“It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials.”
In tracing the origins of lyric from the monody of Greek melic poems to Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody!/Who are You?” David Baker reminds us that “lyric poetry is never merely about a self but is always also a social performance…Interiority is—the ultimate paradox—one of our most conjoining gestures.” Does that also imply perhaps that there exists a path for the leap from lyric to epic, those famously counterpoised modes? Not everyone possesses the skill to vault back and forth across that canyon from private to public—yet it can be done. We commonly understand epic to mean long, heroic, and mythic or historical. Given, the term hero has been so overworked that one now only need be a first responder doing their everyday job, or a rank citizen who rescues a distraught cat to be designated a hero, thus the term’s falling off into a trite trope. Perhaps what needs rescuing first is the term itself.
For the purposes of poetry, I suggest it denotes a temperament forged of resolve, subtlety, and steely but supple wisdom in the face of a significant obstacle, as personified in a poem’s speaker. That could mean confronting whatever life dilemma originates in but resonates beyond the self (the conjoining gesture). The dilemma does not have to be universal, only common. It is enough to make us feel that one suffers, alone, in the way that many suffer. Long since in the genre of poetry, have we ceased to posit “great” destinies (kings, nation builders) as the sole significant avatars of heroic action. Does that then mean it is no longer a going value? The inner life offers sufficiently ample scope for any individual of sufficient depth and reflective power to resonate like El Cid: “With tearful eyes he turned to gaze upon the wreck behind.” William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.”
The making relative of what qualifies as sufficiently exalted status does not necessarily mean a diminishment of endeavor. What counts are qualities of mind and heart. Instead of taking up a lance or sword and mounting a horse, or poisoning a corrupt uncle-king, we say, as Thomas Merton did, “Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war.” The enemy lives within, as does the hero.
Much of the condition of simply being alive and laboring to prosper, bridging the gap between private strife and public harmony, could reasonably qualify as material for modern poetic epic without diminishing the term’s grandeur. For epic is not so much a person as a mode, ripe for lyric treatment to make the personal note resonate when played upon the cymbal of the world. We readers do not, as some critics have suggested, have to become the speaker. Our self-projection need not reach that far. Rather, we exist as compassionate witnesses to the theatrical conceit placed before us, the embodied spectacle of consciousness. This marks the new covenant between reader and speaker. The sensitive, keen and articulate observer, in its meditations, seizes regularly on the phenomenal world, whether its figures burn brightly or are walking shadows—while we watch these exchanges happen.
Revoke, the quietly thrilling poetic lyric-epic of Joy Manesiotis, applies this method, this variant of fierce lyric, with satisfying results. In its individual poems, images of crows, tango dancers, the ocean meeting the shore, a dark Madonna, recur. The progress from dawn to night is offered in a series of variations strategically placed throughout the collection, creating an arc of time that in its turn encompasses months or years, comprising the dramatic unity of a single day that seems to last a lifetime. These continuities make a whole of the book’s individual poems, which are in conversation with one another, specific phrases getting repeated to reinforce what ultimately is a single long poem. This work is of sufficient scope to cross the canyon that lies between lyric and epic modes.
A mother and her daughter, solid yet phantasmal figures who as often come across like two aspects of the same person, provide the book’s dramatic center. The speaker is a cross between the daughter and a more detached, cosmic presence, alternately brooding and encouraging. She inhabits a relative “I,” a mutable subject position. The travails of this mother dying in a hospital bed and her daughter undergoing an ultimately futile fertility treatment occur interspersed among other events, other preoccupations. They, in turn, get subordinated to the implacable world surrounding them and seem to determine their fates, even as they strive to self-determine. Sometimes rain, with “its silver echo/its sheen of answer,” matters more than these women. Other times, their sorrow is paramount. Their relative significance grounded against an ocean, shore, and sky that are at times indifferent or threatening, subtly elevates naked emotion to a higher plane, where it may be considered more philosophically.
