JERRY #7

Sean Zhuraw

Believe You Me:
Jane Gregory’s My Enemies and Christopher Kondrich’s Contrapuntal

How far does the Truth admit of being learned? With this question let us begin—
Søren Kirekegaard 


Two new books of poetry have inherited this territory: My Enemies by Jane Gregory (The Song Cave, 2013) and Contrapuntal by Christopher Kondrich (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2013). Take heed. Their music, ecstatic and formfitting, might be the sound that returns from the cave-wall of Kirekegaard’s own summary of Meno’s paradox:

In so far as the truth is conceived as something to be learned, its non-existence is evidently presupposed, so that in proposing to learn it one makes it the object of an inquiry. … one cannot seek for what he knows, and it seems equally impossible for him to seek for what he does not know. For what a man knows he cannot seek, since he knows it; and what he does not know he cannot seek, since he does not even know for what to seek. ..all learning and inquiry is interpreted as a kind of remembering; one who is ignorant needs only a reminder to help him come to himself in the consciousness of what he knows..

Belief and its rider (the human self pulled with its consciousness) is the primary inquiry for both of these ambitious new books. As each title suggests, the mode of such examination is Contrast: where the inky script both saturates and divides the page, we are saturated and divided from into the other. There is no “progress” or successes of Truth in a singular expression. Rather, Kondrich and Gregory order language, sense and thought stark enough for us to recognize a crystal belief of truth in an instant of feeling, the eternities in a grain of sand.

Gregory communicates this quicker and with greater poise than I can in the opening lines of “IF THE HUNT IS ALSO CALLED BEYOND”:

I want not to tell you anything only
to put things in relation:

there is white on everything’s edges
there are sounds coming out of your mouth
but my eyes are bad and you have two faces.

Is that two-faced idiom a result of the speaker’s bad eyes?

The speaker’s eyes are occluded, image-blurry, yet no less attuned to the relation between the visual field and raw perception of artifice. Classically, truth enters through the eye, but here it is the white of the eye, the framed blind spots, that actuate a truth. The title’s stunning reversal, spring-loaded in the conditional’s tall grass, might be aimed towards the speaker’s demonstration in prose at the end of the poem:

the adjective alethic came, in logic, to designate the possibility or impossibility of truth. Sometimes, we wonder who else watches us here. Say it’s the sculptor who began with anything else as nothing, and as a child, drew rifles. Say, then, one of the lines of the equal sign is the term of fire, the fire that happened from the world that burned down the world. The spin of the fire is in each particle of fire, as the open is in the open, and in the blind, the blind.

Alethic truth can only be expressed when words adhere to their limits; the logic metaphor, that hot equal sign, is by necessity excluded. Gregory finds truth in language’s uncanny gyrations, its tones and registers that retrace their inverted geometries again and again. The fractal saturation of fire is both a substance in a word and is “literally” the transformation of substance into spirit. The conundrum is spinning (and wider!) and we are included, we are the poem’s inverse. The pairing of clinical and epistemically probing language translates to pleasure. And the ending asexual impregnation of words is not altogether a tautology. Perhaps the whole is whole is in the part which is in the whole. We can read the juxtaposition of these sentences as a poetics and we can also put down the hunt and admire them for the sincerity, their burning wonder towards an equation that equals an other, their density of sound and in the extension of their final affirmations: being is in the being.

Gregory’s imagination is of a brand rarely encountered. They often recall the imaginative torque of Wallace Stevens, especially when it comes to her titles (“THE IDEA ENDLESSLY GOES WITH THE PLACE FROM WHICH IT CAME”; “BECAUSE WE HAD SPOKEN OF A GARDEN THEY THOUGHT WE WERE IN IT”; “IT IS DISGUSTING AND IMITATES TRUTH”; I could go on…) Her language extends from its etymological roots as a means of stability in the sincere expression of words. Gregory is acutely aware that, over time, rituals of change turn to routine and routine turns to neglect, cataracting observance. To combat this, My Enemies digs at the root. Words become collapsible, chopped and screwed, their trapdoors de-rugged and gutted, not to mention their homophonous clones and refractions that reign the room’s mood. Many poets use these techniques but Gregory’s is no parlor trick, nor does she sever the tree from its root. Language is. And her speaker, therefore, uses and enjoys with destruction (usus et fructus) with a sense of stewardship—not ownership.

I cannot verify (yet), but my hunch is strong that the title and book are informed by the parable of Minas in Luke 19, where Jesus emphasizes the importance of making a profit with what one has been given. Here are verses 26-7:

For I say unto you, That unto every one who has shall be given; and from him that has not, even that which he has shall be taken away from him. But those my enemies, who would not that I should reign over them, bring here, and slay them before me.

