Norman Fischer
Notes on the Poetry of Donna de la Perrière
I don’t necessarily recommend that you do what I’ve been doing intensely for the last many days (and less intensely for weeks before that): immerse yourself in Donna de la Perrière’s three intense books of poetry, True Crime, Saint Erasure, and Works of Love & Terror. The titles say it all — de la Perrière’s work evokes dark and deep pain. It deals with the impossibility of being alive in the world among others, the grief, the struggle, the confusion; the terrible things that happen to people no matter what they do, the terrible things they do to others. It’s telling that each of the three relatively short volumes is preceded by an “in memory of” section that you might not notice if you weren’t looking for it. And that each such section includes not just one or two but a long list of names, including de la Perrièr's parents, and many close friends and other relations. Here’s a poet who’s paid attention to the losses in her life, confronted them, embraced them, and whose work, it seems to me, is written from inside those losses, as if the impossibility of losing someone close, which has a way of shattering your point of view, is the energy out of which the works are written — and accounts for the aura of haunt that pervades; as if voices from outside this world were speaking into and through the poems.
De la Perrière, living now in Oakland, was born and raised in the the Deep South, Georgia, and her work is colored by that formation through and through. Her first book, True Crime has a distinctly Southern Gothic flavor, you can almost hear the kudzu vines growing (there are famous for growing at an alarming rate), smothering the trees all the way up to the top, creeping at superspeed over the ground, tropical plantlife run amok. I’ve barely been in the American South and haven’t read a lot of its literature so can only guess at the tradition behind the feeling conveyed here, creepy, frightening, inbred, secret, and at the same time absolutely normal. All this out of control catastrophe? It’s just what happens around here. The murder of a grandfather or brother, the suicide of a friend — normal. And the heart goes out to these folks who are desperately trying and failing to cope in the face of the wave of darkness embedded in the bloodied historical landscape. (De la Perrière seems not to directly mention the racial past of the South, but that past’s pain and contradiction seems everywhere evident). These poems have earned their weight; they don’t satirize or aestheticize, rather the reverse: they use the poem’s form as a coping mechanism, a way to face what’s happened and express it, yes, with deadpan horror maybe, with shock that this is us, this is what happens to us, but at the same time with a sense of redemption — because the words are after all on the page, the book is in your hands, and the words signify, touching you in the honest tender places, causing you to stand back and wonder at the extent to which you don’t know of such things, can’t see them, can’t face them, even though (it suddenly will dawn on you, especially in our cultural moment) they are all around you everywhere you look.
Beyond this I don’t want to make any effort to define or analyze this great corpus of work. This is why I’ve called this piece “notes.” In what followed I’ll quote phrases, lines, and in some cases whole poems that speak for themselves, adding only my notes of inquiry or appreciation.
—-
True Crime has a lot of actual crime in it. It opens with a literal corpse at the center of what seems to be a murder scene (in a poem called, provocatively, “The Great and Secret Show”):
the body has been remade
as the center point on a graph
pinning it exactly
to this place, at this hour
someone asks for a magnifying glass
someone removes the body’s jewelry……
(….plain straightforward description, as in many of the poems in the volume, stubbornly representational, as if short hard-boiled fiction, but in many others here and especially in subsequent volumes, a stunningly lyric voice sometimes, sometimes swelling rhetorical repetition, nearly biblical, sometimes lines so laconic you can hear the spaces between the words banging together….)
… and closes with a long prose poem suite called “Return to the Scene” which includes murder, suicide, accidental death, humiliation, insanity, an abortion (punctuated by taunts from a vicious anti-abortion person who rams a shopping cart into the heels of the woman going into the abortion facility as she walks across a shopping mall parking lot), a heart attack (“just the heart’s normal violence”), and a possum or a squirrel trapped inside the walls.
In between, many poems painting a portrait of the South at night, or maybe what I mean is a portrait of the Southern half of the soul, the hot sticky overgrown part at the bottom of the map, the smudgy dark splotch down there into which everything not nailed down tumbles.
Words from “House: The History of Us All:”
In the place where you live the sky is white…vines cover trees, phone poles, deserted houses…,Your mother, as a girl, lived across the road
from ghosts. Your grandmother saved garbage/ Drew crosses over the walls of the house….grandmother dies, the uncle lives alone in the
house…. Something about narcotics…… the hill is overgrown, the uncle keeps pacing… Even in winter the heat is weighty, visceral…It
takes forever to believe that the dead are friendly….
Gospel (whole poem):
My mother grew up in a Georgia town.
Her father was a lawyer who was murdered in the town
square while driving home one afternoon.
The man who killed him was married to a rich girl.
The man had been burning cars in a warehouse
then collecting the insurance money.
The case never went to trial.
My mother’s house was sold.
It was falling in on itself, too big, too expensive to repair.
Several times in college I tried to call my grandfather’s murderer.
Usually at night.
I just wanted to hear his voice.
I just wanted to tell him I hoped he burned in hell.
Everyone in my family is dead.
Sometimes I think our lives have amounted to one
long lesson in crisis behavior.
Everyone lost everything.
It was exactly that simple.
I once had a friend from Georgia who as a teenager had witnessed a murder, had testified at the trial, and was the person mainly responsible for the murderer’s being put away for a long time — but not long enough. My friend, though living now under an assumed name, on the other end of the country, waited every day for the release of this murderer, who she was sure would track her down and come for her the moment he was out. Is Georgia a place where murders happen more than elsewhere? Where (white) murderers who don’t get convicted, or even brought to trial, because their wives are rich are living in the neighborhood, and you can call them at night, to tell them how you feel? And is all this more or less typical of the human condition, that is, when you don’t paper it over with soccer games, garden parties, fancy educations and lots of political and cultural concerns, and is it all, maybe, a necessary way station along the rocky path toward redemption, which has to go through suffering, through the soul’s darkness. Is all this darkness and mayhem the good news, the gospel?
