"It's not confessional, motherfucker": Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Meadow Slasher
Before Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s 2017 Meadow Slasher, there was Selenography, the 2010 collaboration between
Wilkinson and Tim Rutili. Wilkinson provided the poems, Rutili the polaroids;
the result is an opaque investigation into poetry as testimony, witness, being
there. In this way, Selenography already
touches on many of last week’s class discussion. More curiously, however, is
the trajectory Wilkinson follows from testimony to confession in his most
recent work. There is, in fact, something of a through-line between these
works, or, at least, a portal between these two explorations of witness to
confession. Two lines in Meadow Slasher
brought this to my mind: “So you’ve been into the photographs? / What’s not
desire’s aperture” (10). While this reference to photographs may not be a
likely callback to Selenography, it
nevertheless opens up the possibility that Wilkinson is much more invested in
the lyric self than what his often distant, removed poems attest to; in fact,
the epigraph to Selenography clues us
into Wilkinson’s ambivalence toward the necessary presence of some self in
poetry. The epigraph comes from Graham Foust, “Each song / is a room / in which
I’m not allowed to vanish,” but in Meadow
Slasher, Wilkinson offers an unexpected and vital twist—in these poems, the
self is in far fuller view to try to stave off the vanishing “you” at risk of
slipping away.
In Meadow Slasher, Joshua Marie Wilkinson
immediately invokes some of the same concerns we have been discussing about
confessionalism—elegance in the grotesque, artifice and “the dirt,” and
especially the outrage at the very label itself:
I am writing to you
from the
watery grave.
You wanna
cry?
Cry.
Just don’t
try to clobber me
with your
shitty poems. (17)
These lines position the collection’s voice here as well as the emotion
(or at least the possibility of it). Immediately, the poem shifts to a strong
and negative attitude about “shitty poems” that “clobber.” Typical of this
collection, there’s quite a bit of slippage between who is voicing the lines at any given moment—among the questions,
the scene-cuts, the maxims that seem sincere yet come with a “believability”
caveat—the poems here are suspect as “truth” or “fact.”
It’s this point that we would do well to consider: how
the multiplicity of voice(s) here continue to refine and nuance our view of a “single”
confessor or whether we must expand the notion of “confessional” poetry (if we
want to include Meadow Slasher within
this label, at least). Perhaps Wilkinson himself does not want anything to do
with the label—Meadow Slasher speaks
frankly about this matter at the close of the book: “It’s not confessional,
motherfucker: / it’s a constative fact” (60). In other words, in what way does “confessional”
presuppose a self that stands in stark contrast to the speech-act, declarative
bound “constative fact”?
I’ve been talking around this next point in the
paragraphs above, but I now want to address it head-on: what do we do with the “you”
in a seemingly confessional text? Wilkinson’s work deeply invests itself not
only in a confessional “I” but also in the “you” on the other end of the line.
The language breakdown we noticed on Thursday is present in Meadow Slasher, though the stakes of
this breakdown are perhaps of a different sort—communication breakdowns result
in relationship breakdowns:
What if
what won’t
come back
to you
is
calling?
How much
more talk
will it
take to sever us? (6)
These lines are revealing for the collection—is it the possibility of (renewed)
communication that the poems want, even at the expense of continuing that
communication only to have that talk “sever us”? Perhaps the answer lies in the
non sequiters, logic jumps, posed questions (with or without answers), and anti-expectations
that rip through this collection. Consider the following lines:
An
obsession with what?
With the
lamp-lit dust an archive leaves the library shelves with—
But what
history did you want back inside of?
Little
whale on the Gastineau beach won’t last long.
The dream
out in the miner’s wood, trampling on now.
I like the
floorboards in here.
Can I stay
awhile?
I’m
thinking about retreating to
no
trapdoor, no transom, alright. I got it. (14)
Lines like those above, however, seem to be dripping with desperation
when taken in context of the collection as a whole, and for every phrase like “No
turn, no volta, no nothing” (7), another pithy axiom comes along that lures us
again into what’s already been revealed to be a bleak and empty promise: “What
scrapes you heals you,” Wilkinson writes, only to acknowledge its falseness in
writing, “That’s not right, but there is a pause before that clippery voicemail
beep” (12).
It’s that “pause”
that compels this collection—the anxious awaiting for a response, a
solicited voice, a prompt, anything that gives a clue that there’s somebody
still at the other end of the line. That pause makes possible the poems’
surface-level vulnerabilities, though the book resists letting us read these “confessions”
as “true” or as more sinister “calls-for-help.” Most telling, as I see it, is
in the “bedroom diary” entry that Wilkinson gives us of his very own:
What’s at
stake? That would be
desire’s
rootless claim on the sensory.
