Jim Elledge's H: The Eclipse and the Sun

Jim Elledge's new book, H, is an unnerving, insightful, always surprising prose poem portrait of outsider artist Henry Darger.

I wasn't prepared to live in the spaces Elledge created. Darger's work, indeed Darger, has always disturbed me and my tendency was to look away from his art and life. Elledge's portrait of him is challenging and, at times, beautiful. It isn't often that a book of documentary poetry shakes me like this; A. Van Jordan's M.A.C.N.O.L.I.A. (which also uses the "Dictionary Entry" prose poem form, though not exclusively as here), Lavonne Adams' Through the Glorieta Pass, Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia, and Nicole Cooley's The Afflicted Girls are a few others.

The power of these poems rises as much from the careful language of Elledge and the conjured presence of Darger as it does from the biographical details the poet has included. In the opening poem, "Algebra," Elledge gives us an introduction to the disturbing images employed and altered by Darger, and he invites us into Darger's "linguistics of watercolor and crayons." He also warns the reader of what is required to enter Darger's world and vision, to "hear" Darger's art: "You can hear it as clear as can be, if you don't let the screams from the butchery get in your way."

Though much of the language used in the poems is stark and stripped (something which adds to an imprisoning, claustrophobic feeling for the reader), Elledge also uses moments of rhyme and repetition to his advantage and creates rooms in the house of the book where time is blurred and the old Darger is fused with the boy who suffered at the hands of his abusers (arguably individuals who took sexual advantage of the young Darger and a repressed society that created and fostered abusers while punishing the victims of abuse). At times the poems take on a terrifying nursery rhyme life where the aging Darger and the child are inseparable: "When H flops down at his table to trace, retrace, and trace again the little girls and boys he clips out of magazines and newspapers, he ignores their clothes (not pose). Dresses and skirts and blouses and trousers and shirts disappear, even socks and shoes."

These are not poems for the timid, nor will the brave reader find a safe place to settle their minds. Should the reader grieve for Darger, the victim of molestation,  or fear him, a possible pedophile (if only in his mind and art)? Was Darger a would-be-savior or a would-be-predator? Should we try to understand Darger or turn our heads in disgust? Where is the line between saint and madman? Where is the line between the horror Darger confronted and the horror the reader might have confronted in his own life? Part of the book's brilliance is that there are no easy answers "here on the sidewalk where that stud The Unseen leans against a lamppost, on-lookers hold sparklers and shift their weight one foot to the other. In the sticky dark (not park), you can barely breathe, the humidity close as a stranger's palm across your mouth. It keeps you from crying out. It makes you take it like a man. Not H's hand. Someone else's."

Elledge has created an unforgettable book of poetry about an unforgettable man who longed for divine ecstasy while mired in his own darkness and the darkness we create every single day in our too often judgmental and repressive world. Elledge does not free Darger completely, but he frees Darger just enough for us to encounter him in all of his mangled complexity and pathetic beauty. It is not an easy book, but it is a necessary book.

Hearing Voices: Women Versing Life presents Lavonne J. Adams and Historical Poetry

Hearing Voices: Women Versing Life presents Lavonne J. Adams and Historical Poetry

The Poetry of Necessity: Pam Uschuk's Wild in the Plaza of Memory

Wild in the Plaza of Memory lives up to its title. With these poems, Uschuk has opened a public space where all things, all encounters--both beautiful and dreadful--are not only possible, they are inevitable. In this plaza of poetry, the poet moves effortlessly in time and space, addresses the living and conjures the dead, confesses personal losses publicly and public losses intimately.

The collection opens with a an ode to Lorca. It could be said that it takes bravery (some would say, wrongly, hubris) to evoke this poet. Certainly, other poets who have conjured him--directly or indirectly--have been alternately praised and dressed down for it. This said, I can think of more than a few poets who have summoned his ghost successfully (Malena Morling and Virgil Suarez come immediately to mind). Pam Uschuk is now among them:

                                some nights you fly through the window,

                                the eye of a hawk on fire,

                                black gaze gone to blood, gone

                                to the ropey bones of moonlight,

                                to the guitars laughing in the blue pines,

                                to the wet bulls of passion,

                                to the weft of love abandoned

                                to oiled rifles in an olive grove

                                on a sunny day before I was born. Did

                                they so fear the delicacy of your hands?

This ode, like so many of her poems, is part ornate tapestry of deep image, part protest poem. The poet rarely leaves the realm of public discourse, or activism, even when she is at her most personal and intimate. There is always a sense of wonder and awe in her images, and often a sense of outrage at injustice in her assertions. 

This is also part of her bravery. It could be argued that there is a current, poetic aesthetic  which often embraces and values language play, sonics, and anything deemed to be "new" (often a manufactured, confounding, mystery, as opposed to the everyday mystery of the human experience which has never been completely translated or transferred by words) over the sincere poem, the urgent poem, the direct poem--and most damning of all to many critics--the emotional poem that, in its wounded fury, attempts to confront social, political, and environmental injustices. Many of the these critics ignore the fact that some of the poets they hold in highest regard were poets of public--as well as private--discourse. Lorca's "Dawn in New York," is one obvious example. There are numerous others. Strange that poems of "pop culture" are also currently embraced, while poems of protest are often not.  

Uschuck addresses the contemporary world, but, like Whitman, does not avoid the emotional, the dramatic, the rapturous, or the wide world. In the wild plaza of her poetry, students are murdered in Tehran and the poet responds with sincere anguish:

                                Say the students know they could die

                                but demonstrate because silence stings

                                deeper than a interrogator's electric cord.

                                Say a poet powers on a computer, half a world away

                                and blasts  toad-sized letters of longing

                                into cyber space, and the lonely air bursts.

What Uschuk has done with this book is something that could bring poetry back into the hands of the non-poet. She, as Szymborska did before her, questions poetry's place in the world, and, also like Szymborska, gives us an answer. In her poem, "Who Today Needs Poetry," she writes:

                                not a belt unbuckling or the snap of the triggering

                                device on the homemade bomb about

                                to blow in a Kabul market, not the black widow's web

                                spun to catch wings for her children while we sleep, not

                                the blue burka slipping over a mother's head,

                                not a father's prayer rug clotted

                                with his son's blood. No, not any of these.

                                Not these.

Daniel Nathan Terry

March 27, 2012

To purchase this title: http://www.wingspress.com/book.cfm/141/Wild-in-the-Plaza-of-Memory/Pam-Uschuk/