Peter Valente
“Poesis of sweet disorder”: A review of Adeena Karasick’s Salomé: A Woman of Valor
Where are you, my labyrinth?
in the glut of labored fancy
in the ostinato of sated marvel
Flagrantly stained am I!
The night after reading Adeena Karasick’s Salomé: Woman of Valor I dreamt of a body, of indeterminate sex, made of out letters. In essence, Karasick’s language is somatic; it is a language that you can taste on your lips and it is a strange and wonderful elixir; it is wild, fierce, erotic; it plays with many masks, wears many costumes, is theatrical; the language assumes various registers, and the text includes provocative images; what emerges in the text is Salomé, herself, dominant, submissive, transgressive, sexually liberated, and finally, both absent and present in the language, imminent. Salomé, in the text, functions as both the liberator of the patriarchal/phallocentric Sign, a kind of tonic injected into the language, and as a woman free from false Christian interpretations that paint her in a negative light:
Throughout Christian tradition, Salomé has been tagged as an evil murderess notorious for beheading St. John the Baptist. With phallocentric fervor, she has been serially exploited by Gustave Flaubert, Charles Bryant, Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss, forever entrenching her in social consciousness, as a dangerous woman, a praying mantis who cannibalizes the head of her lover. Here, Salomé who descended from Jewish Royalty, (the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee), is not appraised as a villain, but hailed a hero – a freedom fighter;….[who] rejoices in her sexuality, in transgressive passion and female eroticism.”
The beheading of John the Baptist is seen as the separation of the head from the body that “pays homage to the Kabbalistic notion of the separation of the primordial letters.” The letters are separated from their source, “the words are separated from their meaning.” Furthermore, the separation suggests an absence, and from this absence is born multiplicity; in the separation from what is below or above, according to the Zohar, there exists the “unformed, re-formed, visible, invisible.” In the image that accompanies these reflections, Karasick repeats the phrase “Give Me Head,” a play on words, conflating the beheading with a sexual provocation. It is this playfulness that also informs the poems. Furthermore, “The only historical reference that Herodias’ daughter’s name was “Salomé” is from Flavius Josephus who makes no other claims about her” and thus she is the Unnamed; she “embodies all that is perfect, imperfect and reaching towards – And like Shulamit in Shir ha Shirim (The Song of Songs), she is the incarnation of desire.” And this text embodies desire, feminine desire.
Karasick’s language is dense, multivocal, constantly shifting between words normally associated with linguistics and a lyricism that resembles camp. In this she employs both high art and low art, creating a fierce hybrid surface to the poems that resists rational interpretation and remain unapologetically open ended; the words bend to desires that almost resist articulation since they resound so deep inside the poem; but in order to do so, the language becomes fluid, gathering momentum in each line; rising to a kind of orgasmic frenzy, the language attains a red hot intensity in its movement; Signs are stripped bare of their traditional meanings and re-clothed in language more elaborate, baroque even; the language performs in drag. It is both abstract and vivid, but, remember, the mind is separated from the body; so the language is physical, pulsing, the word dancing in the flesh. An example:
So, just kiss me, fruity magnitude
in the portals of
frisson; Kiss me purring
through the pursed posits of scented nests
in the curled mirth
suspended in the flickering ardor
where lines flower, opening like soft combat
And prim cognates unfold
There among lacy congress I will give you
in the musk of virulent surfaces
I will fan our daring plied with
tempests, pageantries.
Savored in the hungry hubris of enflamed rigor.
