Source Codes
Susan Wheeler
publisher: Salt, 2001
isbn: 1-876857-06-4
price: $12.95
Wheeler skirts along the troubled borders where virtual reality and Robert Lowell's Maine lobster town vie for our central geographic tropes, and where the "self" is variably a node in a cluster of rhizomic meanings or enmeshed in an aging, none-too-pretty (but lyrical) body.
Each of the new poems in this startling collection leaps head-first into dizzying, often very formal, always wackily alliterative, language:
We reassert
the selves but the Seagrams of the earth they
sift us with silt no mind our gear in a wind that takes
going off to heart, or what heart a silt self has
in the greater earth it constitutes.
[1]
As the fable of Benny, the beaver who only made a sound with his tail but did no work ("Benny slapped his tail to bang / A beat on hollow logs / Keen for external analogs / To the hums within his head."), Wheeler is obsessed (like Walter Benjamin, about whom this poem may be) with art in a time when the art object, in this case the poem, has lost its singularity and direct relationship to "work" and always echoes something else -- a time when poems can literally be created by computers or be the product of text dumps from the web.
Despite these high-tech concerns, which place her within the interests of Charles Bernstein in his "Nude Formalist" mode (the wrong word used just wrongly in a formal/lyric style, floating high above the essentialism of common lyric conceptions), the technology of the poems, or Wheeler's "tradition," seems equally inspired by the allusive, symbolist-tinged, grand style of the Bishop/Lowell/Berryman line, and her talent for crushing rhymes that expose total disaffection, while owing something to the Artaudian school of pain as pleasure, take overblown advantage of what the often pessimistic "Age of Anxiety" strains of these poets had to offer:
You've been pure trouble since I thought you up,
Acie, hairnet, glass eye, wormy dick
through stretch pants across a girth so thick
even your dog don't jump.
[18]
Wheeler's pantheon of effects takes in everything from jingles ("Double bubble toil and trouble / Double, double, double your fun"), very tight syllabic stanzas, the odd mix of stentorian modes with cartoon-like plasticity that is familiar to readers of middle-period Ashbery, pseudo-wisdom literature modes ("The death of peace is no literature / Leisure is death without letters. / Death is without the leisure of letters. / A lettrist's death is without peace."), myths, fables, and Surrealist mantras, like this poem which, with a Swiftian turn right out of Gulliver's Travels, reverses the trajectory of :
lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself
a swollen juggler's platter face, or a thin
have clouds in her face, be crooked
mammis, her dugs like two double jugs
that other extreme, bloody-fallen fingers
she have filthy, long unpared nails
back, she stoops
very monster, an oaf imperfect
dowdy, a slut
obscene, base
he loves her once, he admires her for all this
[12]
Source Codes, whose poems are only titled by numbers but have, on the contents page, what appear to be one-line citations for each one ("Text: Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy," for example), is punctuated by a series of funny and interesting, if not as technically dazzling, collages that place figures in rooms and landscapes so that their Cartesian coordinates are possible, but socially quite out of place -- a couple necking in a cathedral, for instance.
At the end of the book appear three Appendices, each suggesting, in their own way, how the presence of the poem as a series of singular marks of ink on a page is undermined by its "source," hence banishing forever the image of Coleridge merely transcribing Kubla Khan from his repressed, universal memory: first, a series of scribbled-over drafts of the poems in the book; second, a splash of HTML that (as any programmer could see) wouldn't work; and last, a series of what could be drafts for poems in a new book (in fact, they are drafts of poems from her first).
This remarkably subversive book -- in which Frost's "Provide, provide" becomes the great capitalist mantra "Produce, produce," and the warbling Nightingale "nests in its noose" -- is at once an homage and an evisceration of what might call the main line of American poetry, not unlike Lowell's own haunted appraisal of his aristocratic lineage in his early poems -- but without the pedigree. Source Codes synthesizes, even exhausts, the range of techniques that the 20th century provided for American lyric verse.
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