KYLAN
RICE Reviews
THINK TANK by Julie Carr
(Solid Objects, New York, 2015)
An
ethics is a technology. An implement selected to help me calibrate myself,
measure up, negotiate my proximity to other beings—that is, to rationalize what
it means to live a good life, to hold dear or have done. An ethics is a
technology, too, in the sense that it is a techne.
Different from epistēmē,
disinterested knowledge, a techne is
applied knowledge; meaning, in Greek, ‘craftsmanship,’ ‘craft,’ or ‘art,’ techne is about making or doing. As a techne, ethics (the question of living
and breathing among others) is a making-doing—the art, perhaps, of building
communities, giving justice, weaving the peplos
for the social body. To the extent that techne
is an active art, ethics as techne is
an activist art.
For
Julie Carr, poetry is just such an activated, activist art—an ethical
technology. The enduring lynchpin of her work is engagement. The good life is
an engaged life, a life that attends, that applies itself. The good life is a
making-doing that imbricates the self and its body among other bodied selves
and objects. The poet of the good life, the poet as ethicist, lives entwined,
enmeshed, as essentially distributed as possible, abroad in the world so as to
be inextricable from it. This poet understands belonging as a principle of
proximate support. By belonging and drawing near, entities prop each other up:
…the phone balances the page
wine
glass balances countertop
But
there are consequences to living a life so essentially distributed. Such a life
is a gossamer, gaseous one. A flung-apart, wind-blown one, everywhere and
nowhere diffused. A Keatsian non-identity. It becomes hard to stay in one
place: “The mother says: ‘There is no you, so no way for you to fail or fall,’ so
thus, “Nothing / keeps you here.” (You, here, meaning me, too.) This is one of
the crises of Julie Carr’s Think Tank:
a life that has given itself over to the “all, all” has a hard time focusing,
devoting, loving fully. The paradox of the engaged ethical poet is that the
principle of radical care that has for so long guided her life actually
prevents her from caring for those closest—for her mother as she dwindles into
dementia: “My Mama will not remember me.” So it is that
In the event of her death, the phone balances the
page
wine
glass balances countertop
Blunt and wooden. Shrouded, sudden
The
supportive, tensegral propinquity of thing to thing is, in reality, tenuous,
riddled with and by mortality. In the light of death and loss, thing leans impossibly
against thing, barely there. The slightest disturbance sends tremors through
the whole structure. Everything sudden is shrouded. Think Tank is torn between two types of care, sympathies specific
and general, local and global. Carr tries to negotiate a form of attention that
is responsive to both kinds of sympathy, fielding the risks involved when the
“I” dilates so into an “O.”
When
it is busy caring most generally, beyond the personal, when it says “O” instead
of “I”, Think Tank registers a world
of chaotic hyperreality:
a bird in water. Girl in flames
A man walks onto a train: Anyone, anyone?
Windows blaze, all, all—the train jumps its
tracks
Everything
appears on the horizon. Everything is recognized in its suddenness. In fact,
“Any talk of transition is simply exaggerated // Sudden is all is all.” When
everything shocks, nothing does. The world an arid sand storm—particular and
proximate, yes, but particularized and proximated, pulverized into a swirling
dust. This desperate, exhausted alertness is best illustrated in a relatively
extended dreamlike anecdote in Think Tank:
The body is a scavenger under the cold common
protection of roofs
From bus to piano, no one is home. My
Good Pen: I entered another poet’s hotel room
crawled into her hotel bed, and slept. When I awoke
I lay still
gazing out the window. Eventually, a man appeared,
biking up the driveway
in his red plaid shirt. Lying there I imagined us
fucking
and came without stirring an inch. I slept again
and when I woke this time
the poet was there, kissing her husband, laying her
baby
down
In
this scene, the transient speaker seeks refuge in a transient space,
confronting both her own exhaustion while still affected or burdened by her own
erotic hypersensitization. The sequence concludes with a voyeuristic glimpse
onto the tableau of another’s domestic intimacy. The poet as dust-storm struggles
to settle, to see clearly dearness when everything is dear, scalding and
touchless. The poet tries to get a grip while “gripping onto the self, eating
it from the inside.”
