Review - face blindness by Megan A. Volpert

face blindness
by Megan A. Volpert
BlazeVOX [books], 2007

Reviewed by Gregory Betts

In 1941, Northrop Frye dismissively reviewed three poetry chapbooks by a small Canadian press – though he did praise the publisher for trying. His system of evaluation puts him in the supreme position of untouchable authority capable of distinguishing the difference between poems that work and poems that do not (something the poets, editors, and publishers were presumably not capable of doing). He offers little but the necessity of “complexity” to quantify his qualitative observations. This line is good, he says. This line is garbage.

Frye, who brought back Blake from the dead almost single-handedly, had a deep sense of the English literary canon and how it worked, but one century into the age of free verse and, not coincidentally, Einstein’s relativity, I feel none of Frye’s confidence in declaring this or that line extrinsically authentic. The rules of poetry having long been shattered, an individual poem functions intrinsically, by creating its own necessity, its own inevitability, and its own authenticity. Poetry isn’t a singular noun; it’s uncountable.

Thus, what makes a poem a poem varies from work to work. It can become a detective game to uncover how and why a particular piece occupies the role. Sometimes the poetry in a poem resides in the language, in the decadent, sensuous assemblage of words or the astonishing concision and precision of packaged or structured language, for instance, and sometimes in the content, in the startling emotional resonance of a world described or the startling discovery of new ideas, new comparisons. The weakest poems, it seems to me, become poems by reason of the right margin alone. The best poem reorient the category.

In all of these models (and of course there are more), there operates an element of what Gertrude Stein calls “defamiliarization.” The poem-in-the-poem begins in the perceptual shift caused by turning familiar words into something entirely new. Uncovering a difference, a perceptual shift, will cause a loss of footing and a sense of vertigo. Poetry, from this vantage, is not a path to discover some secret cairn, but a path to experience pathlessness. Frye worked towards an anatomy of poetry, a catalogue of best practices, and used that model to critique even small press experimentation. He was famously afraid of nature, and one gets the sense that the opening wilderness of Twentieth Century verse, especially small press verse, must have profoundly irritated him.

Megan A. Volpert’s extremely self-conscious face blindness (2007) is an excellent contemporary example to challenge Frye’s model of reviewing small press publications precisely because it interrogates the presumptions behind Frye’s aesthetics. While he asks for a kind of coherent voice developed through “rhythm, cadence, epithet, and symbol,” Volpert’s book explores the dissolution of identity and of how we recognize or even construct identities. As the title indicates, the small book (just larger than a chapbook) attends to the dilemma of identity through the rubric of a rare psychological condition called prosopagnosia that prevents one from seeing or remembering faces. The poems use this advanced theory of human genetic behaviour as an allusive metaphor to create a conceptual frame for her own writing. The shattered identity metaphor also explains and justifies Volpert’s polyphonic approach to each poem.

In the poems themselves, the poetry-in-the-poem occurs in the elusive gap between observation and recognition, or what she might characterise as a choice between “distraction and failure” (“purpose statement”). Coherency of voice, of cadence, is not sought after – is distinctly rendered problematic. Each poem changes the mode of expression. Not just the shift from a lyric to a sonnet; in some, the author meditates quite theoretically, some humorously, in others, the words crumble in aleatory fragmentation. In fact, these poems which might be called metapoems invite a kind of literary detective game to accommodate the shifting approach in each individual piece.

The first poem, “Mark of the Beast,” invites us to consider the poems as moving towards “the prospect of a given fascinating image […] a fetish object […] never happening but manifested through text.” The instruction thus provided, the ensuing poems pile words like architecture, creating self-collapsing monuments to Babel. The fetish rises from the rubble, elusive, always just out of reach. The elusiveness of the images echoes the absent signification of the prosopagnosial face, decipherable only through “something uncanny” (“prosopagnosia”). The uncanniness introduces an abstract and ironic humour that runs throughout the work: found in such lines as, “well i replied speech is not my first language” (“xenoglassalalia”) or “have you anything to declare / i have come here to die […] on behalf of french customs bienvenue a paris” (“customs”).

Some poems include more conventional narrative and confessional sections, creating a kind of tension with the work’s overall interrogation of characterization. In a few poems, Volpert explores the tension and sends the “i” shimmering into a surrealist (read: touches myth through psychoanalytic devotion) swirl infused with its own theory and comedy. “something aleatory” and “beyond good and nutshells: oulipian conversations with friedrich nietzsche” both chase the fetish through disintegrating imagery and form. To a lesser extent, the voice-on-voice externalized editing encoded into the poem in “symptoms of good editing” and the direct address to the reader in “amor fati” do much the same.

This review introduced Frye but not entirely to use him as a straw man. When Frye played the part of the great divider, sorting the genuine flesh of poetry from doggerel, he did so based upon a stable conception of the constitution of poetry (which, of course, he spent a career mapping out in precise detail in countless books). Recently, there seems to be a rising current of traditional poetics that threatens to wash away the decades of discovery of the rich nuance of language; or at least there appears to be a growing resistance to experimental modes for their own sake. I’m hearing echoes of Frye’s dividing voice more frequently now as writers from various camps attempt to assert some kind of quantitative standard for poetry. Such a hopeful gesture that The Great Poem can be achieved as a monument for all times, all cultures, seems more defensive than anything – a last stand against the explosion of categories. Endless diversity creates a significant problem for reviewers who each possess the biases and imaginative limitations of any mere human. Legitimate evaluation (which stands in sharp contrast to personal preference of aesthetics) seems damned between a Charybdis of relativism and a Scylla of paternalism. There is no absolute standard for authenticity in writing, but in looking for the poetry in the poem and evaluating a book by its own logic reviewers can overcome the seemingly inevitable imbalance. Furthermore, the small press is precisely the medium where authors ought to have the freedom to experiment with new ways of writing. Experimentation requires submitting oneself to the process before knowing it will work – which means some triumphs and many failures. Failures in such a medium should be recognized as such, but should also be encouraged solely on the chance that they may result in something spectacular. As in all research, failure is an essential part of the process.

The strength of Volpert’s book resides in its anticipation of readerly expectations, and its refusal to rest within one consistent stable mode of speaking, of being. The confessional poems might not test or thrash the boundaries of recognizable planes of expression (and performance), but in the context of other poems that do swirl through multiple planes even the simpler narrative sketches become compelling attempts to speak despite and through the conflicting layers of self-conscious language. This first collection of poems seems to attempt to reconcile the mundane body and world with best mind thinking, using formal techniques to present a sharply original formulation of the poetry in a poem. No failure, though decidedly experimental, it is in this amalgam, cumulative approach that the poet does something defamiliarizing and new.