Lisa Bourbeau
Brian Henry, Lessness (Ahsahta Press, 2011), ISBN-13: 978-1934103203, $17.50.
“But why not stop/& turn to squint/at the streaks as they dry to burden,/wreck the window, make it less./Why not focus on the failure of glass/to guide the eye through,/ watch the snow harden/& not fall.” If a lessening, as implied by the title, is the focus of Brian Henry’s notable newest collection Lessness, the diminishment contained within these lines from the poem “As Difficult as Rain,” with Henry’s trademark unswerving – yet un-tethered – eye and humble but relentless inquiry, contains as well that poetic moment untouched and yet still evoked by language, the destination that is as much the journey: “Another border to ignore by crossing.” Lessness is a body of work that maintains a constant friction between the comfort of what we think we know and the way this understanding shifts, is shattered or smashed, “Already part gravel/the frog in the tire track”, under an onslaught of repositioning, restlessness, repetition, resistance and strike-throughs, while at the same time providing openings for the underpinnings of the moment:
…what I say will be un-
said () un-
derstood as unsaid ()
by me () nothing like silence
() this is nothing like silence
In “Broken Tooth” we are told:
…Forget
the wit that swells with wine
& cross yourself, unblessed one,
for the air says its time to dress
for starker days. All else breaks
in the balance. All else hangs.
“All else breaks/in the balance. All else hangs.” There is no place to rest in language like this. Martin Heidegger, writing about the first chorus from Antigone of Sophocles in his essay “The Limitation of Being,” spoke of “The violent one, the creative man, who sets forth into the un-said, compels the un-happened to happen and makes the unseen appear… In venturing to master being, . . . he must risk dispersion, in-stability, disorder, mischief.” Henry certainly takes risks: the use of strike-throughs – and in some instances, blacking out – of lines and phrases is shockingly effective in drawing the reader into the poem in such a way as to cause the reader to receive the poem kaleidoscopically, or as non-linear multiples of itself. In the poem “Scar,” for instance, only one line of seven remains un-mutilated: “Wherever the eye chooses to rest.” The six lines that precede this line are struck through, but readable, and while the eye is drawn automatically to the unblemished last line first, it is then redireted back to each of the preceding lines, but separately, as if the effect of the strike through is to create detached moments within the poem. “To see a body thrown beyond its boundaries/. . . Wherever the eye choses to rest” shares the page with “To fly and learn the bones have no borders/. . . Wherever the eye choses to rest”, as it does with “Flesh wedge to hold the air in place/. . . Wherever the eye choses to rest” At the same time the same page holds the poem that, with all strike-throughs eliminated, reads:
To see a body thrown beyond its boundaries
To fly and learn the bones have no borders
Flesh a wedge to hold the air in place
The air dilating to keep the span intact
Is to confront the burn skinning the eyes
To feel light scrape across the space inside
Each line becomes a different poem, each individually trembling and “terrible” in Heidegger’s definition of the word: “ Terrible in the sense of the overpowering power which compels panic fear, true fear and in equal measure it is the collected, silent awe that vibrates with its own rhythm.” Additionally, each line read separately with the last, un-mutilated line, either before or after, becomes yet another poem again, “The air diluting to keep the span intact/Wherever the eye chooses to rest” for example, or, in rearrangement, “Wherever the eye chooses to rest/The air diluting to keep the span intact.” This same organic shape shifting applies, in a different way, to the first five sections of the poem “Elegies for Failure,” in which words and phrases are completely blackened out. The mind automatically and somewhat anxiously begins playing with potential meanings behind the black “spaces,” creating other, reader driven poems, while a chaste reading that avoids any acknowledgement of the blackened areas allows an entirely different poem to form.
That the forms in this collection are many and varied is itself a self-informing form, one “. . . that stakes/action on bed-/lam when the asylum of system can gauge the hill & guarantee quick passage,” because “when everything is free . . . mountains can be bought/for flame blown sand/that arranges its holders in self-portraits framed in tussock, wheat & hills that go white/in the onslaught/of wind that haggles so fierce it levels the trading fields to salt & salt’s gestures.” In a body of poems that, in Henry’s own words, “. . . investigate how
landscape (physical and mental) and violence (physical, psychological, visual) bear on the individual—specifically on how one sees and experiences the world,” the interaction implicit in the variation, or disorderly ordering, serves to reinforce and heighten the results of this investigation.