Transcendence
is held up against the friction of immanence: “things move beyond themselves
through their indifferent relationships: motor oil, ketchup, boot polish, gold.”
Interrelationships concatenate into an expanding network. The network-pronoun for
negotiating between nodes is not “I” but “it”—“it” connects to “it,” object
references object: “it simply doesn’t care if it’s ketchup or motor oil or a
light bulb.” But Carr adds, “not like you, / you care.” Here Carr acknowledges
that care ultimately routes back to identity. Care is a force that closes down
the transcendent network of indifferent object-oriented interrelation. It cuts
against “beyondness” and puts immediate presence in its place.
Perhaps
it has always been the task of the poet to leap wing-footed between the planes
of transcendence and immanence, mediator of the heavens and earth. In Think Tank, where Carr reflects on the
ethical consequences that crop up in this middle ground, the mother is put
forward as a figure of the gate between dimensions both near and far, a portal
between non-existence and an emergent world, a world in emergency. But mother
or poet or both, the problem with poems is that, in the end, there is “no milk”
in them. No real sustenance, no pretense for nearness to breast. It doesn’t
matter if “I want your voice in my poem, which is like I want your body in my
own.” It doesn’t matter if “all readers and non-readers desire that pouring” of
milk. After all, the poem is just a poem, words on a page—a no-thing; as a
token of love, King Lear would cast it aside. A poem does not actually provide
the reader with a tangible experience, something warm in their throat or belly.
The poem does not, like “my mother…, wrap[] my body in a towel and carr[y] me
from one room to another, comb[] my hair under a lamp.” And yet, as Carr has
written about in her recent collection of essays on poetics, Someone Shot My Book (University of
Michigan, 2018), the ethereal, unreal no-thing that a poem is can still return
the reader and writer to the world of experience. Or, as she puts it in Think Tank, “these experiences are absolutely
unwriteable which is why I am putting them here.” To acknowledge, in writing,
the unwriteability of real events is to invoke the hyper-specificity of reality,
but in negative relief. The struggle and subsequent failure to render any part
of the world on the page—“mango skin, arch of the / foot”—is to preserve the
presence of mango skin and foot-arch in the form of its attractive absence.
So
when Carr writes “I'm asking a real question here. Can you hear me when I
rustle my shirt? When I close my eyes?”, the rustle may not be real, but the
question is. And the question gives me pause—I strain, suddenly, to listen for
presence; I am made to attend. The poem is a technology of care.
Think Tank is a care-giving book that asks “Who’s breathing
whom here?” It strives to account for who is present. It is set in the
aftermath of the con-fusion of global attention, after attending to
“sky-troubles”—rotten ozone, Iron Dome—which “no longer demand monologues.”
Even still, Carr resolves to occupy the personal intimacy of the monologue, the
monologic of the lyric “I,” insisting “but I'm the one who'll not not speak,
not not eulogize / the ones I've loved.” Ever a witness, Carr’s “I” positivizes
negatives. The “I” of Think Tank
Will present my body as a newspaper, will give you
apples
to cool off your mouth, a windshield shot
through with sun
Perhaps,
then, the lyric “I” is less a witness than a care-giver. Not administering
actual care, coolness to fever, but dispensing instead what it is to care: the
question, what was that? Was that me? Can you hear me, my eyelids as they
rustle shut, and open again?
*****
Kylan Rice has an MFA
from Colorado State University, and he is working on his PhD at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book reviews have been published by Colorado
Review, West Branch, Carolina Quarterly and the Emily
Dickinson Society Bulletin. Some of his poems can be found at Kenyon
Review, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere.