tenebraed, Heller Levinson
(Black Widow Press, April 2017).
The
book cover image by Linda Lynch is entitled Oil Drawing for 2900,
and
is a detail of a larger painting in oil on plywood.
To Frivolity, A
Review of Heller Levinson’s tenebraed
by Nathan Spoon
Heller
Levinson
tenebraed
Black
Widow Press, 2017
ISBN:
978-0-9971725-7-7
123 pages $15.00
123 pages $15.00
The way to get at
the “interior” of the poetic texts in tenebraed
may well be to approach them from an “exterior” vantage. Gayatri Spivak in her
Preface to Of Grammatology writes,
“The text has no stable identity, no stable origin, no stable end. Each act of
reading the “text” is a preface to the next. The reading of a self-professed
preface is no exception to this rule.” Certainly the same applies as well to
the reading of a self-professed review.
“EXTERIOR”
tenebraed is
written to demonstrate Hinge Theory (or simply Hinge) which, according to
Levinson, operates on the premise: “It’s not what it Is, but how it Behaves.”
How does the language in tenebraed
(and other Hinge works) behave?
Hinge writing
focuses on how language is essentially morphic, in that the more language is
used, the more it needs to be used. Particularly when it comes to creative
expressiveness, does any of us ever truly finish saying any given thing we have
to say? In relation to this, anything that is begun as a Hinge work can have
more poems (or “modules”) added to it.
Hinge
writing behaves morphically, as language enters the realm of:
lurch reel ricochet
rum in a
tion
*
It may be helpful
to contrast the work in tenebraed
with “Birches” by Robert Frost. In this poem we find an example of Frost’s idea
of “the sound of sense” in the following lines describing icy birch branches:
Often you must
have seen them
Loaded
with ice a sunny winter morning
After
rain. They click upon themselves
As
the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As
the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon
the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering
and avalanching on the snow crust -
Such
heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d
think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
And
we have another example in this description of a boy climbing birches:
He
always kept his poise
To
the top branches, climbing carefully
With
the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up
to the brim and even above the brim.
Then
he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking
his way down through the air to the ground.
As Tim Kendall has
pointed out, this poem plays with the idea that the boy has bent the birches to
the ground, when it was really the ice that did so.
*
At any rate, this
idea of the sound of sense is Frost’s way of addressing the notion of form and
content, as two fundamental aspects that are combined together in a given poem.
Frost wants the form of his language to express its content and its content to
fit the form. Hinge writing resembles lichen, which is a result of algae or
cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) joining a symbiotic relationship with fungi
filaments to become a third substance. While birches are plants, the most one
can say about lichens is that they are plant-like. Lichens cannot be bent to
the ground by ice or boys; or, for that matter, poets or readers or reviewers.
“INTERIOR”
By contrast,
Levinson (or any Hinge writer) is concerned, as noted above, with how language
is behaving. The opening lines of “tenebraed to mermaid” read:
to
blue algae bludgeon slur
scrape
of solar scrim
two-world
strider slippering through wave-lap
where
do you like it best?
land?
sea?
Pausing over these
lines allows us to observe how the, at first, tumbling language shifts into a
question about where a being living between two worlds prefers to dwell. From
here Levinson’s “module” appropriates passages from Hans Peter Duerr and
Clayton Eshleman, before shifting to say:
plunge
dive
deep-diver
down
down
How does Mermaid
figure into the hybridic-shamanic? She straddles not fence, but Surface. … She
smudges the split between visible & invisible.
Levinson’s mermaid
“straddles” the textual “Surface” of “no stable identity, no stable origin, no
stable end.” This seemingly innocuous “Surface” is the “interior” of tenebraed
and other Hinge works.
“MODULES”
This leads to why
Hinge works are referred to as “modules” rather than “poems.”
The OED defines a “poem” as, “A piece of
writing in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by
particular attention to diction (sometimes involving rhyme), rhythm and
imagery.” By contrast a “module” is defined primarily as, “Each of a set of
standardized parts or independent units that can be used to construct a more
complex structure, such as an item of furniture or a building.”
In the Frost poem
cited above, we are encountering a more or less closed unit of language, with a
clear beginning, a clear middle and a clear end. It is a whole comprised of
various parts. As readers, we are invited to slip back, if only momentarily,
into a “place” where we can re-experience the wonder and magic of a childhood
activity, and not so we can leave the adult world behind forever. The backward
step we are invited to take is meant to enrich and deepen our experience now.
Hinge writing
offers no such opportunity for stepping backward. In “tenebraed to reverie” we
are instead offered the constant “Surface” and ongoing “frivolity” of:
fermata cessate launch un
burden loosed from
trammel-prattle
galimatious-gush
boondoggle
This
is poetry severely reduced to “nerve-nimbus” to “wing-frigate” to
mantis-proxy.” Reading it provides a moment to delight in its:
lavender
lip-loll
aeration
With no clear
beginning, middle or end, our world of language moves in every direction at
once. Each new “module” is a part awaiting its whole (which, of course, can
never arrive). Each new “module” invokes another.
*
In a book of
conversations between George Steiner and editor Laure Adler titled A Long Saturday, Mr. Steiner reminds us:
Language admits
everything. It’s an alarming truth that we hardly ever think about: we can say
anything, nothing stifles us, nothing shocks us when someone says the most
monstrous things. Language is infinitely servile, and language - this is the
mystery - knows no ethical limits.
*
There
is so much that remains to be said.
Notes
1 The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, by Jacques Derrida, Translated and with an
Introduction by John P. Leavey, Jr., Bison Books, 1980
2 The Art of
Robert Frost, by Tim Kendall, Yale University Press, 2012
3 A Long Saturday:
Conversations, George Steiner with Laure Adler, translated by Teresa Lavender
Fagan, The University of Chicago Press, 2017
