The enigmatic torque of Elena
Rivera
Summer
project—I have a particular knack for starting projects. There is excitement in
that new breath, all hope and possibility in the emerging unknown encounter—it
is like taking off along a road you had never noticed was right there, in your
own neighborhood, and hoping it will lead you to see an entirely new city.
Determination, of course, is part of project creation—and an initial sense of
duty, as well as the desire to see the project flourish and be completed one
day. You start with the belief it will. I am starting with the belief it will.
To make that possible, I’ve realized from many prematurely abandoned projects
that it is wise not to put too many constraints on the project, not to demand
too much of yourself every day.
And so, on this, my first official night of the
French “vacances”, entering a summer of completing critical and creative books,
I have decided to read more—and that my newest project, my summer reading
project, will be to post little mini thoughts about the books and chapbooks
that I read in my friend’s houses, at the BNF, on the road. Not reviews—but a
note on something that caught my eye or ear. Something of note in the reading
of the day.
Today I begin with a little booklet I perused
but had not read with attention before tonight. It has been among the pile of
books to review that never got reviewed (I do what I can, but am only one me!)
The first reading here on the train that is rushing at 300KM/hour towards Paris
from Mulhouse, dipping southward towards Belfort then over to Dijon, the sun still
bright in the evening sky, was so quick to complete I began again and gave it a
second read, and then a third—it is On
the Nature of Position and Tone, by Elena Rivera (Field Press: New York and
Chicago, 2012).
I have two sets of thoughts on this chapbook:
one is on the book itself—folded and bound with string that has been carefully
planned to tie so that the interior knot opens the chapbook to the title page
for Part II—Already on Different Sides.
The chapbook is printed on a slightly off-white paper, just a tinge of the egg cream
tone to it, which is comforting to look at. The black and white cover image is
a gorgeous, seductive photo (by unknown) of Vanishing
Ship (third state), a sculpture by John Roloff. The image seems a mirror or
a kind of botanical garden glass greenhouse-ship’s bow emerging from the forest
which perhaps contains unbeknownst to us (or even the artist) the first page,
the first stanza of Elena’s delicate, mysterious poem—which also seems to be
just hinting at the unseen, underground body behind the few visible words “just”
emerging from the “fog” she mentions so often in this book-length poem:
In a field of blooming
thistle
a sensual response
Give me oblivion
as of emotion
Here, two
unpunctuated couplets signaled as such by the use of capitalization and by the
rhyme of the second, already evoke-provoke-elicit reactions, but not
intellectual ones, instead they are “sensual”. The called-forth response is
about feeling and about the attempt to not feel, to forget in the witnessing
instant. But forget what? The prickle of thistle, or its bright flash of
inviting color? Which do we choose to imagine, to see in our minds, to reach
out to? To suckle or get stabbed by? A thistle is a hardy, strong plant, a weed
with hidden sweetness, which seems to be groping for release, and here there is
the voice of the one (presumably Elena, the poet) seeing the thistle’s moment
of blooming as if it is responding—but to what? The poet? A rain that has
passed? Summer? Another season? Or some more opaque connection only known to a
plant’s roots?
I could sit all the hours of the train ride and
keep looking into that field and that combination of oblivion-emotion, but what
surges forth is the command “Give me” that reoccurs later in the book as Rivera
writes a few pages on: “Give me rapture!” and later still “Give me choices” and
near the end “a rattler” says “Give me a twist”. There is a need, as she tells
us in: “Chorus: Need more, seek more, want more” and “at the crossroads needing
something more to go on” as well as “Went to the wishing circle to wish for the
wish that would turn the world//around”. The longing, like all desires, remains
unquenchable in this chapbook. Meanwhile, these landscapes delicately sketched
with gaps and elliptical lines stretching towards various horizons, is pocked
with the possibility of disaster (loss: “Mourning the morning in the evening”
or “her fall”; fire: “Which tree will be resistant to fire”; unknown: “it all
happened so quickly”; accident/hunting: “Dear deer mowed down”; amnesia and
loss: “What am I without my memory/My family”) or with the option of release
into some state of wonderment.
As I close the chapbook, I select the last
option, returning to her line near the start of Part II: “I have...been shaken
by reading the ocean”. That seems like a great way to spend the summer, reading
the ocean, watching in wonderment the way the world undulates regardless of
what is happening within us, or around us, or to us. I am here “Trying for
buoyancy on the surface”.
*
