MARTEN CLIBBENS Reviews
Fawning by Edric Mesmer
(Portable Press @ Yo-Yo
Labs, Brooklyn, 2018)
“…against
what con- / cordance was that silence spoken?”
Edric Mesmer’s Fawning, his sixth collection, is in the
service of the marginal, the outside, the banished. It brings a lavish
vocabulary and a serpentine syntax to bear on an eroticized discourse, its
imagination of queer poetics asking that the characters and resources of myth,
Greek and otherwise, become a place to stand, “against / sheer sky” and
“against / the tide,” a clearing where the poet can attempt an inspection of
self amid a community of selves.
“…would
/ narrative / never find us…”
The
techniques of the book are various, controlled, assured. The lines are
flexible, ranging, capable of moving from ten syllables to two syllables with
no sense of rupture in the rhythm, so short-long short-long becomes a
consistent beat, establishing a perfect balance between like and unlike, but
never approaching the effect of the metronome. This style, this prosody, is
never allowed to harden into mannerism, and becomes almost contrapuntal at
times, even antiphonal, managing to maintain an elegant cadence within an array
of measures, an alternation of difference and similitude which keeps the
attention guessing.
“…mediaries
/ ridden / amid…”
The
poems gathered here provide a lesson in terminal consonance and unlikely
rhymes: strife/sites, for example, tonic/logic for another—scalding/scolding,
ether/meter, and so on—with no apparent end to invention or diminution of
playfulness. These units of echo, small blocks of sonic repetition, form a kind
of base, a structure to be deviated from and returned to, a rhythmic ebb and
flow which lends a melody to the utterance, without it ever lapsing into the
merely formulaic. There is an air of joyous extempore to this writing, which
belies the discipline of its craft, and a sense of surprise accompanies the
turning of the page.
“…the
scrolling unscrolling of voice…”
The
poems flow, seamlessly, one into the next, and the reader is buoyed along by
their momentum, their continuum, and individual poems are all linked and
interwoven, with terms, words, proposals and concepts reoccurring, each
changing context providing a slightly different shade of nuance. This is particularly
the case in the shift from fawning to fawns and back again, an alteration of
perspective as well as idiom of meaning.
“…a
liquidity / was thought…”
It
is surely no coincidence that the cover of the volume alludes to Mallarmé, Un coup de des, which in turn reminds us
of L’après-midi d’un faune, and this
faun is an intimation, a ghostly presence, always hinted, never spoken,
flitting, horns sprouting, throughout the sequence. And so the drama of the
poems is their motion, an iteration and a reiteration, constantly evolving,
almost a process of accretion, and always a challenge to “brute / stasis.” The
book, its “lacing” becoming “threading,” its “thongs” become “cords,” begins to
resemble one long poem, or a serial poem, with each separate part acquiring the
status of a stanza.
“…partitions
of / sightlines…”
As
the act of reading moves from desire to delusion, from height to descent, from
gender to hermaphroditism, the trajectory of the book becomes, perhaps, a quest
for identity, to arrive at “an etiquette / all our own,” a resolution or a
stability immediately undermined by “scapegrace / any one of us” and the
splendid formulation “rife with / unbecoming.” And so the poems refuse, even
repudiate, notions of finality, of becoming as conclusive or gender as fixed,
or identity as social obligation.
“…who
will glide through these evasions…”
Fawning is a dream of a voice “risen
into chorus,” of a self “one with the rally,” “a collective leg” in a “single
singlet,” which is a particularly striking appraisal of these poems, quite
unlike anything else I’ve read in contemporary poetry.
Marten Clibbens is the author of several collections of poems, including Veterans Day and Iconography.