In the first three lines that end with the word “frisson,” we are in a space of erotic intensity; but the passion is directed toward a “magnitude,” not necessarily a single person; the spiritual is eroticized, in essence, this is a pagan spirituality. She speaks of the “flickering ardor” of desire unknown, perhaps unrealized, yet forceful, “where the lines flower, opening like soft combat / and prim cognates unfold.” The use of the word, “prim,” suggest a stuffy academic approach and an unwillingness to accept new ideas and yet, they finally yield their secrets: Karasick examines the etymological origins of the word Salomé and reveals that, in “Hebrew, Salomé is Shulamit, from Shalom: peace, fulfillment; Shlemut: completion, perfection. Thus, in her very name, Salomé as Shulamit embodies all that is perfect, imperfect and reaching towards – And like Shulamit in Shir ha Shirim (The Song of Songs), she is the incarnation of desire.” Here is the poet as scholar, able to strip off the layers of false meaning that have accrued and obscured the reality of Salomé; she tears apart the script. She writes, “I will fan our daring plied with / tempests, pageantries.” This is not about “soft combat”: the relation between the sexes has never been that simple; tempests are on the horizon in this feminist text but also pageantries, both in the sense of elaborate costumes and pomp as well as surface display, the mode of camp. But tempest is also a word that implies a violent disturbance. The old world must crumble to the ground in order for a new world to be born. We are very much in the world of the Kabbalah, of creation through destruction. Various realities are present simultaneously in Karasick’s poetry: linguistic, lyrical, and mystical realities weave to form the elaborate mosaic of this poetry.
But the body of Salomé in this poetry is finally unnamable and imminent; this is not a poetry of finality, or conclusion, or even of manifestation in the sense of the “holy presence” of an authoritative figure. She is incipient, hovering, even haunting this language; she is a specter rather than a pure physical presence; she is stained by all that has been attached to her, and in this impurity she retains all her power, not being reducible to a single, confining Sign; rather, she is constantly in motion, undulating as an erotic specter in the space between the words; she is an “imminence” that is, finally, “inhabitable” in the language, through the spell Karasick is able to weave. Karasick writes:
Suffer me to touch thy body. Thy body is historical like the body of a lapsed eloper. Like a festering will of vaporous quills; like a palace
of scrawled carousels. It is inhabitable; thy body humming with harrowed imminence; parsed like the clusters of fractalled gaps wrapped like
the cinders of aberrance.
Like a crown of torn placards; a knot of uncertainty coiled in the gardens of eros. Fêted with gilded triggers, your body like a branch of
echoic clusters that phishers have found in the twilight of caesurae! scattered in the mines of ebullient looms which lines the brow of
clanging puissance tainted with malleable tales
nested with buttered longing
and parsed in the spectre
of glistening iterates
a lexical elixir.
The figure of Salomé that has come down to us from the word of Christian historians is a “knot of uncertainty in the gardens of eros,” who can be located in the “glistening iterates / a lexical elixir.” She appears in the dark of language and is realized alchemically when it gives up its historical meanings to embrace the complex threads of meaning without resolution. She is a “body humming with harrowed imminence; parsed like the clusters of fractalled gaps wrapped like the cinders of aberrance.” She is found in the random gaps of the historical record; she is the errata, the erased, the repressed, hinting at a transgression that cannot be accepted by the historical record. But she appears, repeatedly. in different forms throughout the record, throughout the centuries, like the flicker of a candle in the night. There is something to this poetry which resists modernity and harkens back to time when Imagination and ecstatic experience were given more importance than science or reason; when alchemy was revered as being able to produce gold; a time when mysteries did not suffer reason to explain them away. The poem above is essentially about Karasick making contact with her parallel self: “Suffer me to touch thy body.” She invokes Salomé in the poem, in the sound of the syllables, the pauses, the open ended quality of these poems, and, in live performance, through the very movements of her body: sensual, erotic, playful. In this, she is like the Sufis who perform the dance which is known as sema, meaning heard; for Karasick, “poetry is revolutionary, and is itself a ‘dance’ of the intellect; for Hasidim, dance is an avenue to reach G-d.”
