Contemporary Poetry

: a web symposium  |  Spring 2006

Upon opening Arielle Greenberg’s Given, the reader is given several clues as to how to read the collection – and collection it is, a neat container filled to the brim with shiny images and coyly clever lines, experimental punctuation and many a well-turned phrase. The words take on a vagrantly precious quality of “found objects” in a Cornell box – which is a fair comparison, since her epigraph includes a portion of Frank O’Hara’s poem titled after the artist. The inclusion of the poem “Joseph Cornell” has layered meanings that can be pulled apart like the pieces of a matryoshka doll. O’Hara’s pop-art style – his use of capitalization to make chosen words pop like neon signs – seems to have been an influence, as Greenberg utilizes a new generation of poetic tools for emphasis and experimentation: strikethroughs, footnotes, and images of scissors-in-miniature. Greenberg’s combustions have ambitions for pop-stardom. Further, the actual lines from O’Hara read: “Into a sweeping meticulously – / detailed disaster the violet / light pours. It’s not a sky / it’s a room.” Although some poems initially seem haphazard and convulsive, there is a deep logic embedded within; even if you couldn’t tell by actually reading the poems, this idea is given right from the start. Her words are random and yet ordered to fit within the “room” or the walls of the Cornell Box – or the covers of a book.

This is not to say that meaning is straightforward and easily touched. Readers get a taste of what they are in for when glancing at a line from Joyce’s exceedingly difficult Finnegan’s Wake, also in the epigraph, which is a novel’s worth of content similar to the line given: “The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the”. The words stand on their own or in combination with each other to distort meaning and recreate it. The “keys” or words are “given away” because their logic has been disarmed. The prefix “a” confirms this negation. Poetry becomes locked in mystery, and yet there is a system of meaning that is only partially tangible. Before approaching the poems, one has the sense that Greenberg’s work will provide a difficult but rewarding experience.

Now, armed with this knowledge, it is possible to look at Greenberg’s poems with a good idea about her project. Her words are poured into variously shaped containers. Some poems are verse and some are prose; some are in blocks with squared edges, and some have the naturally jagged edge of free verse; but always, there is the sense of order within the chaos. On a deep level, this might represent the [il]logical organization of nature, but the obvious reading is that the poems are coming-into-being, privileging process and thus questioning what a poem can be. In reading Greenberg’s work, readers witness the writing and editing process, always with the sensation that her poems make an ever-changing palimpsest; her many references to ancient Egypt provide testimony. Through their playful use of common contemporary settings – for example, a Dairy Queen, a pharmacy, a community college, and a car wash – Greenberg adds a “real” element to the intangibility of her thought experiments. The poems themselves seem to chronicle the act of writing poetry, and different poems show the process at various stages. The most basic level of process seems to occur with “The Giant.”

In “The Giant,” Greenberg utilizes a self-interview format. She begins with a simple statement followed by seemingly unrelated quandaries:

The giant is a girl.
How can I connect this to a cream-and-brown bicycle?
In a childhood mishap, the giant is a girl without a helmet.
How can I relate this to my sister? (1-4)

Although the reader can invent a thread between the questions and answers, these leaps clearly come from the speaker’s own random thoughts; for the speaker, the threads exist, but she must make these connections evident so that her meaning is sufficiently conveyed to her audience through her poem. Did the speaker ride a cream-and-brown bicycle as a child? We cannot be sure, and it is worth little to invest energy pulling the connections apart. The questions and answers continue, creating a pattern while getting closer to the speaker’s material for her poem. She ponders how she can weave her sister, her Treatment, the feeling in her legs, and a Canadian setting into the fabric of a poem – each of which, we will naturally assume, holds personal importance to the poet.

A rhythm is developed through the work, and, like many poems with the question-answer structure, Greenberg creates a flow just to interrupt it by stating, in the place where a question was expected, “Stop. The giant weeps” (15). The speaker ponders taking her project into the living room. The giant hangs up her unfinished pastel picture, which is hung at shoulder height near the ceiling of, perhaps, her living room. The art is set aside and the speaker wonders how she can get “you” to kiss the back of her neck. The giant then eats a bowl of ice-cream, and her stomach hurts. The giant and the “poet” are equally invested in the creation of this work of art. This is an easy poem that becomes difficult when considering the “who’s who” of the structure. The poem begs the question: when we write, are we our speakers? Who controls what shape a poem takes? Our subjects can, at times, be equally invested in the creation of art. When taking baby-steps to understanding Greenberg’s difficulty, “The Giant” is a good training poem.

Another good poem to look at is “Berlin Series” because it plays with the idea of meaning and equation in poetry. The blocks of prose are numbered with Roman numerals, making the poem seem like an outline or academic document. Each section makes a vague sort of sense, but the last sentence of each stanza blatantly explains that the poem is about “war,” about “a person alone,” or about “a lost dog.” None of the pieces of the poem particularly seem to point to these themes, so the poem retains a sarcastic tone. In reality, these poems make their own meanings, which may be tinted by themes like “war.” But can we say of them: “This is a poem about war”? On the one hand, there are no words that clearly signify “war” in this poem. However, the first stanza provides many flashes of boyhood that give an impression that they are hard to follow, perhaps mentally or physically. Boys are admirable or “large” from the perspective of young girls. They are cartoons made from dots, which would make them two-dimensional and yet shadowed. Nothing about these descriptions immediately says “war,” but once the poem is identified as being about war, the statements take on a new shape.

