“This Book Can Hold Our Whisky”: A Review of Welling by Margaret Christakos

 

Reading Margaret Christakos, you often get the sense that language is a playground in which all the toys are conscious knives that love to stab and all the playground equipment endeavours to buck you off. Only, you are Wolverine, so the damage is only temporary, and off you go to go at it again. It’s fun! But there is a danger of growing bored watching the wounds recede. And it can be sad, too, knowing that this is the only playground now that you’ve grown up, that the lie of friendly, inanimate toys and slides built only to serve you can no longer be sustained. The poet agrees. But though she shares the difficulty of coping with this mad mixture of joy, boredom and pain, she will offer you no alternatives. You can deal with it, you’re fine, buck up. It’s not always that way; sometimes the playground cooperates and does as you expect. Anyway, even when that’s not the case the playground’s imperfections may be made known to you and exploited for your pleasure. And there is always bodily pleasure; language can’t get to that. Let me explain.

Welling is the latest addition to Christakos’ quickly-building oeuvre. If there was one word to describe this poet’s body of work, it would be “stir.” Of course, that word also finds its way into Christakos’ previous collection: the masterful What Stirs (Coach House Books, 2008). That collection is at turns zany, hilarious, irreverent, lyrically beautiful, extremely difficult and powerful. That is impressive enough. But to leave it at that would be to sell the book short, because all the mania Christakos creates in What Stirs is directed towards identifying something dire; even if the dominating experience of that collection is the sheer vibrancy of its playfulness, the reader is left with something far more important: a deep understanding of what motivates, or stirs, our will to life in the midst of so much seeming despair, malaise and digital death. However, the argument the poet makes—that beneath this low-voter-turnout, cable TV, status update culture lies a life as real and exciting as any—would be nothing if Christakos failed to mimic that ever-churning essence in the lines and poems themselves. The vibrancy of the line is the vibrancy of the soul it seeks to champion. (Somewhere in the next world, Emerson is mumbling: “nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.”) And if there is one thing that Christakos has proven over the course of her career, it is that she can make the line shake off the page.  This new collection is scaled back in comparison to Excessive Love Prosthesis or What Stirs, but it reaffirms Christakos’ ability to flirt with both chaos and argument while finding space to dance between the two. Welling takes on a more philosophical tone than its predecessors; its dancing is more whimsical jazz (think Thelonious Monk playing solo on a hill overlooking Sudbury—where much of the book is set—rather than the techno-fusion-craziness of her previous two collections). Perhaps Welling is a Sunday afternoon book. Read What Stirs on Friday. Much is revealed by Welling’s first poem, “Tremble.” The poem is made of four verses, each between nine and twelve lines, interrupted by three off-set couplets that sarcastically criticize the main stanzas. It is as if Christakos cannot let the core instinct of the poem go without questioning (or is questioning the core instinct?). The poem begins, “Terrific wind smashes the garage” and proceeds to give us four more loosely related observations in the same tone, including “When/bodies breathe the same air their thoughts/resemble two sides of an emblematic screen.” Before long, the second voice intervenes with “I don’t know what you’re so thoughtful/about over that steaming coffee.” Undaunted by this taunt, the first voice continues, bringing back “Harsh wind” that “hits a recycling tub” and “bodies that have thoughts for the hell of it.” These repeated images connect only vaguely, coming as they do amidst a host of other similarly repeated images (a dog digging or pissing, boxes, storage rooms). But that loose connection, that line being drawn from one fragment of thought to another, gives the reader a sense that there is something like an argument here, even if we suspect that it quickly crumbles. However, those vague connections prove to serve as steppingstones to those connections that are not so loose. For instance, in the second stanza, “the screen tears & on both sides/we see boreal damage so unprecedented/our guts rattle.” Here, Christakos brings us back to the screen image from the first stanza, in which the screen suggests a subjectivity that simultaneously divides and connects people and their respective thoughts. As the screen “tears,” we are released from the cloud of subjectivity and “boreal damage” is revealed, suggesting ecological destruction. Thus, a hard and graspable concept emerges from the fun-but-somewhat-murky repetitions that dominate the poem, appearing all the more clear because of the relative murkiness that surrounds it. Christakos seems aware of this contrast when she writes, in the third stanza, “Listen but have separable ideas clouding/the sermon’s clear rhetoric.” That line is insightful because “Tremble” does seem to have a clear rhetoric that has been clouded over (as well as separable ideas from the second voice). Or, this poem’s rhetoric was born of a clouded-over, but not completely hidden, truth in the first place. “Tremble’s” cloudy rhetoric can be indentified in the “it” that floats through the poem, as well as in the “Terrible wind” mentioned above. “It” is described as “a real mess,/not just the idea of its being invented for enjoyment” and is only identified, by the second voice, this way: “Let’s say it is a hammerhead sharkskull/someone gave you for your birthday.” We get no more of “it,” but that we should “wait it out.” The role of “it” in the poem is similar to that played by the wind.  