Thomas Fink
Joseph Lease’s Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), ISBN 978-1566892582, $16
From the opening pages of Joseph Lease’s Testify, the beginning of a long poetic sequence called “America”(published 55 years after Allen Ginsberg’s), what the poet is testifying about in his fourth collection is extremely clear. The dates “Nov. 2004-Apr. 2008” tell us“America” was begun around the time of John Kerry’s narrow defeat and right before Barack Obama gathered momentum for the decisive Democratic primaries. Lease serves as a witness to the greed, mendacity, and potent PR machine of right-wing capitalist authoritarianism andto resistance to it. In a tone of sustained desperation tinged with longing, he pits the automatic survival mode of various classes—including members of the working class who were twice manipulated to vote against their economic interests—with deliberate aspiration for communitarian goals.
But in “America” and in Testify as a whole, Lease is not offering extended political analysis or primarily mounting a polemic. He testifies to the impact of sociopolitical trends and events on individuals, as the first page indicates:
Try saying wren.
It’s midnight
in my body, 4 a.m. in my body, breading and olives and cherries. Wait, it’s all rotten. How am I ever. Oh notebook. A clown
explains the war. What start or color or kind of grace. I have to teach. I have to run, eat less junk. Oh CNN. What start or color.
There’s a fist of meat in my solar plexus and green light in my mouth and little chips of dream flake off my skin. Try saying wren.
Try saying
mercy.
Try anything. (11)
The nightmarish “fist of” knotted “meat” seems an emblem of how contradictory ideologies coagulate in one mind to produce immense psychic cholesterol. Ever subject to egregious rhetorical abuse in the name of a “rotten” individualist pragmatism masquerading as idealism, the term “America,” suggests Lease, should not be discarded but is in need of rescue so that a“green light” or even “little chips of dream” can be transformed into something close to an actual idealism—or at least an invigorating anti-authoritarianism. Each page (section) of the poem has the same title as the whole, and this device might imply that the section title is the beginning of each opening sentence, as though the poet’s speaker keeps apostrophizing “America” to get his country and himself to move beyond this impasse. The wren is known for loud, intricate songs; in foregrounding this particular bird, Lease calls for a sounding of fundamental emotions as a groundwork for higher aspirations.
As Lease demonstrates, the advertising bastion of crass twenty-first century U.S. materialism knows very well how to toast “the ideal of a free society,” how to manipulate numbers and create artificial lusts: “’Give in.’// NASDAQ +12.90. Dow close: 10,617.78.// Hey, kids big sexy corporation!// Don’t be a quitter—” (13). The tension between the two imperatives beginning and ending this section is instructive: commodity culture wants to break down resistance to its values in the name of “pleasure” and at the same, just as manipulatively indicate that lack of adherence to its values is pusillanimous behavior.
The poet captures the effects of advertising culture’s stimulation of the frantic desire for material acquisition (including the kind indicated by plastic surgery) and consumption rather than enjoyment of nature : “Want my// back porch, want my front porch, want my milkweed, my willow tree, want a new body, want a new mouth, Christmas tipsy, kiss, yes—// I want to live forever, why not, why// not admit it—“ (17). The absurd quest for immortality is actually deliberate distraction from the contemplation of mortality and its attendant clarification of values, and even suffering is commodified: “my scream is a brand name// blue—for a while—“ (24). In the phrase, “Sky like whiskey” (16, 31), repeated in a later poem, Lease shows how nature is transformed into images that stupefy, that create a numbness mistaken for authentic pleasure, and a differing voice strives to refuse this tropological dysfunction: “The sky/ Is the/ Sky” (15).
Various points in “America” mark the emergence of voices that would achieve a reclamation of the positive potential in the word “America”and gain momentum for a task characterized as “nothing less than rescuing a democracy that is so polarized that it is in danger of being paralyzed and pulverized” (18). As in the work of many revisionist historians like Manning Marable and Howard Zinn, one is reminded of a leftist anti-authoritarianism, as well as a time when immigrants’ economic mobility seemed more prevalent: “America says fight the bosses. America told Ada. You can speak. You can speak” (16). Among other things, to fight bosses is not only to declare, “And this is and you are and we are: say we are the people: we are people, the people” and to focus on “popular consent,” but to combat current practices of information dissemination: “say free and responsible government, say informed public, say journalism, journalism, journalism—” (18). Repetition here seems part of an incantation designed to call into being an oppositional praxis that is (during the time that Lease identifies as the poem’s span) fragmentary, inchoate, difficult to assemble.