--
Saint Erasure takes up where True Crime leaves off. It’s as if the events described in the earlier book were here internalized, digested, nearly universalized, transformed by the very means of poetry and a life lived inside poetry into something less concrete, less subject to narrative procedures, and turns out to rhyme significantly with echoing historical cases of these same passions and missteps as they intersect with religious tropes. In Saint Erasure religious passion and insanity merge (as they often do): the text references Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon (about clinical depression); Michel de Certeau’s The Possession at Loudon, about the events surrounded the alleged demonic possession of seventeen nuns in a French convent in the 1630’s; and Madeline Le Bouc’s story, as recounted by the neurologist Pierre Janet. For twenty years, beginning in 1896, Janet treated a woman who gave her name as “Scapegoat” (le bouc emissaire) because, she said, she had to atone for the sins of the world. Constantly awaiting the moment she would be ascending to heaven, she walked continuously on tiptoes.
In these poems as far as I can tell there’s a sense of the physical as being erased by, or constantly threatened to be erased by, the totality of being, the unbounded, undivided — life overwhelming life — the sense that the mind’s being broken by and driven mad by the fragmentation that inheres in a physical life on earth, that longs to be healed by and at the same time destroyed by belief, religious faith, that covers everything with a totality that comforts at the same time it destroys (comforts because it destroys). The book’s three suites of poems are preceded by a strange and haunting lyric that frames the entire text— setting forth this theme without clear exposition, only suggestion, feeling. The poem's particular sort of obliqueness reminds me of Celan, Mandelstam, maybe Rilke, a metaphorical mechanics of the spirit. The poem’s title, “The Book of Lost Vessels” could easily have been the title of the whole volume.
The Book of Lost Vessels
having by now
having forgotten
…oddly fragmented… is it “having by now forgotten” with the repetition of “having” to begin second line a demonstration of the forgetting that is so thorough you’ve forgotten you’ve already said “having” in the first line? Or is the “now” of the first line a completely different situation from the “forgotten” of the second, so that there’s the immediacy of “now” which is what we’re ever only living, and the “forgotten” which is what every now immediately becomes?
what she had come for
the white beaches
the high bluff
…or is this what she had forgotten — what she had come for — and did she come for the white beaches and the high bluff? Which suggest what to us? A kind of sublimely beyond-human atmosphere (not flowers in a vase, a rose garden etc). So we forget this, or in the moment of our living forget it— the vast landscape — all of earth and cosmos — in which our living’s contained?
having forgotten (momentarily)
the otherwise undivided
…and if forgetting is of the nature of now, of every moment (we are constantly momentarily, forgetting — which is our experience of time) then is the white beaches, the high bluff, forgotten even as it’s experienced? And in the living it as a forgetting is it divided then, as it otherwise might not have been, isn’t, it’s in fact undivided, these beaches and the bluff (“bluff”— is there also a pun here, suggesting we are being fooled by all this?) — and that’s what’s forgotten, the undividedness of it, that she can’t but forget, masks the longed-for undivideness that can’t but be unavailable in a physical world that’s always painfully fragmented?
as if there never had been
ship (otherwise heralded)
desertion as possibility
(otherwise forsaken)
…suddenly a ship, which, what?, sails along time’s ocean-paths — or what? Where does this ship come from out of nowhere? — but maybe there never had been a ship (“as if” — so maybe not — but “as if there never had been a ship” so there is a ship but there might not have been?). And what is “otherwise heralded” doing here— which clearly rhymes with “otherwise divided”? And herald is such an unusual word, meaning one who announces something, a messenger, almost has sense of “angel” as in “hark the herald angels sing;” angels are messengers, as Rilke’s angels. But the ship isn’t a herald it is “heralded” which means what? It’s announced, its existence is itself an announcement? An annunciation, as in “The Annunciation” — and we are born, as if we physical beings are doomed to fall and rise again… to be eventually redeemed, our flesh redeemed somehow by a Redeemer?? And if there’s a ship there’s the possibility of “desertion” of jumping ship— if a ship you can desert the ship, flee life, time, being, flesh, you can be murdered, kill yourself, destroyed one way or another… otherwise (the word again coming back echoing "otherwise divided” “otherwise heralded”) — if you don’t desert — you’re going to be forsaken, which happens when you are alive, you’re forsaken by everyone you ever knew, by your own body, by time, by life, because nothing lasts, nothing holds up? (And here I’m wondering if any of this makes even the slightest sense to Donna, who had something else in mind or perhaps had nothing in mind the poem just came to her, compelled her to write it?)
as if the broken the boundried
came somehow instead
to be pulse curve of wrist
neck to shoulder belief
…here again as in fourth and seventh lines above a funny extra space or two between words in the line, a mini-caesura but not for sound, rather for sense, a gap in the flow of the meaning, though the meaning’s not at all certain. Again “as if” — a very undetermined state of affairs — the broken and boundried (in which I can’t help but hear “bone dried”), which certainly seems the opposite of the undivided, the whole, the perfect, the peaceful, the not painful, divided, fragmented, shattered —- it came to be pulse, that is, not something, not flesh per se, a body, a person, a piece of the physical, but pulse, movement, maybe like water pulses under pressure, blood certainly pulses — and flows, like the sea, which pulses, as waves, over which ships sail — this pulse translated into, becomes, flesh, becomes wrist, a line, a curve of wrist, and another line, another fleshly curve, from neck to shoulder, then — whiplash! — belief! Belief. How belief? Belief and pulse and curve of a line of flesh, this is what illuminates us, animates us? Saves us — tragically maybe — from being mere stuff? But then:
having fallen asleep
had awakened to find
empty beaches the pulse the
begotten remains…
… nice rhyme with “belief” and “sleep” which then wakes up, I guess, the pulse of life being generated by the divided and broken world— our very messed up and tragic being as we are is anyway the pulse of life that gives us faith again, wakes up our belief that the world’s madness has put to sleep, and, awakened we find, what? — the very beaches the speaker had come for at the outset of the poem, but now they are empty beaches (before they were white beaches, bluffs), which seems both disturbing (“empty” being generally not a happy word, it’s “deserted beaches”; but, on the other hand, it’s sweet to have the beach all to yourself) — to find such beaches and also "the pulse, the begotten remains,” as in, say “only begotten son” which is Jesus, as human, as flesh, which thought goes along with the awakening of belief….
