Short Reviews: Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus, Anaïs Duplan
“Everything
you say about me is bullshit. Blah-blah-blah,/ the story is you are black.”
(31)
Within
the pink cover, Anaïs Duplan’s Mount Carmel
& the Blood of Parnassus is split into the opening essay on black pages
with white letters and poetry in black letters dwarfed by the surrounding
whiteness. Duality laid upon duality is further complicated by the poems that
seem to exist in multiple realities, shifting between past/memory and present/future,
playful/punning and pensive/pain. Male first names and figures interject and go,
sometimes recurring, but never dwelling or insisting they are truly separate entities.
The line of thought melts together and extends beyond what is seen on the page,
as if it were a spiral viewed in two dimensions.
This
lack of concern towards being coherent or consistent, this anti-conformity places
us at the verge of understanding and the verge of following, echoing the concern
of “I’m not being seen for who I am.” (vi). Unlike the cautiously idealized
Dean Blunt, Duplan provides the context of the poet & for the poems via the
layer of the essay, an extension and compromise of Blunt’s wariness about being
read. The black colors the reading of the white, where absence and obfuscation result
from an excess of being up-front and agonizing over that performance/presentation.
The poems call attention to poetry- the poet as speaker, the reader, the
practice, the industry. The absurd reality is that publishing your own poetry
is often about exposing the deeply personal you would hesitate to disclose to loved
ones for the consumption and judgement of a faceless audience.
Duplan’s
essay connects gender dysphoria to the inhumanity of black bodies, in not only
their treatment within white culture but also the reduction taking place the
term itself. It meditates upon an identity that has no choice but fight against
a dominant force that defines themselves against the other, where the starting
point is a negative space and existence is resistance. Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus rises upon the duality
and plurality required by those who are marginalized, from a haunting origin
that is always under interrogation.
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ReplyDeleteIn Anaïs Duplan’s "Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus," reentry is a force of agentive movement. The chapbook is divided into three parts, distinguishing Duplan’s engagement with essay, photography and poetry. The crux of the chapbook’s movement, the photograph, depicts arms waving in all directions. The photograph gestures both forward and back: to the opening essay and the subsequent poems. Until this point, the conceit of reentry has only been implied by way of content, specifically gender, race and sexuality. Here, among these photographed arms, is a formal “opening” up.
ReplyDeleteThe arms are statuary, which poses the question of the (im)possibility of movement. Whether these bodies can move or not, though, Duplan asserts authorial capability—between literary and artistic forms, as well as within the flux of their being / their being-in-writing. The photograph, and the energy therein, ultimately leads to an invitation; on the facing page, Duplan writes: “Let us reenter this again. In the context of this paragraph, we are hurling through space, toward a small opening.”
Where are they moving from, and where will they continue to land, “again” and “again”? For "Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus," moments between forms facilitate “small openings.” Each form inhabits and explores dysphoria, masculinity, eroticism and violence, and offers a distinct directionality therein. The directionality of Duplan’s chapbook necessarily de-and-re-clarifies as they write within-and-of reentry, self-actualization. Duplan writes: “I am limited by what my hand can do,” yet the collection undoubtedly surpasses their “hand.”
see also: the "third space,"
DeleteSomewhere between and inside the multi-dimensions of Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus, Anaïs Duplan’s volume generates its third space, wherein readers might behold a concert of Rich, Lorde, hooks, Spivak, and a full concert of sister-humanhood in seance; adorning and inducting Duplan’s flexibly agile language and reverberations into a cult of subversive knowingness that—when charged, activated—work to eclipse the conformist plane (twinned with the plane of exquisite mundane), to gently-yet-insistently dismantle the otherwise arbitrary codes to which we—our existences—have been made at once complicit and « victimized ».
ReplyDeleteDuplan makes the necessary overture toward this dismantling in essay-form (the voice of which is made visibly distinct in reverse-negative black/white), which allows for a vocalization of the politically-engaged, [painfully/brutally] self-aware nuances essential to inducting the reader upon the path she is simultaneously forging, a liminal in between resistant oppressor foiling path.
ct’d
DeleteIn this very first-persons essay-ouverture, Duplan’s « identity » becomes intrinsic to the voice we follow toward epiphanic illuminations, which in turn follow Us into the crescendo-esque poem-pieces. Thus, too, shadow-remnants of the dominant (domineering) oppressor must also follow Us and Duplan, made bare at the precipice between these two modes: « I perform my death for you because you have demanded my death. You have exploited my work and my work has become that exploit... »
We are then liberated into the pulsions of surreal delirium, the readers are granted (paradoxically) a euphoria via embodied dysphoria, the free-fall elation only this kind of ambiguation can offer the senses; an escape-latch detaching We from the politicked body. And in this escape, we too are made to reckon with the omnipresence of oppresor guised into forging all bodies as politic-sites, as Duplan experiences and witnesses, this anchor of the (albeit exquisite) mundane. « Ben his curlicue. His barbecue hot dog. His cellphone iphone. His and everyone’s iphone, in my hand, on my lap, at the mezzanine »
DeleteAll pivots, twists, epiphanies hinge on the context of this enduring/endured/elegized/ sung through exquisite mundane.