The poet is strategically smart and tactical in her management of the “I.” In the opening poem, the deliberately generically titled “This” (as in, “it could happen to anyone”), the figure presented is third person, “a mother knows what she knows. Whose insides churn all day. Who wants to sing the song of everything is all right.” But her individual prerogatives are made conditional in what follows.
“This is just the usual how do I keep my child safe? song.” [Emphasis original] This mother is like another, her neighbor, like many others, in her worry. The pain is a generic one, which does not attenuate what the mother feels—rather, that fact makes her anxiety easier to identify with. Even in the deepest privacy, there are bystanders.
“All nod, yes, yes. We agree. We engage in the visible world
as if we know it is real.
This is the felicity of art. The charade that it will save us.”
With simple dexterity, the poet moves the reader through personal anxiety to group anxiety to Platonic perception to an insight about art’s illusory comfort. The speed of this sequence allows the poem’s speaker to be I and we at the same time, straddling lyric and epic. In this moment, she speaks for the many, no less than El Cid. Her battleground is simply domestic rather than martial, but no less preoccupied with life and death.
The first Variation takes us onto an Oregon mountain beach, where an unnamed “her,” doubtless the mother, in exile from herself, traverses the landscape’s vastness.
“The road down through the trees,
her bent walk across the room,
ocean’s monologue, its ceaseless murmur,
long needle through her back into lung, drawing
fluid, she sat curved away from the needle’s deep heat, shrugged
the road curving away toward beach, the trees attendant,
blackberries and honeysuckle
two days later, her hunched walk across the room, its shuffle
the ocean’s talktalk, its own song.”
Ingeniously, “her” is significant in her relative insignificance, over-spoken by “the ocean’s monologue, its ceaseless murmur.” Like Odysseus, she is subject to a natural—almost supernatural—power greater than herself. She can best be heard here as a consequence of the eternal landscape. Even the listeners, the trees attendant, are not human. The curve of her posture to avoid the medical needle’s torturing heat gives way to “the road curving away toward beach.” Both excessive sentimentality and melodramatic self-abnegation become impossible under these lyric conditions, where individual destiny, while poignant, gets instantly recast in a broader, dignifying scope. What’s more, the sound of her shuffle becomes “the ocean’s talktalk,” merging the two into one life force.
Edward Hirsch rightly remarks that “Aristotle’s traditional groupings more or less held until the eighteenth century, but since then the epic and the novel, the drama, and the lyric have continually shadowed and shaded each other. They have blurred, transmuted, crossed boundaries.” In 21st century poetics, and among practitioners of fierce lyric, it is more the case than ever before.
Far from representing an existential drama of the lonely romantic hero, the “she” (always a nameless third person, overlapping yet mutable from poem to poem) is redeemed through others, as in the title poem, “Revoke.”
“And so she found another way.
And the child came through someone else’s body.
And her body forsakes what it would do: and opens
the (arduous) path for this child.”
This biological surrogate for the sterile woman is her salvation. The self, so often isolated in lyric poetry since the Romantics, needs another human to achieve the wholeness of her deepest desire. She just cannot do it alone, for physical facts are physical facts and therefore she must “forsake” the quest of conceiving and bearing a child herself. Only two women together may achieve this goal by forming a commonweal of necessity. Manesiotis is remarkable in her ability to maintain a strict impersonality while making each poem land as intimate, personal, deeply felt. To be human is to traverse a constant path of paradox, to perceive and receive that as destiny:
“(Her child meant to come through someone else’s body.)”
Truth happens in parentheses. This key phrase gets repeated, as the speaker reassures herself of its emotional accuracy. The statement is presented as both an inarguable axiom, and as someone trying to overcome her own skepticism by coaxing a relative statement into absolute status until she herself can believe what she’s saying. Pure knowledge is elusive, for “we sit in a dark theater half the time.”
