Review of I am, am I by Evan Kennedy
I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before
by Evan Kennedy. Roof Books, 84 pp., $18.95.
In Cocteau’s film Orphée a panel of necronomic judges ask Orpheus to give them the name of his occupation.
“I’m a poet.”
“Your card says ‘writer’.”
“It’s almost the same thing.”
“There is no ‘almost’ here. What do you mean by ‘poet’?”
“To write, without being a writer.”
Evan Kennedy’s new book might be called a long prose-poem, but not liking that term, I think it better to say that it is merely (which is to say “purely, nakedly”) a Poem. The poet — author of previous books such as Terra Firmament, Shoo-Ins to Ruin, and The Sissies, among others — is writing a poem; he is also writing a day-book, a travelogue, an inventorium by attention, a work of somatic-psychic notation, and several other things. Enlarging on an earlier poem, “A Cyclist: Fourteen Stops Toward a San Franciscan Terra Firmament,” he does most of this aperch and in motion:
I live in the time that follows the invention of the bicycle, so when it
is dusk, I can be seen pedaling from the crowd.
— the book’s opening sentence. This is a field of kinetic situation, as if one were to have a continually regenerating natal chart. “He is the whole sky focused at a particular point of space-time,” astrologist (and composer) Dane Rudhyar writes. Chart: map, card, layer of papyrus. Multiple sites (sights), multiple hands, multiple layers. “I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,” Whitman says of Life. Kennedy writes from the “Positions of a Passenger,” as he calls the middle section of his triple-sectioned book:
While cycling, I am in a kicking fetal position arriving at the
following moment.
This is nomadic motion. Here, the Kingdom-Within is an island that floats (Delos?), a drifter, Chaplin tramping down the road:
Like everyone, I am arriving and departing at once. My home steps
out of the house when I do. It stays within me.
This is the central operating fact of Kennedy’s book — the place from which his making happens. From here comes all manner of richness. Below, two things the cast net brought back in therefrom.
* * *
Still from Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, 1950. Letterboxd
This is a Whitmanic book — not a surprising claim perhaps, but one essential to note. The Whitman whose body and soul are passages of all the flux of earth, of cosmos, the poet correspondent with all sensation, all possible life. Kennedy writes from a space Robert Duncan also wrote from, who described man “com[ing] into a speech of words . . . so deep that the amoeba is my brother poet.” We find Kennedy noting:
It occurred to me that some indestructible thing might be within myself.
Whitman: “There is that in me — I do not know what it is — but I know it is in me” — and the body turns cosmographic site of ecologic growth, haven for all things the dead among us treat, with terrible irony, as debris, as “foul liquid and meat” to be neglected: “eyes exemplify[ing] the rippling seen in shallow pools inhabited by smallest lives, even singular cells,” “Unheard-of colors…seen on the flora and fauna found on and inside me, a terrain of musculature and fatty deposits,” “the pits of my arms two sources of watering. . . . Blooms extend[ing] from damper regions, so beehives later appear, little economies in air”:
All are
welcome to rest around my eyes and whatever has taken root.
…
Any living thing can approach me, but I would never let them grovel
at my feet, because it is often my feet that resist my conscience.
…none of us
should be the center of anything other than a reference to the
outside.
And the final section, “Your Life,” attains a beautifully rhapsodic Whitmanic cadence:
Unable to trace your shape, I prefer you surround me, your presence
overflow my sight, humbling me and the qualifications to my
correspondences, while I remain displaced and unresolved, isolated
in my dimensions, wondering if I could join what I observe —
* * *
J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, 1812. Oil on canvas. Tate.