DeleteFrom thence this volume’s third-space leaks itself into expression via euphoric subtleties that rise to the surface in permutations of naked-making Mark Baumeresque syntax and sentence-love-making, a self-generating dunamism interwoven with the infinity of this voice’s registers; we hop between txt msgs and post-Citizen inquisitiveness, which offer Us an amorphous pool against the surfaces of which We are led to gaze and be mesmerized into new wakefulness.
P.S.
DeleteThe reader (perhaps Duplan, too) might be tired by now of listening to the « Poet » « just trying to think out loud. » As Duplan points out, « seems like that’s what everyone else is doing. » Because ow much farther will we post-neo-poor-image progeny take our mutable cripplingations of self-awareness explicit-performing? What could possibly become borne from a post-wasteland of spiraling and complicit self-aware selves projectiles?
A quick online search for “What is a poetry chapbook?” yields somewhere around 643,000 results. Top hits include rather nebulous definitions, strategies about length and style, and tricks of the trade for aspiring writers and up-and-comers. It’s all about breaking into the “business,” or so the results suggest, whether through the ever-available chapbook contest or through the controversial DIY approach.
ReplyDeleteHot off the meteoric success of their 2016 full-length debut, Take This Stallion, Anaïs Duplan opts for a different rationale in their 2017 chapbook follow-up, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus. The chapbook, for Duplan, becomes a formal motif for the liminal themes they explore of gender, of race and otherness, of success, and of influence.
Where else, for instance, would an essay on gender dysphoria and critical race theory be both welcome and shunned in “traditional” formats save for the chapbook? Where else could such an essay be followed up with a series—mostly prose poems (an in-between form much like the chapbook itself)—exploring private reflections and the experience of being thrust into the limelight while dreading the “sophomore slump”?
With an unabashed hyperawareness of their expectations from readers and publishers, Duplan writes in chapbook form with oscillating industry-defying swagger and vulnerability with lines including these standouts: “I haven’t even thought about formatting yet. No one will read this book and almost everyone will prefer Bluets. What do you want? A fucking postcard” (35); “As soon as I finish writing this, I’ll send it anxiously to a publisher” before following it up with a litany of influences and interlocutors (39); and “Hopefully U R not terrible / enough to publish a book boasting / of your parent’s faults. U R. young” (46).
Searching for a “third space” throughout their lead-off essay is manifest in the third space of the chapbook form itself. Mount Carmel uses the amorphous artistry of Dean Blunt to realize and “idealize” many of Duplan’s complex interrogations, and while they characterize Blunt in saying “You have to guess both who and where he might be next” (iii), such a line demonstrates the rhetorical strength of “the chapbook” at its apex and, one can only hope, where Duplan will turn up next.
Anaïs Duplan’s Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus is limited to the confines of a body born into parameters, one “limited by what [its] hand can do” (29). The aesthetic quality of the book’s layout informs the deliverance of painfully demystified declarations of selfhood with constant awareness of the objectified and othered “black body,” a dehumanized body space foregrounded in the introductory essays. Especially with its tendency towards block poems, this collection creates pockets of testimony, athletically jumping between instances of witness, conversation, and reflection as lithely as the collection shifts from essays to poems. Rather than a stream of conscious, it is a stream-lined conscious, a deluge of precisely controlled self-aware layers in constant conversation with the hierarchies they resist.
ReplyDeleteThe lack of titles for the poems plus the web of characters creates a linguistic montage sequence wherein the ramifications are global because of the power systems they push against: capitalism, gender politics, race relations, even the construct of poetry with lines like,
“What is this thing called poetry / ...what are its standards / for personhood” (32).
The composite whole mimics the internal fracturing in the creation of a montage, rather than rebuking it for the sake of cohesion. Implicit in the montage is the cohesion from fragments, specifically fragments with a myriad of textures, origins, sounds, and appearances. These atmospheric qualities oscillate between intricate webs of storylines and questions of identity. The voice play-acts a controlled slippage, questioning itself and its surroundings in order to feel out the borderlines of a body as object. In lines such as “I had a feeling in the fingers the other day. They weren’t my fingers” the speaker denigrates from a moment of witness to a realization of physical failure (25). With such an act of recurrent discovery of a body in constant obliteration, we “keep this page as a record,” we keep these poems as witness.
