Criteria
Sianne Ngai
publisher: O Books, 1998
isbn: 1-882022-33-5
price: $10
"An epigram delays / its form of destination" writes Ngai in "chrono / paradise," and the poems of Criteria, most of which are linked sequences of elliptical, highly alluring philosophical junkets, maintain an aura of millennial catastrophe amidst the suspended silence of unnegotiated guilt.
Through such fractured glances at both the totality of a world view and the totality of the sentence, Ngai creates something of a survival guide in the twentieth century's panoptic technological gaze, and doesn't fail to amuse with her dry-witted narrativizations of our need to be fragments amidst the observation:
Safety in Numbers
blue cars are parked here
optimism still abounds
in chunks
of the globe [the first
year in a year
of testing
whiff then
waft
your mother's maiden
name is the code
[42]
Her plays on the commonplaces of literary discourse are emboldened by a sharp sense of enjambment: "Meaning collapses on the other side of the all / terrain vehicle...," she writes, veering from the preciousness that such a linguistically investigative poetics can lead to.
Sometimes Ngai seems to turn the lens back on her role as poet attempting to subvert meanings while in the role of determining them, implicating the writer, and any being in possession of creative will, as the tyro of dreams:
lazy large world-compeller
whose prosperity was likely to develop a red crease
in imitation of the superseded
telling children of the dangers of being trapped in anything that closes
[56]
If Ngai sees politics and society as largely a fractured spectacle of clanking existential comedies, the final prose section "My Novel," with its looping recurring images from Wilkie Collins, turns the quasi-epigrammatic nature of the first parts into an interior experience, demonstrating by contrast the very meanings that are contained in the prose form even when the sentences are torqued beyond easy assimilation.
Liberated discursivity gives her an almost Stevensian feel when describing the nuances of experience, though countered by a cerebral edginess:
A flow can be the object of one or several axioms. To prove a poem: a trajectory of the bird's flight through the yellow forest. Crumbs marking the coordinates at which the name would descend from under a wing.
Distance is a set of differences, therefore only pain can travel over the face without featuers. Similarly, only vibration can travel over the strings of a piano played by a young lady in a drawing room. If femininity is the principle of uncerainty, one cannot expect sounds -- only the blur of the thick lines moving as the name tracks itself through the yellow of a divided highway. Thinking of the bird -- an alienated moralist -- and itself as the absence of the weight the former once carried.
[64]
Criteria contains all the excitement of a first utopaic reading of theory and philosophy while maintaining a level of fun that gives it a youthful, almost pop edge despite the weight of its references and occasionally showy vocabulary, and is exceptional in its restraint, its subtle tonal shifts and its devotion to a fairly extreme mode of poetry.
|
