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Centuries
Joel Brouwer
Four Way Books 2003 ($14.95)
It is a strange fact that prose poetry, in eschewing traditional
verse forms, often inspires more debate on form than ‘poetry’ does.
Joel Brouwer’s Centuries steps directly into this paradox
by claiming for itself the freedom of prose and the constriction
of a unique (almost Oulipian) poetic form; that is, every poem
in this collection is exactly one hundred words.
The constraint Brouwer has placed on himself is an exact one. Within
such strict bounds, there are two poles the writer might strive
toward: a mathematical compliance
to the container, a precise gilding of the box one is contained within; or, a
wild flying against those constraints via an expansive minstreling that allows
the box to exist well beyond its bounds. The greatest feat would be some combination
of these two poles, wherein the reader is launched out of, and then landed perfectly
back upon, one hundred words, a ‘space-shot,’ which acknowledges
its intrinsic limitations by the very act of defying them. However you cut it,
this form relies heavily on the textual surface of language to inspire and provoke
the pure powers of imagination.
Lyn Hejinian writes in The Language of Inquiry that she has pursued
the ‘sentence’ for
something
that was maximally enjambed, because I felt things to be under
the pressure of abutment, contingency, and contiguity and hence
constantly susceptible to
change. One had to think quickly if one were to catch the ideas—the relationships—between
things, and prose generally has greater velocity than poetry.
[It is an] aphoristic mode—a mode of complete but heterogeneous thoughts.
Various statements may seem succinct. Perhaps they are the result of compression,
as if all the parts of a syllogism were condensed into a single excessive
logical moment, but one with explosive properties. The language is also
elliptical, inhabiting gaps but exhibiting gaps within itself also.1
We sometimes hear the complaint that young poets’ work “might
as well be prose poems.” Good, I say, if this indicates a
contemporary tendency toward maximum enjambment, abutment, contingency,
contiguity, aphorism, syllogism, and ellipticism. Brouwer, certainly,
puts these tools to use.
His sentences are, actually, too elliptical to remain aphorisms—“A
bird’s nest warns that desire obeys only itself” – but their
aphoristic tendencies accumulate into what we might call fables:
A bird’s nest warns that desire obeys only itself. Twine
says shame. You love her, but you love yourself more? Wrap a
magnet in newspaper. Abalone
means We must resign ourselves to fate; paintbrushes There
is much I cannot understand. Cotton is astonishment. And if you know you must speak, but
not how or where to begin? Amaryllis.
This piece becomes a fable of starting to say, a fable of recreating
a language in which objects like magnets, abalone, and cotton become
more than simply signs for some ‘thing’ in reality,
but expand to mean something outside the simply referential. The
sounds he hauls into each poem to translate language—into
language—gather strength in almost every piece in the collection.
Brouwer’s ear for musicality in language is wonderful (and
not responsible for counting words): “When everything else
has drifted to sleep, the recluse and his penis sip brandy and
reminisce.” Meaning slips through the cracks in the ‘centuries’ and
the sounds that seem almost to precede meaning.
Of Brouwer’s poetic skill, Andrei Codrescu blurbs that it
can “work as missiles, pastries, or treasure chests.” Missiles
would never be so contained, ‘pastries’ is just Codrescu
NPR-talk—but treasure chests we do have. Brouwer is musical
and imaginative. We look into these wrought and sized boxes to
see worthy, and sometimes priceless, treasures—but shut the
lids, shake them up, reopen them and you’ll have the same
worthy stuff. One discerns no inherent concern for the construction
inside the box, which often amounts to wonderful disjunction and
logical disorder. Brouwer builds his tension from tone and in ideas.
Application, an epistolary piece, stands alone in working with
itself by ending necessarily at word one-hundred with “Respectfully,”—restricted
from signing itself, and, therefore, forced to acknowledge its
own construction.
More often, however, one is not left with a sense of what might
have been left out (or even stretched to). Take the second sentence
of Wedding:
My mother will come back in the end.
Which leads us to the last sentence:
My mother.
What occurs on the way, however, is unrelated. Here is the next
to last sentence:
I chopped out my mouth but nights I still hear
it, down at the dump telling stories
to the eggshells.
The poem makes a promise and then keeps it. The promise is to
arrive, but how and why remains a welcome uncertainty.
Of course, the elliptical structure does require certain gaps.
In prose fiction, these leaps have a certain responsibility to
the next sentence; in poetry, the line allows this for more freedom,
while providing many possible landing-spots down the page. Hejinian
writes that both
lines and sentences make a demand for other lines
or sentences, linkages, but they do so in different ways and
according to
different syntactic and logical operations. Sentences may
incorporate articulation
of this kind within themselves, whereas principle articulation
occurs between lines rather than inside them. Meanwhile,
the conceptual space between sentences is greater than that between
lines, so
that the effort to achieve linkage between sentences may
have
to be greater.2
Brouwer’s leaps across conceptual space are sometimes only
that—leaps into nowhere, without linkage. This seems to be
the greatest danger in writing prose poems: a form that refuses
the landing place of lines while freeing itself from the stricter
responsibilities to sentence relationships. Dean Young is a poet
who comes to mind (and a poet who, some say, is actually writing
prose poems) for making ridiculous leaps that always manage to
land with stunning acuity and a relevant bizarreness. Brouwer,
at times, succumbs to the thrill of the leap alone, as in the poem,
Demonstration:
A man was dancing with a flag, a woman was screaming at a flag,
the flags were introduced, hit it off, walked off together holding
hands. The man and woman shrugged and caught a cab.
