T(HERE) by Jonathan Hayes
Reviewed by Francis Raven
“The title wishes not to be pronounced.” Perhaps because there is too
much to say.
We need confessional poems for our own era. They don’t last. It’s
like certain kinds of thriller, certain comedies; these just become
dated, but that’s not a criticism, they are in the boat, out at sea,
while it is being repaired, trying to describe it. It’s common to
want art to last forever, but I like art that expires. T(HERE) is
just such a collection of confessional poems, though they may not at
first be read that way (or even want to be read that way). T(HERE) is
a splintered memoir of poetry that asks what the use of voice is in
our postmodern times and goes on to use it quite effectively.
Basically, these poems are fragmented and funny enough to earn the
emotional payout that confessional poems guarantee. We’ve been
tricked by confessional poems too many times before; we know their
maudlin answers and have become a cynic to emotion on the whole, which
is why we need to be surprised all over again. Hayes’ poems, at their
best, both resonate with our experience and shock us out of our
emotional complacency.
The book is composed of shards of prose poems (perhaps a new genre:
not the prose poem, but the fragment knocked off of it), juxtaposed
meaningfully. It’s a perfect form for the content: there is usually
too much space in memoirs, too many empty words, too much plot. What
we really want are the emotions, the sadness, the feeling of
poignancy, of regret, sorrow, and perhaps progress (which is also why
graphic memoirs work so well: their relative lack of words). However,
this fragmentation places a very real constraint on the poems
themselves: they don’t have natural endpoints. It seems that each
couplet could be taken as a complete poem just as the entire book
might just as effectively be taken as a fragment, but a fragment of
what? Of consciousness. Hayes’ earlier work was marked by much
shorter amusing rants; the extension of these poised shards has the
feeling of full-fledged consciousness and this is why it resonates
with the reader.
After outlining his personal narrative of being uprooted and finding
meaningful details in a variety of not particularly memorable places,
the author writes, “What follows is of this cycle. / The economic
soil. Winter recession. / And employment up again in the spring… / The
subway will not break down.” That is, it will be us who are forced to
move, we who are forced to bend in light of current market forces.
But it is as a result of these of these forces that the world is held
together. We must bend our voices as we make our way through. It’s a
crisscrossing road book that takes place largely in San Francisco
about which it is precise, but not descriptive, largely evocative.
Along the road there is the mention of a suicide, the repetition of
someone’s suicide, “the fact that / suicides are just / statistics,
that / makes me want / to love you, while / i still exist…” It’s not
a stretch to say that Hayes is a little too close to this and to the
instances of death in the book in general. The best parts of T(HERE)
never fully reveal themselves, yet they are not wholly abstract. They
lift into emotion from something particular. The parts about death,
perhaps because death is not known to the living, at least not from
the inside, cannot lift from the particular to the universal; they
must float in the abstract without any string to tie them down.
Perhaps the book needs some reason to end, some resolution. That is,
perhaps a collection of fragments lacks completeness and just wants to
continue just as consciousness lacks completeness and desires nothing
more than to continue.
“The title wishes not to be pronounced.” Perhaps because there is too
much to say.
We need confessional poems for our own era. They don’t last. It’s
like certain kinds of thriller, certain comedies; these just become
dated, but that’s not a criticism, they are in the boat, out at sea,
while it is being repaired, trying to describe it. It’s common to
want art to last forever, but I like art that expires. T(HERE) is
just such a collection of confessional poems, though they may not at
first be read that way (or even want to be read that way). T(HERE) is
a splintered memoir of poetry that asks what the use of voice is in
our postmodern times and goes on to use it quite effectively.
Basically, these poems are fragmented and funny enough to earn the
emotional payout that confessional poems guarantee. We’ve been
tricked by confessional poems too many times before; we know their
maudlin answers and have become a cynic to emotion on the whole, which
is why we need to be surprised all over again. Hayes’ poems, at their
best, both resonate with our experience and shock us out of our
emotional complacency.
The book is composed of shards of prose poems (perhaps a new genre:
not the prose poem, but the fragment knocked off of it), juxtaposed
meaningfully. It’s a perfect form for the content: there is usually
too much space in memoirs, too many empty words, too much plot. What
we really want are the emotions, the sadness, the feeling of
poignancy, of regret, sorrow, and perhaps progress (which is also why
graphic memoirs work so well: their relative lack of words). However,
this fragmentation places a very real constraint on the poems
themselves: they don’t have natural endpoints. It seems that each
couplet could be taken as a complete poem just as the entire book
might just as effectively be taken as a fragment, but a fragment of
what? Of consciousness. Hayes’ earlier work was marked by much
shorter amusing rants; the extension of these poised shards has the
feeling of full-fledged consciousness and this is why it resonates
with the reader.
After outlining his personal narrative of being uprooted and finding
meaningful details in a variety of not particularly memorable places,
the author writes, “What follows is of this cycle. / The economic
soil. Winter recession. / And employment up again in the spring… / The
subway will not break down.” That is, it will be us who are forced to
move, we who are forced to bend in light of current market forces.
But it is as a result of these of these forces that the world is held
together. We must bend our voices as we make our way through. It’s a
crisscrossing road book that takes place largely in San Francisco
about which it is precise, but not descriptive, largely evocative.
Along the road there is the mention of a suicide, the repetition of
someone’s suicide, “the fact that / suicides are just / statistics,
that / makes me want / to love you, while / i still exist…” It’s not
a stretch to say that Hayes is a little too close to this and to the
instances of death in the book in general. The best parts of T(HERE)
never fully reveal themselves, yet they are not wholly abstract. They
lift into emotion from something particular. The parts about death,
perhaps because death is not known to the living, at least not from
the inside, cannot lift from the particular to the universal; they
must float in the abstract without any string to tie them down.
Perhaps the book needs some reason to end, some resolution. That is,
perhaps a collection of fragments lacks completeness and just wants to
continue just as consciousness lacks completeness and desires nothing
more than to continue.
Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple
University. His books include Provisions (Interbirth, 2009),
5-Haifun: Of Being Divisible (Blue Lion Books, 2008), Shifting the
Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007), Taste: Gastronomic Poems
(Blazevox 2005) and the novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil,
2005). Francis lives in Washington DC; you can check out more of his
work at his website, HERE.
