Trouble with the Machine
Christopher Kennedy
Low Fidelity Press, $11
Christopher Kennedy’s second book takes off from where his
first Nietzsche’s Horse left off, engaging in a kind of indeterminate
brief prose space not quite prose poem, not quite short-short,
not quite…prose? Kennedy offers us the experience of a new
form of prose that sometimes riffs the historically situated parablistic
prose poem, but often verges into a surreal essay, or even the
French feuilletons (a sort of “ephemeral reportage”).
One thinks of the many modes of Borges and Pessoa, or the ironic
distance of Holub when reading these slight paragraphs, but even
then the comparison or mark of influence falters; Kennedy’s
impulse is situated in parodying the psychological pop and empty
consumerism of American culture, such as in “The Fourteen
Resurrections of a Normal Life,” where a man “thought
the television was a window.” Yet it is rare in these texts
that the subjects are made fun of—a further ironic step embedded
within his parody. Instead, those who seem caught in their own “wounds,” their
own inability to engage in discourse are—in the end—received
with great compassion. Because of this many of the texts in Trouble
with the Machine are deceptively tragic. The machine becomes more
than System or Post-Modern metaphor but the organic machine of
the human heart.
This deceptive emotional engagement is a product of prose. As
true prose sentences, sound and musicality do not mark these
texts. They are—for the most part—consciously resistant
to the surface devices of poetry—alliteration, assonance,
and rhyme are nearly absent. They are also oddly more functional
in tone than much of the prose poetry currently being written
in the states. A near comparison might be some of the essayistic
prose poems of West Coast writer Morton Marcus. But Marcus is
more the direct communicator whose prose resides close to conversational
speech, while Kennedy is more the surrealist, constructing contrasts
between action in the text and flat noun-verb, noun-verb syntax.
Take for example the haunting “The Hundred-Odd Terrors
of a Mature Life” quoted here in its entirety:
I have difficulty telling time. Yesterday, the little hand was
on the two, and the big hand was on the floor. The noise
outside could be the wind or a knife slicing across an
Adam’s apple. I’m going to have the furnace fixed
next
week and ask the repairman to investigate the carrion
smell in the wall. Sometimes a bird dies and rots, leaving a
cage of hollow bones. In the meantime, when I look in the
bathroom mirror, a face reflects back to me so much like
my own, I almost say goodbye.
It is this almost goodbye, this almost final
speech act, where one begins to understand the absurd world of
these texts, perhaps
closer to Samuel Becket by ideological impulse (though not linguistic
exploration). It is Being and the difficulties of ontological presence
and the irony of human social relations which are at the core of
Kennedy’s small prose containers. These are speakers for
whom social engagements and the Other—that body not his own—is
distant and untouchable, for even the ability to live in one’s
own body—to simply live is a deep struggle. Words like “person,” “human,” birth
words like “born,” “fetal,” and the presence
of a dominant “I” populate these texts. God or some
version of God can be found in seven near sequential pieces with
such titles as “The Gods of Indeterminacy” and” God
is a Frail Chain-Smoking Woman.” For Kennedy’s argument
is an argument with a seemingly random and absurd universe. His
God is not New Testament but Old Testament with a black and sardonic
humor. But it is the speaker—not God—who often has
the last laugh, who finds under the covers his “Christ penis,
Buddha penis, penis of what one desires”(The Early Worm).
Whereas many of the traditional surface techniques
of poetry are absent from these texts, one technique that has
become minor in
much of contemporary poetry can be found here: the pun. These texts
are littered with wordplay. Along with this is the deep use of
metaphor and image, often with the metaphor constructed in the
object position: “I spent all afternoon shoveling yesterdays
into the fire” (Across the Calm Blue Lake). In “Doubting
Thomas Syndrome” Kennedy utilizes these techniques to great
effect. The text begins, “I brought my wounds to the party
and introduced them to the other guests.” The poem proceeds
to become a hilarious and painful send-up of over-sharing—how
many of us have been the one or been cornered by someone at a party
who reveals just a bit too much, whose insecurity leads them to “pick
a fight”—all those uncontrollable wounds. The text
ends with the great word play:
During the drive home, I said, for the last
time, I wouldn’t
be bringing any wounds with me to anymore parties. There was
some giggling in the backseat. I mean it, I said to no wound
in particular.
But Kennedy is not simply an ironicist obsessed
with social critique. Irony, as too many young poets these days
do not realize, it not
enough. What enriches his ontological argument and offers the reader
so much more than irony is his obsession with the beautiful. These
texts are traversed with exquisite metaphorical, minimal moments,
such as in the deceptively heartbreaking “Gongoozler”:
I was the idle spectator, the purveyor of trees and latitudes.
There was no consequence. I was simply there, like a telephone
pole. There were wires and invisible voices; there were people
walking as if they knew where they were headed, wearing t-shirts
that said something. I just folded into myself like origami. No
one could guess what animal I was supposed to be.
What a beautiful and near cruel retreat from
the social world. But it is not just human interaction that these
speakers have trouble
with, it is language itself. Those “t-shirts that said something.” And
it is for this reason that the reader can begin to understand the
elusive nature of these texts and their unwillingness to reduce
to paraphrasable structures, instead relying—for the most
part and to varying degrees—on the tools of the prose poem
to defy the prose container, but at times even eschewing those—parable,
parody, aphorism, and the surreal leap—for something near
essayistic, something wholly new, a kind of absurdism where “The
ceiling felt like the sidewalk. I appeared to be hovering about
it in the perverse sky of my last coherent thought” (Waiting
for the Lawnmower). It is this “Cartoon Logic” that
eschews the fear of the crushing world by reinventing it, as in—perhaps—the
book’s ars poetica:
To wake up content with dreaming as the room floats
like a square balloon or a really light and festive anvil.
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