In these poems, Karasick also explodes the historical assumptions which falsified the true meaning of Salomé, and re-envisions her as a strong woman, a woman of valor; but, in the following poem, she doesn’t do this by rejecting but by assuming the chains of these false meanings in order to defy them through abjection:
When to cut is to bind,
take me
and as you come
to the tenet of my house. In the bed that is
spread across this lexicon
bind me
in the splendor of our haunting
bind me to your wrists
to your forearms, your fingers
bind me
with your leather strapped
heritage histories rituals traditions
bind me
with your tableaux fabliaux
of ragged madness
aberrance, labyrinths
bind me
in prophecy, sophistry
as i taste you
all palistrophically erotic and
threaded with hysteria
bind me to your doorposts bedposts
For in my death i taste you
with the paradox of worship.
Salomé welcomes the “leather strapped / heritage histories rituals traditions” as well as the “ragged madness / aberrance, labyrinths;” indeed, this language is labyrinthine; her poetry is like a complex mosaic. She wishes to be bound “in prophecy, sophistry….threaded with hysteria,” a term that refers to the 19th century diagnosis of women who exhibited signs of not conforming to the rules of society. Getting down to basics, Karasick unearths the substrata of reality that creates the underlying conditions of female oppression. And “in my death i taste you / with the paradox of worship.” She uses the invented word, “palistrophically” which contains “palistrophe,” a literary technique in textual passages, and describes it as erotic; here language is made strange, bent to serve the Imagination, and to create a relation to language as a kind of erotic body to be touched or licked, savored for its essence. She wants to be bound “in the bed that is spread across the lexicon.” The language is where she consummates her desire; it is the bed on which she enacts her transgressions, her desires, her loves; she writes: “you will find me along the path of the letters / ripe with the conspiratorial architecture of moist reverence.” Salomé, “is quickening her pace / adjusting her grace // dancing bare-back and saddle strapped.” This vivid description almost materializes her before our eyes; but then Karasick’s language moves in a different direction, speaking of “ebuliant effluvia” and “lawless philologies;” concluding that “she is all headstrong / like an angel on the head of a / word that is purred.” This is not the language of authority, spoken firmly to convey the strength of the laws; this is language that is “purred,” feline, independent, not running with the pack, going its own way.
The language is where her Imagination is liberated from cause and effect, and can exist in a time before time, a kind of eternal space; here she locates Salomé. And her reverence is not prim, or official, but “moist,” suggesting fluidity, a dynamic relation to divinity, sexualized. Salomé will not kneel before any godhead in deference to authority. This bed is also the foundation of knowledge, of hermetic knowledge, the mysteries of the universe; speaking of the “path of the letters,” she is referring to the paths on the Kabbalistic tree of knowledge; the Hebrew letters do not merely signify but have alternate lives as numbers, and as actors in the drama of the Zohar and the Kabbalah. She writes : « tongue tulle tête-a-tet ט tav ט vav ו tallies, valleys, volés / stretched in moist torment all honey-dipped / as ripped script…lips yud hei vav hei’s peh פ mouth tongue taste / honey-drenched torqued corps / a lettered nectar of wild honey.” These lines, informed by the fluid linguistic nature of Hebrew letters, creates a sensory effect in English; the words are tasted; the experience of language is somatic; the tetragrammmation is inserted, followed by peh פ meaning word or mouth. The holy name is on the tongue, “honey drenched.” This playfulness eroticizes the relation between taste and word, the language, “stretched in moist torment all honey-dipped / as ripped script.” Salomé is a word, behind which stands the unutterable. Salomé is a Sign, fluid, dynamic, forming, re-forming, flowering; it is a flickering light in the language; to invoke her is to stimulate the body, to raise the dead, and ultimately to dance. She is found:
in the rhythm of refusal
in the die of desire
in the rustle of prison
in the depth of immensity
in the witness of crushing history
And not in the visible language, but as if behind the words, or between them, in the palimpeset, in the “mad fragility / of erasure,” in the sound. She is located on the border of meaning, at the edges of the visible, “pure vocative, non-iterable prayer.”
