Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
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Joseph Lease



Real-life Poetry Top Ten, February 5, 2021:
         Donna de la Perrière edition



         1  make it new

When I read Donna de la Perrière’s poems, it is as though (I am as though) I have been told about poetry all my life but am only now reading poetry for the first time.



         2  how did this happen

At Brown, in 1991, late August or early September, I heard Donna read a draft of her poem (she called it a short story at the time) “Occupational Marks and Other Signs” (she called it “Duino” at the time). I felt physically as if the top of my head were taken off:
 
     it will probably go away    you will concentrate    think
     clearly    but still this other thing is happening also
     imagine    for example    the scene of a hunt    people
     crouch in thick animal skins    fires are lit in progressively
     widening arcs on the floor    something quiet and
     thorough and violent    consider crossing yourself or
     screaming    consider what might occur if you fought
     your way out of this room    consider what they would do
     if you suddenly    just now    flew away out    into the air
 
Above all, the music, the melodic and rhythmical control; the poem shocks me in so many different ways at once. It connects as a kind of negative transcendentalism, or a kind of shimmering negation, luminous negation; it channels these things, it is, to use an old-fashioned word, vatic, and it is utterly unpretentious.  I could tell right away that I was in the presence of a new reality. 
 
The poem reminds me a tiny bit of Plath, but it is much more poised, much more self-aware (N.B. I love Plath); it reminds me a tiny bit of The Hotel Wently Poems, but it is much more open (N.B. I love Wieners), and, yes, the structure of the poem, its emotional trajectory, its through-line, and its trace, are gorgeously experimental (and that word still matters).



         3  yes, Rilke

And yes, of course, the poem is an oblique meditation on The Duino Elegies, but it is not merely scholarly; it is profoundly learned, profoundly inventive and imaginative; if you want to think about Rilke you should, but you don’t need to: the poem is metaphysical realism, a spiritual and phenomenological potboiler, embodied and enacted in a secular present haunted by messengers:
 
         after God there were angels   they came out of the dark
 
     come like old acquaintances
     interesting if not entirely    friendly
 
     the day they return you do the regular things
     ignore them briefly    then pay some attention
 
--
 
         we are not biologists

     this question: what is body    and your eyes
     can hardly make out the way it shades
     off into the other thing    something glows
     just next to your eye    spine    curved back    like
     a fish    all those ridges    backbone    landscape
     the places where you decided
     not to go
     after all
 

        
         4  a different way to be life-affirming

I am amazed by the poem because it is despairing and horrible and it also finds a way to be (not just persuasively, but) authentically life-affirming:
 
     light and air falling from wires
     try to explain why the basic impurity
                         of light    air    water
                         attracts
     misjudgment    misunderstanding    all of it:
     the blank surface    the false start
     the eye just missing
     the needle
 
Of Saint Erasure (in which “Occupational Marks and Other Signs” appears), Claudia Keelan wrote:“Here, physical law is what guides, and, though the poet, despite postmodernism’s plethora of claims, is not a biologist, it is nonetheless in the recognition of the ultimate ‘desertion’ of physical life that poetry, in the hands of a poet as wise as de la Perriere, stakes its powerful claim: it helps us die.”



         5  the voices

The voices in de la Perrière’s poems are often in difficulty, and they are often movingly aware of their own unresolvable conflicts: the poems frequently begin in medias res, in the middle of the action of catastrophe: here is the opening of “Reaping Wheel”:
 
     That was our arrangement. I would look at you. I would see that you were beautiful. From far away. This is a story about distance.
     You were beautiful. I couldn’t say anything. Living entirely in my own head.
 
     The movement from past, to possibility, to impossibility, to present, back to past (movement as statement of paralysis) creates a map,
     maybe a world, a circuit of desire that becomes a process of becoming.



         6  the voice against herself

The speaker seems to indict herself in the process of discovering herself:
 
     This is easy, this is heaven. This is perfect. I didn’t say anything. I wanted to come home. I didn’t know anything. Like a river that
     fights its own bed. (This is heaven, this is easy.)
 
The poem swerves, to a different, but not separate, story, a different place made of the same language world:
 
     O old friend. He couldn’t walk, couldn’t take it, he rode it out as long as he could, and it was my hometown, the year everything went
     wrong: the blood pooled on the sidewalk, the smoke and cinders from the burned theatre, the railroad depot where the chateau once
     stood, the motorcycle overturned in the creek, the ever-loosening grip.
 
The poem is the theater in which the speaker challenges and disqualifies her voice, her language, her ability to be aware or to have been aware in the present (in what was the present all too briefly):
 
     I’m writing it down, in the wrong window, in the wrong language and decade.
 
“Window” here is wrong and perfect, like death. Perspective becomes voice, and, by the way, the speaker is addressing death (the perfect kiss, the perfect apostrophe):
 
     When you touched a friend of mind, I thought I would lose my mind. But really, I was not ready. (O death, O death, you’re cruel and
     you are constant.) He’s all lost, and everyone is gone, it’s a ghost town, and really I was not ready.
 
The readiness is all, and we are not ready. That a poem can embody such awareness of difficulty and limit is an astonishing gift.
 
         7  soul-making

So to sing the soul, so to sew the soul. And what is self but memory of soul. Memory or trace, memory or monument (the frailest monument).

Yeats calls the aging human body “a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick” unless it is animated by the soul that claps and sings it into meaning.

One of the most radical things de la Perrière does is to locate soul-singing (and soul-making) in the dying and suffering body. (The word radical is still important, too, even though I challenge my own need for it. Radical means root.)
                 
         8  now what? 

Here, in its entirety, is “Even your breath can’t save you, / even your bones give you away”:
 
     this repulsion   or simply
     an abandonment of moving forward
     was called into question
     was parsed and undone
     a temptation of bones was held as if cradled
     was heralded   belief-ridden
     was called sister, sister
     was called into being as a hospital garment
 
     was called into being as a thousand small hands
     was parsed and undone   (as if held, as if cradled)
     lifting up from the window   was the barest of flags
     and the veil gone to seed
     was boundried   belief-ridden
     from breath   from a word
     was the barest of flags
     was called sister, sister    (was held, as if cradled)
     by the hospital garment   which falls as it will
 
The body is the winding-sheet, the body becomes soul-making, not hope but mercy.
 


         9  direct address

So to sing the soul, so to sew the soul. So the self-in-process is made and unmade, woven and unwoven, and the poet knows with her very, very remarkable musical grace what the (provisional, contingent) pieces of identity are, and the poem reimagines elegy, so that each possible facet of the transgressive female subject is loved.
 
Here is “Mère”:
 
     The old women rose with the moon
     twisting their gnarled arms across the sky
     they hovered over the places they had walked
     they passed the houses where they had lived as girls
     the dark, pine-arched roads here they had received first kisses
     and clutched at boys or other girls in the quickening dark
     they passed the hospitals or rooms where they had birthed children
     they passed the graves of children, they passed their own graves
     they tore light out of the stars and wore it as cloaks
     other light they flung to earth where it split apart and shattered
     they crowned each other with the wrecks of their longings and despairs
     they fell apart, cohered again, they spun with the weather
     they watched the world flame out, ignoring them at best or hating them
     they rose over the ridge like a troop of fixed stars
 
The poem greets injustice and life and justice and says farewell in the same breath. And because there is love, there is triumph, though it diminishes the triumph to put it that way. There is the quest for reality, the quest for justice (and the resistance to closure) (soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing).
 


         10  my whole life

Reading your poems has been the greatest privilege of my life.