Sooner
by Giles Goodland
[ bookreviews ]
I really enjoyed leafing through this book. You can tell a lot by flicking pages and comparing the margins, paragraph structure, stanza form, line length and size of poems. Within a few seconds I knew that this would be an interesting book to read because of its visual appeal, especially the variation in these visual elements. Here is a poet who is restless, who does not stick to one form for longer than is necessary. Here are long poems with a formal structure of some kind, prose blocks, shorter lyrics. Looking closer (and still not reading) there is some interesting punctuation, capitals appear without full stops. Each poem has clearly found its own structure.
Then comes the first read, and Christakos is a poet who passes the first-read test. She writes clearly but also with ambiguity; she does narrative and lyric, experimental and straight; she has wit and humour; she has concerns with gender and an interesting and compassionate take on masculinity. I enjoyed the first read with some half-formed reservations, and maybe I should have left the book there, but something was not quite right; and now after several pass-throughs I begin to see what is the matter. The bulk of this book is made from longer poems that are narratives.
They are interesting short stories, and Christakos is a good prose writer. To this good prose style she has added all the visual elements I listed at the start of this review. But this does not quite seem to make it poetry. In fact, it began to feel as if the very strength and variety in the visual components was a smoke-screen, a way to stop the reader trying to read these pieces as prose.
Here is a passage from the first page of one of the long poems, ‘Lucent’, in which the narrator travels on the subway:
Around him, people hunched into their bellies, pulling from
the public gaze all the intensity they had invited over
the afternoon in their offices. He looked at his hands,
cracked and small-knuckled. He
pretended to read the corporate posters
while snatching glimpses of the upturns and sunken wounds of
people’s tired eyelines, the glowing skin of one girl, the
tragicomic beard of a fleshy-cheeked college kid up too late
the night before. Who was his father and how must
he love this large boy of his now? In his
own skin he felt beautiful and completely unprepared. He
hadn’t brushed his hair, hadn’t washed. His last shower
was Tuesday - no, Sunday. Five days.
And so on for 23 pages. This has very much the prosody and narrative feel of prose, particularly of the short story. An observational character study, not quite stream of consciousness, leading up to a surprise dénouement which I shall not reveal. Line run-ons are routine and don’t seem to be there for a purpose. The couplets seem to serve no discernible purpose apart from leading the eye. There is interesting language here, but there are not interesting lines. I wonder why Christakos chose to format this as a poem. Perhaps something I do not understand about the poetry market in Canada encourages this. It works as a near-experimental short story. Packaging it as a poem would (at least in Britain) lose a large slice of any potential readership, which is a pity. Perhaps this is obvious commonsense, but any longer narrative in poetry should surely have something unique in it that only poetry can give, whether it be formal structure or ‘poetic’ language or convention, or non-convention.
Obviously there is a larger question buried here about the nature of the poetic line. Once we dispense with metrics and rhyme scheme, the function of the line in poetry is contestable and a matter of taste. Most British readers expect, I think, a certain semantic element to justify a line. It is either a unit of sense, or if not, provides some sign of aliveness – an unexpected word, an image, a thought, a sound. If a line does not provide one of these things, it seems flat. It has to work for its space. There is a different tradition in North America that allows more laxity to the line itself. Larger countries: space not such an issue. I am usually comfortable with both kinds of poetry, but when the poetry is narrative - as these longer poems in Christakos’s book are - a new set of expectations come in. The dynamics of the story (character, observation, scene) with its different symmetries. The looser musculature of the free-flowing prose line is one that (as in the above quotation) she adopts, and which rides over the line-breaks, as if blindly. Possibly this is deliberate. It does produce the feeling of an affectless, blithe narrator, riding a subway, unaware of the possible rhythms that ride over him. But I am not convinced: Christakos uses the same techniques in other poems with different narrators.
Equipped with this insight about Christakos, my slight unease in first reading her volume falls into place. She seems to be a good and experimental prose writer who has been mis-categorised, perhaps to her own detriment, as a poet. The best of her pieces in this book, such as ‘Retreat Diary’, have the lineation of prose. In the poems which are lineated, the lines seem to be there for visual effect, not as lines of poetry. One poem (‘Lection’) uses a strict three-line syllabic pattern (5-7-5) for no obvious purpose:
This is my new book.
This is of jouissance and I
half smile. You are some
one I like a lit
tle playing to lose pants fair
ly. Her middle fin
gers smell of the juice
before curtains tank. Canis
ters of news reach the
front and then on cer
tain days we absorb you. In
dividuals can
be made to stand for
itself...
Isn’t formalism with no purpose the worst of both worlds? But perhaps that’s the point. Even the non-narrative and experimental poems in this volume seem to lay little or no stress on the line itself. There are good sentences, good, interesting phrases, but seldom coinciding with lines, and not running against them in a significant way.