There are many questions that are alluded to and go unanswered, although the impression of an answer lies hidden somewhere. The speaker asks if music is a criminal, and then says that children know the answer. We, not being children, could not say; but still, an answer exists. At one point the poem says: “Vision is a guess made by the power of subtraction.” This seems to make little sense, but for me, it means that what we see, in part, is formed by what we know we cannot see. A chair is a chair because it is not a table. The poem says: “This is obviously about a person alone.” If anything is clear about this poem, it is the obvious falsity of that statement. The last stanza meaningfully discusses our lack of self-trust, the chain of being that is passed from parent to child, the memory hidden in the “toy” which we cannot give up, and the falsehood of memory. She concludes, “As you can see, this is about a lost dog.” The punch-line is perfectly placed, as the most ridiculous “signified” meaning is placed after the deepest of philosophical thought.

Another poem that plays with process is “The Alexander Technique,” a collage of famous figures from various eras of the past including Joe DiMaggio, God, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, and William Carlos Williams – a relatively reasonable mix, with perhaps the exception of Joe DiMaggio. The poem prizes secrecy and silence, beautifully concluding that “What everyone is doing while they sit quietly is a secret more beautiful to me than any speaker” – which seems an interesting conclusion to be drawn from the speaker of a poem (25). To give some background information, the Alexander Technique was a method of vocal training invented by F. Matthias Alexander, who taught clients methods to improve the breathing mechanism so it could function more effectively. Besides improving the vocal skills of his clients, the breathing technique also improved respiratory difficulties. Alexander also found that breathing is a vital part of how the body, and thus the mind, functions as a whole. Habitual breathing and vocal patterns must be learned in order to possess a vigorous body and mind.

Drawing this back to poetry, Greenberg seems to liken the breath of the Alexander Technique to a “secret” or silence of religion, psychology, poetic language, and – baseball? Her inclusion of a wide array of subjects is a testament to the vast communicability of the Alexander Technique, which was as important to the body as it was to the mind. As breath is vital to body and mind, poetry finds a place in athletics as well as religion and psychology. The idea of secrecy and silence links back to the trouble of “meaning.” In the quest for meaning, we are continually coming up short, but there is beauty in the mystery and unknown. This secrecy seems, many times, to keep readers locked in bewilderment when encountering poems – and this seems to be true quite often with Greenberg’s poems.

These three poems – “The Giant,” “Berlin Series,” and “”The Alexander Technique” – are useful for understanding the underlying design of the book, but they are not necessarily representative in terms of content. Despite the continued strangeness of the language, most of her characters are fairly common. Instead of poets, philosophers, feminists, and musicians, we have people who sleep on Jennifer convertibles with their socks on. The settings include Dairy Queen, a pharmacy, a community college, gas stations and car washes, freeing her poems of the pretension that could be associated with so dense and complicated a work. This seems appropriate, because if poetry is meant to mirror the singing real world, then they should include “real” things. That said, much of the content is funny in the way the juxtaposition between everyday places and complex poetry is funny. The carwash is a common place – if you’re looking to get your car washed. You might not expect to find love or poetry there. Still, while Greenberg has a winsome way with words, the poems appropriately tread some serious water as well. Much of life can be random and funny, but it’s no joke.

Despite the efforts of this essay, Greenberg’s meaning cannot be categorized under columns “A” and “B.” There are secrets, failures, and fragments that seem to be given naturally, and yet there is beauty in the inarticulate language. The poems “The Giant,” “Berlin Series,” and “The Alexander Technique” communicate the “meticulously detailed disaster” that is Given, which, to use her words, sparkles with the “jeweled confetti” of Greenberg’s combustion. The analysis of process, meaning, and mystery in her poetry is only the base netting on which the bulk of her poems sit. Given this basic understanding, it becomes more enjoyable and enlightening to read some of her other excellent poems, including but not limited to: “Tornado at the Dairy Queen,” “Teaching English at a Two-Year College,” “An Origami,” “Pharmacodynamics,” “Yesterday Yes,” “International Herald Tribune,” “The Touchless Carwash of Love,” “News from the Front,” “The Teeth of Betty Page,” and “Given”.

Further Reading

Books by Greenberg

My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005)

Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003).

Greenberg Reviews Other Poets

"Zirconia by Chelsey Minnis," Electronic Poetry Review no. 3

"The Penultimate Suitor by Mary Leader," Rain Taxi summer 2001

"Plot by Claudia Rankine," Electronic Poetry Review no. 2

Essays

“On the Gurlesque,” http://www.sptraffic.org/html/news_rept/gurl.html

"Anybody of the 20th century: poetry conferences 2000," http://home.jps.net/%7Enada/conferences.ht