Invoked as a “terrible,” in the first stanza and “harsh” in the second, the wind is also prominent at the poem’s close: “the wind’s roar coats every breathful.” The constant wind—there in the first line, there in the last and on every thought and body in between—suggests a felt, intuited force beneath the “skelter-helter trembling” of the transitory events it unthinkingly pushes past. However, once again, this poem cannot arrive at its conclusion only by the force of its argument. Instead, its lines must create the sense of permanent transition upon which its conclusion depends. The poet must convince you—and does—that you can hear the wind in the movement of her images and gestures. “Tremble” can be read as a microcosm of the book as a whole and, by extension, the worldview the book posits. That worldview is in no way made explicit, and “worldview” may even be the wrong term to use, but Welling does at least suggest a profound vision of the contemporary individual’s relationship to the world. To place this collection in that context, allow me a short digression. In Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman makes the argument that Western Civilization has made a transition from a solid to a liquid state, meaning that the once solid structures of power—along with the worldview those structures imposed—have dissolved and dispersed so as to be nearly inaccessible. However true that may be on the grand scale, the individual need not—cannot—adhere to either condition. No one is ever all liquid or all solid. Both the ridged society that predated the cultural upheavals of the twentieth century may have produced a more solid individual than regularly exists today, and many, indeed, despair today in the face of the relativism that has resulted in the degradation of so many deference-imposing institutions. But for many, there is a way out. That way could be said to resemble glass. Glass displays the characteristics of both a solid and a liquid, but it cannot be said to be either. Similarly, it is not uncommon for contemporary individuals to retain some of the deference that defined the solid state of civilization while exercising the freedom associated with “liquid modernity.” For example, many people show deference to universal human rights or to God without submitting their will to an institution that would instruct them in that deference. Welling suggests an approach to the world that is similar in shape to that just described, if different in content. There is no appeal to a higher power or truth here, but there is an acknowledgment that chaos and ineffability are closely intertwined with order and meaning. But while this book does shed light on the big issues mentioned above, Welling does not approach them from an equal height. Instead, it chips away from the ground up until it reaches its conclusion (which we arrive at, fittingly, while on top of a hill). In the process, the reader encounters a host of down-to-earth, often bodily and very non-metaphysical moments. So, it must be admitted that, yes, this is just a book of poems capturing a mind in the world. But the sum of these moments, and the conclusion they lead to, resonate far beyond the everyday. Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is the simultaneity of its profound and banal insights, which allows Welling to go big while retaining the ability to be silly or charming. However, because Welling is made of so many moving parts, it is hard to pin down its conclusion—its bigness—although one senses there is one. Just as What Stirs does not conclusively identify what stirs, but rather confirms that something stirs, Welling does not guide us out of the despair it identifies, but it reminds us that there is a way out, and that we probably already know it. The poet affirms, by the wonderfully fluid and abundant movements in her collection, that existence dwarfs us. Yet, there are easily recognizable moments of clarity here that hold together the book’s more liquid-like aspects, suggesting that some power over existence remains with the will. Likewise, glass is not a solid, but we trust it to hold our whiskey. Take, for instance, the poet’s movement between Toronto, her adopted home, and Sudbury, her place of birth. “You wait for the heart to rise,” Christakos writes in “Fortune,” but “it can’t jolt itself fully,/crippled by indecision.” “Fortune,” like the other sequences that make up Welling, interweaves images and gestures in a semi-chaotic manner that defies easy logic but allows for bits of clarity to emerge—like the lines of solid-like molecules in glass surrounded by more liquid-like bunches. In this case, clarity emerges in the form of sentiment. Having come to the end of a string of semi-attached observations of nature, the poet describes a scene from her home, telling us, “from the rockpoint I watch particular clouds/cascade through mauve sentiments./Who/would leave such a place?” Of course, the poet would, and has, left that place for “Toronto’s metal skin immaculate, masking/a thrombosis of the senses.” Thus, amidst scattered fragments of visual perception, we arrive at a feeling that probably a million Torontonians—or those from any big city—would relate to: the longing for home, which is real but too weak to draw them back. It is largely through such humble clarities that Christakos saws out a window to the world for us, the occasion being anything from a conversation the poet has with her child, to an angry man on a long bus ride emanating “silent howls from his nose,” to the admission that “(like you) I have not wanked off/in a while.” But despite the prevalence of these moments, the larger mystery haunts Welling to the end. “Wind is a substance we all wish to see,” Christakos writes in “Feud,” but “we’ve been blown/side to side by the unseen thing we now call drive, but/might as well name age or depth or ineffable perspective.” I might add, you could also call it “wind.” Christakos isn’t making religion or myth here, but she is addressing the basic human mysteries—in particular, the limits of our insight—that motivates the best of those pursuits. But while there is a real search going on in Welling, no final certainty is offered or expected. Again from “Feud” : “The trees arch toward the lake./They know what in hell the wind means when it blows & blows/white as a sheet and obscuring something.” The trees might know, but they ain’t tellin’. Christakos even ends “Barrel,” which includes “Feud,” with two poems written, perhaps, from the voices of trees (sometimes the speaker seems human). Still, no higher truths are revealed: “Ineptitude I can only tell you of/after, for the dumb & mute do not/talk for good reason, & rage is a kind/of deep snuff.” This refusal to settle on a final truth does not stop the search. Instead—and this is never a new idea, but always worth refreshing—the search becomes the end in and of itself. In “Evolution,” the poet is asked, “mom, when did time start, when did it all begin/what preceded the universe” and she responds,

in fact the question stopped bugging me long ago in the mirrored mise-en-abyme of an Eaton’s changeroom. I could see my own fat buttocks from the rear, enough I tell you, of a Revelation.