My fantasy
is so simple it’s pitiful:
you turn
around & ask me to unhook your bra.
Then, you
stand at the foot of the bed
&
somehow you undo your skirt.
Your socks
don’t match. That’s
the
fantasy? That’s the fantasy. (55)
This question of intent is what I found most fascinating in Meadow Slasher. A far cry from
confessionalism’s ability to “get something off your chest,” this collection unloads
these feelings to keep that pause on the other end of the line open, holding on
to what may already be out of reach, beyond resuscitation, but still undergoes
the death rattle of failed communication or a failing relationship.[1]
In the end, Wilkinson proposes that confessionalism is not nearly as one-sided
as many readers might think—and that opens up a whole can of worms for us to
reevaluate.
[1] I’ve
probably gone over length by now, though I wanted to mention briefly the
central connection I see between Eliot and Wilkinson. Eliot condemns Hamlet as a failure because of the lack
of an objective correlative for Hamlet’s emotion. What I suggest, however, is
that Eliot’s criticism of emotional excess is precisely what Wilkinson leans
into. We could easily swap out Wilkinson’s voice for Hamlet when Eliot writes, “Hamlet
(the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear” (5).
After Jake, I’m thinking of Graham Foust’s “Star Turn”: “That the deepest wound is the least unique / surprises nobody but the living.” And of Chris Marker’s “Level Five,” Laura’s remembrance and oblivion. The banality of one’s deepest suffering.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Meadow Slasher, I was compelled by Wilkinson’s insistence on incision, and how such wounds literally open up by way of geographic expanse: “If the road could stretch out like a blank path under spectral willows alive” (10). Perhaps these openings serve as a proliferating and manifold volta, always turning, navigating, deepening, transgressing. “Cut a path through it,” he insists (27). Jake speaks about “unloading” in his blog post, and I’d like to add the notion of the unfolding, the unfurling.
The book may not be “confessional,” but its voice “can boxcutter you open” and, while cutting, challenge “you” to “[categorize] your wounds” (21, 57). Like Jake says, Wilkinson asserts a compelling and vulnerability-inducing “pause.” The physical and sonic space of Wilkinson’s “pause” enables his addressee’s absence—a wound—to fester , as well as that which surrounds the addressee's non-voice (e.g. the landscape, the speaker, the speaker-as-landscape). The authorial awareness necessitated by such a “pause” heightens the drama of the book, as well as its questioned stakes.
Meadow Slasher contains wounds to the body, as well as less obvious wounds: crossing out items from lists, imagining dresses being torn, windows being broken. The self flung from a plane mid-flight. The invitation to participate. Breath, vision and perception serve as vessels for wounding, and Wilkinson sardonically addresses them: “You liked to breathe, right?” and “How do you feel about memory?” (19, 25). Meanwhile, the road itself stretches, turns, unfurls.
I’m not sure what to do with Wilkinson’s invocation of Lead Belly at the close of the book, but I’m curious to sit with his presence, and perhaps hear what others think. Lead Belly was a vital presence in the folk revival, and greatly influenced Bob Dylan, Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, these three men are often regarded in “American memory” before Lead Belly. His “Moaning”: https://open.spotify.com/track/2omUmttfvQYBYtTyO1FDhr.
I was perplexed by the same! And I wondered the non-end-ish quality of it gestured again to the insistence that there be ''no volta, no turn, no nothing..", and to the mention that Meadow Slasher was one among four pieces. There's a penultimateness lingering there on the last page, and the effect (with this one book right) adds a touch of irreverence for me.
DeleteIrreverence of the sonnet form? Or the resistance to come to a conclusion (which in turn may offer a healing moment)?
DeleteGoing off with investing in the self in poetry, different kinds of wounds are associated with the speaker/self, and his dynamic with the world around him. In the line “I cut my face in looking” (1) indicates when the speaker is observing the external world, he hurts himself, thereby exposing his vulnerability to the outside/readers. His insecurity about exposure of his interiority is reflected in the next line: “Dogs on a hunt for what may come.”(1), implying a degree of animosity.
ReplyDeleteIn a self-reflexive line, he poses the question: “A gash is how big?” (1) and shows that wounds can be hidden and interior (lesion) or visible on the body (a slice). Or wounds can be evidence of being impacted by violence, like “one of these bruise cuts that boxers get.” Desiring to be hurt and be wounded in the line “ I want somebody …. & punch me in the neck” is how the speaker manifests his internal and mental pain.