Pace and/of Attention. One difference I note between I am, am I and Kennedy's previous books is a change in tone, or perhaps better called a pace of measure. Much of the earlier work has a wonderful mania to it, as well as an emphatic sound- and sense-play. This is not universally true, but a noticed trait. Here is Shoo-Ins to Ruin’s “A Worm and Amen”:
of spectral animal slag suburb of ashen of made-up
patience spare dime spurt ditch and barter fang
pennylicks and chemistries soul’s hatch occupied ray
lay composed raise antenna manna neon stumble
west confluence of darkening merge greyed the boys
go to blued the boys go to fossilized, the young
wolves
Each syllable, each sound, is a pivot and leap [1]. Taking up Kennedy’s “favorite singer”, this recalls for me Bob Dylan in ‘65/6 delivering verse with a rhythmic ingenium tough to match. Or, if we move back to Greece, it’s one of those missing (non-extant) Pindaric dithyrambs which Horace compared (Carmina 4.2) to the uncontrollable rush of a river of rainstorm down the plummeting face of a mountain. The force of sound, the associations of sense, propel. With I am, am I, the pace is ‘calmer’ in the unfolding of the measure. (Perhaps Zukofsky would enter here to say, “intellection,” and exit.) It is not the aged Dylan now “collaborating with the very limitations that had become a detriment” to make beauty, as Kennedy writes of his singer; but it isn’t manic.
I am probably, by now, the age of my mother and father when they
were awaiting my birth. I am sensing the development of something
at turns indecorous and genteel. I may have the unspeakable wish to
cut the vital cord, see my family line die out, or stunt my family tree,
perhaps because I am not impressed by some who preceded me, or I
cannot honor their work or nurture anything into my present
dimensions or qualities.
Rumination, vacillation — ‘revolving in thought.’ I do not mean this was a quality absent before, but in this book, it pervades.
Thomas Meyer, trying to define the “middle voice” in a piece on Robert Kelly, writes: “Speaking from a condition neither active nor passive but somewhere in between. Something like a field of possibilities where intention arises through observation” [2]. Careful attention to thought, body, environment, sensation, the imaginal, as it arrives (‘comes to the [mind’s] shore’). Kennedy: “Any sensation is a gift,” necessitating “lessons of attentiveness”: “A watchful moment was a unit of measure, as was the length of our limbs, or our tongues.” From the first part of I am, “Runt Savant” (which can be, by alchemy of etymology, translated to mean “a wise, undersized animal” or “an insightful, decayed [or old] tree-stump”), a paragraph I’ve scrawled “EYES” above in my copy:
I had thought my eyes were perfect spheres until I discovered the
corneas that could be felt by my finger once I closed my eyelids to
examine this essential triumph of my anatomy. Perhaps this was the
only instance when my eyelids closed to assist an examination. I
closed my eyes, placed a finger upon my upper eyelids, and shifted
my eyes again and again to the left then right.
This is not, as Kennedy later says, autopsy-work. Narcissus can be labelled a drowning victim. On the second page of his book, the poet tells us the processual initiation this palping of organs enacts:
I wish to be admitted continually to a gentler order.
Since 1555, says the OED, gentle could mean ‘tender.’ Later, in the 1800s, fairies were often called the gentle people. The Latin root is ‘to beget, give birth.’ “Poetry is a natural thing,” Duncan wrote in 1957. It “feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, / to breed itself, / a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.” The breed, brood: family as order, nature’s. And beyond that — or in strange conspiracy therewith — the preternatural veer the poet makes in keeping ‘visionary company’:
I stopped my bicycle at an intersection that had suddenly become the
site of a pedestrian's death. I was catching little glimpses between
bystanders and police when a fellow bicyclist said that it would be
best not to look because, as it was put, I would not want that in my
mind. The cyclist had already seen the body and, having that body in
mind, took the initiative to impart advice, yet I remained on the side
of life attempting to look through a limit.
* * *
Paul Klee, Laterne in d. Stadt, 1912. Watercolor, ink, and pencil on paper. Zentrum Paul Klee.
Here I leave you. Go read this book, over which Keats’s definition of “negative capability” looms. //
[1] Here I recall that proposed etymology Jane Harrison gives for dithyramb: ‘the song that makes Zeus leap up, and beget’.
[2] A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly. Ed. Pierre Joris with Peter Cockelbergh & Joel Newberger. (Contra Mundum Press, 2019)
