“Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt.”
This review is the third consecutive essay I have devoted to an author of Airlie Press, a publisher where the writers are also the editors. These talented poets are bringing a fresh look at contemporary poetry by focusing on poetry being written in Oregon, especially by women. As FC2 did years back for fiction, the writer-editors have taken matters into their own hands and produced exquisite editions, friendly to the touch and challenging to the mind and the senses.
Of the three Airlie poets I have considered, Daneen Bergland is the most impish. To read her verse is willingly to hold a pack of firecrackers in your hand, light them, and get so busy watching them explode that you forget to put them down. Reading her work sent me back to James Tate, one of my early favorites, a prolific and changeable author I always felt was hemmed in by the descriptor “surreal.” The poet Charles Simic, interviewing Tate in the Paris Review for the Summer 2006 issue, holds a similar view to mine.
“The critics usually deal with him by calling him a surrealist and leaving it at that. If he is one, he belongs to that native strain of surrealism to which Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields also belong. ‘It’s a tragic story, but that’s what’s so funny,’ Tate says in one poem. He is one of our great comic masters.”
I do not claim that Bergland has consciously or unconsciously been influenced by Tate or has even ever read his poetry. (Any more than I can biographically trace her to Deep Image poets such as James Wright, which would be a whole other essay.) But if she did read Tate’s writing, she would find a kindred spirit there, however the differences in style break down. In one of my favorite Tate poems, “The Blue Booby,” he briefly seems to undervalue the male, describing how he constructs the nest from a “Gaulois package,/a string of beads,/a piece of cloth from a sailor’s suit.” Then he remarks that over “fifty million years/the male has grown/considerably duller,/nor can he sing well.” After having seemingly left the creature evolutionarily déclassé, Tate turns it around, from the female’s perspective. She sees her mate has found her
“a new shred of blue foil:
for this she rewards him
with her dark body,
the stars turn slowly
in the blue foil beside them.”
So, not so dull after all. There are consolations even when your kind gets consistently diminished over fifty million years. You may find sudden avian eros. The casual tone belies a careful eye for the natural world, which in turn creates a cosmic tenderness. The comedy involved is, as we say, the human comedy—not the kind involving an open mic. Bergland casts a similar eye in her deadpan “Tractor Music,” the account of a perverse and fallible god before a skeptical believer. After a bridge collapses, the speaker tartly observes of the immanent deity:
“He thinks with the clouds
a song he sings to lull me to work,
his song an old hermit with a spoon
carving caves into limestone.
He’s in the woods too.
He chickadee dee dees from a place
so pretty he must ruin it every so often.”
Just as the female booby forgives the male for his dullness and bad song, this skeptic gives a pass to a wantonly destructive god who “needs me to believe.” She concludes, with spiky compassion,
“Lord, I forgive you for green beyond reason.
God’s in the weeds where my soul’s kept
in hock. Oh my beloved
covered with ticks!”
Presumably, in the film version, an unsmiling and beleaguered Buster Keaton would play God, crouching in the weeds at riverside, covered in insect bites, gazing impassively at the twisting wire and wooden bridge, not really knowing what to do next. That scene would have resulted in his first Oscar nomination. (Keaton, not God.)
Speaking of Creation, Eve plays a starring role in The Goodbye Kit in the wittily titled “Sometimes Eve Gets Drunk Enough to Forgive Herself.” She tries to be philosophical about getting booted from the Garden of Eden, after eating from the Tree of Knowledge.
“I wish I knew less. But unlearning it not the same
as being unseduced. I’d like to still be piecing together the story
of how trees were invented, the wanderlust of weeds.
But it’s good to think we’ll never again
have to eat a pleasureless salad from Safeway.”
Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt. I cannot help but think of Woody Allen’s quip “If it turns out that there is a God…the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.” Beyond succeeding as a superb comedienne, Bergland excels in poeisis. “Wanderlust of weeds” concisely and precisely hits the note of Eve’s impending exile. If lyric is the mode that lives by its wits, those wits are less made of thoughts than of sheer images.
Bergland is a highly efficient lyric poet in that she seldom strays into gross abstraction. To the extent there is blatant thinking, it is: 1) in character, therefore idiosyncratic 2) colloquial 3) and serves as the connective tissue between one image and the next, rather than the reverse. In the marvelous faux throwaway “Fashion Crisis,” the speaker sneaks up on an emotional insight by means of a string of memorable images.
“The seagulls dip their wings
into the rainbows on puddles.
Hairspray holds the cloud up
and makes the oceans sultry.
What makes the tarmac glitter?
Everything comes from something.
This year the butterflies from Mexico
might miss the milkweed by a mile.
I never thought I’d be alone
enough to say this.”