The speaker invokes wounds implicitly in imagery. In the line “Spring drifts away and you chase it waving your hand like a knife.” (6), “your hand” as a knife shows its potential to split open, and the waving action increases the chance of getting hurt. The line warns that attempting to chase after the past might inflict harm on oneself. In another line, “what scrapes you heals you ” following the line “Can’t you open further (the window)”(12) is encouraging exposure to put himself at a greater risk of getting hurt/wounded and letting the wounds instigate healing and recovery.
After getting half-way through the book I returned to Eileen Myles's quote at the beginning:
ReplyDelete"I am a bad place // from whence / to when // a tiny shadow /
of that dark / thought"
The poem slowly dissolves, with the incremental distance each line lays down, the immediate, physical presence of the first line. That is: a poem, a lyric "I", tracking even graphing its own passage into and back out of language -- into and out of itself. Like a sequence of photo stills clocking a single "stalled junky in the evening summer / alight under factory lamp blossoms" (re Wilkinson), or a single firefly's phosphorescent blip that begins and ends with its absence.
This metaphor as a way of thinking through the way images in each line (or set of lines) arrive and fade, however, falls flat. As Wilkinson says, this "isn't for a book of polaroids."
There's movement, a propulsion, or a pull, like a "long drawn chain of blowflies out of the bottle." (13) But sometimes the energy isn't slow, but frantic, like when "A child of the hotel registry / watched a man watch a man / at the urinals," the path of their looking already "grown over" & "Can I get a shot of his hands now?"
Part of the energy for this pull might come from the frequent associative leaps whereby the lyric "I" tries to escape each line "by climbing out / the lavatory window". Each precisely narrow instance of this escape might be described as "The crux of becoming in movement's / memory, memory's blinding chatter"(57). Indeed, this is a poem that "clock[s] the roads of an errancy", following the "words' sounds' can't, alright?"
I'm interested in Jake's remark that Wilkinson's Meadow Slasher has a "talk [that] 'severs us'", because as both J and AM pointed out, these poems are violently dependent on the "you" to make things happen. As in "Press here for bludgeon / here for steam & here / for marauding-type shit."
That there's something voluminous about the way these lines accumulate, or "unfurl" re AM; something about "Thread, gumption, willowy shade" & "some more colleopterous scattering"; Something loud, that attempts to "turn everything up to bleeding" (12). Because it's more than talk; it's a "music against which to crumble" (57).
Still, I couldn't help but think about travel narratives and road movies, but "If the road could stretch out like a blank path under spectral willows alive," where does the road movie fit into the poetics here?
& what in the poem might be the "wet little pidgeonheart / inside [it] thudding"?
There's also this really interesting/perplexing image on pg. 47:
"How long have you been waiting there / nodding off in the slick /
70s seats at the DMV? / When this was in style /
it was a hundred thousand years ago."
I got the sense that the poem, like the reader, was starting to feel the exhaustion of the energy and was approaching/arriving at a crash. As if the leaps strung us through history at an accelerated rate, or something. Anyway would love all your thoughts in this and whatever else. Might add more comments/responses tomorrow.
With Warmth -M
HI!
ReplyDeleteWith Jake’s sharp exploration I’m left to ask, what is the lyric self, or what is its apparition?
Wilkinson seems to offer a deformed sonnet sprawl through which our eyes (ears?) are meant to metabolize such a permutation of ‘self’—or else its other, multiple selves do it for us, and we’re made inevitably complicit. By these means the ‘collection’ seems to compulsively, incessantly dismantle the itineraries of self-pain. We become entangled in a mesh of these selves, which respectively inhabit histories, pasts, very spectral (fleeting) memory --in relation to an exterior that evades, feels unpossessable, can this exterior/outside be what blurs into view through the conduit “messenger girl” (pgs. 11, 49, 61…)?
Instead of distance and removedness, however, my reading leaves me with an impression of a real-time unvarnishing of a solitude-state, probing for a kind of intimacy between reader and poet that asserts the present relentlessly (“What I was/ started to shread the fine air/ around my body” p.24) ; this, for me, produces an effect of perpetual yearn, a forced-open and prodded-at ‘gash’-- all swampish. Each recognizable artifact of the external is rendered disembodied of itself (as if already succumbed to Past-spectre), recontextualized to inhabit the poet’s protocol.
