrator states bluntly: “Lot’s wife turned to salt; I’ve turned to ice.” Why not: “unlike Lot’s wife, I’ve turned to ice.” Is it the poet’s place to write primers for Dummies? It’s even worse when Simpson unpacks a word, as in: “Stars send charming, indecipherable messages. No one can figure them out.” Is this not what indecipherable means? There is plainly a lack of faith here in both language and reader. And it doesn’t stop there.
Not a poem flits by without at least one cliché: flung wide, ears pricked, snatches of an aria, heard faintly, studies his hands, running with juice, a gleam in the eye, veil of rain, shock of feathers, heavily lidded, draw her close, her eyes fill with tears, rustles underfoot, give or take, a branch scrapes, wind rattles. I could continue this list for some time like a roster of missed opportunities. Then there’s the mowed-down verbs: passes, move, put, go, stay, come and the overuse of the unevocative noun, “thing.” Along with the previously mentioned redundancies, there are also odd assortments of cobbled together metaphors that are impossible to visualize like, “You hold my face as if it were a cup of rain that you’re trying to carry without spilling.” Ouch, get me a chiropractor! Or how about “every tree in the ravine is a bell clanging.” Dontcha just hate it when the trees wake you up in the morning?
Finally, what irks me most in Simpson’s Quick is what also grates in the work of poets like Robert Bly and Patrick Lane: the excessive use of vague, Everyman abstractions – rarely is anyone named, identified, rendered tangible. No, there is only “the boy,” “he/she,” “the man,” “the girl,” and, of course, “the woman.” Used sparingly, such universal gender markers render the characters luminously anonymous, inhuman, more balanced figures in relation to the bee, the ice, the fawn. But there is hardly a poem in the book in which a human is rendered three-dimensional.
Let’s take a close look at another poem from Quick:
What I learned about Rain:
Air turned to thrum. To slant. It’s wet under the droop of clover but the world is bound. Up joined with down. Nexus rerum. Streaming loom of rain between tree trunks. The Greeks tied strips of cloth to their arms: mourning, prayer, celebration. To free something? Tether it? How easily rain forgets us as it softens, pulls back into cloud. How it forgets. A hundred scents ribbon my body, drawing me this way and that.
I like “loom of rain.” I appreciate the moment of Latin. Yet, apart from these redemptions, the piece ditches me in the ice bath of its laxness: terse, but not as efficiently, pugnaciously terse as Karen Solie can be, elegiac but not as bloomingly and movingly elegiac as Lorna Crozier at her best. The poem, with its bald, fragmentary pronouncements – “Air turned to thrum” or “Up joined with down” – lacks emotional resonance. Simpson’s attempt to jerk tears with her repetition of “how easily rain forgets. How it forgets,” clanks like a tin exercise in a 1st year writing class, while the ending parades vagaries with its “hundred scents” that draw her “this way and that.” Her cadence here is like chopped potatoes while the images are those same spuds mashed into an abstract slop.
But is all of Quick forgettable? No. Simpson, for all her flaws, is capable of turning out a credible poem. What I admire most about her vision is its inhuman underpinnings. One emerges from multiple readings with more of a recollection of the “star-shaped aster” and the precise arc of a deer’s leap than of any particular human, outside of mythical figures like Odysseus and Circe. “Far Off World” is a gorgeous roundelay of sorts whose repetitions – unlike the catchpenny tropes in less successful poems like “Clock of Rain” – are perfectly necessary to the swirling ecosystem it evokes. There are also many images in “Grass Prayers” and other pieces that take textured, auditory risks as with: “slur of buzz,” “small-leafed shine/wine red,” “hippogriff of cloud,” and “wild pouch fringed with cream.” “Ocean, Ocean,” the last sequence, is the most laden with such tasty instances, washing between descriptive sluicings of oceanic creatures, embodied by a full sensory spectrum, and choral snippets that hauntingly chant such memoranda as: “You could have been anything you wanted. Not merely human.” Though reductive metaphors (“the ocean is an open cupboard”) and pallid verbal pairings (one way/another, opening/closing, push/pull) still crop up like tenacious barnacles, “Ocean, Ocean” achieves its epiphanies through a concentrated plunging into all the salt elements of its scenario: “No one will know who she was, or when. So what? The sea clicks together; there’s a far-off sound of goblets breaking into bits. Here’s her life, what she has made of it. Parabola, cissoid, strophoid. Whatever goes forward and back, making an elegant trajectory. In water, a few bodies bulge and soften. There are things that shine.”
It’s the promise cupped in such lines – despite the nondescript shining “things” – that make Quick’s shortfalls all the more disappointing. There are too many failures of effort and flaws of intent in this collection to simply laud what works. Without a demanding ear, the poet often loses her own capacity to determine what sings and what flops about like a flaccid, auricular jellyfish.
Tags: Anne Simpson, Issue 76