Smokes
Susan Wheeler
publisher: Four Way Books, 1998
isbn: 1-88480-019-X
price: $12.95
Wheeler's second book signifies an important, if not entirely unanticipated, rapprochement of the indeterminate, militantly ironic stance of the postmodern with the comforting, bourgeois closures of the sentimental lyric.
Smokes is infused not only with the play of signifiers -- often a dance of malapropism, jarring surrealist and pop imagery, violent (and violating) pastiches and merciless non-sequiturs -- but also with the play of sound, placing her somewhere between Ashbery/Bernstein axis of high schtick appropriation and the baroque strains of a 17th century English metaphysical.
It opens with a cheeky homage to Robert Frost in the form of an overture to the reader, but as is the case with her poems, the invitation is to the text, not to the nurturing interiors of the poet:
The girls are drifting in their ponytails
and their pig iron boat. So much for Sunday.
The dodo birds are making a racket
to beat the band. You could have come too.
[3]
Arbitrary word-replacement, often for the sake of clunky, but tempered, alliteration, often seems to be a tactic of hers, and at times it strikes with alarming presence, as when she writes in "Fractured Fairy Tale":
Doze Doll Does Wiz Biz -- a century that, her sleeping,
a stenotic century self-circling, noodling its tunes, drug
by the scuff of its kitchen to stand, squinting, at thing
coherent, drooping from clouds, bungeeing to boot.
[41]
Wheeler's work often places somewhere within the realm of po-mo fiction, as in "The View from There" which seems to tell the story of an employee's desperate (gen-X Kafkian) leap from vacuity at the office:
The old boss was surprised when you ran into her
on the street. Behind her eyelashes a model TV
hummed a sports coach and a car. The old boss
said, for instance, Well I'm so glad things are going
well for you with genuine surprise. She rubbed
at her eyelid and tried to revise her history of you,
invisibly.
[47]
However, the poem, while remaining within the scale of reference (boss, car, work) soon appears more concerned with the "e" sound in the first verse -- "lazy", "invisbly", "trees", and "library" all make their appearance at metrically foregrounded moments -- and the "o" sound in the second verse. The poem ends:
Herr Arbeit showed me the desk by
appliances: eleven more forms to blot with dry
snow, seven mock beavers to stuff. Then show.
My work cut out to a tee.
[47]
Such obsessive repetitions suggest a subtext of hysteria, strangely linking the poem to Plath's "Daddy" with its pounding "oo"s ("Daddy, you bastard, I'm through"), but Wheeler, while not offering an humanist vision of a adjusted psyche, is far from the expressionist heroine of adolescent angst -- her confessions are, if anything at all, halls of errors.
While the poems of Smokes are occasionally marred by a sort of tunnel-vision -- some of the poems seem based more on the academic argument for a "postmodern" poetry rather than the mundane, but felt, need for poetry, the play more a statement of intent rather than the attention to play -- the book's desire to astound, contort, pervert and yet sing at all turns makes it a peculiar delight.
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