…. having
forgotten having forsaken
was thrown far
into the sky
…. so yes maybe we are onto something: “forsaken” appears again as earlier in the poem, when it was mentioned in same breath as “desertion” —begotten, forsaken, and forgotten, as Jesus was, abandoned there finally and thrown into the sky, as we all are in the end, buried in the earth, going up in smoke in the sky… where (as in final lines below, we rest, exactly in our fall from— from what? — and in falling return — in this fleeting moment, — this pulsing moment — home. Which is where, we can imagine, the three suites of poems to follow in this book, will lead us.
and came to rest (in the fall from)
the returning now
home
Here’s the poem without my interruptions:
The Book of Lost Vessels
having by now
having forgotten
what she had come for
the white beaches
the high bluff
having forgotten (momentarily)
the otherwise undivided
as if there never had been
ship (otherwise heralded)
desertion as possibility
(otherwise forsaken)
as if the broken the boundried
came somehow instead
to be pulse curve of wrist
neck to shoulder belief
having fallen asleep
had awakened to find
empty beaches the pulse the
begotten remains having
forgotten having forsaken
was thrown far
into the sky
and came to rest (in the fall from)
the returning now
home
The opening poem in the first suite of poems (the suites are numbered, untitled) is called “The High Note”; it seems at first to describe a literal persistent nagging disturbing high note, like “an organ key that /cannot get unstuck” which is also a tapping, a clicking, like “little nails outside/the pane.” And also a “horizon that shades/off into yet a further/horizon”. Or “a tantrum. A running/in circles.” Whatever this is, sound, visual, an inner pressure, something insistent, unpleasant, constant, whatever it is it seems to describe a metaphysical or spiritual condition described here in a very quiet poem, consisting of couplets and short lines of a word or a few words each, so that you get lost in it, as the poem slowly turns, opening out to its conclusion:
the flat crack of
rock falling
on rock down
a slow pocked hill
Which seems somehow, despite the hardness of the “k”s, calm, maybe even pastoral, (maybe it’s the word “slow” here, you see the rock as if from a distance slowly silently falling?)— so that the form and sound of the poem undercuts or subverts its meaning. (Here a note about de la Perrière’s use of small, rather than capital, letters to begin lines, not, of course an unusual practice, though one I usually don’t follow, preferring to capitalize my first lines. Capitalizing, you draw attention to the formality of the line, not capitalizing creates more a sense of naturally speaking, talking. That way the poem flows more easily line to line. This flow, as in this poem, tends to merge lines together into a smoother discourse, so that you flow along with the lines in reading, though in the case of these poems you don’t necessarily know where you are or, at the end, where you have been— anyway this is the impression de la Perrière’s work leaves in me — a sense of derangement).
The fourth poem in this six poem sequence is “The Glass Delusion” which is the poem (as I mention above) based on Andrew Solomon’s book about depression The Noonday Demon, which apparently references women who believed they had glass buttocks and so were frightened to sit down anywhere, lest they break. People suffering from depression or other mental disorders might be frightened in a similar manner by ordinary everyday things (but why isn’t anyone terrified, for instance, any time to enter a room lurking behind a closed door: who can know what’s on the other side? The only reason entering a room, say, in our own house, doesn’t terrify us normally is that we delude ourselves in believing we know what’s on the other side; we require familiarity to cut through the paranoia we would otherwise constantly feel if we experienced the actual reality that we never know what will happen next or how long time goes on). The poem ends:
One woman thought she was a shellfish;
another believed she was all cork, light
as air, she said, and terrified of the ceiling.
Another thought her head so heavy
that it might fall from off her shoulders, and
whenever she sought to speak, swore
she felt a darkness tightening in her throat
(Since this poem works on a sentence basis, with periods at the end and capital letters at the beginning of each sentence, the lack of a period at the end of the poem is thunderous: this condition goes on forever!)
The second suite of poems includes a long sequence called “Occupational Marks and Other Signs” written as a response, an endnote tells us, to Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” While I haven’t re-read that long poem for these notes, my impression is that Rilke’s angels and spiritual speculations live fully in his head, leaving the physical world far behind. De la Perrière’s sequence struggles with the presence of angels, they’re around, but the physical world intrudes too stringently, pulling you back. “This question: what is body. And your eyes/can hardly make out the way it shades/off into the other thing. Something glows.” Or perhaps you’re out running errands or getting coffee when this thing appears, seemingly, in the vicinity, and you consider “crossing yourself or screaming” unless instead you just fly off into the air. Writing about stuff like this seems reasonable enough — to imagine such things. But somehow the words suggest more urgency than that: de la Perriere is not imagining this, she is living it so viscerally in this poem (these poems) that it’s a bit unsettling:
how to breathe a conscious decision:
pulling air in out in what this feels
like what interferes with it in
time and whether your heart is coming
through the wall of your chest and whether
you can think except for things that are so
close in closed off that they are barely
thought at all barely there…
… note here the insistent driving rhetorical passion created by the repetition of “how” “what” “what” “whether” “whether” “close in” “closed off” “barely” “barely.” The urgency mesmerizes and seems all too real. And in the next section of the poem, quite directly: “the physical as/desertion as art as the last best hope.” (An echo here of the “desertion” of the opening framing poem, giving us art as a kind of desertion, a leap out of life — conflating it with physicality??)
This driving almost desperate rhetorical pressure continues even more strongly through the third suite of poems that meditate on the body, on hurtling through time in a world, on the crazy and horrible coping mechanisms that derange us — all of this in the dark, in the sky, in the wreckage.
Here’s the entirety of the volume’s final poem, which brings back the tapping and high thrum of the earlier poem, and the entire catastrophe of our trying to live here, in this world, as it and we are. Its title is the opening line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “The world is everything that is the case”
in the real body there is always
the sound of the ocean
a frantic
tapping a dull
hum a high rushing
of air in the real body
cars flash by the end
of a tunnel in the real
body things are caged
and trampled
and shut down
in the real body
we think of
doing something but we never
do anything in the real
body in the real body
we buy time and buy
and buy and we remember
the dark patches and we
remember collision and
we remember that time
when and remember
when we fell and the
city looks all full
of light from up here
all beautiful up here
and you cannot imagine
the view here, we say
buried up to the neck
our patron saint is
wind our patron
saint, erasure
I’m nearly overjoyed the speaker did manage to escape, and did, as in the earlier poem, cross herself, maybe screaming or not, and flew away, off into the sky above the city, where she looks down on it, surrounded by the beautiful light. Well yes, she is still buried up to the neck — but only up to the neck. Her head held high, she feels the wind, and prays to her patron saint, erasure.
