NEW YEAR

                                                               

  2000

 

JANUARY 2

 

New Year's Day:

Tessa Rumsey and Harryette Mullen

 

So, what is the work of the new century going to look like? Here, for the new year, is the work of two young poets. Get ready for a ride. They aim to be alive in their language, but they do not aim to be clear in the way that many   of the poets of the 1960s and 197os, in revolt against what seemed like the academic appropriation of high modernism, of the difficulties of Ezra Pound   and T. S. Eliot, aimed to be clear. This new work comes from

several different directions—surrealism, semiotics, the jump-cut rhythms of video and film, an impulse to make language rather than story or personal history do the work of poetry. One critic has called this vein "the new  difficulty," and it has sometimes looked to models like the Jewish poet Paul  Celan, who fractured the language to find a way to use it after the Shoah; or the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo who, in one of his books, Trike, partly written when he was jailed in Lima for his political activities in the late 1920s, wrote poems in a riddling and fractured Spanish; or the American   poet John Ashbery, experimenting  with language the way the abstract expressionist painters had experimented with paint.

   The first is Tessa Rumsey, whose first book, Assembling the Shepherd, has just appeared from University of Georgia Press. Surrealism doesn't quite describe her method. But she's inventing in language; she's a poet capable of writing, "Fish be ruby-weeping" or "no one knows who wind pitches for. “This poem assembles its own half-mythological world. It seems to be trying to trace the shape of some ancient and buried grief:

 

     Poem for the Old Year

 

     January The archer aims at himself.

     His target is the eye of a fish. River

     is frozen. Field rises in mist of lost

     desire and steams the sealed sky open.

     Fish be ruby-weeping. Fish be nailed

     through scale onto door of silver birch.

     Over the mountain beaten boy searches

     for his teeth inside a clump of brambles.

     The sound of thorns through his skin

     is mercy. The sound of a beautiful fish

     being nailed to a door is mercy, mercy.

     Nobody knows the origin of music,

     or who wind pitches for between rock

     and rock like a bronco heart kicking

     in its cage. Breeze seduces bow. Bow

     abandons arrow. Boy finds shelter

     in thicket and hears music of his breath

     through ugly, twisted thistles. Come

     home. It's time to begin again. A boy

     is nailed to the door and a fish is aimed

     at an archer, mountain is weeping rubies

     onto frozen river while wind grinds

     two   new teeth. Who are you

     inside the music of another's suffering?

     When I was a nail, I loved only

     the hammer. When I was a breeze, I died

     on a door. When I was a fish

     I swam without   knowing not yet, or last

     breath, or shore.

 

   The second comes from Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge, from Singing Horse Press in Philadelphia. It was published in 1995. It's written in quatrains, four-line poems or stanzas, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not. What Mullen does is invent, play with language, play with ideas, make all the sounds she can discover. It's an exuberant performance. Here are some stanzas from the end of it. Notice that every stanza invites you to read it as a separate poem, something between a blues and an epigram, and that you then have to do the work of seeing how  each stanza connects to the next:

 

     blessed are stunned cattle

     spavined horses bent under their saddles

     blessed is the goat as its throat is cut

     and the trout when it's gutted

 

     Jesus is my airplane

     I shall feel no turbulence

     though I fly in a squall

     through the spleen of Satan

 

     in a dream the book beckoned

     opened for me to the page

     where I read the words

     that were to me a sign

 

     houses of Heidelberg

     outhouse cracked house

     destroyed funhouse lost

     and found house of dead dolls

 

     two-headed dreamer

     of second-sighted vision

     through the veil

     she heard her call

 

     they say she alone smeared herself

     wrote obscenities on her breast

     snatched nappy patches from her scalp

     threw her own self in a heap of refuse

 

     knowing all I have dearly bought

     I'll take what I can get

     pick from the ashes

     brave the alarms

  another video looping

    the orange juice execution

    her  brains spilled milk

    on the killing floor