Dorothea Lasky, The Shining

 

BLUE CHRISTMAS

I am so excited
I am dancing with my sister
In the front of the restaurant
Two men look at us and smile

We are wearing the clearest blue dresses
That look like the sky in the middle of the spring
There is a pretend antagonism to our song
But we know that we really love each other

Years later they will film us as children
Wearing matching dresses again
But the blue will be muted
Soon after they will show us chopped up

As always they will be obsessed
With the violence men can do to us
But I was only ever trying to do my job
I only ever wanted to be a movie star

The latest from American poet Dorothea Lasky, following her essay-quartet, Animal (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here] is the poetry collection, The Shining (Wave Books, 2023). Riffing off its namesake film, as the press release offers, Lasky’s The Shining “is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s text or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptations.” Lasky fleshes out the asides to the main action, almost as a dark turn (if one might say) akin to Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, or even Steve Englehart’s run through West Coast Avengers #17-24 (1987) that ran alongside and through early Avengers and Fantastic Four histories. Through her usual playful swagger of dark turns, Lasky utilizes the bones of the source material to carve out lyrics sharp enough to draw blood. “I was Dorothea Lasky,” she writes, to close the poem “TIME,” “Now my name is nothing / But I never forgot my name / Did you [.]” Lasky’s poems are dark and complex, writing of innocence revealed and lost, writing slant across a horror lyric. “The key to surviving in here,” she writes, to open the poem “STRANGE HUMOR,” “Is to pretend every room is haunted / Even when it isn’t [.]” Lasky writes from and within spaces King and Kubrick could never hope to fathom, offering a sequence of horrors that exist not purely in the extraordinary but across more familiar spaces. Through Lasky, background characters move from mere decoration to flesh, and to acknowledgment and even, finally, agency. “What is language / Is the question I ask the large peacock,” she writes, as part of the poem “MARRIAGE,” “Who sits at the end of the bed / Smiling the grin of demons / Bending its neck to get a good look at me [.]” It is through Lasky, finally, that these characters are allowed their own stories.

Dorothea Lasky, Animal

            In this brief compendium of four lectures, I will talk about poetry and its relationship to ghosts, colors, animals, and bees. In each of these discussions, I will be thinking of poetry at least a little through the lens of an idea I have termed the metaphysical I. although the idea is never named within these lectures, it affects them, as it is the crux of my poetics. It functions as a ghost haunting this book.

            The metaphysical I is not a new idea really, just maybe a new term. I define this I as a wild, lyric I, one that has no center and has no way to predict where it will go. An I that is a shapeshifter. A persona that uses unexpected language and imagery, that is inconsistent, frightening, funny, and beyond the idea of a singular self. (“AN INTRODUCTION”)

As I am quite an admirer of her poetry, I was curious to see New York City poet and editor Dorothea Lasky’s latest, Animal (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2019), a volume described as “a compendium of four essays.” Originally composed as part of The Bagley Wright Lecture Series, earlier versions of these essays were individually delivered by Lasky in Chicago, Washington D.C., Seattle WA and Cambrige MA from October, 2013 to January, 2014. I’ve been enjoying the books Wave has been producing in this series (I’m still working though the dual-volumes by Joshua Beckman from 2018), allowing the possibility for engaged and engaging contemporary working poets the length and breadth to stretch out their thinking and see where it goes.

Lasky is the author of five full-length poetry collections—AWE (Wave, 2007), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Rome (Liverright/W.W. Norton, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Milk (Wave Books, 2018) [see my review of such here]—so it is fascinating to see her essays that speak to and around her thoughts and structures around poetry, as, in her opening essay “Poetry, Ghosts, and the Shared Imagination,” she writes

            As a poet, I think a lot about belief, the belief in what my mind might bring to me. There are a lot of things that enter my mind that I choose to translate into language. All poems contain images and these images have been in the poet’s brain and hang in the balance always, to be given to the reader upon reading. And in a poem images have weight, so that you cannot help but believe in them.

            Emily Dickinson said of belief:

On subjects of which we know nothing … we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.

In four lectures that exist as consecutive sections of a larger, more expansive thesis—“Poetry, Ghosts, and the Shared Imagination,” “What is Color in Poetry or is it the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word,” “The Beast: How Poetry Makes Us Human” and “The Bees”—Lasky is akin to Anne Carson in the way she opines to write in one particular direction, and uses that to also write into and around the subject of poetry and imagination. Lasky threads her thinking through lines and thoughts from film (The Shining) and theory, and an array of examples from poets including Wallace Stevens, Bernadette Meyer, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Sappho, Rimbaud, H.D. and Octavio Paz, among others, as well as her own juvenilia.

