The Exit Show
by Anne F. Walker
Palimpsest
Press, 2003
Read
TDR's interview with Anne F. Walker
Reviewed by Sarah Bonet
 Sex, in this book, becomes a vehicle
for comprehension. Anne F. Walker’s fourth collection of poetry, The
Exit Show, draws on multiple sexual and romantic partners as a way
to explore and articulate complex social and poetic forms. Walker’s
collection flows easily through a variety of formal and not-so-formal
constructions (prose poems, emails, individual lyrics, and lyric
suites), tied together by a powerful rhythmic sensibility reminiscent of
a jazz drummer.
The prose poem, or short story,
"chiasmus," tells a fractured fairy tale of love and meeting
whose many players transfigure the primary protagonists’
interpretation of one another. "Footnote 21" is a odd parable
from an orgy, in tight and edgy language:
footnote 21.
recognition. couples and who they are in bipartite equations, routines,
the blonde 36 year old Marin doctor's wife who looks 21, her slim strip
and dance routine by the pool, with muñequita, pat's wife. pat all buff
upstairs in the kitchen smoking in the kitchen smoking and. we look down
to the hot tub spa. muñequita moves and sits naked on the thin edge. a
woman with beautiful brown store-bought breasts puts an orange-red
plastic lobster between muñequita's shaved legs, over her shaved lips.
pat upstairs shouts now you've got crabs. laughs.
These varied sensibilities, in which
form both echoes and transforms content, illustrate a method of poetic
sexual comprehension. The multiplicity of forms evokes a world of
shifting connections; they move within and around each other like bodies
at a party- touching for a brief transformative moment, discovering a
personal, private language, and then breaking away and sending out new
tendrils in search of another connection.
Walker is an established Canadian
author whose previous books (Into the Peculiar Dark, Pregnant
Poems,
and Six Months Rent) have examined illness, poverty,
pregnancy, and birth, all with a strong presence that expresses the
breath of the body in a manner that transcends the pages. As she turns
her eye to experimenting with sexual norms (much of the poetry is set in
the San Francisco Bay Area... need we say more) she continues to present
a tangibly embodied sense of language that is truly breathtaking. This
collection won several awards in manuscript form, and clearly pushes
Walker’s work past previous thematic and aesthetic boundaries.
The title poem "The Exit
Show," a ten page linguistic collage, is perhaps actually closer to
a filmic montage. Like the figures within the text, the many poetic
forms appear to be in motion, creating a dance in and out of one
another. The text deals directly with sexual multiplicity, "i’ve
been wanting you for two weeks /and the girl on the couch with my shirt
/up and the man on his side to my side / his shoulders so built, they
are electricity / in these hands that reach toward your face. / we all
had something / one line / to say to each other."
Movements in the collection include the
opening section entitled "The Poetics," "Next,"
"Snow Suite," and "Star-Lit Suite." The final poem,
"1/11," stands on its own, outside of the preceding sequences.
This choice is suggestive of what is left after all is said and done
throughout the collection. The lines are simple, lyric, and evocative:
raindrops on the clothesline hang
like christmas lights
my body is joined to yours under
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxmy nails
the taste of the skin of your back.
Use of space on the page is also worth
mentioning. For example, here in "1’11," the space in line 4
creates a pause, a place for a breath, that emphasizes and eases the
hinge quality of the line as the line makes sense to the preceding and
proceeding, though the whole stanza does not present a linear flow of
consciousness. At York University, Walker studied for several years with
bpNichol. I believe this is an example of his aesthetic moving down
through to the next intellectual generation. This is not to say that the
lines appear derivative, but they do appear well-tutored.
Walker’s use of rhythm is also worthy
of note. Often, with younger poets, there is a struggle to find a
cadence both individual and rhythmically fresh, and this effort to break
into a kind of improvisational flow strains the poem. Walker’s
cadence, on the other hand, is elegant and sure. She is not trying to do—she
simply does. Her linguistic drum solos both serve the poem and elevate
it. In "San Andreas Fault," her use of fragmentation, missing
language, and rhythmic repetition echoes themes of fractured
place/person/connection:
Zero is minus 20 Celsius,
or something like that. I don’t
want to see you. I’ve seen you
naked as a starfish, naked in a nest
of seven like
you’ve seen me in a three
that same night that night
in a house of flesh, I’ve seen
your bare voice each night
the other end my phone
your dailies appeared and we spoke
and spoke and she
and she and she
Finally, I believe, the collection
becomes about movement and transcendence. These are the foci underneath,
the pivots. There is a montage sensibility of the long poem "The
Exit Show" which emphasizes having and letting go. Use of various
forms is in dialogue with the many characters coming and going, with
themes of possession and of loss. The collection’s third poem,
"start sequence 8. selling a car," embodies these bipartite
ideas of having and letting go with water imagery that moves gently
through sounds and thoughts:
a glide of space above a boxy red
jeep cherokee beneath
a white heron slides through air
above freeway next to
(you were a bird. you were) next to
the estuary
those constant small motions, of the
series of docks
in which your boat is tethered, begin
to suggest
how delicately (to me briefly, you
were the ocean
Sarah Bonet
is a poet, and award-winning playwright and screenwriter. She is
currently associated with the MFA program at San Francisco State
University. |
