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Frail-Craft
Review by Tryst Editor
Jessica Fisher's book, Frail-Craft was the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition in 2006 making it Volume 101 in the series. Poet and former poet laureate, Louise Glück was the judge. No matter what the foreword, by Glück, has to say:
I read Frail-Craft many times and felt, each time, the same involuntary relinquishing, the giving over, like someone standing at the edge of a body of water, hypnotized by the patterns of light, the slight shifts of color, and then led, without ever knowing how, deep into the recesses of contemplation, of emotion.
this won't be the book for everyone because of varying degrees of assumption, taste and experience. What Glück seems to be describing is an out-of-body experience and maybe it is just that for her - a bodiless roaming of sorts through the text where words somehow tenuously attach themselves to some ganglion of emotions. I think the praise is warranted, but these high-minded ideals tend to dilate into convoluted musings about the mysteries of writing. Writing is not a mystery any more than reading is; it is a process whereby words as symbols either trigger response, or no response. The only mystery lies in the reader's response. And how one responds to a poem is going to be based upon assumption, taste and experience.
We assume, for instance, that a poem is bad when it does not meet our expectations; then our disappointment, rather than the merits of a poem, becomes the measuring device by which we refuse to consider its worth. Taste speaks for itself and is too broad of a topic to discuss here other than to mention that some readers will probably dismiss the "experimental" style of writing in Frail-Craft as unfamiliar, contrived, or accidental. Although experience can be based upon taste it must be taken into account separately as one of many possibilities as to why a poem, or a book of poems is rejected and I'm convinced that it's not going to be the fault of this book because it is in many ways quite superb for a first book.
To begin with I had some expectations about Frail-Craft, that it would be fairly good since it was, after all, selected for the Yale Series. I wasn't disappointed; rather, I was surprised because I was also preparing myself to be let down in case it was overrated. It is overrated, but for a good reason - it needs to be: Oversell the stock value of the book and when the rates begin to fall, the dust settles, you'll still end up with a book that is grounded in careful writing to earn its place in the balance of things. I've no doubts that Fisher will go on to write more books, better books to quiet acclaim. And that's precisely one of the reasons I like her work: It is quiet, sometimes understated - no loud symbols, epigrammatic metaphors, "look-no-hands!" kind of bravado. Start with the poem, "West 12th Street":
He's belly-down in the nest you've made
on the floor in the add-on that was my room when I was small; the door is open so
you can keep an eye on him. He's tuckered out from the move or whatever it is
you went through before you arrived here, but his back is taut as a racehorse's
haunches. No child sleeps like that, I should know. He's crying; I curl myself
around him, ask what it is, I hate her, I hate her, through the shut doors we can
hear the whack and laughter, he knows what it is. There's the hint of child abuse, negligence, and I suspect the speaker has experienced it herself: "I should know," the speaker says. Abuse is the common theme no one wants to write about, much less read about when it's overdone with a box of kleenex and a stream of epithets. Follow this poem with "Three Dreams" and you have even a clearer picture of the broken lives Fisher is writing about:
The bald eagle circled there, a papa eagle, inept at nest-making, but the eggs
had lost their nest, and there was nothing else for him to do than try to build
a new one around them. They were so hard to contain, his would-be chicks,
their shells were cracked open, no nest could house them, and still he circled
with straws in his beak to make a bed for his would-have-been chicks. And I
knew my brother was in danger.
I was turning the bend of a village road when a man in a VW bus pulled up
beside and showed me a photograph of a boy with a blood-covered face. Do you
know this man? he asked and my eyes told him yes he's my brother though what
I said was that I had seen him before, I'd dropped him off at the bus stop where
he had begun the journey to a place he'd never arrived. They've found him, he
said, he was tortured ... and when I took him in my arms he was so small, but still a
man whose eyes had seen what they had seen. It was then I could not stand it,
with that gangly body limp in my arms and every part of it in need of coaxing back...