Karasick’s language play also includes references to musicians and pop songs, as she deflates pompous assumptions (the Christian historical record) about the reality of Salomé and John. John the Baptist becomes Johnny in Richard’s iconic song, Johnny Be Good, or Johnny Thunders of the Heartbreakers. Salomé becomes Sally, s[ou]lame, and also dolly, as in Hey Dolly, the song made famous by Louis Armstrong. The language is peppered with French words, and has a quick rhythm more like a song lyric or a heated conversation between lovers. Here are the two examples:
ride sally ride like a resale sale oh sally sally be my girl sally
mustang sally headlong agon so langue tall sally
salient alias wholesale sally down wind done gone
done rot her s[ou]lamé so lay me down sally ‘n
don’t slow me down with your tally sally hey dolly dolly
psalm soullier what sally say salomé slalom mal Allez! andelez salomé
holy olé salomé me softly
tallying the cadences
of aphoristic rings
And for John the Baptist:
John I’m only Dancing. Not yet Johnny, on the sloop don’t sleep
Johnny jaunty joue ingénue kick a hole in the sky. Johnny.
Handsome Johnny Thunder Johnny Guitar Feelgood B. good. Oh Johnny!
who’s Johnny gens johnboy when Johnny dies. Dear John.
john jamais bon journée, nobody knows where my Johnny goes
Big Bad Getaway St. John Johnny Angel, come home, come back come-lately
jejeune jean regênte.
There is a manic energy to this writing; the sounds are so varied and unpredictable, with their own unique logic. But Johnny is ingénue, a unsophisticated young woman; he is also a regênte, which means Regent, or Empress, perhaps referring to the Tarot card, which suggest maternal influence, the creation of life, art, or romance. The image of the masculine, phallocentric male is destabilized; he is in drag in the poem. The “jean” may also suggest Jean Genet.
Sally is “headlong agon so langue tall Sally:” the Greek word, agon, suggests contest, conflict, not “soft combat.” The phrase “langue tall Sally” could be heard as “long tall Sally,” which refers to the Little Richard song, “Long Tall Sally” with the sexual suggestion in the lyrics: “Well, long tall Sally / She’s built for speed / She got everything that Uncle John need.” But the insertion of the word “langue,” which is French for language, suggests the poem itself is in “headlong” motion: “don’t slow me down with your tally sally.” The tally of what? Of “the cadences / of aphoristic rings.” She doesn’t want to hear the high-minded aphorisms of the conventional histories. As a scholar, and cultural historian, she wants to dig below the surface of traditional meanings, stretch the boundaries of meaning in re-envisioning Salomé as a woman of valor. The two poems also express desire, the force of it, the pain of it, even the torment of love lost: “nobody knows where my Johnny goes.” Sally/ Salomé is the incarnation of desire, the open ended force of it, a “poesis of sweet disorder.”
Adeena Karasick’s Salome: Woman of Valor, finally, is a powerful work of feminist criticism, that operates as a poem with the apparatus, such as footnotes, of a scholarly work. It attacks the Christian historical record that paints a negative portrait of Salome, and as a work of poetry and visual art, creates a space for the embodiment of female desire. The language is fluid, dynamic, textually complex, dense, and multivocal; Karasick bends English to serve her purposes, not those of Authority; in this, the text remains open ended. Salome, herself, in the poem is not a fixed presence, nor even a fully visible presence but in the process of forming, re-forming, multiplying; she is essentially a paradox of presence and absence. She haunts the text; she is like the perfume that remains in the air after a woman has passed. She is a shapeshifter, simultaneously here and gone, a flicker of light in the language. And despite all this, she is vividly present in the sound. Sonically, the poem’s music is polyphonic; a rich combination of English, Hebrew, and French words, which destabilizes the sole authority of English. This is an ecstatic poem that transcends the language it is speaking, for Salome stands for the Unnamed, that which is beyond time; thus, her name is “a hidden name, the name of the name which cannot be encapsulated or understood.” She exists in the eternal space of the reader’s mind. S/he cannot see her through the normal channels of sight. But she is there, nevertheless. Salome: A Woman of Valor is all the proof I need.