What does the stripling, the scythe, the ploughshare, the machete, the meadow slasher become here? A means of destroying the boundary between past/present? Or poet/reader? BOTH!? Is ‘testimony’ implicated here? All witnessing here (of the selves-hauntings) seems transcribed on the inside of the skull, evidencing ‘the face that turns inward’.
We do not escape the solitudinal. The solitudinal takes us in stride—lapping, pulsating, commingling with and becoming inextricable from the many liquids (lakes, swamps, tears, bloods, sweat, rain, various moistures…)—then strobes between violence and an emptying that has sorrow written on it, rendered like fat from the self-trespassed self/body, histories, wants… “at times a voice in a poem can boxcutter you open” (21): the voice that’s (perhaps without agenda) lured us turns in on itself, too, and spectralizes into an oblivion of the exhumed. And another haunting (“no volta, no turn, no thing” (11)) reinforces what seems akin to a cultivated stagnation of these liquids; but it’s stillness, moreover we’re made to pulse/lap/throb along with it all.
AND HERE'S THAT SONG on page 9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njbmwfndFH4
there's that gesture toward Insidious Complicity between reader and manipulated/played-with valences of selfhood. Here's one of those exterior artifacts, taken in hand by the poem/poet (who's who i guess?) tw: hoola hooping gyrations
What is a cut? What are all the things a cut can do and be?
ReplyDeleteA cut can separate things that normally hang together or continuously—a stem from a flowerhead, a head from a body. But a cut need not sever—it can suffice to puncture, to force a rupture (which can then leak, stretch, bleed, let matter escape or enter, sometimes eventually heal over, sometimes with a scar). And in film, a cut is the switch from one shot to the next—two distinct segments of recorded time, spliced along a seam that joins them in a near-instantaneous alternation. As if seamless. Meadow Slasher makes use of all of these species of cuts, among others, to enact a failure of communication that becomes its theme, its object of obsession.
From the jump, the poem just cuts in like a tape reel switched to play. The structure of the book gives no indication of any organizing principle than sheer duration—eleven lines of varying length to each page. In these homogeneous units, the poem inscribes itself on the field of the page.
Is it a crop circle? Internal consistencies and hermetic logics, like the fractal geometry of that hoaxy phenomenon, suggest themselves in the recurrence of images, questions, phrases, themes: lots of cutting—wounds and injury generally, ranging from the puncture to the punch—lesions, scrapes, bruisecuts, slices, falls, gashes. What’s beauty? What’s desire? Careening, traveling on buses, snippets of the blues.
Or are these recurrences the fixated repetitive ringings of a traumatized reverb—a pathological sampling? The wringing of hands that can’t decide whether they want to wrangle and tear something apart—maybe themselves?
Where is the body, for that matter, in this poem? Barely—just parts (a hangnail, an arm)—damaged, if anything (a knife in the chest).
And who is doing the damage? “At times a voice in a poem can boxcutter you open.” (21) And when that happens, do you—does the you—become “desire’s aperture” (10)?
And if the you has indeed become desire’s aperture, can that aperture speak back? Well now, who’s asking? The speaker [him]self, at one point in a kind of reverse metonymy, melds to or becomes [his] own freshly re-opened wound:
This intern—trembling—begins to remove
my stitches & cuts me back open, re-making
the wound. What I was
started to shred the fine air
around my body.
The wound-state reclaimed and normalized, it is the recent memory of wholeness and continuity of self that begins, like contagion, to abrade the atmosphere, to shred—a dissimulation. In this mi(d)st, it’s hard to tell who’s speaking—how many, and to whom.
How do you feel about memory?
Pretty swell.
You been having a hard time, haven’t you?
Enlivened by sadnesses
I’m not playing games already.
[…]
You only like nighttime?
You tried & failed, huh?
You know cowardice?
(25)
Even in these semblances of exchange, of turns in conversation, it is not always—often not at all—clear whether the speaker is addressing themselves, another, another self, or what else. Often these seeming-questions are more like taunts or threats (“I said, do you like being here with me presently?” [24]), or abstruse propositions that sound like the kind of thing you might pose to someone you kind of know if you were tripping on acid (“you hear that scurrilous sound?” [29]).
(1/2)
Delete(2/2)
In a statement to Poetry Society, Joshua Marie Wilkinson described the preconditions for the writing of Meadow Slasher as one of hauntedness:
“Basically, I was hearing voices. I was fielding spooky inquiries. And I was listening closely to what either was or—more likely—was not there in the apartment with me. Either way, though, I was deep in a hallucinatory fit. There were no pink elephants or flying saucers. There was just—I later identified—the voice of my father, furious with me when I was a little kid. It had come loose in my brain after all these years.”
