“By that token, perhaps Bianca Stone is just the poet for our times. Her verses wrestle with a dirty angel, one that bites and kicks. There is no snow-white falcon in her pages. But she does not quit.”
Bianca Stone is a visual artist and poet, best known until now for the collection Someone Else’s Wedding Vows. Her 2022 poetry book What Is Otherwise Infinite is a witty yet dolorous search for what life can mean when God feels distant or simply inaccessible, yet weirdly omnipresent. The book’s tone of backtalk by a chronic backslider caught in a cyclical mental Via Crucis could suggest that Infinite is governed by poststructuralist sass, in which there is no transcendental signified, à la Derrida.
Yet this is not the case. Stone’s poetic mindset here is captured in the cognitive dissonance existing between Neoplatonism, with its rationalist consciousness and demands for strict proof, and Scholasticism, the latter being faithful, secure, self-sure, yet beset by its own dogma. Stone is like an audiophile wanting the separation and clarity of digital media yet still craving the pops and crackles of analog sound. This is a chronicle of grit and mud. For as is the case with the great Christian mystics, Stone’s persona is governed by moods ranging from momentary ecstasy to tormented near-defeat, in this taxing, rewarding volume.
This poetry’s penchant for bleak expression, as in “Yield,” feels strangely enlivening.
“Get down on your knees and be thunderstruck with language.
Start in like those fanatics you read about
who stop eating and drinking and live
on the breath of irises, heavy mist.”
On the other hand, Stone’s extravagant and quirky sensibility provides a stream of images and similes that stray into comedy and dark wit, as in “Mary Magdalene,” in which Jesus’s favorite Girl Friday might just be trapped in an eternal temp job.
And in “Apocrypha,”
“It is said that Jesus couldn’t admit to himself that he was a simile.”
The abundance of literary and theological reference is not mere showing off. Stone’s density of reference has a purpose and if anything, one can easily believe this is simply how she thinks. Some of the verse is punctuated with a vaudeville vibe. In “The Way Things Were Until Now,”
“I am bored of all excuses.
Bored as Mayakovsky
at the Finnish painters’ exhibition
barking like a dog through the foreign minister’s toast
until he cried and sat down. Deadly serious.
I am bored as an elegy.”
But while this well-structured and expansive tome covers childhood, motherhood, romantic love, and the foibles of being human, the subject always soon comes back to God, under whose fitful guidance the limits of faith and reason are tested, and no amount of ennui or sheer fatigue can absolve the poet of the burden of questing. (“Man and his ciphers/cannot save me. Meaning cannot not pile me up/with more meaning.”)
On the other hand, there’s this outburst:
“Sometimes, I want to be taken into nothingness…
I don’t want this phone. I want to kill God.”
Stone is on particularly fertile ground in one of the book’s standout poems, “Illuminations,” in which the speaker seems eager to present fleshly pursuits in the form of an illuminated manuscript about a saint’s passion.
“Human nature is bifolios, versos, even blank pages
with preparatory rulings for the scribes, never painted upon.
Little books of suffering saints and resurrections.
That’s what we are.”
She splits the difference between Thomas Aquinas and Jacques Derrida, as if they were drinking buddies who only pretend to quarrel about God’s existence to keep things lively. Whatever we are, our destiny is written, or drawn by the illuminator as a terrifying annunciation.
“And like the angel, every bat is terrifying.
They keep appearing in my house,
silent and graceful, and so too as in Rilke’s elegy,
we stand in the doorframe with coats over our heads
and fishing nets in our hands, asking Who are you?”
In Infinite, there is no clear answer. Poststructuralists believe everything is a text. Stone believes, conversely, that texts are real life, the way a child believes that if she leaves the storybook open on her chest as she drops off to sleep, the Big Bad Wolf will jump out of it and eat her in the middle of the night. In the end, what makes this book succeed is we feel that for the poet, this is not just words. Her poems, no matter how esoteric or referential, in the end are tantamount to living. Life is deadly earnest, the stuff of desperate mammals. And this mammalian aspect gives a special vigor and directness to this poetry.
“When I am like this, I can taste
the earth by just looking at it,
like pregnant women who crave dirt, a gesture of animalism—I,
wanting to die, wanting to dig back in…
want to taste stones in my mouth.
Want to taste something of rock.”
Thomas Aquinas refuted as specious the omnipotence paradox of whether God can lift a rock larger than himself. Stone might add that the answer does not matter. Rocks were made to be eaten, not lifted. Besides, as she posits in “God Searches for God,” the deity, far from omnipotent, has its own questions.
“Do not touch this. Having laid the cosmic egg
Who will take my eternal life in their hands?
It is said this planet came to be
when I was pulled apart.”
In this regard, the last quarter of the book, “Tetrad,” is perhaps the most comforting, if only by virtue of its vaudeville quotient. While garish and disturbing, the absurdity of certain moments elicit laughter.
“I’ve disappeared into the huge false teeth of my grandmother’s mouth
hoping she’ll posthumously forgive me for our fight
when she shouted so hard, they fell out.
You don’t like me anymore
Because you found out I have dentures.”
Is this consoling? Probably not, but at least it is comic relief. One would sooner find consolation in St. John of the Cross’s “Of Falconry,” in which, enraptured with the prospect of meeting God, he imagines himself “no feather adroop/oversailing the heron above/in thrilling crescendo above.” After Freud, Marx, Darwin, Derrida, it may be harder to find our way back to where we can embrace such certainties in uncomplicated fashion.
By that token, perhaps Bianca Stone is just the poet for our times. Her verses wrestle with a dirty angel, one that bites and kicks. There is no snow-white falcon in her pages. But she does not quit. She has not killed God yet. In fact, it is what she mostly thinks about. In an age in which one’s religion may never come up in conversation, and if it does, could as well be used to dismiss one’s political beliefs as to create commonweal, it is good to see someone treat the matter with visceral sophistication (yes, that is a paradox), someone who cares so much she would have been willing to spend all night drinking and having an intense dialogue with Kierkegaard.
Poetry was made for gnarly truth, what performance artist Laurie Anderson referred to, sardonically but seriously, as “Hard Listening Hour.” For some, despite its spiky exuberance and summoning burst of brilliant phrases, What is Otherwise Infinite will feel challenging to some readers. That is how it is with truly original writing, which tries to tell us something we have not heard before, or else something familiar in verses we have not heard before. This book speaks for God, against God, to God, as God. John Milton would either call it Luciferian in its overreach, or just a damned fine read.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. He is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles and earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
Johnny Payne
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University. Contact Johnny at johnny@merionwest.com.
