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.
