Final Reviews
My comparative review is below, with Krieger and Ellsworth!
Even beginning with the title, Giving Godhead by Dylan Krieger promises and delivers a stunning
account of personal heresy, morphing together declarations of apostasy and blasphemy to make a
sweeping spectacle out of itself.
account of personal heresy, morphing together declarations of apostasy and blasphemy to make a
sweeping spectacle out of itself.
Poems track an insistent rhythm, building on and interrupting themselves to the point of self-conscious
reflection in lines such as: “a slither upriver makes you question your existence. what is it with lizards?”
(from "animal crown") Krieger demonstrates an ear for sonic disharmonies and resonates new
frequencies between incongruent phrases and images, both lyrical and familiar:
reflection in lines such as: “a slither upriver makes you question your existence. what is it with lizards?”
(from "animal crown") Krieger demonstrates an ear for sonic disharmonies and resonates new
frequencies between incongruent phrases and images, both lyrical and familiar:
“impossible / machine unwashable...
sweep that dirty soul
under the rug the only
carnal rush round here is
quid pro tug slug for slug” (from “X-machine”).
This collection actively resists unity (even breaking apart and sodomizing the holy trinity) and cohesion
through disjointed scene-building and testimony/witness. On one hand, this speaks to the intense
disillusionment of organized religion that carries these poems’ driving force, but it also enacts the effect
of relating trauma through fragments and stuttering speech. On a stylistic level, this is marked by a
tendency towards lines injected with gaping holes or proliferate dashes. Through a terse manipulation
of modern “text speak,” these poems traverse in broken syntactical patterns to create a stuttering visual
and sonic effect:
through disjointed scene-building and testimony/witness. On one hand, this speaks to the intense
disillusionment of organized religion that carries these poems’ driving force, but it also enacts the effect
of relating trauma through fragments and stuttering speech. On a stylistic level, this is marked by a
tendency towards lines injected with gaping holes or proliferate dashes. Through a terse manipulation
of modern “text speak,” these poems traverse in broken syntactical patterns to create a stuttering visual
and sonic effect:
“my jew fro über sexy on the telephone for $$$...”
“w/...”
“who’s rly that balls-out convinced” (from “womb song”).
On a surface level, the poems in Brooke Ellsworth’s collection, Serenade, appear to be more
well-behaved than those in Krieger’s collection. Stylistically and tonally, they are not bursting through
the seams, “a panic / bombshell of meaning / that cannot be fixed,” to use Ellsworth’s words. One mode
that is familiar in Serenade is Ellsworth’s tendency towards long positioning lines followed by indented
explorations of lyrical moments, sensational situations, or emotive through lines:
well-behaved than those in Krieger’s collection. Stylistically and tonally, they are not bursting through
the seams, “a panic / bombshell of meaning / that cannot be fixed,” to use Ellsworth’s words. One mode
that is familiar in Serenade is Ellsworth’s tendency towards long positioning lines followed by indented
explorations of lyrical moments, sensational situations, or emotive through lines:
“I’m thinking about the dead seal again
This is one
pissed off rock
I thought as
I leaned
closer
Come
and look at
this rock
I said
then followed
you back to the
dead seal” (from “Eraserhead”).
But these poems are not so meek that they do not break their own canon in a similar way to those in
Giving Godhead. Ellsworth also invokes a culturally referential “text-speak” to create a new language
of modernity, similar to Krieger, which fixes a frame of new historicity on both books. These poems
could be texting and emailing back and forth:
Giving Godhead. Ellsworth also invokes a culturally referential “text-speak” to create a new language
of modernity, similar to Krieger, which fixes a frame of new historicity on both books. These poems
could be texting and emailing back and forth:
“Would u believe…” “mine’s called brothels w/o borders…”
“I was drinking purse wine in gridlock “h/o a sec
on the George Washington when I got yr while I photoshop my
email…” withdrawal out”
(Ellsworth, “The Raving Ones” (Krieger, “apostles anonymous"
and “Life is Beautiful”) and “force flood”)
In effect, these two collections carry strikingly varied delivery, but atmospherically they both work in similar modes of self-presentation and testimony. The speaker of the poems in Serenade is positioning the projected world in relation to itself, creating reality through the valence of controlled self-awareness. The speaker in Giving Godhead is similarly undergoing construction, but it is the proposed reality that is creating the “I”. When the immediacy tapers off in the lines of Ellsworth’s collection, the poetic reflection takes precedent. When the lyrical contemplation takes a backseat in Krieger, a volatile reactionary style takes control.