___
De la Perrière’s most recent volume Works of Love & Terror (2019) follows the same mode as Saint Erasure, untitled suites of poems (this time there are five of them) preceded by a framing poem. As with my discussion above, I’ll begin my notes with the framing poem called “Exegesis.” As with my above discussion of “The Book of Lost Vessels,” “Exegesis” suggests where the rest of the book is going — into the fact of language-making as a weaving of meaning “to transform the human field,” that holds for a minute, then dissolves.
Exegesis
the function of
this tour is to invent
the symbolic, to transform
the human field into
a pageant of meaning --
(A “tour” like a theatrical tour or the tour of a rock band? A tour of duty? Or we are tourists, we the living? Going forever from one temporary visiting spot to the next? And the fiction — not the purpose— of the tour, what makes it go, I suppose, is the need to invent symbolic meaning, to transform the human field — like any field it needs to be tilled, planted, improved, otherwise it grows over — into meaning)
— we
arise from our labor, comb
our hair, put on our
elements --
(Here the human field begins to constitute itself, the day unfolds, we comb our hair, put ourselves together; oddly “arise from our labor” in the context of combing the hair and putting on the elements [I see a woman dressing herself with the various elements of her ensemble] must mean waking up in the morning, sleeping, dreaming, being the labor)
— we totter then
stand, we move out into
the world — the rift
makes the ritual:
a dervish, a bargain,
a cadence, a threshold,
the cog that makes us
run —
(Then we move forth into the human world where we’re immediately cut adrift we spin, we compromise, we run, we’re divorced from ourselves)
— we dreamt a tapestry
or shroud in which every
text was sacred: we dreamt it,
we wove it, begged it
sing, then tore
it down
(Our dreams, our labor, was a tapestry, a shroud we wove; we made with language meaning out of our meaningless commercial living — and we pleaded that that tapestry would sing to us, save us… and we tore it down, not because we’re foolish or self-destructive but because that’s the only way it goes. “Exegesis” — we must explain, we must define, our language will do that to us, so that whatever meaning we make, ungraspable as quicksilver, dissolves in the definitions, the explanations, the fixed identities…. with this thought in mind the five following suits of poems unfold).
Again, the whole poem without my interruptions:
Exegesis
the function of
this tour is to invent
the symbolic, to transform
the human field into
a pageant of meaning— we
arise from our labor, comb
our hair, put on our
elements — we totter then
stand, we move out into
the world — the rift
makes the ritual:
a dervish, a bargain,
a cadence, a threshold,
the cog that makes us
run — we dreamt a tapestry
or shroud in which every
text was sacred: we dreamt it,
we wove it, begged it
sing, then tore
it down
Works of Love & Terror is particularly haunted by the death of de la Perrière’s mother, several of the poems in the volume refer to this directly and several others seem related to it. The poems are charged with loss, but this time it’s less the desperate feeling of helplessness that loss can bring on and more the singing into the space loss opens up. “Into the Silent Land” begins:
it was waiting for you all along
there at the end of the shoreline
where the first person ends and
all subjects get pulled tight like a string
Then there’s an emptiness, an echo, a wind, stories, the sun, the blue sky and then
…….. that elsewhere
is always the better place, and that time is
for no one, and there is everything to fear
The poem “Invocation: I” (it’s unclear to me whether this is invocation “I” as in first person singular, or “I” as in Roman numeral one — or maybe these are the same?) is one of the loveliest and toughest meditations on the whole catastrophe of attempting to be alive that I have ever read, each of its words seems essential, simple, trenchant, and sad. The poem’s too long to quote in its entirely, but here are some of my favorite lines:
… everything falls
into darkness, periodic terror,
complacency — domesticity
with all the haptic modernity
unfurling — which escapes
the ticking self
and its fantastical exhibits,
its fragile instruments
The poem ends with
each of us born
with time clutched
and crashing in
our bodies — a riverbed
a seam of ore, a placid lake
called never
To underscore the disastrous nature of these poems (which’s as I have been saying, cheer you up anyway because the language they are made of is so well-wrought, so straightforwardly — I can almost say “sincerely” — true) I’ll run below a list of words and phrases that struck me in several consecutive poems in the second suite:
hideous universe
dust
stricken
gasp and stutter
distorting
fell and bled
black and purple skies
hollow
shadow
ghosting
darkening
starlings crash the horizon
stone eyes stone heart
a sacking
an ill wind
a ghost town
a flat blank burning
just let it be over, just let us lie still
… and so on.
The long prose poem “First Love” (chilling title!) is an account of a rape, told calmly, long after the event, whose pain, whose strangeness, has never been digested by the victim, the writer of the poem, from whose point of view the story is told. The impression is of an event, painful yes, but, mostly, inexplicable, an event that can’t be encompassed by identity, by the flow of a life, but is stuck there in time, forever, and you don’t know what to do with it. So you write the story. Again and again. To try to make it cohere. But it doesn’t, can’t, cohere, so you come back to it again and again to try to make sense of it but it never works, so “she won’t come back to it, or she will but, when she does she’ll just re-read it, not know what to do with it, then put it away” — these are the final words of the piece, with, again, the thunderous silence/lack of period at the end.
I’ll conclude this over-long tribute to Donna — which has been for me an excellent excuse to spend so much time delving into her work — with the final short poem in this volume, the title poem:
Works of Love & Terror
the last several years I’ve been going
to a lot of volcanoes --
at the edge, ash tastes like memory
as memory tastes like water --
you feel a kind of concreteness, fields of love
and catastrophe: infinity flings a wide net
then pulls itself in --
… a summing up of all I’ve been saying about this essential poetry — ash (what’s left of us when we’re gone) is memory is water, life-giving water; the concreteness of our physical life with all its difficulty of loss and trouble: fields of love (completing the “human field” of the opening poem, as above) and catastrophe— how do the two not always go together? Infinity flings a wide net (woven by our words, flung out, torn down) and pulls us in.