Don’t panic. You will survive, slain among her beyonds. Her speaker’s second person address usually is directed towards the reader and is usually a woven construct that transparently aids in the speaker’s thought ad voice—this part of Gregory’s Truth. In her poem “SEVERAL MORNINGS AT ONCE / GIVE THE LIE TO THE NOTION BEYOND IT,” she writes:

we eat meat and where it came from and like to know from where
it came and how it came to be killed. days like these possible not
to know this. words are cows and gimp chickens. one does make
up origins. I am putting food on the table, you.

Here, “where it came from and like to know from where,” like etymological intent, comes to inhabit the human form via the other forms. The self resists definition that does not configure change: where we come from, what we contain, the parts, the eros, needs, adaptable functions or relation to others—all of this intense study leads to the question of what our self will be beyond itself: a made up origin? A theory closer to laughter? Later in the same poem comes the impossible crux of the book: “What’s the opposite of belief’s activity?” Phrased as a question (with the implied you) and invoking the negative: there is no misunderstanding here. Now joined are the consciousness, the imagination, and real: the shared world.

Yet I have not mentioned what might be most apparent when reading her book, the serial poems that share the title “BOOK I WILL NOT WRITE” that could be and are a conglomerate of separate and/or imagined book(s), possibly unsuccessfully commissioned. Their outward stares form the backbone of My Enemies and exemplify the various window frames that this book releases between its covers.

In one we see that:

This is a picture book, more precisely a book of pictures. Pictures of everything that has ever been used as an example by somebody making a pretty abstract point. … There are pictures that do not exist and have never happened: the book’s own three dimensional index … What is impossible is that I would have to put inside the book a picture of the book since it is an example too. This isn’t to say it exemplifies anything at all or has a point worth clarifying. I simply want to ask if you will stand still so I can take a picture of you, for example, or you, and you.

It is fitting that Gregory’s book finds its scaffolds in the deck of boisterous possibility that paradox provides. Is it the search for the self, tethered to the poetic other, or the book, or the clay origin of home/language that precipitates the search for every other belief? Perhaps it is the invocation of the absence that recalls it into being. But with certainty I can say this: for her philosophic wit, enigmatic humor, and observant stewardship of language, Gregory is a poet to read, over and over, to speak aloud, share, and watch for new work.

Now, if Gregory’s book finds its path through negation in a shelf of unwritten books, Contrapuntal arrives with an overabundance. Kondrich’s deeply moving and deceptively effortless debut is not one book but four, enumerated through section breaks.

Aside from this frame, there are no titles in Contrapuntal. However, before Book One is a prefatory poem. Here it is in full:

So I take my hand,
and even though I know my hand,
I know I know it,
it feels like your hand.
I take it but I’m tired.
I know I’m tired because I squeeze
what I see between my eyelids.
Then I dream that your mind is mine.
I dream that I secure it
with my end of the rope.
I wake while saying
that what I say is the truth
that you should believe me
because I say it.

Kondrich’s speaker deploys the cadences, interruptions, intimacy, and all the appeals of spoken language unto its highest limit: music. From the outset, truth is speech itself and to observe it is to believe. In this poem’s case, speech has traveled from the ineffable interior-topography of a dream to communicate the self-same divide of having to express: the dream imagines inhabiting, perfectly, the mind of the you (or, as perfect as one can intuit their own mind, nonetheless). Even though the repetition, the colloquial conjunctions, and the direct honesty of everyday communication (“I take it but I’m tired”), Kondrich’s speaker always crafts without wasting. Take the third line from the poem above: “I know I know it” as a clause interrupts the completion of the subordinate conjunction. In doing so, the most intimately known appendage, idiomatically at least, is estranged from the speaker—knowing is indeed different from knowing that you know it. It was actually the repetition in these lines that called me to recall the Kirekegaard.

Book One of Contrapuntal continues in the same form as the prefatory poem. Concerning the second person address, we read, “you could barely connect / to your life and in a way / you felt as though / it were repeating”. Book One continues to characterize this second person address. Its saga is engrossing as we discover the catalyst for the change: “you had been exposed / to T” within the setting lab. T could be a drug that modifies consciousness or it could be the phantom of a third person named Tim, the speaker’s confidant.

But as soon as we expect a page-turning narrative to unfold, music counters. It is natural. The enduring interlude below is a stunning emblem of the conscious mind as it revolves towards harmony:

I memorized the
melodies of the world,
played them back
as I was listening
to them in real time,
the twin melodies
were slightly off,
one was a bit ahead,
or maybe one was
a bit behind, I couldn’t
tell, but this created
an echo that shared
as much of itself
with my ears as
it did its origin.