Another poem, "June" also introduces us to some form of abuse:
Most unfathomable, that my mother once lay with you
in this room or that, knew your knees and palms,
each and every story of each and every scar—
to see you sitting side by side on her back porch,
eyes averted, tension in your shoulders, a parley
between rivals tired of war, splitting the kingdom.
If you hit, who you fucked, is not my business...
Are these the poet's lives? Who knows or needs to know; the poems read like a memoir even though the title of the one poem is, "Three Dreams." Dreams can have their bases in reality. What I appreciate is that they're not safe poems, or coded in such a way that the lives in these poems become incognito or unbelievable - the premise here is that no one, no topic should be off limits to a writer...provided that they're not presented in tabloid style.
One of the virtuoso, not-to-be-overlooked prose poems is "Novella." It wouldn't be fair to Fisher or to the reader to cite only portions of it here, even an excerpt of the poem would not do it justice. It is a remarkable poem and shows off Fisher's best talent: The ability to sustain and maintain clarity, attenuation and control throughout six pages of prose-lyricism. While Glück compares the shorter poems to "choral laments in a Greek Tragedy," the mythical love story of Echo and Narcissus comes to my mind in "Novella."
I agree with Glück that "some of the best poems in Frail-Craft are prose poems." Where she and I divide sharply probably comes down to a matter of perspective and approach. If experience has anything to do with how we shell a poem, carefully, down to the kernel, to its basic denominator, most of us can find something memorable about a poem. When the joy of that first utterance takes on special meaning for us (e.g., Carroll's, "Jabberwocky"), the taste of language, strange upon our tongue, takes on pure delight. But in time we become increasingly dissatisfied; we demand more from a poem and when it doesn't meet our expectation, we grow bored and are quick to dismiss it without even trying. Unlike the food of our childhood, the poetry we grew up with no longer comforts us; there is no such thing as comfort poetry. I don't know why this phenomenon happens. We can chalk it up to experience, or to external influences, to the prevailing mood swing of the day, or the need to be constantly stimulated.
I sense some of this dissatifaction in myself, but it grates harshly in Glück's exegesis. She devotes a good portion of her foreword to a rhetorical rant about "American poets in the mid- to late twentieth century." To paraphrase, Glück accuses those poets of "single intelligence bent on finding meaning ... the poems made by these compulsions are dramatic, artificially weighted at the end with insight, pat, histrionic endings, and has fueled a poetry more interested in impressions than in symbols and conclusions."
She concludes: "The word artifice is very grim: it cannot suggest our experience of art, principally because it does not suggest the world of feeling ...Too often distaste for sentiment, anxiety at the limitations of the self, create a contempt for feeling, as though feeling were what was left over after the great work of the mind was finished."
What is histrionics if not extensions of sentiment, feelings? Ultimately what Glück believes in is her business but if her impassioned outburst was in defense of Fisher's "marked taste for experiment," or was meant to serve as a contrast to all that is good about Frail-Craft then she missed the boat. If anything it was a disservice to Fisher, and I wish Glück had left out that entire part. Furthermore, the poem that launched her missive, "The Right to Pleasure," in my opinion was the weakest in the book:
You would think that I go mad with grief
when the white sails fill and the keel cuts
the waters like a knife honed on a whetstone:
that's the way you're taught to interpret these signs—
matted hair, the salt-dirt lines where sweat has run,
hands that feed the mouth but will not wipe it.
But when my love decides to go and then is gone,
I can still taste him, bitter in the throat; I still
feel the weight of his body as he fights sleep.
I do not fight it: on the contrary, I live there,
and what you see in me that you think grief
is the refusal to wake, that is to say, is pleasure:
qui donne du plaisir en a, and so if
when he couldn't sleep in that long still night
you sensed it and woke to show him how
to unfasten each and every button, then it is
promised you, even when he goes—
The same-experience will alert readers to clichés when they run across worn-out words, tired phrases and the poem all but collapses for them. The clichés in this poem don't overwhelm it, but "mad with grief" and "I can still taste him, bitter in the throat" is the stuff of pulp novels replete with white sails, a woman on the shore waiting for her lover to return even if in dream. There's also a little mix up with the personal pronouns, you, I, me, he in the poem; it feels crowded. I'm confused by who is "you," then who is "I?" Then much to my dismay the poem was published in the New Yorker as the representative piece for the book. So many poems to choose from, why that one? How is this move any different from the "pat, histrionic endings, that has fueled a poetry more interested in impressions than in symbols and conclusions?"
