Eric Schmaltz, I Confess

 

            In truth, I was surprised to learn that I was a witness to this collection’s inception. As I prepared to write this afterword, Schmaltz reminded me in a Zoom meeting that the foundations for I Confess had been laid at a Poetry and Poetics event, comprised of graduate students and faculty, at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. I vaguely recall that a small group of us had gathered to discuss his then-recently published book Surfaces. If I am to accept Schmaltz’s version of this event, I (allegedly) asked him whose body was represented in that particular book. In all honesty, I remember this discussion somewhat differently; I believe it was either Davy Knittle or Charles Bernstein (and I’m mostly sure it was the latter) actually posed this question. But in the context of my confession and Schmaltz’s I Confess, does the veracity of this moment really matter? The failure of our collective memory of this event underscores the fragile constructions of the truth and its expression in the book. What matters is that truth is really a partial thing, but the robustness of the lyrical poem can hold these ambiguities with grace, even if the documented record skips it. Such grace is inherent in the pleasure of poetic form and in the indeterminateness of memory that underlies Schmaltz’s verse in I Confess. Michael Donaghy may call the poem a ‘diagram of consciousness,’ but Schmaltz’s poems are forensic study into truth’s mystification. (Orchid Tierney, “Afterword”)

From Halifax-based poet, critic and editor Eric Schmaltz comes I Confess (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a book-length poetic expanse that follows an array of chapbooks, as well as his full-length debut, SURFACES (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018) [see my review of such here], and critical titles including I Want to Tell You Love, A Critical Edition by bill bissett and Milton Acorn (co-edited with Christopher Doody; Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Produced with an “Afterword” by American-based New Zealand poet, editor, academic and critic Orchid Tierney, there’s an enormous amount of play through Schmaltz’s I Confess; play, resistance, confession, self-awareness, visual expansiveness and lyric truth. It is as though he, as a poet who leans far more into experimental and conceptual forms, attempted to approach lyric’s “confessional mode” from an entirely different perspective, pulling apart the bones to thus reassemble into something else. “Remember, you can be as nervous as you like.” he writes, in his own call-and-response, “Nervousness and deception look different. // Do not move. Tell me when you would like to begin.”

There are those who might see the confessional lyric as an exhausted form, although through Schmaltz, a whole new life is introduced. Through text, photographs, visual text, waveforms, erasure, utterance, polygraph charts and accumulation, Schmaltz explores the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental lyric; exploring certainty and uncertainty, as he investigates text-forms and perceived truth, attention, poetry and poetic form. A caveat, whether descriptor or warning, by the author at the offset, offers: “This book is a document of truth’s performance under duress. // Some of what you will read is true; the rest is poetry.”

In many ways, the core of the book’s content is familiar—who am I and how did I get here—but examined through a unique blend of experimental and confessional, each side wrestling for a kind of control that might not be possible. Given the foundation for this particular mode of inquiry is the use of polygraph, it introduces a whole other layer of tension, of resistance: “I confess,” as the poem, the pages, repeat. “We’re going to focus on some background questions.” Schmaltz writes, “This part of the session ensures that you are able to speak truthfully and that you are mentally and physically fit to proceed with the polygraph test today. // Please answer the following questions truthfully.” There are occasionally ways through which certain conceptual poetry-based works can articulate human elements more deeply, more openly, than the lyric mode, something I felt as well through Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Book 1 (Coach House Books, 2015) [see my review of such here], and Schmaltz manages a dual-core through this work that counterpoints brilliantly, working from the most basic of human questions across a structure of the nature of being, the nature of expansive, articulated, inarticulate and impossible truth, composed across an expansive bandwidth.

after the fullness of night / I arrived at the border / he eyed the length
of my surname / a distance I could never travel 

there / he saw the lines of kin / ‘how do you pronounce your last name?’
he asked / ‘did your family change it?’ / this is where I found myself 

lost / my tongue lolled at its limit / unsettling the certainty of living it /
a line crossing a line / struck / I forced it through my teeth & stuttered
the revelatory cut 

I was sighed into a palimpsest / photographs with no names / a map
with lines faint / my family’s uncertain phrase 

we were not taught to look too deeply at the tangle of root / just the
finger pointing to the tree / I open its file & see the error line 

I could retrace my westward steps / to run my finger in the once
nomadic / only to settle again along these same waterways / taught
to shrug longingly whenever asked