Where are you, my labyrinth?
in the glut of labored fancy
in the ostinato of sated marvel
Flagrantly stained am I!
The night after reading Adeena Karasick’s Salomé: Woman of Valor I dreamt of a body, of indeterminate sex, made of out letters. In essence, Karasick’s language is somatic; it is a language that you can taste on your lips and it is a strange and wonderful elixir; it is wild, fierce, erotic; it plays with many masks, wears many costumes, is theatrical; the language assumes various registers, and the text includes provocative images; what emerges in the text is Salomé, herself, dominant, submissive, transgressive, sexually liberated, and finally, both absent and present in the language, imminent. Salomé, in the text, functions as both the liberator of the patriarchal/phallocentric Sign, a kind of tonic injected into the language, and as a woman free from false Christian interpretations that paint her in a negative light:
Throughout Christian tradition, Salomé has been tagged as an evil murderess notorious for beheading St. John the Baptist. With phallocentric fervor, she has been serially exploited by Gustave Flaubert, Charles Bryant, Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss, forever entrenching her in social consciousness, as a dangerous woman, a praying mantis who cannibalizes the head of her lover. Here, Salomé who descended from Jewish Royalty, (the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee), is not appraised as a villain, but hailed a hero – a freedom fighter;….[who] rejoices in her sexuality, in transgressive passion and female eroticism.”
The beheading of John the Baptist is seen as the separation of the head from the body that “pays homage to the Kabbalistic notion of the separation of the primordial letters.” The letters are separated from their source, “the words are separated from their meaning.” Furthermore, the separation suggests an absence, and from this absence is born multiplicity; in the separation from what is below or above, according to the Zohar, there exists the “unformed, re-formed, visible, invisible.” In the image that accompanies these reflections, Karasick repeats the phrase “Give Me Head,” a play on words, conflating the beheading with a sexual provocation. It is this playfulness that also informs the poems. Furthermore, “The only historical reference that Herodias’ daughter’s name was “Salomé” is from Flavius Josephus who makes no other claims about her” and thus she is the Unnamed; she “embodies all that is perfect, imperfect and reaching towards – And like Shulamit in Shir ha Shirim (The Song of Songs), she is the incarnation of desire.” And this text embodies desire, feminine desire.
Karasick’s language is dense, multivocal, constantly shifting between words normally associated with linguistics and a lyricism that resembles camp. In this she employs both high art and low art, creating a fierce hybrid surface to the poems that resists rational interpretation and remain unapologetically open ended; the words bend to desires that almost resist articulation since they resound so deep inside the poem; but in order to do so, the language becomes fluid, gathering momentum in each line; rising to a kind of orgasmic frenzy, the language attains a red hot intensity in its movement; Signs are stripped bare of their traditional meanings and re-clothed in language more elaborate, baroque even; the language performs in drag. It is both abstract and vivid, but, remember, the mind is separated from the body; so the language is physical, pulsing, the word dancing in the flesh. An example:
So, just kiss me, fruity magnitude
in the portals of
frisson; Kiss me purring
through the pursed posits of scented nests
in the curled mirth
suspended in the flickering ardor
where lines flower, opening like soft combat
And prim cognates unfold
There among lacy congress I will give you
in the musk of virulent surfaces
I will fan our daring plied with
tempests, pageantries.
Savored in the hungry hubris of enflamed rigor.