I don’t necessarily recommend that you do what I’ve been doing intensely for the last many days (and less intensely for weeks before that): immerse yourself in Donna de la Perrière’s three intense books of poetry, True Crime, Saint Erasure, and Works of Love & Terror. The titles say it all — de la Perrière’s work evokes dark and deep pain. It deals with the impossibility of being alive in the world among others, the grief, the struggle, the confusion; the terrible things that happen to people no matter what they do, the terrible things they do to others. It’s telling that each of the three relatively short volumes is preceded by an “in memory of” section that you might not notice if you weren’t looking for it. And that each such section includes not just one or two but a long list of names, including de la Perrièr's parents, and many close friends and other relations. Here’s a poet who’s paid attention to the losses in her life, confronted them, embraced them, and whose work, it seems to me, is written from inside those losses, as if the impossibility of losing someone close, which has a way of shattering your point of view, is the energy out of which the works are written — and accounts for the aura of haunt that pervades; as if voices from outside this world were speaking into and through the poems.
De la Perrière, living now in Oakland, was born and raised in the the Deep South, Georgia, and her work is colored by that formation through and through. Her first book, True Crime has a distinctly Southern Gothic flavor, you can almost hear the kudzu vines growing (there are famous for growing at an alarming rate), smothering the trees all the way up to the top, creeping at superspeed over the ground, tropical plantlife run amok. I’ve barely been in the American South and haven’t read a lot of its literature so can only guess at the tradition behind the feeling conveyed here, creepy, frightening, inbred, secret, and at the same time absolutely normal. All this out of control catastrophe? It’s just what happens around here. The murder of a grandfather or brother, the suicide of a friend — normal. And the heart goes out to these folks who are desperately trying and failing to cope in the face of the wave of darkness embedded in the bloodied historical landscape. (De la Perrière seems not to directly mention the racial past of the South, but that past’s pain and contradiction seems everywhere evident). These poems have earned their weight; they don’t satirize or aestheticize, rather the reverse: they use the poem’s form as a coping mechanism, a way to face what’s happened and express it, yes, with deadpan horror maybe, with shock that this is us, this is what happens to us, but at the same time with a sense of redemption — because the words are after all on the page, the book is in your hands, and the words signify, touching you in the honest tender places, causing you to stand back and wonder at the extent to which you don’t know of such things, can’t see them, can’t face them, even though (it suddenly will dawn on you, especially in our cultural moment) they are all around you everywhere you look.
Beyond this I don’t want to make any effort to define or analyze this great corpus of work. This is why I’ve called this piece “notes.” In what followed I’ll quote phrases, lines, and in some cases whole poems that speak for themselves, adding only my notes of inquiry or appreciation.
—-
True Crime has a lot of actual crime in it. It opens with a literal corpse at the center of what seems to be a murder scene (in a poem called, provocatively, “The Great and Secret Show”):
the body has been remade
as the center point on a graph
pinning it exactly
to this place, at this hour
someone asks for a magnifying glass
someone removes the body’s jewelry……
(….plain straightforward description, as in many of the poems in the volume, stubbornly representational, as if short hard-boiled fiction, but in many others here and especially in subsequent volumes, a stunningly lyric voice sometimes, sometimes swelling rhetorical repetition, nearly biblical, sometimes lines so laconic you can hear the spaces between the words banging together….)
… and closes with a long prose poem suite called “Return to the Scene” which includes murder, suicide, accidental death, humiliation, insanity, an abortion (punctuated by taunts from a vicious anti-abortion person who rams a shopping cart into the heels of the woman going into the abortion facility as she walks across a shopping mall parking lot), a heart attack (“just the heart’s normal violence”), and a possum or a squirrel trapped inside the walls.
In between, many poems painting a portrait of the South at night, or maybe what I mean is a portrait of the Southern half of the soul, the hot sticky overgrown part at the bottom of the map, the smudgy dark splotch down there into which everything not nailed down tumbles.
Words from “House: The History of Us All:”
In the place where you live the sky is white…vines cover trees, phone poles, deserted houses…,Your mother, as a girl, lived across the road
from ghosts. Your grandmother saved garbage/ Drew crosses over the walls of the house….grandmother dies, the uncle lives alone in the
house…. Something about narcotics…… the hill is overgrown, the uncle keeps pacing… Even in winter the heat is weighty, visceral…It
takes forever to believe that the dead are friendly….
Gospel (whole poem):
My mother grew up in a Georgia town.
Her father was a lawyer who was murdered in the town
square while driving home one afternoon.
The man who killed him was married to a rich girl.
The man had been burning cars in a warehouse
then collecting the insurance money.
The case never went to trial.
My mother’s house was sold.
It was falling in on itself, too big, too expensive to repair.
Several times in college I tried to call my grandfather’s murderer.
Usually at night.
I just wanted to hear his voice.
I just wanted to tell him I hoped he burned in hell.
Everyone in my family is dead.
Sometimes I think our lives have amounted to one
long lesson in crisis behavior.
Everyone lost everything.
It was exactly that simple.
I once had a friend from Georgia who as a teenager had witnessed a murder, had testified at the trial, and was the person mainly responsible for the murderer’s being put away for a long time — but not long enough. My friend, though living now under an assumed name, on the other end of the country, waited every day for the release of this murderer, who she was sure would track her down and come for her the moment he was out. Is Georgia a place where murders happen more than elsewhere? Where (white) murderers who don’t get convicted, or even brought to trial, because their wives are rich are living in the neighborhood, and you can call them at night, to tell them how you feel? And is all this more or less typical of the human condition, that is, when you don’t paper it over with soccer games, garden parties, fancy educations and lots of political and cultural concerns, and is it all, maybe, a necessary way station along the rocky path toward redemption, which has to go through suffering, through the soul’s darkness. Is all this darkness and mayhem the good news, the gospel?
