SURFACE-TO-SURFACE SONNET
Daughter you need a real
jetlag plan
For the wee hours
When sleeping it off isn’t
working
A banter of scare quotes
to antler
Any storm : the angels
Playing marbles, trucks
that try to fly
Daughter you need a new
landscape
– sodic soil, ablation
zone, graffiti
blinging the airport route –
To tuck you in at night,
the lavish noir
de zed à a
– Dada what does dead
mean is
Dead it’s when you can’t
Come back?
I
might have missed it when it first came out, but I am finally catching up with Georgia
poet, editor and translator Andrew Zawacki’s latest poetry title, Unsun
(Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2019), a lyric propelled by sound, fragment and
cadence, utilizing meaning almost as a means to a end. There is something reminiscent
in Zawacki’s poems of the work of Windsor, Ontario poet Louis Cabri through their
shared propulsion of sound [see my review of Cabri’s latest here], such as the
opening of Zawacki’s “DIXIE PIXIE SONNET”: “Solar panel, a Fresnel lens / Five-pound
bag of M&Ms and we could 3-D print a clone of you // Pell-mell all hell and
ill will will unfurl / If you don’t wear your cheap synthetic, frilly fuchsia
princess dress / Fake glass high heel sequin slippers clacking on the tile // In
your lifetime, the Arctic will have been [.]” His lines suggest both precision
and perpetual motion. “Everything I say is a meteor shower,” he writes, to open
the poem, “STREWNFIELD.” Mid-way through the same piece, he writes: “Half
transistor, / half self / my voice is flensed mid- / flight inside the glare
between two screen : // a bezelled Citibank tower / in blue and the NASDAQ
ticker spitting its intraday / figureds and decimal // squall.”
The
book is constructed in numerous sections around shape and sound and image, but
what really strikes are the paired sonnet sections, “Sonnensonnets,” collecting
eleven in the first “Sonnensonnets” section and eleven more in the further. Zawacki
is a master of effectively blending precision and motion, such as the twenty-part
sequence “WATERFALL PLOT,” a sequence of poems that pairs each short poem with
a photograph, a sequence of what he calls “loose variations” influenced by and
responding to works by the eighth-century poet Wang Wei. As he writes in his “NOTES”
at the end of the collection: “The accompanying large-format photographs – shot
with 4x5 film, to replicate the aspect ratio of Wang’s poems: four verses
containing five characters each – were taken at a compound of disused chicken
coops in Athens, Georgia. The site has since been dismantled altogether.”
5.
The affect of flatness :
in a woods without branches, or
Needles or bark, late
sunlight bleaches the shadows to silver –
echo an arrowkeen
flexing, no feather – and night is a country
where no one lived, and
loved like a language, and left.
In an interview at OmniVerse around his prior collection, Barbara Claire
Freeman opens her questions with: “I just read ‘Sever Sonnet,’ a gorgeous and
exquisitely sever/e sonnet you published in the spring issue of A Public
Space. Re and re-reading it makes me hope that the poem is part of a
sequence or book that’s soon to be published. Can you offer reassurance?” Zawacki’s
lengthy answer is interesting, in part due to the fact that the poem isn’t yet
part of a larger manuscript-length consideration, the not-yet of Unsun. “Daughter
is an / Edge, edge / A verb –” he writes, as part of “LIMIT SONNET.” The poems
for and from his daughter provide a fascinating pair of sonnet-suites,
articulating parenthood in ways I haven’t seen, managing to provide a fresh language
into a long-familiar subject, as well as breathing new life into the sonnet-structure,
a poetic form that is too often replicated poorly. His response speaks to the
early sparks of what would eventually become Unsun:
Thank you for your kind
words about that poem. The ending needs rewriting, somehow. But I’m sorry I
can’t reassure you just yet! It isn’t included in my latest volume, Videotape,
though some of its companions have appeared in or on BOMBlog, Poetry
Northwest, a new online journal I’m excited about called Flag + Void,
and here at OmniVerse.
The sonnet is one of
fourteen—a corona whose ligatures have been altered—that I wrote for, and from,
my daughter Ella. Begun when she was just over a year old and more or less
abandoned when she was around two and a half, the series was meant to accompany
her through her acquisition and nascent deployment of language—or of two
languages, since her mother is Parisian and we speak French at home. I’d been
seeking a way to stand, or sit, beside her, attentive to her earliest
attentions to the world, in order to articulate my experience of what I could
fathom of hers. A phenomenology not of speech, then, but rather of listening:
my daughter and I composed the oblique lyrics together. Referencing Béla Tarr’s
film The Turin Horse or a microwave’s voltage, a Pink Floyd song or ski
slopes manufactured in Dubai, are moments that come from my own consciousness,
of course. But misquoting The Cat in the Hat, intoning “bye bye,” auditioning
the differing pronunciation of the English word “ours” and the French word ours
for bear—those are slippages Ella spoke for herself. Even within a language,
there were the—I don’t know what to call them—declensions or conjugations or
trills of sounds within the same sonic zip code: doudou, for doll or security
blanket; dodo for a nap or good night’s sleep; dada, the name Ella still calls
me, although it’s not really correct French—and that word refers me, in turn,
to Dada, as a sort of principle of ludic elasticity presiding over this
elaborate naming game.
[…]
I’ve called the suite
“Sonnensonnets,” from the German for sun, intending to establish a kind of
antagonism, beginning from Derrida’s anxiety—not that he redressed it in Politiques
de l’amitié—that the history of friendship in the West has always been a
matter of brothers and sons, despite the fundamental role that Antigone might
have played in altering that discourse. (George Steiner wondered in Antigones
what might have happened had Antigone’s tale, instead of her father Oedipus’s,
been identified as the fundamental text of psychoanalysis; but it took Judith
Butler to think that missed opportunity through, in Antigone’s Claim.) The
other contrary in the title, of course, involves the trope of the sun as
central, primary, unifying. In the sonnet you mention, my daughter is done
being anybody’s moon. In my mind—and maybe because we’re expecting another in
September—daughters are the new sons!