The more "experimental" poems that Glück alludes to I think are interesting as they invite the reader to explore spatial topography along with the words on a page. The sprawling effect of the layout is a sweeping gesture, as if by experimenting with the spacing, Fisher was trying to give her thoughts unrestricted access to breadth and movement. This in turn gives the reader a sense of freedom to explore different ways to read a poem and not be dictated by where s/he thinks a caesura should have been inserted. Interestingly enough, the poem, *"The Hunger for Form" seems to exercise this right of space:
Sidewinder's trail in the windswept desert, that's how I saw
the snaking hairs leading down—
I'd not yet been there, I did not know how makeshift the rim.
If you sit in the front row
then you are on stage
if you see blood on the glass
then you have chosen blood and because matter hungers form, from form into form it passed—
Dragon of Love, love's devourer
hunger has an end:
here it is
the winding path
come full stop...
I can't decide if the experiment is successful or not. If I thought the topography added an extra layer of meaning to the poem, or enhanced the landscape of the poem, or was evidence of careful planning and deliberation, then I'd say it was effective. When I experimented with the linebreaks, rearranged them differently it didn't change the meaning of the poem; but, the poem did seem to lose some of the thrust and energy, and "the winding path/come full stop." Here is the same poem left-aligned with different linebreaks; (keep in mind that some lines have been omitted from the original):
Sidewinder's trail in the windswept desert, that's how I saw
the snaking hairs leading down—
I'd not yet been there, I did not know how makeshift the rim.
If you sit in the front row
then you are on stage
if you see blood on the glass
then you have chosen blood
and because matter hungers form, from form into form it passed—
Dragon of Love, love's devourer
hunger has an end:
here it is
the winding path
come full stop...
Finally, it would be a regretful omission on my part if I didn't at least entertain some thoughts on the title of the book (and poem), Frail-Craft, which is an adjective-noun compound modifier. What is the purpose of the hyphen between frail and craft? Or a better question to ask what is frail-craft modifying? Does it serve as a double-entendre? I'm going to guess that it was one of Fisher's quirky moves to offset her title and make it original, or a very clever play on "frail and craft" though you'll read in her endnotes, "The opening lines of this poem paraphrase Jacques Lacan's story of boating with Petit-Jean in 'The Line and the Light,' from which the phrase 'frail craft' also comes." It doesn't however explain the hyphen. The overall impression I get from Frail-Craft is that Fisher's work is delicate: Likened to a spider's web, it is tensile but strong enough to hold its own weight. The poems meander, weave in and out of dream-like states; at times, they are dead on, and they are stunning. On that note, I'd like to end on one of her more tautly-woven, haunting poems, "Flayed":
—the dream I stayed with past waking
in which Pascale sits sewing rabbit fur to glove your hands
and silently, feet propped on a table, I flay a long strip
from each thigh to make you boots. The skin peels easily,
it's like stripping the pale bark from a fallen birch,
the muscle beneath like the crimson trunk still teeming,
but I can't believe I could even dream it, who vomited
in the museum bathroom at Bruges after seeing the four-
paneled painting of the lawyer skinned for lying in court.
I imagined them salting his flesh, needling it, excited
in their cruelty. Why I thought you'd want these boots
I don't know, unless as evidence that this body is yours still.
******
*Endnote: "The Hunger for Form": "Inspired by Fiona Shaw's performances as Medea, this poem derives two lines from Chaucer's account of Medea in The Legend of Good Women (lines 1580-1585).
Jessica Fisher is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of California at Berkeley. She is coeditor, with Robert Hass, of The Addison Street Anthology . She lives in Oakland.
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