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Turneresque
Elizabeth Willis
Burning Deck ($10.00)
In Turneresque, Elizabeth Willis explores permanence in motion,
the
differences between a frozen and internalized moment captured in
a painting, and the motion of film. Each ‘still’ creates
the illusion of a seamlessly whole work or story, and, subsequently,
a seemingly trustworthy physical universe. The ‘Turner’ in
the title is a result of two intertwining explorations: the work
of 19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner and a social critique involving
media magnate Ted Turner. The discourses and aesthetics seem to
collide, synchronically and diachronically, challenging the reader
to question how and why our cultural ‘momentum’—our
choices—have taken us to these different and often disturbing
polarities. At the same time, the speaker of the poems invites
the reader to "rise above your life" and to test the
self and its surroundings.
However, the reader is not left to his or her own devices in this
exploration as Willis unfolds the process through a study of representation,
and shows, with a generous acuteness, that our points of reference,
though unstable, provide the foundation necessary to rise to the
challenge of explaining our surroundings. The trajectory of the
book reinstates the impossible arc of an object being let go, its
curve created by the tension between something being pushed down
as it is simultaneously raised. The book seems to ask, “do
things happen to us or do we make things happen?” For example,
she writes:
Without an arch
triumph is a fantasy
of daily warfare
lunging into nightly airs
Iron can’t protect
a feeble word, I’m
less confident
than butter The Blind
limits of a ragged
suggestion: to follow
like an Astor, to belong
to dirt, like a question.
These moments, of ‘belonging to dirt, like a question,’ must
be what she means by, “I was fluent in salamander” which
she writes earlier in the same section— i.e. her language
is wonderfully slippery, like a salamander, and forces us to reexamine
how confident we really are moving about in the world, this experience,
this ‘self.’
The poems throughout the collection are simultaneously sumptuous
and spare – admittedly a strange combination, but one that
is as alluring as it is exact. This might have to do with her exploration,
infatuation, and, ultimately, trepidation regarding notions of
the sublime. In the opening poem, Autographeme, she writes:
The present was a relic
of a past I was older than
Taking its language, I became an abridgement
of whatever I contained
A social imperative of silky fears . . .
Others formed an invisible order
felt in every part
Willis explores, manipulates and, often, rescues language from
the ‘invisible order’ – a nod to Jacques Lacan
perhaps, or, more likely, a critique of the largely male-centered,
logocentric social constructions and ‘autographemes’ that
consciously or unconsciously determine our reality. She forces
us, as readers, to confront and question “the poem scratching
its ring against the roof, stalled out in its own country.”
Despite the tension between what we do and what is done to us,
and all the blurry possibilities that this entails, Willis celebrates
personal effort—a sort of Foucauldian self-fashioning with
a paint brush in one hand and a movie camera in the other—throughout
the text, showing that a universe which seems separate and in constant
movement away from us provides another window through which to
observe. Willis's language reflects this effort; the leaps between
images are necessarily daring: "like the arches of a brick
heart, letting go." But, not to be misunderstood, the apparently
disjunctive and abstract images are held firmly within the poem
by the momentum between each line, each image held to the page
and firmly planted within the poem much like centripetal force
will hold water inside a spinning bucket. For example, in the final
section titled, Drive, she writes:
Felt things last longer than seen things, says who, drawing
out forks of fire, who walking by, tied for departure, packaged
into
powder. Fled ecstasy as a response like “brilliant” can
mean anything. Everything appears to shine given enough darkness.
Crushed into brilliance, the bright ball, dished. Write your poem
in the space above, erasing what is beneath it. Paper covers rock.
Listen. It’s tough, hearts get crushed by metal these days,
no matter what.
Willis is interested in the poem’s textuality and language,
but she is not afraid to suggest—and really mean—that ‘hearts
get crushed’ or that ‘triumph is an illusion.’ Irony
and sincerity are odd bedfellows, but in a Willis poem the oddity
must be dark enough to make both shine through with amazing and
effective clarity. Interestingly, this section opens with an epigraph
by Liliane and Cyril Welch: “Not a cathedral but rather a
railway or one’s private automobile ‘locates’ human
concern and effort: the conveyance which contains intrinsically
no reference . . .” Drive is the referenceless conveyance
as well as our actual ‘drives’ and desires. ‘What
drives us?’ asks Willis, and how can we be expected to make
sense within a vehicle (and tenor) that is built to move?
Turneresque is primarily about this momentum, exploring the energy
necessary "to make or love anything" while simultaneously
pairing the drive toward human growth with the laws of the natural
world – its gravity and perpetual turning. This is a brave
and generous work, deftly attuned to the dirt, air, sea and light
of the world and sharply aware of its own cultural make-up. That
the “I” of the poems is an "abridgement" of
cultural influences never interferes with the intensity of the
speaker's experience of living in a physical world:
What unknown slippered thing of x is thou
a dirty engine shooting out the star
a decoy aurora’d in fig
I myself
in plain flesh, answer
The soul’s a fine thing
less than feathers
free to glitter
in no-light night
a petticoat of sand
the mind’s a hinge
a roughly chestnut arsenal
a little box of nothing
an incidental rose
What exists in-between you and me, I and thou, sign and signifier,
tenor and vehicle, slides and crashes into the figurative. The
fourth section, Elegy, begins as a drive “from realism to
impressionism,” and then beyond; knowledge, the past, memory,
the unknown, understanding, and the sublime are elegized. Although
loss and absence are part of the momentum that pulls at human
experience, there is always possibility and potential, and splashes
of hope
and humor that fill these pages. The poems are illuminated not
only by the thing exhaled into being, but, also, by the responding
inhalation of wonder that there are things and things that move
and live and grow.
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