TWO BOOKS by SANDRA SIMONDS

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

Warsaw Bikini by Sandra Simonds
(Bloof Books, Central New Jersey, 2008) 

and

Mother Was a Tragic Girl by Sandra Simonds

(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Cleveland, 2012)

… In “No Pastrami” (Walt! I’m with you in Sydney / Where

the echoes of Mamaroneck howl / Down the outback’s

pixilating corridors)—does the pastrami refer

to a highly seasoned shoulder cut of beef? Is

Mamaroneck a place in the U.S. where wild oxes howl?

I take it corridors refers to the passageway

in the supermarket? Could I read the poem as —

The speaker is doing shopping in a supermarket

in Sydney; he is walking along the eccentric   

passageways among the shelves on which goods

are placed; he does not want to buy the pastrami

as he seems to have heard the echoes of wild oxes

howling in the U.S. while he addresses Walt Whitman?

In “No End to Envy”, does the envy refer to admire or

in the bad sense?

            -Charles Bernstein, “A Test of Poetry”

*

Bernstein’s “A Test of Poetry” could have been written in response to the poems of Sandra Simonds. Of course, it asks all the wrong questions. So what are the right questions to ask?

My answer is there’s lots to get to / thru first before one gets to the questions. My answer is a question itself: is asking questions of these poems the appropriate response? My overwhelming reaction to the poems in both of these books is joy. As if someone’s overturned a cornucopia and every living thing has come spilling, pouring, rushing out. It’s as if I’ve been caught in a tsunami, but one that doesn’t drown me, one that buoys me up (well it dunks me a little, and at times I’m gasping for breath* – but there is something about reading these poems that makes me fearless. The energy, the rush.

*

I don’t want to give the wrong impression with this review. As Juliana Spahr notes in her blurb for Mother, “"What does it mean to be a used white wife, a mother, a tragic girl writing poems? Sandra Simonds gets into these messy words and then tears them apart. Sometimes with the words of others. And sometimes with poems made from scratch. They aren’t all bad, these words. But they aren’t all good either. And that is where Mother Was A Tragic Girl gets its power. You will at moments be laughing but then you will also at moments just as much be crying. If Antigone was alive and decided to write some poems about the nuclear family, she would write them like Sandra Simonds. These are tough”. Damn straight these are tough. But that does not negate the energy rushing through them.

I think I will call these poems poems of “joyous revenge.”

Revenge against what? To quote Speedy from Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga, “Modern times, mon.” “Interesting times”, to quote the old proverb, “May you live in interesting times.” Interesting is such a good word for what we are living thru. Living in. Neck deep at least. (Back to the tsunami image).

So: how do we live? I’ve always wondered about that. That’s been my question ever since I was a kid. Simonds doesn’t answer it, and yet, and yet … It’s a long story, anyone interested can ask, but these poems have come into my life just when I needed them. What did I need? I think of Cacus in Dante’s Inferno who, from a deep deep pit, flips God off. A smart move? It’s way too late to worry about that. We get our satisfaction where we can. I think of Spinal Tap, who cranked it to 11.

Since these poems don’t really display their strength in excerpts, I’m going to quote two in their entirety. The first is the first poem in Warsaw Bikini, “I Serengeti You”:  

like a banshee, a leprechaun, a geek

in the shuffling feet of trick neurons

limbic, I skipped

          town with your checkbook

rode limber sleuths through suburban felts on flushed cheek,

           from gill to aorta, renal to fallopian tube

       twirling like Mendel’s string bean.

in the covered wagon of the corpus collosum

traveled to Coca Island, my mind’s coliseum

sliding off your mansion’s

                 cedar banister wowed superstellar monks a high-altitude kiss

           where the prevailing winds

          clipped their yak-butter-colored robes.

   As long as I could

            through white matter grids, pons, gas plants, ice plants, gum

trees, steam

          pouring from a half-inch medulla hole

           Eating gumbo on a glacier of

  you melt my global warming

Peeling squash by a saguaro of

you alkaline my pesticides

Doing jumping jacks on Mount Rushmore,

     slurping udon noodles

    my brothy stomach bulimic, bubonic,

influenzic, tubercular, emptying out

a department store’s clearance rack

- gaunt mannequin of me, oh where o where

can my Gucci be?