Like the “talktalk” of the ocean, there is a quality both tormenting and consoling about these self-locutions, as when the word that is the book’s title crops up: “a hum of revoke, revoke.” [Emphasis original] Something of value has been taken away—the woman’s fertility. It cannot be called back, for it has been revoked by God, the universe, blind circumstance, or immutable physical reality, its psychic cost immense.
“a good mother: attentive, compassionate, but not
without her flaws. In her throat she carries her daughter’s loss,
carries an ache like swollen fruit
and in her limbs, the current of longing.
…
The body’s process: silent, internal, how film,
once exposed, begins to break down:
…
The body as healed: as perfect vessel: as holding it all
even the sharp dust scoring emulsion, scrim where image is imprinted, white lines
running through faces, waves, even the gulls:”
The poet practices recursiveness, writing as wave, again lending dignity even to the body’s assiduous insistence on breaking down, on “exposing” the body to repeated mischance. The figure of a Madonna appears and reappears in these pages, counterpoised by the Dark Madonna, an ambiguous figure of both death and comfort, overseeing the fraught balance between life and its opposite, principles that live in close proximity.
From “Study: Dark Madonna”:
“Today the sky held up by invisible hands. Today is raining down.
And how to contain the hours and minutes, give form and purpose to the daylight?
The roses, citrus, salvia thirsty today, bowed down by enormous heat, a hand
at their throats.”
The mythic element gets subtly insinuated, floating above the everyday, once again reinforcing the link between lyric and epic, creating forceful divulgation of emotion, yet strangely decorous and delicate in its acts of assertion. Always, the speaking consciousness returns to the natural world, showing itself as healing yet possibly doomed. Often there is a feeling of immense space around this verse, quietly cosmic. Then the poet swiftly brings things down to earth in modestly devastating couplets, such as this description from the same poem about the failure of the embryo to take hold.
“Shadows took shape in the room.
There was an embryo, it was
only just barely attaching, it needed to be protected,
above all else, it needed shelter, her job
to shield its fierce industry, spinning and spinning.
and why wasn’t that embryo primary in attention,
beyond the need to assert some strange
undisputed sense of self?
oh, great sorrow comes from it—
a stream widening to a river—
oh sorrow for our little engines of self—
it had no choice, it let go, that little blastocyst did,
its spinning and spinning to shape more cells, finally refuted,
the atmosphere inhospitable—.”
It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials. As always, Manesiotis juxtaposes the vast and the infinitesimal, supplying immense scope in spaces so tiny they would only be perceptible to the human eye through an electron microscope. And through that scope we watch the pageant of life, both personal and social, unfold. The “I” in Revoke is a you, she, them, us, sometimes distinct, sometimes confused with one another, such as in the intermingled, inextricable destinies of a dying mother and an infertile daughter. This book of poetry offers the gift of continuity within a world of sudden and disastrous discontinuity.
Let it be said that Airlie Press, here and in other books, presents a sleek, beautiful edition, worthy of the poet’s talents, to offer an experience all of a piece. Turning the high-quality, artfully designed pages, or gazing as I did numerous times at the front cover of a crow standing atop a tilted children’s carrousel, ambiguous harbinger, runt tree bending over the bird’s figure, behind it an empty sky smudged gray and white, the foreground spare grass and dead leaves, is an odd and affecting pleasure.
In fitting symmetry, Revoke bookends that with a poem, “Skein,” undoubtedly an ekphrasis of Edward Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks.
“The loneliness thing is overdone, Hopper said. What he wanted
was pure light, the room empty of everything
but light, and paint, and of course the skein of leaves
outside the window meant to signal a tree, or many trees, a storm
…
of light and green, ocean of restless movement, landscape that never rests.”
Joy Manesiotis, in sure strokes, also offers us such a landscape to contemplate, never overdoing the loneliness thing, instead describing a bare ground determined to people itself with light and life.
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.