Music has the uncanny ability to change our center of kinetic consciousness and Kondrich’s live performance recorded on the page harmonizes real time (experience as it occurs) with memorized time (experience as it is reproduced). It is our luck to be able to return to these lyrics over and again. They are beautiful in many ways but their short lines and enjambments on words like “the,” “back,” “was,” and “as,” inspire breaths of air into the reader. Whether I am catching up to the line or getting ahead of it doesn’t mater. Here, every moment overheards its awakening echo. The second person address returns throughout. Yet, once temporality is exposed (and perhaps T stands for time and not Tim) there is no origin and rightly no closure to return to since the world, and all that adds to its melody, manipulates the individual’s concordance.

The sense of loss and disharmony from Book One is taken up in Book Two where the speaker announces through Tim, “We have a problem here” and that perhaps the solution is the problem itself:

because what we seek whether we admit it or not
is our destruction, or that little bit of doubt that builds character

Details associated with the mythologized you of Book One are held back while the speaker’s relationship with Tim, and ultimately the self’s identity, are dug into. Whereas in Book One, harmony with the world and its sounds were (and are, still, on that page) being sought, now it is our destruction that isolated, the destruction of belonging to a larger, polyphonic identity. One way this is immediately apparent is in the modulation of form. The lines in book two are coupled, they propel forward, and though they are stitched together syntactically, the leaps from one sense making to another widen considerably.

Here is one of Kondrich’s virtuosities from this section:

Tonight, the piano will project me into a dream
into which I’m on stage. It’s a terrible night

to discover what we were composed of. Without first
breaking, Tim said, we can’t be whole

be threaded outside into something wonderful
and this is called counterpoint

a need to return to a previous state
buried beneath years of habit and rationale

even when I was already there
there was a voice inside me

make some sacrifices—this includes sacrificing what we want
because once we have it, we become different people

completely separate and meaningful
which is to say that whatever is inside us

hope it will allow
the mistakes I know I will make.

To observe the obvious, each stanza, each line and each movement are separate and meaningful. What beauty is this? Sacrifices are made to others, to divines and wishes. Here we are called upon to sacrifice in order to become the self’s counterpoint, even when it was already there. This recollection is an echelon on the precipice of a clairaudient dream.

Book Three gives the reader a view into the lab, where T is being tested and where the speaker is both a practitioner in the lab and one of its participants. The hierarchy and its will-of-production along with the speaker’s colleagues and their wills prove as equal an influence as T can be. Of a colleague the speaker remarks, “How strange it would be for him to se me in this loop crossing and re-crossing the threshold unless his experiences are also looped but in a way applied especially to him.” This book’s form is prose, in paragraphs that can fracture mid-sentence. T becomes a catchall for the mysterious rendezvous of instinct, desire, choice and knowledge. Says the speaker, “…one could believe anything and still find a relationship between what one believes and T.”

Book Four completes the formal loop, returning with more of the form with which we began. The music is now of progression (“I was making headway / though I knew not how. / I was gaining ground / by losing it.”), of possible improvement going forward though the use of T, especially when it comes to the piano. Book Four contains some of the most striking crescendos, in part because the lines of earlier poems have layered and doubled over the same center as various fugues. A Stevensian dialectic is phrased perfectly: “I’ve come to think of the world / as the mind’s refrain” and there is a plaintive air that drives the forward processing. But Kondrich’s speaker says,

I’m not there yet, nor
do I know how long it’ll
take to arrive. In fact,
I won’t know I’ve arrived
until I have. This self-
sustaining logic, though
frustrating, is the only
way I convey truthfully.
Anyway, can logic even
have truth? Only to the
extent that what it proves
is truthful. Do you agree?
I’m not saying that you have to,
but knowing that you do
is knowing that you’re with me,
that, at this point along the way,
you are here, too.

Kondrich, we are with you. The closer we touch the mirror of logic that consciousness gazes into, the more mosaic it becomes. Kondrich has no trouble showing eternity in a grain of T, or a grain of salt for that matter.

But what sets his voice apart is his ability to harmonize the urgent poignancy of the oral with the durable form of the printed page.

We won’t know where or when Kondrich or Gregory’s next collections will land, but these two poets concern themselves (and vise-versa) with that deepest root of it: belief. If the book on your bedside table has been more of a sleeping pill than an alarum clock, the stakes, sincerity and imaginative vigor of My Enemies and Contrapuntal both blaze new trails to their copies of Plato’s cave. Aside from reading sharing their song over and over again, I don’t know how to give higher praise.