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The Biography of Broken Things
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Mitki/Mitki Press ($10)
These days, stream of consciousness seems like a rather passé relic
of early Modernism. However, this isn’t necessarily the case
if the language and images are energized, poignant, and vital.
This is precisely what you will find when you read Sean Thomas
Dougherty’s new work, The Biography of Broken Things, which
is a quasi-stream of consciousness collection of vignettes that
spill into each other, fragment, and then explode into numerous
but distinct polymorphous constructions. I use the general label, ‘work,’ because
this book defies genre categories; it is prose poetry, fiction,
biography, autobiography, cultural criticism and philosophy. Dougherty’s
range is immense, and his subject matter ranges from urban street
life to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment to surrealist
poet Caesar Vallejo to “a signifying snake crisscrossed with
John Coltrane and Saint Van Gogh” (41).
The author’s language is as natural tackling metaphysical dilemmas of
identity as it is describing a street corner in the Bronx. In one instance,
you find yourself sliding through intense and vivid details, and the next,
confronted with racial politics. The language is charged with an intense momentum
and explosive energy that is full of alliteration, internal rhyme, and assonance—all
devices that are part of Dougherty’s pallet as a performance poet, and
which we now see working equally as well on the printed page:
I recall that whole car mural I saw earlier in the evening painted
by some brash boy with a backwards baseball cap, unsung Diego Rivera
from the Bronx, riding the trains of paint over the Island to Spanish
Harlem, those shimmering lights, those hours between Michaelangelo
(sic) and Basquiat, between Brahms and Boogie Down, the ground
shakes before the silence of people passing (32-33)
Imagistic urban detail fills the pages of this unique biography.
However, it is not simply a romp through quotidian reality and
human experience, but, rather, it is a textured and multi-faceted
work that often foregrounds language and process. At times, the
narrator seems surprised by being ‘thrown into’ a reality
that is manipulated by and through language and history:
. . . only hemlocked Socrates is smoked by the flash fire choked
histories . . . the speaker called Being and art are as closely
bound on a page about to become, begun unraveling the form
like a fine sweat, reminding us the diferance’, a world
of things so lovely somewhere between childhood and addiction
I thought I
was working the entire orchestra of winter (40)
The form and structure of Biography of Broken Things follows its
content; it is broken, fragmented and disjointed, but entirely
compelling. Moreover, Dougherty’s text is hopeful and elegant,
which is convincing and surprisingly effective:
. . . the persistence of living, a persistence of broken strings,
a sort of almost silenced song meaning for some things there is
a music beyond even music, beyond even musing, for some things
sing without saying so, as when the city bus heaves and my son
laughs and throws his hands in the air, as when he danced in a
circle the first day it snowed. (56)
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