The poem’s direct gesture toward thinking about solitude first occurs in line nine, after we have been offered a startling string of visual images (the firecrackers going off in our hand). The speaker—in Bergland, always a supreme if quirky observer of the natural world—surprises us with the precise imagery of a seagull dipping its wings into rainbow puddles, as well as the accurate and amusing metaphor that attributes clouds’ fluffiness to hairspray. (Why didn’t I ever think of that?) After which, her first occurrence is to wonder what causes the tarmac to glitter. The real conclusion is not about her solitude but, rather, a statement of the obvious truth that “everything comes from something.” That axiom is news to no one perhaps, but, for the speaker, it is an existential surprise, or one she knew all along but was not comfortable stating in company. Maybe they would think her stupid. Or maybe she simply needed solitude to enter the space of wonder. “Miss the milkweed by a mile” is an alliteration both lyric and lame, redeemed by “milkweed” serving as the noun of that phrase, the place where the Mexican butterflies were supposed to land. In Bergland’s world, knowing the right noun is as likely a path to heaven as any for a nominalist such as her.
Bergland’s gift for image and metaphor is, like her poetry, ultimately serious-minded, even if it has a funny way of showing it. “Pleasure,” one of my favorite poems of the collection, displays this gift to best advantage, in a series of offered visual and sensory equivalents for a speaker starved for pleasure. A violin player gets depicted as a wholly sensual object of desire.
“The chords unravel their formulas
like an orgasm revealing its math.
There’s that candy box
humming against his neck.
There’s the horsehair that feels the way honey tastes.
I know his fingertips
are sticky and smell of pinecones,
which feels like having your hair
gently tugged at the crown.”
The poet-speaker’s rapt attention spins out a precise lyric equation: chord + formula = orgasm + math. The candy box, honey, and sticky fingertips redolent of pinecones neatly lead to her fantasy of a sexual gesture, gently pulled hair, as if she has become the instrument in the violinist’s hands. Again, Bergland leads with image and lets thought catch up. That is her greatest talent, and it is present in every poem in this collection.
For me, the pièce de résistance of The Goodbye Kit is its longest poem, at almost three pages, “The Story.” Wit is held in abeyance, and the verse becomes, if not less mediated, more guided by a persona of the author as blank witness rather than squirming vassal of the gods or puckish desiring machine. In it, the poet listens, to a woman, all the women, living among an impending and mostly unstated violence. Here the tragic is tragic, if mainly in tone, and the poet-speaker’s compassion gets laid out in front.
“Once she told the story
it left her body like a cloud of swallows
swirling out a chimney.
You could feel the sky darken
you could hear her hollowing
and now, I own it, I noun it,
I womb it safely away from the world.”
In “you,” we, the reader, are invited directly into the proposition, which elsewhere plays as cosmic vaudeville. Here, not so. There is an unspoken plea for us to participate in what otherwise is unbearable. Only then is she empowered, by us and by language itself (“I noun it”), to “womb [the story] safely away from the world.”
Further, we are told, “There’s no way to safely unhear the story…So I let it bloom and fold and bloom/its phosphorescent pain/inside the dark tank of me.”
The poet is recast as fellow sufferer and birth vessel. It is a metamorphic destiny she chooses, a product of her willingness to listen to the stories of others. Later, her daughter asks why some humans live while others die and rages as she becomes more aware that violence is ubiquitous. One respects such a poem, its honesty regarding the fact that poetry is more about questions, as ultimately it has no definitive answers. Instead, it floats one hypothesis after another. To lay claim to absolute truth (vs. firm convictions) is not in the province of poetry. Many recent declaimers, in the fervor of their unquestionable rightness, have forgotten that fact. Bergland has not. Her wit; parallel constructions that keep one guessing about their un-parallel logic; and, most of all, her borderline non-sequitur confidence in the image as a reality of its own—all of these are what save Bergland from flat or obvious irony or from grim and earnest lecturing. In short, as Eve might say, the world is just too Goddamned crazy. She posits a strange optimism, even in the most awful and absurd hypothetical situation.
“I like to think if you cut my heart out
and fed it to my mother,
it would split eagerly to her teeth,
its two halves bursting and impossible
to fold back into a whole.
It would hurt her
to be full of all my joy.”
This unprecedented, imagined violence is so extravagant, almost laughably so, that it could almost stand as the sole (darkly) comical moment in this longish poem. In a singular vicious paradox, the kind that does sometimes happen between mothers and daughters, the joy of one means pain to the other. Either the speaker is raging and cruel, or the gesture is self-sacrifice tendered as a blessing on the other. Which is it? Maybe both? Bergland does not explain further, so we accept the description of devouring at face value. We can only judge by the poem’s final couplet, in which the wish for peace reigns, as in a manger.
“I want the hollow place to be the grass
Pressed down where a deer recently slept.”
This comes as close to a direct prayer as we will find in this book. It is echoed a few pages later in the collection’s closing/title poem, “The Goodbye Kit.” That final gesture is a sincerely expressed acceptance of the fact that we are all always leaving Eden, a place which in Bergland’s conception seems to have been created on a tremendous fault line. Yet its last two lines, another paradox of many, sound more like an affirmation than a lament.
“Nothing’s calmer than a husk,
its soft brush with breath.”.
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.