Lasky seems quite fond of imagination, as well as dreams, both as writing and thinking tools and of subjects for inquiry. Responding to a quote by Goethe in her second essay, “What is Color in Poetry or is it the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word,” she writes: “I love this idea that even in the absence of light, our imagination is readily capable of producing it in dreams. That the imagination houses a dormant light. I think that poets and writers have very strong dormant lights just waiting to be shared. Sometimes I think that if all poets used their dormant lights extensively, it would have a viral effect, and the brains of all of us would be even more lit up.” What is fascinating, as well, is how she writes on not just language, but on words, and ideas, constantly in motion across the space of the page and the paragraph. She speaks on different ways of writing, and thinking, and seeing, all working to expand her range of thinking through inquiry. Lasky’s meditations move at lightning speed, as she writes as part of her second essay, writing through colour:

            What I am trying to say here, though, is that color is not simply a decorative element in a poem. Color makes an expanse—a field, a shared formal field, with which to plant more shared components of the material imagination—a poem. Color makes this space bigger, this imaginative space more specific and bigger, and gives it weight. Color makes this expanse—a colorless idea—into something solid.

            Recently, I learned about the Pirahã society in Brazil. It is said that the Pirahã have no specific words for colors like the ones I am talking about here. So, whereas if we were to describe a red flower, someone who is part of Pirahã might describe the color of it as “the thing that is like blood.” Likewise, a blond girl’s hair might be described as “the thing that is like the sun.”

Dorothea Lasky, Milk

Is it a burden to be so perfect

And to have such perfect children

And to have such a perfect marriage

And to look so perfect all the time

And to make every decision perfectly

Cocktails on Thursday with Sammy—perfect

You know your sweater really does look perfect

That mango salad you made—it turned out perfectly

And that car with your shoes

Goddammit that’s perfect

Your dog—perfect

Your computer

Well it works perfectly

My supervisor—he’s perfect

The desk, it looks perfect

All and all the day was perfect

And lovely and still

What did we do

We walked the earth

So perfect! (“IS IT A BURDEN”)

Following her poetry collections AWE (Wave, 2007), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012) and Rome (Liverright/W.W. Norton, 2014) [see my review of such here], New York City poet Dorothea Lasky’s latest is Milk (Wave Books, 2018), a collection of smart, deviously funny, dark and savage lyrics, as she writes as part of the poem “Milk No. 2”:

But when you look at me, I can’t lie

Baby, it’s with love

I never knew what it was to be this way

But then again I never let myself be

Cascade of ocean

The beach was lost and dark

The house was dark dark

I went in, I wasn’t scared

It wasn’t the going in the door that struck me

It was the getting out, or even wandering

What’s behind the hidden doors

Can I find a bed there

Can I set up my electronic things

Can I put this machine on

It’s my armor to protect you

I have nothing

You are in a glass house

The fall of it

Orange hearts one after the other

My true love is sleeping

I tell him, don’t rest

I swirl

I find another

Another with the moon

Lasky’s poems are incredibly visceral, long known for being straightforward and fearless, pushing unflinchingly through some rather dark territory. Her poems are constructed as accumulations, with phrases stacked upon another, moving further and further, heading off into directions unknown that managed somehow to exist simultaneously linked and trailing off into some unknown distance; lost, somehow, and yet connected. Part of the rollercoaster thrill of reading her poems is in seeing just where the poem might end up, often a far distance from where it might open. The poems in this collection are centred on domestic concerns, writing of babies and breastfeeding, of loss, loneliness and miscarriages; she writes of solitude and lovers; she writes from some dark places, and being “fucked up,” from poems ranging from the oddly hilarious “WHY I HATE THE INTERNET” and “KILL MARRY FUCK,” to “MILKING THE REST OF IT” and “POEM FOR THE MOON MAN,” that opens:

Have some mercy Dottie

No sex, just milk

Is the only thing I have to show for all my hormones

A little vulnerable, not a jerk

Is what he said about you

I am starting to think I am profoundly fucked up

And the only one who can save me is the one I let go in the

    river so long ago

Death, death, it’s all death

Anne Cecelia Holmes, The Jitters

ODE

None of this concerns you but

sometimes it’s better to pretend closeness

than live in fear of rejection. Things I know:

car sickness, the Mall of America, all-night

murder dreams. Childhood was a joke.

