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”)
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