--
Saint Erasure takes up where True Crime leaves off. It’s as if the events described in the earlier book were here internalized, digested, nearly universalized, transformed by the very means of poetry and a life lived inside poetry into something less concrete, less subject to narrative procedures, and turns out to rhyme significantly with echoing historical cases of these same passions and missteps as they intersect with religious tropes. In Saint Erasure religious passion and insanity merge (as they often do): the text references Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon (about clinical depression); Michel de Certeau’s The Possession at Loudon, about the events surrounded the alleged demonic possession of seventeen nuns in a French convent in the 1630’s; and Madeline Le Bouc’s story, as recounted by the neurologist Pierre Janet. For twenty years, beginning in 1896, Janet treated a woman who gave her name as “Scapegoat” (le bouc emissaire) because, she said, she had to atone for the sins of the world. Constantly awaiting the moment she would be ascending to heaven, she walked continuously on tiptoes.
In these poems as far as I can tell there’s a sense of the physical as being erased by, or constantly threatened to be erased by, the totality of being, the unbounded, undivided — life overwhelming life — the sense that the mind’s being broken by and driven mad by the fragmentation that inheres in a physical life on earth, that longs to be healed by and at the same time destroyed by belief, religious faith, that covers everything with a totality that comforts at the same time it destroys (comforts because it destroys). The book’s three suites of poems are preceded by a strange and haunting lyric that frames the entire text— setting forth this theme without clear exposition, only suggestion, feeling. The poem's particular sort of obliqueness reminds me of Celan, Mandelstam, maybe Rilke, a metaphorical mechanics of the spirit. The poem’s title, “The Book of Lost Vessels” could easily have been the title of the whole volume.
The Book of Lost Vessels
having by now
having forgotten
…oddly fragmented… is it “having by now forgotten” with the repetition of “having” to begin second line a demonstration of the forgetting that is so thorough you’ve forgotten you’ve already said “having” in the first line? Or is the “now” of the first line a completely different situation from the “forgotten” of the second, so that there’s the immediacy of “now” which is what we’re ever only living, and the “forgotten” which is what every now immediately becomes?
what she had come for
the white beaches
the high bluff
…or is this what she had forgotten — what she had come for — and did she come for the white beaches and the high bluff? Which suggest what to us? A kind of sublimely beyond-human atmosphere (not flowers in a vase, a rose garden etc). So we forget this, or in the moment of our living forget it— the vast landscape — all of earth and cosmos — in which our living’s contained?
having forgotten (momentarily)
the otherwise undivided
…and if forgetting is of the nature of now, of every moment (we are constantly momentarily, forgetting — which is our experience of time) then is the white beaches, the high bluff, forgotten even as it’s experienced? And in the living it as a forgetting is it divided then, as it otherwise might not have been, isn’t, it’s in fact undivided, these beaches and the bluff (“bluff”— is there also a pun here, suggesting we are being fooled by all this?) — and that’s what’s forgotten, the undividedness of it, that she can’t but forget, masks the longed-for undivideness that can’t but be unavailable in a physical world that’s always painfully fragmented?
as if there never had been
ship (otherwise heralded)
desertion as possibility
(otherwise forsaken)
…suddenly a ship, which, what?, sails along time’s ocean-paths — or what? Where does this ship come from out of nowhere? — but maybe there never had been a ship (“as if” — so maybe not — but “as if there never had been a ship” so there is a ship but there might not have been?). And what is “otherwise heralded” doing here— which clearly rhymes with “otherwise divided”? And herald is such an unusual word, meaning one who announces something, a messenger, almost has sense of “angel” as in “hark the herald angels sing;” angels are messengers, as Rilke’s angels. But the ship isn’t a herald it is “heralded” which means what? It’s announced, its existence is itself an announcement? An annunciation, as in “The Annunciation” — and we are born, as if we physical beings are doomed to fall and rise again… to be eventually redeemed, our flesh redeemed somehow by a Redeemer?? And if there’s a ship there’s the possibility of “desertion” of jumping ship— if a ship you can desert the ship, flee life, time, being, flesh, you can be murdered, kill yourself, destroyed one way or another… otherwise (the word again coming back echoing "otherwise divided” “otherwise heralded”) — if you don’t desert — you’re going to be forsaken, which happens when you are alive, you’re forsaken by everyone you ever knew, by your own body, by time, by life, because nothing lasts, nothing holds up? (And here I’m wondering if any of this makes even the slightest sense to Donna, who had something else in mind or perhaps had nothing in mind the poem just came to her, compelled her to write it?)
as if the broken the boundried
came somehow instead
to be pulse curve of wrist
neck to shoulder belief
…here again as in fourth and seventh lines above a funny extra space or two between words in the line, a mini-caesura but not for sound, rather for sense, a gap in the flow of the meaning, though the meaning’s not at all certain. Again “as if” — a very undetermined state of affairs — the broken and boundried (in which I can’t help but hear “bone dried”), which certainly seems the opposite of the undivided, the whole, the perfect, the peaceful, the not painful, divided, fragmented, shattered —- it came to be pulse, that is, not something, not flesh per se, a body, a person, a piece of the physical, but pulse, movement, maybe like water pulses under pressure, blood certainly pulses — and flows, like the sea, which pulses, as waves, over which ships sail — this pulse translated into, becomes, flesh, becomes wrist, a line, a curve of wrist, and another line, another fleshly curve, from neck to shoulder, then — whiplash! — belief! Belief. How belief? Belief and pulse and curve of a line of flesh, this is what illuminates us, animates us? Saves us — tragically maybe — from being mere stuff? But then:
having fallen asleep
had awakened to find
empty beaches the pulse the
begotten remains…
… nice rhyme with “belief” and “sleep” which then wakes up, I guess, the pulse of life being generated by the divided and broken world— our very messed up and tragic being as we are is anyway the pulse of life that gives us faith again, wakes up our belief that the world’s madness has put to sleep, and, awakened we find, what? — the very beaches the speaker had come for at the outset of the poem, but now they are empty beaches (before they were white beaches, bluffs), which seems both disturbing (“empty” being generally not a happy word, it’s “deserted beaches”; but, on the other hand, it’s sweet to have the beach all to yourself) — to find such beaches and also "the pulse, the begotten remains,” as in, say “only begotten son” which is Jesus, as human, as flesh, which thought goes along with the awakening of belief….
