petal / transport, James Mesiti
Arteidolia
Press, 2024
In
contemporary lyric and post-lyric poetry, the voice is not that of a
personalized, speaking subject revealing itself through the expression of
interior states of thought and feeling, but rather takes the form of a
synthetic nexus within and among various moments of perception, thought,
sensation and imagination, as realized in language. Contemporary lyric and
post-lyric, in other words, is grounded not in the appearance of a transcendent
sensibility or personality but instead by the way the voice identifies with the
world and situates itself as a presence within it, through the suffusion of
imagination and the binding force of language. In petal / transport,
his new collection of poetry, the voice James Mesiti sets out on the page
rarely makes direct reference to itself as a thinking, feeling subject – I
counted only sixteen occurrences of the first person singular pronoun “I” in
its pages all of which, as if to signal subordinate status, appear as lower
case – but nevertheless brings us news of a world whose concreteness is shot
through with imagination and enacted in the material given of language.
The book opens with a long sequence of forty-five poems titled “becoming clay.” Here is the first poem in its entirety:
reaching to. of
reaching stairs to soil. soil to
milk jaws. this
wind was broken. gravels and
fingertipped last
like nothingness in god. or clear
moss that is. its
row is / what was. it like to place
elbow in vessel.
what branch left waters not to
continue. not to
shape without door. not to know
which is to be
petal and which is only. just transport.
best, yours.
treelands, january 13
Mesiti
articulates moments as they are taken up in fragments of language. He describes
physical gestures (“reaching to”; “fingertipped”; “to place elbow/in vessel”),
pairs nouns in unlikely combinations (“milk jaw”), and refracts inanimate
objects (“gravels”; “moss”) through abstractions (“nothingness in god”; “is /
what was”). A sense of subjectivity emerges here, as elsewhere in petal
/ transport, not on the basis of direct, first-person utterance but
indirectly, through its attention to things, qualities, and analogical
connections by which the moment’s constituent instances can be framed and set
in order. The ordering principle is language, whose artifice and difference
from sensual experience Mesiti emphasizes through unconventional phrase
structure, grammatical omissions, and word coinages. Throughout the book, in
fact, the strangeness of the word-world interface manifests itself in the
deliberate obstruction of plain reference through deformations of syntax and
diction. At every turn Mesiti brings out the material otherness of language as
if to highlight its formative role in the saying of what is said.
At the same time that he draws attention to language’s role in mediating and articulating the human presence in the world, Mesiti affirms that there is something for language to mediate – that there is or was a particular presence present at a particular moment. In addition to what he puts in the body of his poems he often, as he does here, appends a postscript in the form of a closing salutation and reference to a location and date. We can imagine the poem as having been written at a given time and a given place, like the personal letter it mimics. Mesiti’s parodying of epistolary form this way not only indicates the relationship of the poem to a time and place, but helps to establish something like a community of complicity with the reader. In appropriating the closing conventions of a letter his postscripts imply a link between the poem and the reader-as-addressee, a motif he plays in different affective registers depending on the closing salutation he chooses. In addition to the fairly neutral “very truly, yrs” we get the mildly rueful “sincere apologies”; the friendly concern of “take care”; the abrupt informality of “time to go”; and the oddly ambiguous “love but something, always.” In being addressed in this way we as readers are pulled into the knot of meanings Mesiti constructs, as interpreters and distant (because unknown) intimates. It is as if Mesiti is hinting that the voice speaking from the page can realize itself as a voice not through a reflexive sense of its own interiority but rather only to the extent that it is reflected back to itself through the reader’s participation in a sympathetic I-thou relationship. Or, as he puts it in the preface to the sequence: “reader/if you’ll have me”. To be sure, Mesiti seems to contradict this in a passage in poem xxvii of “becoming clay,” two versions of which appear one after the other: “a/letter’s/fallacy/must/be/that/second/person/is/hinge/to/first”. But we might ask whether the fallacy lies in the I-thou relationship itself, or in the inevitable way that a letter, by virtue of being a text removed in time and place from its recipient, implies the presence of an interlocutor who in fact is not there.
Whatever the ambiguities of the I-thou relationship as mediated through a text, Mesiti invites the reader to become a more active participant in a community of meaning in a later poem called “circle your/the poem.” There, Mesiti lays out a dense rectangular block of text composed of syntactically decomposed phrases whose words are run together without spaces in between. The reader presumably is given the choice of assembling a poem by selecting whatever thoughts and images seem to him or her to belong together; whatever order emerges is the result of an open-ended, interactive collaboration.
Emergent order appears as the subject of a poem Mesiti presents as a wry parody of a multiple choice question:
2) How can tempo
antagonize ambiguity?
a) a translation
for chaos in coherence
b) if upside down
doesn’t need a beholder
c) by drought
d) in the preterit
absence must define and be defined
e) all of the
above
f ) none nor the
above
The meaning suggested here relates to time as we structure it, its structure being one of the ways imagination contributes to the order we perceive, or think we perceive, in the things and events surrounding us. “Tempo” in music structures time with a rate of movement; in a larger sense it represents the imposition of a regular measure on something that often is experienced ambiguously as an inchoate and inconsistent flux. To structure time as tempo is, as Mesiti suggests, to antagonize ambiguity by exchanging the regularity of an artificial coherence for the everyday experience of time as a variably paced flow. Human temporality itself is shot through with ambiguity: as an always incomplete synthesis of past, present, and future it defines and gives value to two absences -- the future as the not-yet-being and the past (here represented as “the preterit,” the simple past tense) as the no-longer-being – by virtue of a present that itself is an unstable point vanishing into the past as it flees toward the future. Does this built-in ambiguity translate into an all of the above? A none or nothingness, which would imply a none of the above? An undecidable both?
The
poems in petal / transport encompass a heterogeneity of form and
content that resists reduction to a neat summary. And yet the short poem “the
fiction to be” does seem to capture something of the general tone of the book
in what it says and how it says it:
the fiction to be.
Its border where
we likeness
semantic and so on. on.
The poem, the story, the text in general, is experience’s discursive double – a semantic likeness arising at the border between language and world. Because we can create these discursive doubles we can even imagine the world as given as a kind of pre-linguistic fiction to be, one that will take on color and sense once we craft it through our choice of words and attention to prosody. Language may not be a transparent medium for blandly pointing to the given but rather is, as Mesiti phrases it elsewhere, a “slippage [in/sound]” – a sliding together and apart of word and world as each attempts to escape the gravitational pull of the other.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021). Website: danielbarbiero.wordpress.com