This rejection does not halt the search, it only alters its trajectory. “By fantasy you miss/the sequence of what’s real” Christakos writes in the lyrical “Gulls.” “Or,” she continues, “the images themselves are pretty and present./It depends.” There is constant slippage between “what’s real” and our representation of it. Then again, the images that emerge from our representation of the world might be truth, might be “present” to some worthwhile degree (that they can be “pretty” is well evidenced by this book). In any case, we cannot be sure of what we say, but we cannot but say things. “We/are only human,” she tells us in “The Problem of Confessionality,” “caught in our/codes of/confession.” Christakos reveals “this problem of confessionality” to be that language is “only/coded, always coded,/never pure” and that “You cannot tally/all the motion in/process.” Thus, though humans “can never be disgorged from their/ craving for clarity,” we can only ever arrive at an imperfect tally or an acceptable impurity. And we can only do that if we accept that transition is arrival and that purity is always obscured by perception. Welling ends with “Wellington,” named for the elevated neighbourhood in which the poet was raised. Composed in long-lined couplets (like “Feud,” “Cold Compress” and “The Point,” but unlike the majority of the book), “Wellington” follows the poet up and down the hill that is the poem’s namesake. We are brought to the top, where she asks us to “survey the slag from here,” as well as from below, where you “descend under the hill’s heavy thighs.” The reader is made to feel the upward and downward movement at once, as is supported by the poet’s suggestion that “you have to hate and love simultaneous muscles,” “I hate love as one hates Wellington,” “this is the way I love, loudly and in silence,” among other suggested paradoxes and simultaneities. Likewise, while Wellington, as a hill, prompts a response in the poet, the name of the hill becomes an object of meditation itself. Christakos writes:

There I shall language my muscular project, make the three words cohere and disentangle, one syllable from its leeching others, pull them apart like sluggish parasites. Well. Ing. Ton. Weight of meaning persists. A welling tonne on my neck

Here we find the collection’s essence: its title embedded in, and separated and reconfigured from, the word signifying the central symbol of the collection’s concluding statement. Here, the name is questioned, played with, but never loses its weight (in fact, it comes to weigh a “tonne.”) The point is not that there is no point (as is the case in “The Point,” in which it is unclear if the poet is discussing a rhetorical point or a point of land jutting into a lake). The point is that, though we won’t ever get it, the pursuit is worthy of our effort. “We’re moments from capsize,” the poet tells us in the book’s final couplet, “embrace me with a rope or something. Pull me. Try.” Christakos is not after a truth but a way of existing within an uncertainty that is beyond our understanding. So what can you do? Try. Live in it. (Note Christakos’ calm casualness at such a dramatic moment: “or something.”) Once again, this is not new (See: Buddha, Hemingway, Whitman, Carson …). But the thought is not the point. The thought is important, but how you get there is more so, and that becomes largely a question of prosody. Prosody, in turn, embodies the point that the thought can only vaguely capture. How so? These are not formalist poems, but the poet has complete control over the rhythm of these lines and the cadences therein. Christakos does not dominate these poems so much as she works with their natural energy and harnesses their power. To borrow a term from above, you could say that, in lieu of formal structure, she is “trying” these poems into shape, and succeeding. The result, again, resembles glass: there is much that flows freely in these poems, but there are clusters of repetitions and cadences that give the poems a definite and pleasurable shape and sound—after all, “(what) you want (is) to/(reside in music).” That said, I will leave the last word to the poet, for she can certainly defend her prosody far better than I. I will only add this: notice the propensity to stress the syllable (46 stressed and 37 unstressed), the clumping together of spondees, and even one molossus, at the start and end of the poem, the middle filled with iambs and trochees (which create a nice relief from the spondees), the repetitions (the consonance on “o” in the second line and cadence between “solo key” and “family” in the final two, for instance) and, finally, the excellent phrase that ends the first stanza. The poem is titled “Motional,” comprises its own section and serves as a mighty pivot that swings the book as a whole merrily on its heavy way. Enjoy.

I cannot pass the chance to design your motional face in an orange moon. If you are coming, whistle the way a night- bird thinks of its mate, out pulling worms so the babies, wormish enough themselves, will be less so, & gladder than silence. This black camp is profuse with pitched sounds of a solo key, that now, turning its lock, makes of landfall: family.