AH! I'm so glad you excerpted the "keep this page as a record" line--as seemingly "small" as it is, it was a real guiding force for my reading of Duplan's text this time around.
DeleteRight?? Especially given how they set the poetry up via the essays exploring their identities, great addition to the whole "act of witness" angle
DeleteIn A Love Song to Dean Blunt in Three Parts, Duplan poignantly admits that she used to date men because she “wanted to be men I dated more than I wanted to date them”, and resented that she couldn’t pass as male in her female body. She also desired the power she projected into her father, who is rendered an ideal figure but is absent in her life. In her poems, Duplan counteracts the ideal male figures she envied. In performative imagery, Ben was stellar with his jawline, curlicue, hot dogs and iPhone. However, male’s heroic status was disintegrated by toxic masculinity. “For his bravery many men will die for many years to come”, and the cost behind maintaining a male icon is sacrifices of other men. The speaker’s yearning for male power collapses when “I” revealed her childhood’s vulnerable experience of keep falling on the school bus (possibly caused by the discomfort of encountering a blonde boy) to her therapist, and fell hard again symbolically because he is “married and employed and doesn’t need the money”. The symbolic falling occurs again when “I” told her concerns about her fingers to Dr. Addleson for three times but she still felt so dejected. In the end of falling, however, she saw her mother “peeling carrots”, and was married to Rebecca, “who had given her many great children”. “I” had witnessed both the reproductive and independent power of female in her family, which will potentially severe her obsession with the idealized male.
ReplyDeleteAppreciate & am humbled by your readings. Mine (maybe too long):
ReplyDeleteThe opening, "A Love Song to Dean Blunt in Three Parts", reads as an intimate announcement to the reader. One that says: I am not a frivolous poet; I am serious. Or later, perhaps more plainly: "I am going into my depths."
The way Duplan prefaces these poems with a critical text, mirrors the way she prefaced her previous, formally dynamic, collection with the long poem "On a Scale of 1-10, How Loving Do you Feel." Which isn't surprising.
"Let's enter this again", says poetry's arrival, "[in] the context of this paragraph, we are hurling backwards through space, towards a small opening"--& through what? Into what? The mouth or the eye? The "I" or the "not-I"?
As her essay suggests, Duplan's is a poetry whose body has a political stake in being understood. "On a Scale..." announces: This textual body is not opaque, but an opaque-poetics. Or: "I'm not opaque. I'm so relevant I'm disappearing."
Indeed, Mount Carmel, as with Take this Stalion, makes relevancy and context both aesthetic and political stakes. Claiming that "a poem should be: [-] righteous good and true/ like my body/ this is thinly veiled disguise"
For Duplan, as for other marginalized artists, this textual body, to 'resist dehumanization', must adopt "an oppositional position in relation to the projections of the dominant culture." Meaning: 'White Culture', or the ostensibly more inclusive: 'poetry world'.
At the same time, the artful wit required to maintain this resistance, makes, via image, a vital game of disguise and disappearance. The way: "Chester has a ball in his mouth!" & "All figures, like this one, refer themselves to Christ."
or: "A single butterfly landed on De'Shawn's back at the / barbecue. OK, now put that image
out of your head. / Next image, you a pauper in the desert. You, pushing spit from your mouth into your eyes and nostrils."
This is an intimate, resistant poetry wryly "making biscuits for daddy". & somewhere, "in the tick of it", makes a farce between the "I" and the "not-I"--between the language and the "you"-- "So that you and the body are in a room together.
And so, a kind of ecstatic union may emerge."
A you who is " blue-green-white-/grey-mauve-lilac-like";
You as: "a version of me without the shot wounds."
(srry, know the ending/conclusion needs work)
Delete(also, may have missed it if someone else wrote about this, but this is also a poetry (in both collections) that makes farce of its articulation of mental health, particularly as it relates to a body that holds, as she puts it, the "burden" of 'white cultures' "not-I".
DeleteRevision:
DeleteAnaïs Duplan, Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus, $16
ISBN 978-0-9860461-8-6
"Let's enter this again", says the first poem from Anaïs Duplan’s chapbook, Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus ", [in] the context of this paragraph, we are hurling backwards through space, towards a small opening"--Through what? Through the mouth or the eye? The "I" or the "not-I"? As her introductory essay suggests, Duplan's is a poetry whose body has a political stake in being understood, without apprehension.