Slinging imaginary rifles over my shoulder,

falling out of trees for negative attention.

Now I talk to you like I have nothing

to lose, no grip whatsoever. I sneak into

the neighbor’s basement just to be the criminal.

I call you in the middle of the night to say

I’m not a ghost yet. It’s funny because

in Chicago I have a real brother but what

a boring story. Things I don’t know:

portion control, easing depression,

the optimal gesture.

Nothing I say will make you love me

and there’s real honor in that.

The author of two poetry chapbooks, Massachusetts poet Anne Cecelia Holmes’ first trade collection is The Jitters (Grand Rapids MI: Horse Less Press, 2015). Built as a collection of compact lyrics, the poems in The Jitters are fearless, vulnerable and razor-sharp. These poems revel in even the smallest miracles, attempt to comprehend the darkness, and take no shit from anyone. As she writes to open the poem “WORLD’S TINEST EARTHQUAKE,” “I’d like to say what’s been said / and say it better. Break // accountability exactly open. / When faced with an ultimatum // I choose the most destructive force, / haul everyone onto the lawn just // to get tough. Please trust me.” These are poems born of a quick, dry wit, composed as a series of observations, critiques and direct statements that take no prisoners. “When nothing changes I finally love myself,” she writes, in the poem “MEMORY BRICKS.”

SOME RELICS

All of this hurts the facial expression.

I’m sick of watching you fall over

the television like you’re the one

inside it, and more than ever

I feel like a tugboat in that scene.

Don’t blame me for your

bad cartography. I can’t be

an acrobat because

my heart isn’t ripe.

You said this trampoline

makes you dream of chairs

but to me the backyard

is a butcher shop.

Bring me a bag of rocks

and I’ll carpet you in them.

I’m going to be

an admiral in all this.

I’ve been increasingly aware over the past few years of a particular strain of American poetry: poets, predominantly female poets, composing very striking lyric poems that combine savage wit, subversion, distraction and use of the straight phrase, blending lightness against dark subject matter. If I were to attempt any kind of list of examples, it would include Matthea Harvey, Natalie Lyalin, Dorothea Lasky, Amy Lawless, Sommer Browning, Emily Pettit, Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Emily Kendal Frey, Anne Boyer and the late Hillary Gravendyk, and now, Anne Cecilia Holmes. What connects the writers on this list is the way they each compose tight lyric bursts that slightly unsettle, managing to utilize both light and dark humour, and push to shake at the core of expectation, discomfort and the otherwise-unspoken. There is something about how each of these authors, including Holmes, have embraced elements of the confessional mode through a compact lyric that can be used to voice flashes of anger, annoyance, frustrations, loneliness and violence, and even conversations on evil, as Holmes writes in the final poem in the collection:

POEM FOR WHAT I’M NOT ALLOWED

Ode to the murderer I imagine

in every band of trees. To

my blood cells, to well-ordered systems,

to my head absolutely thick

with disease. Ode to the dress I slept in

and wore the next day, to the cilantro

I planted in all the wrong weather.

Ode to the fucking cosmos. Ode to my face

against your face, to poems that want to

like us but don’t. Ode to being

the bloodless one, the neurotic one,

the one ignoring your spiritual journey.

To your clothes in my basement

covered in ink. To I wore this when

we first met, to I want to hurt you like this

and then like this. Ode to quitting my job

to stay excited, to exposing myself

to my neighbors, to embedding so many

rocks in my chest. Ode to Tulsa.

Ode to the 900-foot Jesus, to keeping

my hands in my pockets most of the time.

To my brothers and sisters, to all my

enemies, to imagining every way

to die in every possible scenario.

Ode to crying when I can’t find my shoes,

to feeling like god will punish me for

sins I don’t believe in. Ode to taking

pictures in front of strangers’ houses.

Ode to my jacket covered in yellow.

Ode to how I wish you were built

out of wood panels. Ode to staring

out the window in the worst

of the house. Ode to your age,

to my age, to how I react improperly

when reenacting your fate. Ode to

so few phenomenons. Ode to

absolving myself of everything.

To singing what I’m doing, to arguing

what counts as “artifact” and “alive.”

Ode to my wandering pacemaker.

Ode to my big fat heart. Ode to

pretending I’ve never been where

I used to live. Ode to hoping you’re

a goner. Ode to grieving nothing

each time a villain is born.