A riddle: Where does diatribe end and song begin?
ReplyDeleteAnswer: It begins and ends in the mouth.
It begins and ends, that is, in the mouths of poets slinging language around. At times, these words land with a direct hit on a specific target without too much worry for collateral damage, friendly fire, or even the self. At others, these words can be flung helter-skelter—not carelessly, but rather as echolocation, orienting the poem and the mouth behind it, catching its bearings, an experience pieced together in little moments.
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Dylan Krieger’s debut collection, Giving Godhead, is a scathing takedown of organized religion and American evangelicalism. But that’s only the surface of things a surface that does not do justice to Giving Godhead’s balancing act of mordant critique and playful iconoclasm. The crass sexualization of the book’s title is but a teaser, for Krieger plumbs a reservoir of these registers, mining them for puns that sting, burn, erode, and stain. In “sons of david,” she wryly explains that “this is what they mean by hellfire: one old doG with two tricks— / death and texas” before evoking a spiritual remixed: “swung low / sweet carrion, waiting for to bury my bones.”
Such a balance, Krieger confesses, comes easy. Another poem, “sacred sucre,” makes this point most explicit: “so arrest me, it’s too easy to blaspheme / what already reeks like decomposing mystery.” Blasphemy, to be sure, is Krieger’s m.o., but this is a blasphemy she argues is well earned and, what’s more, becomes life-giving and life-affirming, to the point of, as she writes in “peri-,” “I only feel alive / when I’m going down on america.”
It’s easy to read Giving Godhead simply through Krieger’s biography; the book’s acknowledgements takes aim at her parents, her sister, and “the entire congregation of Calvary Temple (AKA Southgate Church) in my hometown of South Bend, Indiana” for “providing real-world inspiration for these poems.” These details help explain Krieger’s in-depth knowledge of religious lexicon and the trauma of Bible-Belt Americana, but the book surpasses this limiting specificity by surrendering over to irreverence writ large. The closing piece, “Sacreligion Manifesto,” speaks volumes all its own: “MY RELIGION IS IRREVERENCE. WHATEVER YOU HOLD DEAR, POKE A HOLE IN IT.” Let be done. Can she get an amen? Amen and amen.
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DeleteIn Serenade, another debut full-length collection, Brooke Ellsworth presses us to consider whether the interior self (and selves) can be held dear, whether this too is susceptible to hole poking. The eponymous poem of the book literalizes this possibility in a similarly sexualized action as Krieger’s: Ellsworth, to wit, baldly professes that
Grounded for finger-fucking, we took our without-airplane hands to the
setting. Wanting
desire
itself
to align like
trees
down the neigh
borhood
This desire, however, is not easily won: wanting does not always result in getting. Ellsworth oscillates between stable and unstable selves. The poems range from proclaiming, as in “Fucking Island,” that “I can go home in the winter and be totally impersonal” to a fraught closeness with personality in “Flaca” where, with “Two burned masks, there are two of me.” For all of this, though, there is a desire that binds it all together, a desire that situates the blurry body and the voice emanating from it. We get a snapshot of it in “Joke,” where “I fill the bed with blood. You’re a liar you text back. ha no you’re right, I wake / up this parody and I want myself so bad.” And while the conversation that unfolds via text message is one of digital encounters, “Joke” ends – a punchline? – by turning that encounter into one much more internally sourced: “Some days there’s so much to love explains the boy in me.”
It’s this dance with the self that Ellsworth’s Serenade sets to music. And what she gives us is a deftly choreographed testimony. A testimony of a lyric voice in the process of self-actualization and individuation, and Serenade revels in the uncertainties and precarities of that defining process.
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A riddle (Take Two): Is “lyric” sounded for the speaker or for others?
Answer: It sounds out for itself, from the mouth, tasting sometimes sweet and sometimes sour.