In the first three lines that end with the word “frisson,” we are in a space of erotic intensity; but the passion is directed toward a “magnitude,” not necessarily a single person; the spiritual is eroticized, in essence, this is a pagan spirituality. She speaks of the “flickering ardor” of desire unknown, perhaps unrealized, yet forceful, “where the lines flower, opening like soft combat / and prim cognates unfold.” The use of the word, “prim,” suggest a stuffy academic approach and an unwillingness to accept new ideas and yet, they finally yield their secrets: Karasick examines the etymological origins of the word Salomé and reveals that, in “Hebrew, Salomé is Shulamit, from Shalom: peace, fulfillment; Shlemut: completion, perfection. Thus, in her very name, Salomé as Shulamit embodies all that is perfect, imperfect and reaching towards – And like Shulamit in Shir ha Shirim (The Song of Songs), she is the incarnation of desire.” Here is the poet as scholar, able to strip off the layers of false meaning that have accrued and obscured the reality of Salomé; she tears apart the script. She writes, “I will fan our daring plied with / tempests, pageantries.” This is not about “soft combat”: the relation between the sexes has never been that simple; tempests are on the horizon in this feminist text but also pageantries, both in the sense of elaborate costumes and pomp as well as surface display, the mode of camp. But tempest is also a word that implies a violent disturbance. The old world must crumble to the ground in order for a new world to be born. We are very much in the world of the Kabbalah, of creation through destruction. Various realities are present simultaneously in Karasick’s poetry: linguistic, lyrical, and mystical realities weave to form the elaborate mosaic of this poetry.
But the body of Salomé in this poetry is finally unnamable and imminent; this is not a poetry of finality, or conclusion, or even of manifestation in the sense of the “holy presence” of an authoritative figure. She is incipient, hovering, even haunting this language; she is a specter rather than a pure physical presence; she is stained by all that has been attached to her, and in this impurity she retains all her power, not being reducible to a single, confining Sign; rather, she is constantly in motion, undulating as an erotic specter in the space between the words; she is an “imminence” that is, finally, “inhabitable” in the language, through the spell Karasick is able to weave. Karasick writes:
Suffer me to touch thy body. Thy body is historical like the body of a lapsed eloper. Like a festering will of vaporous quills; like a palace
of scrawled carousels. It is inhabitable; thy body humming with harrowed imminence; parsed like the clusters of fractalled gaps wrapped like
the cinders of aberrance.
Like a crown of torn placards; a knot of uncertainty coiled in the gardens of eros. Fêted with gilded triggers, your body like a branch of
echoic clusters that phishers have found in the twilight of caesurae! scattered in the mines of ebullient looms which lines the brow of
clanging puissance tainted with malleable tales
nested with buttered longing
and parsed in the spectre
of glistening iterates
a lexical elixir.
The figure of Salomé that has come down to us from the word of Christian historians is a “knot of uncertainty in the gardens of eros,” who can be located in the “glistening iterates / a lexical elixir.” She appears in the dark of language and is realized alchemically when it gives up its historical meanings to embrace the complex threads of meaning without resolution. She is a “body humming with harrowed imminence; parsed like the clusters of fractalled gaps wrapped like the cinders of aberrance.” She is found in the random gaps of the historical record; she is the errata, the erased, the repressed, hinting at a transgression that cannot be accepted by the historical record. But she appears, repeatedly. in different forms throughout the record, throughout the centuries, like the flicker of a candle in the night. There is something to this poetry which resists modernity and harkens back to time when Imagination and ecstatic experience were given more importance than science or reason; when alchemy was revered as being able to produce gold; a time when mysteries did not suffer reason to explain them away. The poem above is essentially about Karasick making contact with her parallel self: “Suffer me to touch thy body.” She invokes Salomé in the poem, in the sound of the syllables, the pauses, the open ended quality of these poems, and, in live performance, through the very movements of her body: sensual, erotic, playful. In this, she is like the Sufis who perform the dance which is known as sema, meaning heard; for Karasick, “poetry is revolutionary, and is itself a ‘dance’ of the intellect; for Hasidim, dance is an avenue to reach G-d.”