…. having
forgotten having forsaken
was thrown far
into the sky
…. so yes maybe we are onto something: “forsaken” appears again as earlier in the poem, when it was mentioned in same breath as “desertion” —begotten, forsaken, and forgotten, as Jesus was, abandoned there finally and thrown into the sky, as we all are in the end, buried in the earth, going up in smoke in the sky… where (as in final lines below, we rest, exactly in our fall from— from what? — and in falling return — in this fleeting moment, — this pulsing moment — home. Which is where, we can imagine, the three suites of poems to follow in this book, will lead us.
and came to rest (in the fall from)
the returning now
home
Here’s the poem without my interruptions:
The Book of Lost Vessels
having by now
having forgotten
what she had come for
the white beaches
the high bluff
having forgotten (momentarily)
the otherwise undivided
as if there never had been
ship (otherwise heralded)
desertion as possibility
(otherwise forsaken)
as if the broken the boundried
came somehow instead
to be pulse curve of wrist
neck to shoulder belief
having fallen asleep
had awakened to find
empty beaches the pulse the
begotten remains having
forgotten having forsaken
was thrown far
into the sky
and came to rest (in the fall from)
the returning now
home
The opening poem in the first suite of poems (the suites are numbered, untitled) is called “The High Note”; it seems at first to describe a literal persistent nagging disturbing high note, like “an organ key that /cannot get unstuck” which is also a tapping, a clicking, like “little nails outside/the pane.” And also a “horizon that shades/off into yet a further/horizon”. Or “a tantrum. A running/in circles.” Whatever this is, sound, visual, an inner pressure, something insistent, unpleasant, constant, whatever it is it seems to describe a metaphysical or spiritual condition described here in a very quiet poem, consisting of couplets and short lines of a word or a few words each, so that you get lost in it, as the poem slowly turns, opening out to its conclusion:
the flat crack of
rock falling
on rock down
a slow pocked hill
Which seems somehow, despite the hardness of the “k”s, calm, maybe even pastoral, (maybe it’s the word “slow” here, you see the rock as if from a distance slowly silently falling?)— so that the form and sound of the poem undercuts or subverts its meaning. (Here a note about de la Perrière’s use of small, rather than capital, letters to begin lines, not, of course an unusual practice, though one I usually don’t follow, preferring to capitalize my first lines. Capitalizing, you draw attention to the formality of the line, not capitalizing creates more a sense of naturally speaking, talking. That way the poem flows more easily line to line. This flow, as in this poem, tends to merge lines together into a smoother discourse, so that you flow along with the lines in reading, though in the case of these poems you don’t necessarily know where you are or, at the end, where you have been— anyway this is the impression de la Perrière’s work leaves in me — a sense of derangement).
The fourth poem in this six poem sequence is “The Glass Delusion” which is the poem (as I mention above) based on Andrew Solomon’s book about depression The Noonday Demon, which apparently references women who believed they had glass buttocks and so were frightened to sit down anywhere, lest they break. People suffering from depression or other mental disorders might be frightened in a similar manner by ordinary everyday things (but why isn’t anyone terrified, for instance, any time to enter a room lurking behind a closed door: who can know what’s on the other side? The only reason entering a room, say, in our own house, doesn’t terrify us normally is that we delude ourselves in believing we know what’s on the other side; we require familiarity to cut through the paranoia we would otherwise constantly feel if we experienced the actual reality that we never know what will happen next or how long time goes on). The poem ends:
One woman thought she was a shellfish;
another believed she was all cork, light
as air, she said, and terrified of the ceiling.
Another thought her head so heavy
that it might fall from off her shoulders, and
whenever she sought to speak, swore
she felt a darkness tightening in her throat
(Since this poem works on a sentence basis, with periods at the end and capital letters at the beginning of each sentence, the lack of a period at the end of the poem is thunderous: this condition goes on forever!)
The second suite of poems includes a long sequence called “Occupational Marks and Other Signs” written as a response, an endnote tells us, to Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” While I haven’t re-read that long poem for these notes, my impression is that Rilke’s angels and spiritual speculations live fully in his head, leaving the physical world far behind. De la Perrière’s sequence struggles with the presence of angels, they’re around, but the physical world intrudes too stringently, pulling you back. “This question: what is body. And your eyes/can hardly make out the way it shades/off into the other thing. Something glows.” Or perhaps you’re out running errands or getting coffee when this thing appears, seemingly, in the vicinity, and you consider “crossing yourself or screaming” unless instead you just fly off into the air. Writing about stuff like this seems reasonable enough — to imagine such things. But somehow the words suggest more urgency than that: de la Perriere is not imagining this, she is living it so viscerally in this poem (these poems) that it’s a bit unsettling:
how to breathe a conscious decision:
pulling air in out in what this feels
like what interferes with it in
time and whether your heart is coming
through the wall of your chest and whether
you can think except for things that are so
close in closed off that they are barely
thought at all barely there…
… note here the insistent driving rhetorical passion created by the repetition of “how” “what” “what” “whether” “whether” “close in” “closed off” “barely” “barely.” The urgency mesmerizes and seems all too real. And in the next section of the poem, quite directly: “the physical as/desertion as art as the last best hope.” (An echo here of the “desertion” of the opening framing poem, giving us art as a kind of desertion, a leap out of life — conflating it with physicality??)
This driving almost desperate rhetorical pressure continues even more strongly through the third suite of poems that meditate on the body, on hurtling through time in a world, on the crazy and horrible coping mechanisms that derange us — all of this in the dark, in the sky, in the wreckage.
Here’s the entirety of the volume’s final poem, which brings back the tapping and high thrum of the earlier poem, and the entire catastrophe of our trying to live here, in this world, as it and we are. Its title is the opening line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “The world is everything that is the case”
in the real body there is always
the sound of the ocean
a frantic
tapping a dull
hum a high rushing
of air in the real body
cars flash by the end
of a tunnel in the real
body things are caged
and trampled
and shut down
in the real body
we think of
doing something but we never
do anything in the real
body in the real body
we buy time and buy
and buy and we remember
the dark patches and we
remember collision and
we remember that time
when and remember
when we fell and the
city looks all full
of light from up here
all beautiful up here
and you cannot imagine
the view here, we say
buried up to the neck
our patron saint is
wind our patron
saint, erasure
I’m nearly overjoyed the speaker did manage to escape, and did, as in the earlier poem, cross herself, maybe screaming or not, and flew away, off into the sky above the city, where she looks down on it, surrounded by the beautiful light. Well yes, she is still buried up to the neck — but only up to the neck. Her head held high, she feels the wind, and prays to her patron saint, erasure.