Dylan Krieger’s Giving Godhead renders the divine in a bestial and grotesque form. In scaredy creature, Krieger constructs Mr. Master Extremist as an alternative form of God with its capitalization, and his son Jesus is embedded in “he-bejesus” as a word play of “heebie-jeebies”, which implies that child-rearing accompanied with language transformation produces fright and anxiety. The bambino, which means both a baby and an image of the infant Jesus, is a “man-eating” cannibal who will suffer the fate of its victim by turning into someone else’s steak dinner. In the erasure of firstborn bloodbathing, Krieger dissembles the myth steeped in Christian ideology by revealing the vicious cycle of abuse – the rapist who “was once raped by the father himself” will continue to make others victims. In addition, “forced consent” was disguised in the “sweet redemption” and the humbleness of the pervert priest’s oppressed “model servant” who has no power to resist the patriarchal violence in the form of holy lacerations. Krieger creates the ritual as a space for resisting the Christian tenets in automessiah. It’s interesting that “my sacrificial ram” is a robotic entity, and might be built for sacrificial purposes, because it can be alive again by charging by batteries after it is “killed” by murder. “At the site of its own blasphemy”, the ram resembles the devil with “horny head” and “dirty-talk in tongues of fire”. The bestial sound “baa-baa” transformed into human language “O woe is my adultery!” becomes subvertive by turning loyalty to God originally implied in the sacrificial ritual into breaking the sexual taboo in Christianity. The realization of rape dreams where christ becomes victimized and begged to laid and eaten is a psychological display of the intensification of awakening sexual desire.
ReplyDeleteThe line breaks in some poems in Serenade draws my attention. In Rooster Rock, the first line seems to belong to a prose poem, and the following lines divide into small segments. In “as we walk along the/obvious/mud”, the single word “obvious” & “mud” that occupies one line renders the object (mud) “obvious” on the page. I am not sure, though, why readers are called attention to the mud because the poem does not build up the significance of the mud and it shifts to other imagery quickly. “first” in “Whoever dies/first/must be eaten” takes up the entire space too, but readers are given no reason why the sequence of dying determines the fate of the corpse, and why the dead after the first one won’t be eaten. I am also not sure about the enjambment between Columbus River. The poem ends on the capitalized river, which is only a partial phrase toward which “we” run toward, and a segment of “our” destiny, so I wonder about its purpose.
DeleteLife is Beautiful seems like a simplistic title, but the poem complicates this title’s statement. In the second line “on the George Washington when I got yr”, the line break lets the readers focus on a trivial detail and set up expectations for mundane elements in the next two lines of the poem. The first part of the line is merely the road name where “I” was stuck in gridlock. “email” and “Don’t come back” are unsurprising words choices to describe a broken relationship, but the broken relationship seems to be intensified by occupation of an entire line by a single word or a short message. When “suddenly I felt smoked out like diesel”, “I” seems to be transformed into the car that malfunctions while being stuck at the gridlock. “The performance” that takes up the entire eighth line is not a surprising word choice either, but “lifted into a landscape painting of a blasted tree” is in stark contrast with the last line in terms of strangeness, and takes reader suddenly into violent and eccentric mental space. “You” seems to seek solitude in the lonely farm-house (a symbolism of his anti-social tendency reflected in the email). The speaker’s voice in “shouting down the train” is a flooding of words that echoes the rain that flood the tunnel. In the world of imagination/fantasy, “we romantics/multiply” (presumably openly). Compared to the speaker’s idealistic mental vision, “in this open world” (which might be the real world) “we” can only “flood”/leash our ecstasy “in private”, which undermines the perfection in “a gift of happiness” that repeats in the end of the poem or the title.
Mine is the first post, in lieu of an instigation
ReplyDeleteThe sinister irony of “Giving Godhead” (see: “doGgy-style dogma,” et al), while self-justified through consistent perpetuation and amplified via Krieger's “Sacreligion Manifesto,” repels that which is humane—and, thus, moves into the realm of the sensational. With slam-poetry-esque rhyme/wordplay and capital-T Trendy form (particularly the proliferation of em dashes as anti-breaths), the reader is left to feel psychically flattened *and* left to wonder how much of the poetics demands praise for its “cleverness” vs. earnestly effecting an impression. Only one poem, “filled,” gestures outside of the self/“frightful God” dichotomy and sensational affect therein/thereof; its inclusion roughly halfway through the book begs the question: why now, and why just one? “and my soul filled […] and my deepest soul filled.” These assertions, placed within the bookending confines of form/content, highlight the psychic paucity experienced as a reader. “Giving Godhead,” thus received—in lack, as lack—is a kind of smoke and mirrors, un-filled and unfulfilling.
ReplyDeleteAM your comment is poignantly accurate. I also feel that some of Krieger’s poems lack meaningful contents despite its seemingly “innovative” forms.
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