“Is there any thing not broken,/any part not about to break?/The question snaps. The line/cracks where it should be whole.”If the poems in this volume enter the wreckage left by the limitations contained within experience as much as they record the external “onslaught of wind/that haggles so fierce it levels the trading fields to salt & salt’s gestures” in the poem “Even/Even”, Henry enters the process itself:
The chair in splinters, the sidewalk
in tatters. Bodies in pieces.
Because of the weight? gravity
& inertia yanking everything
apart? Everything belongs in pieces,
earth says, you try to hold everything
together, always have, & still
you fail, always will, your failure proof
that rot is too advanced for you, too far
ahead, or down, like strata, too patient,
like a fossil which you collect & kill
in the collecting. Even your dust
shatters. Even your air.
“Even your dust/shatters. Even your air.” Yet throughout this volume, the tone is surprisingly tender, honeyed, caressing even, which in
itself, while lending its own peculiar disquiet to the subject matter, at the same time helps provide a meditative state that allows for complete freedom of movement between ideas, events and things. In the poem “Elegy, Flailing,” the reader is moved from “Jeff Buckley’s broken ‘Hallelujah’,/which begins with a gasp/& ends with a strum,” through “the lines I wrote earlier. . . . -- no longer look up when we hear a plane”, to “river death…/what that means for the skin/how it must cancel the care/taken to protect from the sun.” In a review of Astronaut, Henry’s first book, Philip Nikolayev had noted that “Henry’s poems reflect his preoccupation with the idea of freedom, which is understood as a willed escape from a perceptual status quo. . . . for Henry the poetic ‘I’ is hardly unified or coherent. [He] asserts a vitality without presenting a vita. However, [his] work exhibits its own integrity and authority, its own insight into the metaphysics [of] the human condition, its own paradoxical meta-self. . . . Henry’s ‘astronaut,’ . . . perceives himself as floating freely through a galaxy of words and things.” In Lessness, Henry’s work continues to expand in its integrity and authority:
my subject here
-- not death, not the body flailing
-- not elegy, flailing
but a look at what happens after childhood
after the first fuck has dropped
from the mind’s rearview,
when we no longer look skyward
at the sound of a plane
Lessness, however, is a body of work grounded in the landscape, a landscape of “salt and salt’s gestures”, and it is through friction with the “perceptual status quo” that Henry provides entrance to that freedom from it:
But friction is what slows us
as we move toward the dying,
friction is what slows us
as we move toward the dying.
Without it we will slide effortless
into our own end. Without it
we will slide without effort
without pause with or without
a gasp at the end, our end.
“But why not stop/& turn to squint/at the streaks as they dry to burden,/wreck the window, make it less./Why not focus on the failure of glass/to guide the eye through,/ watch the snow harden/& not fall.” If a lessening, as implied by the title, is the focus of Brian Henry’s notable newest collection Lessness, the diminishment contained within these lines from the poem “As Difficult as Rain,” with Henry’s trademark unswerving – yet un-tethered – eye and humble but relentless inquiry, contains as well that poetic moment untouched and yet still evoked by language, the destination that is as much the journey: “Another border to ignore by crossing.” Lessness is a body of work that maintains a constant friction between the comfort of what we think we know and the way this understanding shifts, is shattered or smashed, “Already part gravel/the frog in the tire track”, under an onslaught of repositioning, restlessness, repetition, resistance and strike-throughs, while at the same time providing openings for the underpinnings of the moment:
…what I say will be un-
said () un-
derstood as unsaid ()
by me () nothing like silence
() this is nothing like silence
In “Broken Tooth” we are told:
…Forget
the wit that swells with wine
& cross yourself, unblessed one,
for the air says its time to dress
for starker days. All else breaks
in the balance. All else hangs.