___
De la Perrière’s most recent volume Works of Love & Terror (2019) follows the same mode as Saint Erasure, untitled suites of poems (this time there are five of them) preceded by a framing poem. As with my discussion above, I’ll begin my notes with the framing poem called “Exegesis.” As with my above discussion of “The Book of Lost Vessels,” “Exegesis” suggests where the rest of the book is going — into the fact of language-making as a weaving of meaning “to transform the human field,” that holds for a minute, then dissolves.
Exegesis
the function of
this tour is to invent
the symbolic, to transform
the human field into
a pageant of meaning --
(A “tour” like a theatrical tour or the tour of a rock band? A tour of duty? Or we are tourists, we the living? Going forever from one temporary visiting spot to the next? And the fiction — not the purpose— of the tour, what makes it go, I suppose, is the need to invent symbolic meaning, to transform the human field — like any field it needs to be tilled, planted, improved, otherwise it grows over — into meaning)
— we
arise from our labor, comb
our hair, put on our
elements --
(Here the human field begins to constitute itself, the day unfolds, we comb our hair, put ourselves together; oddly “arise from our labor” in the context of combing the hair and putting on the elements [I see a woman dressing herself with the various elements of her ensemble] must mean waking up in the morning, sleeping, dreaming, being the labor)
— we totter then
stand, we move out into
the world — the rift
makes the ritual:
a dervish, a bargain,
a cadence, a threshold,
the cog that makes us
run —
(Then we move forth into the human world where we’re immediately cut adrift we spin, we compromise, we run, we’re divorced from ourselves)
— we dreamt a tapestry
or shroud in which every
text was sacred: we dreamt it,
we wove it, begged it
sing, then tore
it down
(Our dreams, our labor, was a tapestry, a shroud we wove; we made with language meaning out of our meaningless commercial living — and we pleaded that that tapestry would sing to us, save us… and we tore it down, not because we’re foolish or self-destructive but because that’s the only way it goes. “Exegesis” — we must explain, we must define, our language will do that to us, so that whatever meaning we make, ungraspable as quicksilver, dissolves in the definitions, the explanations, the fixed identities…. with this thought in mind the five following suits of poems unfold).
Again, the whole poem without my interruptions:
Exegesis
the function of
this tour is to invent
the symbolic, to transform
the human field into
a pageant of meaning— we
arise from our labor, comb
our hair, put on our
elements — we totter then
stand, we move out into
the world — the rift
makes the ritual:
a dervish, a bargain,
a cadence, a threshold,
the cog that makes us
run — we dreamt a tapestry
or shroud in which every
text was sacred: we dreamt it,
we wove it, begged it
sing, then tore
it down
Works of Love & Terror is particularly haunted by the death of de la Perrière’s mother, several of the poems in the volume refer to this directly and several others seem related to it. The poems are charged with loss, but this time it’s less the desperate feeling of helplessness that loss can bring on and more the singing into the space loss opens up. “Into the Silent Land” begins:
it was waiting for you all along
there at the end of the shoreline
where the first person ends and
all subjects get pulled tight like a string
Then there’s an emptiness, an echo, a wind, stories, the sun, the blue sky and then
…….. that elsewhere
is always the better place, and that time is
for no one, and there is everything to fear
The poem “Invocation: I” (it’s unclear to me whether this is invocation “I” as in first person singular, or “I” as in Roman numeral one — or maybe these are the same?) is one of the loveliest and toughest meditations on the whole catastrophe of attempting to be alive that I have ever read, each of its words seems essential, simple, trenchant, and sad. The poem’s too long to quote in its entirely, but here are some of my favorite lines:
… everything falls
into darkness, periodic terror,
complacency — domesticity
with all the haptic modernity
unfurling — which escapes
the ticking self
and its fantastical exhibits,
its fragile instruments
The poem ends with
each of us born
with time clutched
and crashing in
our bodies — a riverbed
a seam of ore, a placid lake
called never
To underscore the disastrous nature of these poems (which’s as I have been saying, cheer you up anyway because the language they are made of is so well-wrought, so straightforwardly — I can almost say “sincerely” — true) I’ll run below a list of words and phrases that struck me in several consecutive poems in the second suite:
hideous universe
dust
stricken
gasp and stutter
distorting
fell and bled
black and purple skies
hollow
shadow
ghosting
darkening
starlings crash the horizon
stone eyes stone heart
a sacking
an ill wind
a ghost town
a flat blank burning
just let it be over, just let us lie still
… and so on.
The long prose poem “First Love” (chilling title!) is an account of a rape, told calmly, long after the event, whose pain, whose strangeness, has never been digested by the victim, the writer of the poem, from whose point of view the story is told. The impression is of an event, painful yes, but, mostly, inexplicable, an event that can’t be encompassed by identity, by the flow of a life, but is stuck there in time, forever, and you don’t know what to do with it. So you write the story. Again and again. To try to make it cohere. But it doesn’t, can’t, cohere, so you come back to it again and again to try to make sense of it but it never works, so “she won’t come back to it, or she will but, when she does she’ll just re-read it, not know what to do with it, then put it away” — these are the final words of the piece, with, again, the thunderous silence/lack of period at the end.
I’ll conclude this over-long tribute to Donna — which has been for me an excellent excuse to spend so much time delving into her work — with the final short poem in this volume, the title poem:
Works of Love & Terror
the last several years I’ve been going
to a lot of volcanoes --
at the edge, ash tastes like memory
as memory tastes like water --
you feel a kind of concreteness, fields of love
and catastrophe: infinity flings a wide net
then pulls itself in --
… a summing up of all I’ve been saying about this essential poetry — ash (what’s left of us when we’re gone) is memory is water, life-giving water; the concreteness of our physical life with all its difficulty of loss and trouble: fields of love (completing the “human field” of the opening poem, as above) and catastrophe— how do the two not always go together? Infinity flings a wide net (woven by our words, flung out, torn down) and pulls us in.