There are few poets in America who generate as much excitement among poets and critics alike as Dorothea Lasky. Her radically straightforward diction and deadpan delivery have generated some of the most talked about collections in recent American poetry: Awe (2007), Black Life (2010) and Thunderbird (2012), all from indie super-presence Wave Books. In her most recent collection, Rome, her first with the revived (and storied) Norton imprint Liveright, Lasky pushes her now-recognizable voice into a desperately new register, and the direction is incredibly promising. Though these poems at time spin their wheels to little effect (or affect), there are as many or more moments when their witchy self-talk seems to break through its own artifice, establishing contact with something entirely other.
“Is it true that all trees are the same
All houses are the same
Is it true that all people are the same
We eat from the same china
And the sound is similar
A very similar sound”
(February 21st)
In the late eighties and early nineties, as grunge began to bleed into the mainstream, Daniel Johnston gained underground notoriety among musicians and artists for the weird, un-self-conscious songs he would write and sing directly into his tape player—tapes he would then copy and hand out to strangers on the street or at local gigs. Part of Johnston’s art is its lack of artifice: it is seductive because it carries with it no pretense to “talent” in any conventional sense.
Art like Johnston’s begs many questions: does he know he can’t sing? Is he aware that the quality of his art is its artlessness? Is he being ironic? It is necessarily uneven, as evenness is a product of stingy editorialism—and the genius of the art, when it really finds its stride, is the sensation of pure thought—a slipstream of yeses without whiff of a no. Lasky’s poetics channel something of Johnston’s powerful lack of pretense—the difference is that we know Lasky can sing. Johnston’s brilliance was his art’s power over and against the lack of traditional “talent” of its artist—Lasky, though, is unbearably talented.
“Dear friend, I would paint your eyes anywhere
The elements so mixed up in me
That Nature might stand up and say: Now this is a man!
And when they burn me up into the trees
I hope you are the trees”
(Poem for My Friend)
There are moments in Lasky’s oeuvre that conjure some of the greatest voices in the history of the avant-garde: Rimbaud, Lorca, Stein, Ashbery and O’Hara. Which is why it’s such an odd experience to read a poem like, “Diet Mountain Dew.” It begins:
“Something that I have
Thought of recently
Was my Diet Mountain Dew
Bottle in the kitchen refrigerator
I would like to be
Home
I would like to go
Home and to the places
Where people like me
It is really hard to
Keep the output
At an input
I go
And no one gives
A shit
All they want
Is the gift
Without even knowing
All the Diet Mountain Dew
That went into it…”
Does she know she can sing? It’s a fascinating effect, and not necessarily a problem. After all: there is something incredibly refreshing about poetry so radically unencumbered. But still: at times the poems seem so content with surfaces that their lack of depth calls into question their necessity. If Frank O’Hara turned chattiness into art in what he famously labeled his, “I do this, I do that poems,” Lasky at times contents herself to a kind of, “I like this, I like that…” posture that threatens to be consumed by its own triviality.
“I feel pity for the stars, the blue stars, and the red stars
And the green stars, I feel pity for the stars that shoot sparks
And the green-grey
I feel pity for the colors
I feel pity for this room”
(I Feel Pity)
There are moments of head-scratching simplicity in Lasky’s poetics, and that simplicity can be difficult to trust. However, in Rome, more than in any of her books to date, Lasky sings. And when she sings, the musings of an ego break through to something profoundly other: as though someone kept talking to the Ouija board and then it started talking back.
“What a blank and edible flower
The lilac is
It is as if your face
Were there inside of me
Or on that tree
White-lined
And inside your heart
A glowing purple, a glowing green
It is as if I had made you believe
In me once again
It is as if you knew I was your true love
It was as if I didn’t have to know
In this life
All you were to me
Was that flower” (Lilac)
When Lorca brought to duende America, ancient Spanish spiritism was for the first time in contact with the fast, black guts of the greatest city in the world. Lasky’s Rome moves in the opposite direction, from the butcher paper, boombox-recorded stack of mix-tapes of the American demotic toward something more ancient and Old World, something deeply rooted in the history of poetry.
“I write you
From above an ocean
Wilted and stale flower
I used to think you were odd
Until you burst in my mouth
Like the most obvious thing
All in all I was glad I had had
Another moment in the rain with you” (You Think Language Is Silly Until It Happens to You)
There is incredible tenderness here, a tenderness reminiscent of Robert Desnos, the greatest love poet of Surrealism. Like Desnos, Lasky is capable of blending devastating vulnerability with surprising buoyancy. And because of Lasky’s straightforward diction, the thought patterns of these poems are relatively easy to track, which is more artistically daring than it might appear at first glance. Poetry, as a medium of thought, often blurs itself in complexity of image or diction or allusion. In many ways, this is the legacy of Modernism, and each subsequent development in the avant-garde has defined itself largely (or, in some cases, entirely) by its resistance to meaning. Lasky’s poems, too, resist meaning, but not by any sleight of the hand whereby the reader is left in the dust of lyric or the density of syntax—they speak plainly. And it is this feature—plainspoken-ness—which makes the sublimity of Lasky’s work so profound (and its frustrations so prominent). The poems resist epiphany and intellect—a resistance that produces tremendous, original energy.
“There was a lonely summer
Where I took the string and unraveled the magic circle from everything
It was because of you, and what you did to me
No it was winter
When I drank cola right by his head
The girl said her poem was called Winter
The boy said his name was The Sea
If I could have wrapped you in purple robes
For the rest of my life
I would have” (Winter)
It is appropriate, then, that Lasky’s most startlingly avant-garde contribution to date would come from Liveright, the imprint that almost a century ago published Eliot, Pound, H.D. and E.E. Cummings. Like the greatest Modernists, Lasky’s work is important precisely because of the way it complicates the conversation between the old and the new, the avant-garde and the mainstream. Most admirably, it demands the conversation take place on its own terms, and it is absolutely uncompromising in this.
“
You walking towards me
In the ghostly smoke
When you took off your raincoat
It was not to keep you hungry
It was not to keep you simple
It was to keep you wet
Wet and violent flower
That I shook at the people
When I described you as an ocean
It was because I was still close to it
” (You Think Language Is Silly Until It Happens to You)
To read Lasky is, for better and worse, to overhear an original mind thinking aloud to itself. At their worst, Lasky’s poems are art, just the most indulgent kind: self-amused, insular and a bit obnoxious. At their best, though, they push through boredom into something quasi-spiritual: something like the electric mind of Surrealism. Since appearing on the scene with Awe in 2007, her poems have pushed the limits of ego to various effect, and while Rome at times reverts to old habits, it signals a breakthrough in Lasky’s aesthetic where ego is transformed into something sublime—where, as in the heights of Rimbaud, “I” truly becomes an “Other”.
Dorothea Lasky—Rome
Liveright 2014
Page Length: 144
Retail: $23.95
Notable Poems: Winter; I Remember in the Morning; February 21; Lilac; You Think Language Is Silly Until It Happens to You; What Is a Man if Not a Siphon; Poem for My Friend; The Art Deco of the West
Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD student at the University of Missouri. His work can be found in New American Writing, Fugue, New Orleans Review, Forklift Ohio, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. His chapbook, Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).