In these poems, Karasick also explodes the historical assumptions which falsified the true meaning of Salomé, and re-envisions her as a strong woman, a woman of valor; but, in the following poem, she doesn’t do this by rejecting but by assuming the chains of these false meanings in order to defy them through abjection:
When to cut is to bind,
take me
and as you come
to the tenet of my house. In the bed that is
spread across this lexicon
bind me
in the splendor of our haunting
bind me to your wrists
to your forearms, your fingers
bind me
with your leather strapped
heritage histories rituals traditions
bind me
with your tableaux fabliaux
of ragged madness
aberrance, labyrinths
bind me
in prophecy, sophistry
as i taste you
all palistrophically erotic and
threaded with hysteria
bind me to your doorposts bedposts
For in my death i taste you
with the paradox of worship.
Salomé welcomes the “leather strapped / heritage histories rituals traditions” as well as the “ragged madness / aberrance, labyrinths;” indeed, this language is labyrinthine; her poetry is like a complex mosaic. She wishes to be bound “in prophecy, sophistry….threaded with hysteria,” a term that refers to the 19th century diagnosis of women who exhibited signs of not conforming to the rules of society. Getting down to basics, Karasick unearths the substrata of reality that creates the underlying conditions of female oppression. And “in my death i taste you / with the paradox of worship.” She uses the invented word, “palistrophically” which contains “palistrophe,” a literary technique in textual passages, and describes it as erotic; here language is made strange, bent to serve the Imagination, and to create a relation to language as a kind of erotic body to be touched or licked, savored for its essence. She wants to be bound “in the bed that is spread across the lexicon.” The language is where she consummates her desire; it is the bed on which she enacts her transgressions, her desires, her loves; she writes: “you will find me along the path of the letters / ripe with the conspiratorial architecture of moist reverence.” Salomé, “is quickening her pace / adjusting her grace // dancing bare-back and saddle strapped.” This vivid description almost materializes her before our eyes; but then Karasick’s language moves in a different direction, speaking of “ebuliant effluvia” and “lawless philologies;” concluding that “she is all headstrong / like an angel on the head of a / word that is purred.” This is not the language of authority, spoken firmly to convey the strength of the laws; this is language that is “purred,” feline, independent, not running with the pack, going its own way.
The language is where her Imagination is liberated from cause and effect, and can exist in a time before time, a kind of eternal space; here she locates Salomé. And her reverence is not prim, or official, but “moist,” suggesting fluidity, a dynamic relation to divinity, sexualized. Salomé will not kneel before any godhead in deference to authority. This bed is also the foundation of knowledge, of hermetic knowledge, the mysteries of the universe; speaking of the “path of the letters,” she is referring to the paths on the Kabbalistic tree of knowledge; the Hebrew letters do not merely signify but have alternate lives as numbers, and as actors in the drama of the Zohar and the Kabbalah. She writes : « tongue tulle tête-a-tet ט tav ט vav ו tallies, valleys, volés / stretched in moist torment all honey-dipped / as ripped script…lips yud hei vav hei’s peh פ mouth tongue taste / honey-drenched torqued corps / a lettered nectar of wild honey.” These lines, informed by the fluid linguistic nature of Hebrew letters, creates a sensory effect in English; the words are tasted; the experience of language is somatic; the tetragrammmation is inserted, followed by peh פ meaning word or mouth. The holy name is on the tongue, “honey drenched.” This playfulness eroticizes the relation between taste and word, the language, “stretched in moist torment all honey-dipped / as ripped script.” Salomé is a word, behind which stands the unutterable. Salomé is a Sign, fluid, dynamic, forming, re-forming, flowering; it is a flickering light in the language; to invoke her is to stimulate the body, to raise the dead, and ultimately to dance. She is found:
in the rhythm of refusal
in the die of desire
in the rustle of prison
in the depth of immensity
in the witness of crushing history
And not in the visible language, but as if behind the words, or between them, in the palimpeset, in the “mad fragility / of erasure,” in the sound. She is located on the border of meaning, at the edges of the visible, “pure vocative, non-iterable prayer.”
