The first sentence of this discursive lyric winds like a river of spiritual yearnings worded in the “alienated vocabulary” of polysyllabic thoughts before crashing in a line of everyday monosyllables of a speaker in crisis that has both spiritual and economic dimensions. We may locate the unemployed speaker in today’s perma-temp economy and the increasing unaffordability of college, without reducing it to that context:
If nirvana is the extinction of
concepts,
and graduate school the acquisition
of concepts, the only justification
for denying myself enlightenment
is getting a job, which I don’t have
(1-5).
The “If then” construction raises many questions. “Much virtue in an if,” equivocates Touchstone in As You Like It, and Virginia Konchan’s “if” leaves the possibility open that the speaker of this poem is not really denying themselves enlightenment, that contrary to some spiritual teachings, nirvana may not require the extinction of concepts, especially since my own experience disproves the fact that grad or even grade school gave me concepts, even if it may have given me new names. Konchan may very well be bridging the gap between two definitions of meditation here.
Does the last line make you laugh? Does it release tension? Do you ask yourself why you’re laughing,
And feel sympathy for the speaker? Can you do that while laughing?Does this make me a jedi ninja or
a consummate loser? How sweet,
the pathogenetic air on my sleeves.
The art of today is marketized,
beyond Apollo and Dionysus,
without a baseline of quality. (6-11)
Konchan’s a master at creating time space between sentence units that invite leaps. When she brings up debased market art, I reread the previous sentence as a satire on, or ironizing of, “heart-on-my sleeve” lyric purism. I also picture the graduate degree artist without a job (a situation I can identify with) tempted to contemplate marketing their art, yet despising the thought! Why Apollo and Dionysus? I think it becomes clearer later, but first:
Who lives here?
Is this my life?
How can one love
without ideas?
Maybe I took the
wrong pills again.
Maybe I confused
changing channels
with dismantling
the primitive machine.
If thoughts are
energy, and anger illusion,
what forms of verisimilitude
are left to me? (12-18)
Here is where I read the crisis that had only been hinted at before. The economic concerns seem to disappear into a deeper existential, ontological, dark night of the soul, a crisis of language & art, soul reckoning knotted up by desperate thoughts of concept-less nirvana, into the despair of consummate uselessness, the bottom of a bottomless pit. I too have a hard time loving without ideas, and have felt I was “dismantling the primitive machine” when maybe I was only changing channels like genres or clothes.
Perhaps, on a formalist level (as meta-poem), this section, since it follows the abstract talk of debased art in the previous section, can also be read as examples of debased-art, condensed and collaged in operatic choral. This doesn’t mean it’s not also genuine passionate crisis. Something magical, however, seems to happen in the next 8 lines of “Coda.”
I can’t believe the shit that God puts
up with.
Take my never-ending freight train of
bullshit.
Take my prayer to be accountable,
followed by
a burning desire to sing mermaid songs
all day.
For dinner, I ate two fish fingers:
once frozen,
made edible by the true miracle of
convection.
After the funeral, I hurried to put on
my jeans.
The cedars of Lebanon are aromatic and
durable. (19-26)
The first line confirms the feeling the speaker feels God, as ethical arbiter of living art, wants more than the previous section allows. She honors God in a way that speaks to me. When I first read this section, I read the repeating word “Take” in lines 21 and 22 examples of “the shit God puts up with,” but the word “prayer” suggests that “take” is also a genuine offering, spoken directly to God, “I don’t have much, but…” In this light, the word “shit” is not a gratuitous cuss, especially when contrasted with the words “ate” and “edible” in lines 23 and 24 respectively. We take food from God, and give him shit back. And what of our prayers, are they just bullshit?
As Konchan’s speaker grounds herself in the giving and taking of natural cycles of connectedness, however deemed vulgar by dominant culture, perhaps our shit may feed the “aromatic and durable” cedars of Lebanon, as if such shit may feed God more than barren gold! And who’s to say God doesn’t need mermaid songs at least as much as “prayers to be accountable.” In a way it reminds me of Dickinson’s “I heard I fly buzz—when I died.” People were looking for God in the King, but find him in the fly. To stretch it a little further, I could also read the movement in these lines as a series of analogies—
a prayer to be accountable is to a mermaid’s song
what a burning desire is to the miracle of convection
what funeral attire is to casual attire
what gold is to the cedars of Lebanon,
coming together like yin & yang a marriage of heaven & hell “beyond Apollo and Dionysus.”
Speaking of her own practice, Lisa Jarnot writes that “the poem is not only something I make, it is also something that makes itself revealed, a breakthrough event where the divine streams in….the tenderness of the imagination that bears witness to the pathos of the real, of the profane, of the temporal.” (Four Lectures, 68). I feel something like that happens in “Coda.” I believe this witness. The final couplet (the coda?) does not equivocate, but gives the last words to Deuteronomy 33:25, and demands no analysis.
Coda
If nirvana is the extinction of concepts,
and graduate
school the acquisition
of concepts, the only justification
for denying myself enlightenment
is getting a
job, which I don’t have.
Does this make me a jedi ninja or
a consummate loser? How sweet,
the pathogenic air on my sleeves.
The
art of today is marketized,
beyond
Apollo and Dionysus,
without
a baseline of quality.
Who
lives here? Is this my life?
How can one love
without ideas?
Maybe I took the wrong pills again.
Maybe
I confused changing channels
with
dismantling the primitive machine.
If thoughts are
energy, and anger illusion,
what forms of verisimilitude are left to me?
I
can’t believe the shit that God puts up with.
Take
my never-ending freight train of bullshit.
Take
my prayer to be accountable, followed by
a
burning desire to sing mermaid songs all day.
For dinner, I
ate two fish fingers: once frozen,
made edible by the true miracle of convection.
After
the funeral, I hurried to put on my jeans.
The cedars of
Lebanon are aromatic and durable.
The neon sign blinks we buy gold. Who is we?
Yet I
am responsive to him; his way is perfect.
As
for your days, so shall your strength will be.
Chris Stroffolino has published six books of poetry, most of which are out of print, including Speculative Primitive (2005), Stealer’s Wheel (1999), and Light as A Fetter (1997). Most recently, Crisis Chronicles published Drinking from What I Once Wore (2018). A book of prose reminiscences at the intersection of the personal and cultural, Death of a Selfish Altruist, was published by Iniquity Press in 2017. Radio Survivor.org published his history of the corporate takeover of radio, Radio Orphan, in sequential form, in 2012. He co-authored a study of Shakespeare’s 12th Night with David Rosenthal (IDG Books, 2001). Spuyten Duyvil has also published an earlier collection of essays on mostly contemporary poetry, Spin Cycle (2001). He has released four albums of songs under his own name, including Single-Sided Doubles (2009), Predator Drone (2011), The Griffith Park Sessions (2014), and 12 Songs of Goodbye, and 1 Song of Hello. (2019). Recent poetry has appeared in New American Writing, 14 Hills, Bennington Review, Volt, Konch, Chiron Review, Big Hammer, and The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets (Nomadic Press, 2023). He is currently seeking a publisher for Medi(t)ations, his first full length book of new poetry in 20 years. He has taught Critical Thinking, and, sometimes, Creative Writing, at Laney College in Oakland since 2008, where he lives in a closet with no heat but a piano in a hallway.