Brouwer—whose other work I’ve come across has been
in verse and has exhibited wonderfully realized imagination—is,
at times, forced to introduce and dispense with entire concepts
and characters. This ‘leaving off,’ however, is again
a welcome indeterminacy, albeit a haunting one, as he suggests
himself at the end of the poem: “And later we slept in the
sheets we’d waved at the cameras, our convictions flaking
off in brittle red splinters.”
Under such compressed circumstances, any disconnect is no small
matter. The ‘condensed syllogism’ of a sentence and
the ‘conceptual space’ between sentences are far from
contradictory. The syllogism (A=B=C; A=C), when complete, makes
the elliptical leap from A to C, leaving out B. No matter that
the conceptual space between sentences may exist primarily because
of the endstops of period and capital letter, or because of our
expository educations—if the syllogisms do not work, they
will not survive their compression intact and in-line. Across a
distance of conceptual space, the prose reader’s eye may
allow for some sloppy imagination, confident it may be explained
later—the poetry reader, however, is reading with Hejinian’s
velocity (imagine the mental equivalent of squinting at an abstract
painting) and hearing the problems. This is doubly true when the
100th word is always in sight.
But these speed bumps need not be ‘problems’— they
are, in fact, the tensions available for the prose poet to exploit.
Their enactment is key to the effect of the work, as Gertrude Stein
has suggested:
Prose is the balance the emotional balance that
makes the reality of paragraphs and the unemotional balance that
makes the reality
of sentences and having realized completely realized that sentences
are not emotional while paragraphs are, prose can be the essential
balance that is made inside something that combines the sentence
and the paragraph.3
Hejinian writes similarly that “[b]ecause whatever is going
to happen with sentences does so inside them, sentences offer possibilities
for enormous interior complexity at numerous contextual levels.”
Thus we arrive at a representative sentence from Brouwer, the opening
of Ignorance: “The authors you haven’t read are cooking
over campfires in your back yard.” Grammatically and syntactically,
this is no different than writing: “The leaves you haven’t
raked are sitting on grass in your backyard.” The difference
being that Brouwer’s choices are maybe wild and kooky—and
a semantic disruption—which suggests that the one place where “enormous
interior complexity at numerous contextual levels” may exist
is between the ‘leaves’ and the ‘authors’ in
your backyard. It is immediately clear from Brouwer’s writing
that he is intelligent, well read, and certainly self-conscious
about every impulse and gesture. And, if his complexity is between
what we would consider ‘normal’ and ‘quirky,’ then
the reader may be overcome with the desire to read these pieces
as extended metaphors. For example, in the same poem, Ignorance,
he follows the line quoted about with this: “They’ve
pitched tents and dug a well.” This does not add interior
complexity to the previous sentence, but it does add detail to
what is already established—authors in your backyard (not
leaves), the personification of unread texts—and, ultimately,
an extended metaphor for your own ignorance. The self-recrimination
is exercised for a total of 100 words – a “century” in
language.
The fable, in Brouwer’s hands, becomes a sort of three-dimensional
metaphor, a treasure chest, indeed, that can explain the subtler
or rococo possibilities of the cardboard box. We know that it’s
a cardboard box or ‘ignorance’ because the title of
every poem tells us so. That is, the titles explicitly indicate
the actual topic – sometimes ironically, but more often not.
Some readers may enjoy being told what they are about to read about—I
find it an unfortunately limiting force against the work’s
potential. Brouwer’s more expansive passages and language
can exhibit wonderful unfoldings—but “Sorry,” the
titles say, “that is an incorrect reading.” In the
end, some poems produce the feeling of having read an exercise
journal—of a fluid writer with a gifted ear—but exercises
nonetheless. This isn’t necessarily a complaint. Who is not
fascinated and educated by the exercises of a talented writer?
We find excellent things, like the poem Michigan:
Smoke a pack of Kools in the dunes. Then he’ll push your
hand down his swimsuit. Hold the damp cold there. Smell alewives.
Then he’ll do you, and that’s it. Back to the campground.
No talking. Coppertone, hamburgers, Frisbee. Suggest a walk on
the pier to see if the fish are biting, though you couldn’t
care less. Too small, son. We’re throwing them back. Good
soldier-talk to remember for later, when someone’s older
brother wants payback for the rum and the storm’s chasing
boats to harbor like a dog after rabbits. Fish biting, kid? Too
small. They’re throwing them back.
Michigan shows what Brouwer is capable of in the best of this
collection: a cinematic crispness and visual indirection, an acute
eye for American scene-ism, and ‘quicksand’ shifts
of voice and authority. We get the distinct and disconcerting impression
of so much crucial detail forced out: leaving the dysfunction that
thrives in and demands silence, also demands that the fable stop
at 100 words—or else—now go to your room. And not another
word out of you.
Notes:
1: “A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking,” in
The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2000.
2: “Line,” in The Language of
Inquiry.
3: “Poetry and Grammar,” in Gertrude Stein:
Writings 1932-1946.
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