“All else breaks/in the balance. All else hangs.” There is no place to rest in language like this. Martin Heidegger, writing about the first chorus from Antigone of Sophocles in his essay “The Limitation of Being,” spoke of “The violent one, the creative man, who sets forth into the un-said, compels the un-happened to happen and makes the unseen appear… In venturing to master being, . . . he must risk dispersion, in-stability, disorder, mischief.” Henry certainly takes risks: the use of strike-throughs – and in some instances, blacking out – of lines and phrases is shockingly effective in drawing the reader into the poem in such a way as to cause the reader to receive the poem kaleidoscopically, or as non-linear multiples of itself. In the poem “Scar,” for instance, only one line of seven remains un-mutilated: “Wherever the eye chooses to rest.” The six lines that precede this line are struck through, but readable, and while the eye is drawn automatically to the unblemished last line first, it is then redireted back to each of the preceding lines, but separately, as if the effect of the strike through is to create detached moments within the poem. “To see a body thrown beyond its boundaries/. . . Wherever the eye choses to rest” shares the page with “To fly and learn the bones have no borders/. . . Wherever the eye choses to rest”, as it does with “Flesh wedge to hold the air in place/. . . Wherever the eye choses to rest” At the same time the same page holds the poem that, with all strike-throughs eliminated, reads:
To see a body thrown beyond its boundaries
To fly and learn the bones have no borders
Flesh a wedge to hold the air in place
The air dilating to keep the span intact
Is to confront the burn skinning the eyes
To feel light scrape across the space inside
Each line becomes a different poem, each individually trembling and “terrible” in Heidegger’s definition of the word: “ Terrible in the sense of the overpowering power which compels panic fear, true fear and in equal measure it is the collected, silent awe that vibrates with its own rhythm.” Additionally, each line read separately with the last, un-mutilated line, either before or after, becomes yet another poem again, “The air diluting to keep the span intact/Wherever the eye chooses to rest” for example, or, in rearrangement, “Wherever the eye chooses to rest/The air diluting to keep the span intact.” This same organic shape shifting applies, in a different way, to the first five sections of the poem “Elegies for Failure,” in which words and phrases are completely blackened out. The mind automatically and somewhat anxiously begins playing with potential meanings behind the black “spaces,” creating other, reader driven poems, while a chaste reading that avoids any acknowledgement of the blackened areas allows an entirely different poem to form.
That the forms in this collection are many and varied is itself a self-informing form, one “. . . that stakes/action on bed-/lam when the asylum of system can gauge the hill & guarantee quick passage,” because “when everything is free . . . mountains can be bought/for flame blown sand/that arranges its holders in self-portraits framed in tussock, wheat & hills that go white/in the onslaught/of wind that haggles so fierce it levels the trading fields to salt & salt’s gestures.” In a body of poems that, in Henry’s own words, “. . . investigate how
landscape (physical and mental) and violence (physical, psychological, visual) bear on the individual—specifically on how one sees and experiences the world,” the interaction implicit in the variation, or disorderly ordering, serves to reinforce and heighten the results of this investigation.
“Is there any thing not broken,/any part not about to break?/The question snaps. The line/cracks where it should be whole.”If the poems in this volume enter the wreckage left by the limitations contained within experience as much as they record the external “onslaught of wind/that haggles so fierce it levels the trading fields to salt & salt’s gestures” in the poem “Even/Even”, Henry enters the process itself:
The chair in splinters, the sidewalk
in tatters. Bodies in pieces.
Because of the weight? gravity
& inertia yanking everything
apart? Everything belongs in pieces,
earth says, you try to hold everything
together, always have, & still
you fail, always will, your failure proof
that rot is too advanced for you, too far
ahead, or down, like strata, too patient,
like a fossil which you collect & kill
in the collecting. Even your dust
shatters. Even your air.
“Even your dust/shatters. Even your air.” Yet throughout this volume, the tone is surprisingly tender, honeyed, caressing even, which in
itself, while lending its own peculiar disquiet to the subject matter, at the same time helps provide a meditative state that allows for complete freedom of movement between ideas, events and things. In the poem “Elegy, Flailing,” the reader is moved from “Jeff Buckley’s broken ‘Hallelujah’,/which begins with a gasp/& ends with a strum,” through “the lines I wrote earlier. . . . -- no longer look up when we hear a plane”, to “river death…/what that means for the skin/how it must cancel the care/taken to protect from the sun.” In a review of Astronaut, Henry’s first book, Philip Nikolayev had noted that “Henry’s poems reflect his preoccupation with the idea of freedom, which is understood as a willed escape from a perceptual status quo. . . . for Henry the poetic ‘I’ is hardly unified or coherent. [He] asserts a vitality without presenting a vita. However, [his] work exhibits its own integrity and authority, its own insight into the metaphysics [of] the human condition, its own paradoxical meta-self. . . . Henry’s ‘astronaut,’ . . . perceives himself as floating freely through a galaxy of words and things.” In Lessness, Henry’s work continues to expand in its integrity and authority:
my subject here
-- not death, not the body flailing
-- not elegy, flailing
but a look at what happens after childhood
after the first fuck has dropped
from the mind’s rearview,
when we no longer look skyward
at the sound of a plane
Lessness, however, is a body of work grounded in the landscape, a landscape of “salt and salt’s gestures”, and it is through friction with the “perceptual status quo” that Henry provides entrance to that freedom from it:
But friction is what slows us
as we move toward the dying,
friction is what slows us
as we move toward the dying.
Without it we will slide effortless
into our own end. Without it
we will slide without effort
without pause with or without
a gasp at the end, our end.