In the single-paragraph prose-poem “Vow,” Lease provides a hint of the political concerns in “America,” the book’s final long poem “Magic,” and other pieces, as well as an allusion to the financial crisis of 2008, while offering an elusive narrative that could be framed as a love poem, intimate communication with a close friend, or a plaintive lyric evocation to “every-reader”:
Authentication failed. “Dignify my renaissance.” In the rhythm of hair and sky, in this telling so rivers and ledges and
horses, in this so hard then, so hard and free, in this telling cradled by slow moss, breathing September. I can’t break again.
I want to give you this.
While individual words and phrases are generally accessible, the poem’s luminous intensity often resists paraphrase, and the three fragments—occupying a majority of the text’s words—signal an important sense of incompleteness. If socially constructed modes of validation from the computer world and elsewhere do not support the speaker’s own way of configuring his identity, he is in need of a rebirth in a natural setting so that he can offer a meaningful gift to the one being addressed. Though he cannot (yet?) see clear to the completion of his vow, the lyric concentration of one who can acutely name the colors and qualities of a rainy autumn road may prove a fundamental resource:
Wander all day, sleep like a dog, sleep like a wren, sleep like a fire. (“Your eyes are made of cash and going broke.”) If I fall down
or dance or go across the road where orange leaves are spinning in a thin grey rain. If I fall down or dance or go.
Against the tenuousness of the reiterated “if,” the speaker,“burning” even in “sleep,” implicitly expresses his determination to pick himself up from every fall, to weather every obstacle, and to restore vision compromised by the relentlessness of the culture’s promotion of materialism as he crosses “roads” to fulfill his mission.
“Magic,” a long poem in which verse passages keep following prose, depicts the longings of Americans caught in the muck of current turmoil—“please/ breathe my/ newsprint”—and in the banality of the quotidian: “you have a diner in your voice, maybe the chamber of commerce.” These people seek “magical” avenues of transcendence, while they sometimes recognize that they have become painfully alienated from accurate, valid perception: “my eyes don’t fit—.” As sections—each, again, bearing the poem’s title—accumulate, various strategies are entertained, such as materialism based on “credit/ credit// everywhere”; the combination, exemplified by the sonic relation of “gold” and “God,” of materialism and religious faith offering the confidence that “Jesus told ‘me’ so, he gave ‘me’laws, he gave ‘me’ diamond rings,. . . he gave me nations too—” (71); an attempt to abolish all desire, to “dream of nothing”; and, in a larger frame, “pro-business policy solutions” that, among other things, are supposed to ”solve your child’s sleep problems.” The poem’s whirr of simple, quick solutions suggests that their transience, their fragility in the face of complex social situations. From any one of them, disintegration is a much more likely result than sustained satisfaction:
four minutes that could change you into mist
four minutes that could trade your soul for beer
four minutes that could dry you out like crack
four minutes that could dance like winter rain
The idea of trading one’s “soul for beer” would seem ridiculous if it were not such an oddly accurate tag for how commercials saturate viewers with overdetermined symbolism to sell products meant to intoxicate.
Without posturing or seeming the least bit journalistic, the poem’s closing section brings individual desire into the arena of the Obama era health insurance debate (prior to passage of the compromise legislation):
Remarkable condensation with repetition as incantatory insistence (and perhaps marking of obsession) No fat. Dashes
as caesura with emphases)
pro-business policy solutions solve your child’s sleep problems book-birds shining leaves hang fat grapes so mist deep kiss
mouthful of wind like wet peonies his head is winter are you a worker health insurance health insurance health step into the
water and step into the road step into the water and step into the sky health insurance greed health insurance greed before you
know it you’re lying in a pool of blood
I hear that everywhere I go
Replete with Gertrude Stein’s talent for letting the seams out of syntax to expand possibilities of signification and for engineering repetitions that ring powerful changes, Lease’s last paragraph felicitously juxtaposes bits of imagery and narrative to foreground a strong suspicion of any invitation to “step into” a pseudo-opportunity and, of course, to show that terms like “pro-business policy,” when applied to the attempted denial of health coverage to workers, are not pragmatic thinking to maintain the GNP but the “greed” of those who can never get enough “fat grapes.” Far from solving “sleep problems,” these attitudes and policies will trouble sleep and waking with widespread misery.
Through searing imagery, remarkable condensation of expression featuring reiteration as incantatory insistence, and carefully chosen abstraction, Joseph Lease testifies to the last decade’s state of disunion with major acuity and eloquence. Washington, Wall Street, and Main Street could use a generous dose of this book.