Yes—it feels right to speak not of a speaker, but of voices, where this book is concerned. Meadow Slasher swarms with voices—perhaps subvocal frequencies of one voice—around the question of how many cuts it takes to escape oneself. One-self. This self that thrashes against language, clawing and slashing, at times seeming or succeeding in splitting into two or several, which is a success, which is a failure.
For ultimately, “The problem with these half ghosts is that they won’t / take the windows out of the casements.” Alone in this apartment, we are not sure how we got here, how to exit, or even whether we are ghosts or just half-lit reflections of the selfsame speaker. Cut.
I like your head-on question Jake, the phantom confessional second person address. The omnipresent "you" seems as integral to these experiential moments as the "I" does, which is a lot of authorial power for a voice that doesn't act independently. Madison, you phrased it perfectly: "violently dependent" on the you. What's interesting about these (and it's a trend in so many other poets' style that aren't necessarily labeled confessionalists, like I'm thinking of Marosa di Giorigio from translation workshop and how her "you's" and "we's" made it seem like a collaborative memory moment rather than a public narrative) is how we treat the second party. Do we go literal and say it's the audience to whom the confession is directed or is it an address to the perpetrator of the violence that is cause for confession. In this way, rather than an implied guilt, it's more like a poem sorting out the ramifications of a past event and calling out a guilty party in a very intimate and angry way. Such a weird power dynamic! I'd say yes to Trish, this is more testimony than confession. But that troubles the line between poet and speaker even further, especially considering the biographical info Wilkinson divulges that article that Jean sent us.
ReplyDeleteAlso, anybody else find it funny how he resists voltas but published The Volta Book of Poets?
If I may pose even more questions, how did you all react to the slippage in colloquial language, as in "till my head throbs" (7), "you wanna cry?" (17), "I'm gonna try" (19) and so on. I didn't particularly find it distracting until I consciously sought these moments out, and they're inconsistent. The conversational back-peddling is everywhere, which is most likely why the grammatical slippage isn't so glaring. For example, the abundance of qualifying and requalifying, "I mean, I wanted..." (19), "unless you still want to. Do you / still want to?" (30).
There's that inescapable violence and body and violence done to the body and violence done by the body etc. etc. that everyone's picking up on, and I wanted to throw my two cents in on Madison's final point about the momentum that the collection picks up, beginning (I think) with page 36 when the poems begin to abandon the narration for rapid snapshots (polaroids?). Meadow slasher, motel drifters, thread, gumption, landlord of the dogs, Mt. Saint Helens, they almost act like buzz words in advertising to push urgency. He even switches his language to "careen" and "falling" on page 38 and then going into a "crumbling" and "categorizing" by page 57. Maybe we're supposed to feel the motion of a journey through memory that effects the body and leaves us with a "ditch ringing" in the ear and "blinding chatter"?
Looking forward to coalescing all these talking points on Tuesday!
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ReplyDeleteLike Jake, I also found that the lines on page 17 strongly resonated with the discussion we had about the label of confessional poetry and the disdain of Berryman and Snodgrass.
ReplyDeleteI am writing to you
from the watery grave.
You wanna cry?
Cry.
Just don’t try to clobber me
with your shitty poems.
The dismissal of the confessional label as some thing childish, submissive to a God or authority, or as bedroom memoir mirrors the reduction of poems as crying, shitty. The speaker(s) seem to be saying that good poems should not be raw and naked, something regurgitated involuntarily. Again, control enough to construct a mask seem to be an important factor.
Perhaps it is not exactly the confessional that Wilkinson fears, but emotion and sentimentality, the edgy and emo, and being mistaken as ignorantly indulging in them. Much like how the bedroom memoir and sex scenes in all forms of media can end up being awkward or humorous instead of arousing when they are overwrought, the harshness and intensity of Meadow Slasher that begins with the very title itself carries the risk of ridicule, at least in the poet's head. Thus the dance between sincerity and obfuscation becomes necessary, to call attention that this is a poem and a book and that the speaker(s) are aware of that fact in order to avoid getting caught in the position of being laughed at. Moments of straightforwardness are hidden with apparent non-sequitur or word salad like a shell game (& I'll wait for you in the fog/at Donut World on Judah./What's beauty but a little death retracted? [48]).
Of course, excessive awareness of the medium can also be seen as trying too hard to be clever and different, suggesting a lack of actual substance. Does having confessional/shitty elements while addressing them make a poem less confessional/shitty? I suppose the act does add an additional layer, at least.