This essay reads as an intimate announcement; one that says: I am not a frivolous poet; I am serious. Or later, more plainly: I am [a poet] going into my depths." The way Duplan prefaces these poems with a critical text, mirrors the way she prefaced her previous, formally dynamic, collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) with her long poem, "On a Scale of 1-10, How Loving Do you Feel” (at Hyperallergic). "On a Scale...” says: "I'm not opaque. I'm so relevant I'm disappearing." Or: This body is not opaque, but a poetics of opacity. Indeed, Mount Carmel, as with Take this Stalion, makes relevancy and context both aesthetic and political stakes. Claiming that "a poem should be: [-] righteous good and true/ like my body/ this is thinly veiled disguise"
For Duplan, as for other marginalized writers, this textual body, to 'resist dehumanization', must adopt "an oppositional position in relation to the projections of the dominant culture." Meaning: 'White Culture', or the ostensibly more inclusive: 'poetry world'. At the same time, the artful wit required to maintain this resistance, must make, via image, a vital game of disguise and disappearance. The way: "A single butterfly landed on De'Shawn's back at the / barbecue. OK, now put that image out of your head. / Next image, you a pauper in the desert. You, pushing spit from your mouth into your eyes and nostrils." Here, "in the tick of it", these poems make a farce between the "I" and the "not-I"--between the language and the "you"-- "So that you and the body are in a room together. And so, a kind of ecstatic union may emerge."
This is an intimate, resistant poetry that simultaneously, exuberantly, performs the exhausting mental "burden" of the “not-I” projected by 'white culture,’ while wryly "making biscuits for daddy". A you who is " blue-green-white-/grey-mauve-lilac-like"; You as: "a version of me without the shot wounds."
Haven't figured out my destination with the last paragraph, quite, and I could work on making things sound more commodified, but...
ReplyDelete---
Mount Carmel is, according to Wikipedia, a mountain range that abuts the Mediterranean coast and stretches southeast into what is Israel, and it comes endowed with religious/Biblical significance and symbolic valences of beauty, fertility, lushness, the plenitude of vineyards. Parnassus is a mountain in Greece whose accompanying mythology has to do with the gods—particularly Apollo, particularly the story of his gift of music to Orpheus—and the arts of poetry, music, and learning in general. Anaïs Duplan dedicates Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus to their mother (“Our Lady of Mount Carmel”) and father (“my Parnassus”), as well as a Jessy.
Following this, these names exit the text and remain as distant and oblique as actual mountains from the text, which concerns itself with the mundane and the anti-monumental—a fugitive rather than high-flown poetics. The book opens with a long essay, “A Love Song to Dean Blunt in Three Parts,” which addresses the inescapability and manipulability of social genre in the fields of gender assignations, the embodiment and performance of race, and finally the constraints of idiomatic language. If changing the body that dissatisfies leaves intact the social inequities that generate that dissatisfaction, what is a person to do? Citing Blunt’s relentlessly interdisciplinary, pseudonymous, and anti-mass market art practice and Eric André’s performative self-humiliation, Duplan drives toward a rearticulation of resistance to paradigms of oppression as an operation that burrows into the register of the mundane.
The essay is printed in negative—white letters left in negative on a black page—and, separated by a black-and-white photograph of a crowd of sculptural hands, crammed together and posed in gestures of strained reaching—the short untitled poems that comprise the rest of the book vary between paragraphed and lineated forms. The poems are printed in the “usual style” (black print on white page)—reinforced as such by the graphic inversion of the first part.
“Let us enter this again,” the first poem opens, articulating the text’s exit from the photonegative-like space of the essay into the gallery of the poetry chapbook. What the words do in this latter space recurringly troubles and redoubles the purposiveness of language—interspersing narrative detail articulated in an autobiographical first person voice with oblique cutaways that turn on sleights of language and/or montage, as well as live inscriptions of the writing process. Continuity without causality. “What is this thing called poetry.” They duck and feint away from coherent, resolutive meaning-making: “I cannot lie to you. I would like to”
Over the progression of the poems, an unspecified second person/“you” comes increasingly into play. “Something else I have to say: You will alienate everyone you love, systematically, as a practice.” This mode of address that seems to enfold the speaking I—“You hear how my voice always becomes yr voice”—might be the fugitive operation that cuts an exit from the bleak history of familial and mundane cruelty that attends the speaker’s place in poetry. Might. “Ecstatic union? Do you believe in that?”
https://goo.gl/images/kWao37
ReplyDeleteSt John of the Cross' drawing / via negativa
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