From the opening pages of Joseph Lease’s Testify, the beginning of a long poetic sequence called “America”(published 55 years after Allen Ginsberg’s), what the poet is testifying about in his fourth collection is extremely clear. The dates “Nov. 2004-Apr. 2008” tell us“America” was begun around the time of John Kerry’s narrow defeat and right before Barack Obama gathered momentum for the decisive Democratic primaries. Lease serves as a witness to the greed, mendacity, and potent PR machine of right-wing capitalist authoritarianism andto resistance to it. In a tone of sustained desperation tinged with longing, he pits the automatic survival mode of various classes—including members of the working class who were twice manipulated to vote against their economic interests—with deliberate aspiration for communitarian goals.
But in “America” and in Testify as a whole, Lease is not offering extended political analysis or primarily mounting a polemic. He testifies to the impact of sociopolitical trends and events on individuals, as the first page indicates:
Try saying wren.
It’s midnight
in my body, 4 a.m. in my body, breading and olives and cherries. Wait, it’s all rotten. How am I ever. Oh notebook. A clown
explains the war. What start or color or kind of grace. I have to teach. I have to run, eat less junk. Oh CNN. What start or color.
There’s a fist of meat in my solar plexus and green light in my mouth and little chips of dream flake off my skin. Try saying wren.
Try saying
mercy.
Try anything. (11)
The nightmarish “fist of” knotted “meat” seems an emblem of how contradictory ideologies coagulate in one mind to produce immense psychic cholesterol. Ever subject to egregious rhetorical abuse in the name of a “rotten” individualist pragmatism masquerading as idealism, the term “America,” suggests Lease, should not be discarded but is in need of rescue so that a“green light” or even “little chips of dream” can be transformed into something close to an actual idealism—or at least an invigorating anti-authoritarianism. Each page (section) of the poem has the same title as the whole, and this device might imply that the section title is the beginning of each opening sentence, as though the poet’s speaker keeps apostrophizing “America” to get his country and himself to move beyond this impasse. The wren is known for loud, intricate songs; in foregrounding this particular bird, Lease calls for a sounding of fundamental emotions as a groundwork for higher aspirations.
As Lease demonstrates, the advertising bastion of crass twenty-first century U.S. materialism knows very well how to toast “the ideal of a free society,” how to manipulate numbers and create artificial lusts: “’Give in.’// NASDAQ +12.90. Dow close: 10,617.78.// Hey, kids big sexy corporation!// Don’t be a quitter—” (13). The tension between the two imperatives beginning and ending this section is instructive: commodity culture wants to break down resistance to its values in the name of “pleasure” and at the same, just as manipulatively indicate that lack of adherence to its values is pusillanimous behavior.
The poet captures the effects of advertising culture’s stimulation of the frantic desire for material acquisition (including the kind indicated by plastic surgery) and consumption rather than enjoyment of nature : “Want my// back porch, want my front porch, want my milkweed, my willow tree, want a new body, want a new mouth, Christmas tipsy, kiss, yes—// I want to live forever, why not, why// not admit it—“ (17). The absurd quest for immortality is actually deliberate distraction from the contemplation of mortality and its attendant clarification of values, and even suffering is commodified: “my scream is a brand name// blue—for a while—“ (24). In the phrase, “Sky like whiskey” (16, 31), repeated in a later poem, Lease shows how nature is transformed into images that stupefy, that create a numbness mistaken for authentic pleasure, and a differing voice strives to refuse this tropological dysfunction: “The sky/ Is the/ Sky” (15).
Various points in “America” mark the emergence of voices that would achieve a reclamation of the positive potential in the word “America”and gain momentum for a task characterized as “nothing less than rescuing a democracy that is so polarized that it is in danger of being paralyzed and pulverized” (18). As in the work of many revisionist historians like Manning Marable and Howard Zinn, one is reminded of a leftist anti-authoritarianism, as well as a time when immigrants’ economic mobility seemed more prevalent: “America says fight the bosses. America told Ada. You can speak. You can speak” (16). Among other things, to fight bosses is not only to declare, “And this is and you are and we are: say we are the people: we are people, the people” and to focus on “popular consent,” but to combat current practices of information dissemination: “say free and responsible government, say informed public, say journalism, journalism, journalism—” (18). Repetition here seems part of an incantation designed to call into being an oppositional praxis that is (during the time that Lease identifies as the poem’s span) fragmentary, inchoate, difficult to assemble.