Karasick’s language play also includes references to musicians and pop songs, as she deflates pompous assumptions (the Christian historical record) about the reality of Salomé and John. John the Baptist becomes Johnny in Richard’s iconic song, Johnny Be Good, or Johnny Thunders of the Heartbreakers. Salomé becomes Sally, s[ou]lame, and also dolly, as in Hey Dolly, the song made famous by Louis Armstrong. The language is peppered with French words, and has a quick rhythm more like a song lyric or a heated conversation between lovers. Here are the two examples:
ride sally ride like a resale sale oh sally sally be my girl sally
mustang sally headlong agon so langue tall sally
salient alias wholesale sally down wind done gone
done rot her s[ou]lamé so lay me down sally ‘n
don’t slow me down with your tally sally hey dolly dolly
psalm soullier what sally say salomé slalom mal Allez! andelez salomé
holy olé salomé me softly
tallying the cadences
of aphoristic rings
And for John the Baptist:
John I’m only Dancing. Not yet Johnny, on the sloop don’t sleep
Johnny jaunty joue ingénue kick a hole in the sky. Johnny.
Handsome Johnny Thunder Johnny Guitar Feelgood B. good. Oh Johnny!
who’s Johnny gens johnboy when Johnny dies. Dear John.
john jamais bon journée, nobody knows where my Johnny goes
Big Bad Getaway St. John Johnny Angel, come home, come back come-lately
jejeune jean regênte.
There is a manic energy to this writing; the sounds are so varied and unpredictable, with their own unique logic. But Johnny is ingénue, a unsophisticated young woman; he is also a regênte, which means Regent, or Empress, perhaps referring to the Tarot card, which suggest maternal influence, the creation of life, art, or romance. The image of the masculine, phallocentric male is destabilized; he is in drag in the poem. The “jean” may also suggest Jean Genet.
Sally is “headlong agon so langue tall Sally:” the Greek word, agon, suggests contest, conflict, not “soft combat.” The phrase “langue tall Sally” could be heard as “long tall Sally,” which refers to the Little Richard song, “Long Tall Sally” with the sexual suggestion in the lyrics: “Well, long tall Sally / She’s built for speed / She got everything that Uncle John need.” But the insertion of the word “langue,” which is French for language, suggests the poem itself is in “headlong” motion: “don’t slow me down with your tally sally.” The tally of what? Of “the cadences / of aphoristic rings.” She doesn’t want to hear the high-minded aphorisms of the conventional histories. As a scholar, and cultural historian, she wants to dig below the surface of traditional meanings, stretch the boundaries of meaning in re-envisioning Salomé as a woman of valor. The two poems also express desire, the force of it, the pain of it, even the torment of love lost: “nobody knows where my Johnny goes.” Sally/ Salomé is the incarnation of desire, the open ended force of it, a “poesis of sweet disorder.”
Adeena Karasick’s Salome: Woman of Valor, finally, is a powerful work of feminist criticism, that operates as a poem with the apparatus, such as footnotes, of a scholarly work. It attacks the Christian historical record that paints a negative portrait of Salome, and as a work of poetry and visual art, creates a space for the embodiment of female desire. The language is fluid, dynamic, textually complex, dense, and multivocal; Karasick bends English to serve her purposes, not those of Authority; in this, the text remains open ended. Salome, herself, in the poem is not a fixed presence, nor even a fully visible presence but in the process of forming, re-forming, multiplying; she is essentially a paradox of presence and absence. She haunts the text; she is like the perfume that remains in the air after a woman has passed. She is a shapeshifter, simultaneously here and gone, a flicker of light in the language. And despite all this, she is vividly present in the sound. Sonically, the poem’s music is polyphonic; a rich combination of English, Hebrew, and French words, which destabilizes the sole authority of English. This is an ecstatic poem that transcends the language it is speaking, for Salome stands for the Unnamed, that which is beyond time; thus, her name is “a hidden name, the name of the name which cannot be encapsulated or understood.” She exists in the eternal space of the reader’s mind. S/he cannot see her through the normal channels of sight. But she is there, nevertheless. Salome: A Woman of Valor is all the proof I need.