Well-dressed and indefatigable in my aquamarine goggles

on this timetable highway of cranial nerves

where a brute Genghis Kahn [sic] aphasia transfixes

          me forward – One June day I promise to rescue

baby Jessica trapped

in her pipe, repair the Challenger’s

tummy of cosmonauts     busted open

  through an ozone      hole the size

of sixteen Oklahomas     but for now

Doctor Dura Mater, so skull to meet you

wear your you so well                please put

your stethoscope to coal my syndrome chest

and tell me

where to asphyxiate

the piranha, the red-eyed firefly,

kinjakou and newt –

because the Amazon’s a

     goner, a game show gong.

OK. She probably doesn’t miss one disaster during the epoch mirabilis through which she has lived, personal, public, planetary. And yet. I am so happy reading this. Because none of them stop her, she continues to live. That might sound stupid of me to note. But it’s not so easy, continuing to live. And to make music of it. Music of course is a close cousin to dance. (I told you these poems came to me when I needed them.) I could go through this poem line by line, but this is Galatea Resurrects, not The Glossator, so I’ll leave that for the reader. I will just quote Blake here: Energy Is Eternal Delight. I delight in this dance.

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?" It’s not just the dance I delight in. It’s that the dancer dances right in the mess, thru the mess, with the mess. Grace under fire, or something.

Grace under fire is good, I think, because it appears that Simonds became a mother, or at least that motherhood took a more central place somewhere between these two books. This focuses the poems on a more obviously domestic level. I should add “ostensibly” between obviously and domestic I think. Because tho the focus is narrower in a way, there is no loss of depth of field. Which is not to say that there are no other “subjects” in Mother Was a Tragic Girl. Even Olivia Benson gets her own poem (more or less). But I will transcribe one of the poems that centers on the child, or uses the child as a center:

You Can’t Build a Child

with the medicinal poppies of June

nor with Celan’s bloom-fest of dredged stone,

      not with history’s choo-choo train of corpses,

    not with Nottingham’s Robin Hood

            nor Antwerp’s Diamondland.

Not walking on the Strand in Manhattan Beach with her

      silicone breast implants, refinery, waves of trash,

        not out of the Library of Alexandria

            with her burnt gardens that prefigure gnarly,

        barnacle-laden surfboards broken in half.

You can’t build the child with the stone paths

        that we have walked on through the atmosphere,

            the pirate’s plank, the diving board, the plunge,

          nor with the moon whether

                she be zombie or vampire.

        Not with Delphi, not with fangs, or cardamom bought

                in Fez, red with spring, red with

                    marathon running cheeks.

            Not with monk chant, bomb chant,

        war paint, not with the gigantic Zen pleasure zones,

                nor with this harnessed pig

        on the carousel that I am sitting on with my son

                in Nice, France. How it burns on its axis

            as if it were turning into pineapple-colored kerosene

        the way the Hawaiian pig, apple in snout, roasts

            in its own tropical meat under the countdown sun.

OK. This poem more or less can serve as an explanation for the miracle that is at work in life (sorry, no other word for it), and why, tho we must acknowledge all the horror and atrocity and suffering, why we must never turn our backs, that’s not where it – it – begins or ends. I think of this, about Emma Goldman: “‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.’ Did [she] really say that? In a word, no. The sentiment was certainly hers, and in her memoirs she told of being admonished for dancing when she was a young radical; but the actual words? No.” [http://takebackhalloween.org/emma-goldman/ Take Back Halloween] Simonds never says that, either. But, if I read her right, she does seem to say: also dance. Never forget that the dance is part of it. That delight is part of it. I won’t let you sap my poems of their fun.

“Joyous revenge.”

I wrote at the beginning of the review: So what are the right questions to ask? I don’t have many questions for these poems, I confess. That is not to say I read them mindlessly. I could ask more questions, there is plenty of intellect at work in these poems. But I don’t feel the need. I’ll quote another poem to explain why. It’s by Ian Hamilton Finlay:

The Dancers Inherit the Party

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy—

Not so when I have danced for an hour:

The dancers inherit the party

While the talkers wear themselves out and          

sit in corners alone, and glower.

So. This is an admittedly lopsided review. Had I been in another place, I could have emphasized other aspects of these poems, such as their social consciousness, their politics, their pop culture references (all lovely), and so on. But these poems came my way when I needed to remember to stop glowering so much, to get up and also dance. Since there is no more Siskel and Ebert, I’ll say it for them. Two thumbs up.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman is just past the halfway point of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch pasting stuff to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making (Leafe Press), and Flux, Clot & Froth (Meritage Press). In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he is in the midst of two collaborations (one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick) has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. His is learning to play the viola and he blogs at www.johnbr.com (Zeitgeist Spam).