In the single-paragraph prose-poem “Vow,” Lease provides a hint of the political concerns in “America,” the book’s final long poem “Magic,” and other pieces, as well as an allusion to the financial crisis of 2008, while offering an elusive narrative that could be framed as a love poem, intimate communication with a close friend, or a plaintive lyric evocation to “every-reader”:
Authentication failed. “Dignify my renaissance.” In the rhythm of hair and sky, in this telling so rivers and ledges and
horses, in this so hard then, so hard and free, in this telling cradled by slow moss, breathing September. I can’t break again.
I want to give you this.
While individual words and phrases are generally accessible, the poem’s luminous intensity often resists paraphrase, and the three fragments—occupying a majority of the text’s words—signal an important sense of incompleteness. If socially constructed modes of validation from the computer world and elsewhere do not support the speaker’s own way of configuring his identity, he is in need of a rebirth in a natural setting so that he can offer a meaningful gift to the one being addressed. Though he cannot (yet?) see clear to the completion of his vow, the lyric concentration of one who can acutely name the colors and qualities of a rainy autumn road may prove a fundamental resource:
Wander all day, sleep like a dog, sleep like a wren, sleep like a fire. (“Your eyes are made of cash and going broke.”) If I fall down
or dance or go across the road where orange leaves are spinning in a thin grey rain. If I fall down or dance or go.
Against the tenuousness of the reiterated “if,” the speaker,“burning” even in “sleep,” implicitly expresses his determination to pick himself up from every fall, to weather every obstacle, and to restore vision compromised by the relentlessness of the culture’s promotion of materialism as he crosses “roads” to fulfill his mission.
“Magic,” a long poem in which verse passages keep following prose, depicts the longings of Americans caught in the muck of current turmoil—“please/ breathe my/ newsprint”—and in the banality of the quotidian: “you have a diner in your voice, maybe the chamber of commerce.” These people seek “magical” avenues of transcendence, while they sometimes recognize that they have become painfully alienated from accurate, valid perception: “my eyes don’t fit—.” As sections—each, again, bearing the poem’s title—accumulate, various strategies are entertained, such as materialism based on “credit/ credit// everywhere”; the combination, exemplified by the sonic relation of “gold” and “God,” of materialism and religious faith offering the confidence that “Jesus told ‘me’ so, he gave ‘me’laws, he gave ‘me’ diamond rings,. . . he gave me nations too—” (71); an attempt to abolish all desire, to “dream of nothing”; and, in a larger frame, “pro-business policy solutions” that, among other things, are supposed to ”solve your child’s sleep problems.” The poem’s whirr of simple, quick solutions suggests that their transience, their fragility in the face of complex social situations. From any one of them, disintegration is a much more likely result than sustained satisfaction:
four minutes that could change you into mist
four minutes that could trade your soul for beer
four minutes that could dry you out like crack
four minutes that could dance like winter rain
The idea of trading one’s “soul for beer” would seem ridiculous if it were not such an oddly accurate tag for how commercials saturate viewers with overdetermined symbolism to sell products meant to intoxicate.
Without posturing or seeming the least bit journalistic, the poem’s closing section brings individual desire into the arena of the Obama era health insurance debate (prior to passage of the compromise legislation):
Remarkable condensation with repetition as incantatory insistence (and perhaps marking of obsession) No fat. Dashes
as caesura with emphases)
pro-business policy solutions solve your child’s sleep problems book-birds shining leaves hang fat grapes so mist deep kiss
mouthful of wind like wet peonies his head is winter are you a worker health insurance health insurance health step into the
water and step into the road step into the water and step into the sky health insurance greed health insurance greed before you
know it you’re lying in a pool of blood
I hear that everywhere I go
Replete with Gertrude Stein’s talent for letting the seams out of syntax to expand possibilities of signification and for engineering repetitions that ring powerful changes, Lease’s last paragraph felicitously juxtaposes bits of imagery and narrative to foreground a strong suspicion of any invitation to “step into” a pseudo-opportunity and, of course, to show that terms like “pro-business policy,” when applied to the attempted denial of health coverage to workers, are not pragmatic thinking to maintain the GNP but the “greed” of those who can never get enough “fat grapes.” Far from solving “sleep problems,” these attitudes and policies will trouble sleep and waking with widespread misery.
Through searing imagery, remarkable condensation of expression featuring reiteration as incantatory insistence, and carefully chosen abstraction, Joseph Lease testifies to the last decade’s state of disunion with major acuity and eloquence. Washington, Wall Street, and Main Street could use a generous dose of this book.