4 Octopus Chapbooks
reviewed Anne Heide
The Ohio System
Jen Tynes & Erika Howsare
In Jen Tynes and Erika Howsare’s collaborative chapbook, The Ohio System,
peripatetic language is transposed into the language of the body: “That dialect
of here and now which makes one wander about. Another’s thighs, all leg parts
are named after ‘infinite acreage.’ A lot of skin to care for” (24). The body’s
roads are vast and wandering, and the tributaries that flow through it are
addressed in a language of persistence; the body’s “infinite acreage” cannot be
easily represented or addressed, and so the language of wandering that is
gleaned from the side of the road in passage infiltrates the body:
A tide, frankly, there goes the architecture. “I
was ready to go rowing and cut my foot” and the tiny cities of
inflammation began moving downstream. Town inside its lower jaw.
“Then she gave each girl a double handful” poured downline, so running,
then spent. What seemed like cathedrals at the source were, at the mouth,
the inner parts of oxbows.
The acreage of this text folds the roads of the body into the roads of the
country, where the distinction between waiting and wandering loses focus and
blurs under the light of examination. When “together at last are post and
outpost,”(21) the sign of past presence and multitude of current presence
collapse into a singularity of prospect.
This text assumes a lyric “I,” a potentially problematic gesture in a
collaborative work, one identified by the authors in an 2007 interview in La
Petite Zine: “Sometimes… I felt we were speaking to each other,
communicating using traditional pronouns, etc. But other times we were each
taking part in the same "I"—not becoming each other by any means, but
collaborating a voice that is neither persona nor autobiography.” This self-
questioning, self-blurring voice manifests itself in the image of the face, the
singularly identifiable. The first poem ends with, “the bargain of the century is
the bones of the face,” and the last poem ends with, “when occasionally things
go missing they are usually my face.” Although the face is the personal
identification, the mark of selfhood, in these instances, it is split, torn apart,
missing, and so, unidentifiable. Similarly, the double lyric self has here been
split and sewn together, and the identifying selfhood of this chapbook
subsumed under the greater possibility of communion between body and
text.
The Tides
Genya Turovskaya
Genya Turovskaya’s chapbook The Tides is comprised of three sections: Pax,
Anchorage, and The Tides. Each of these calls into question plural existence
that manifests itself in the self voicing itself as “we.” This “we” both assumes
roles and watches the roles of others unfold. This results in a full rupture of
identification in a specific “place”: “to begin what has begun again/suddenly
men appear and absolutely nothing/happens/except that something is and
becomes was”(13). The gap and difference between past and present emerges
in the image of the tide, a force that will have always “begun again,” where
“absolutely nothing happens” except for temporal passage and recurrence. A
tide signals reliability, a continued presence, a return to the same place that is
never actually the “same.” Because while we may return to the same physical
location, it is always changed by its counterpart: time.
Like the tide that returns to never the same place, music returns in this text,
changed but always present. It is the technological: “when walking in the arbor
someone’s cell phone rings the tune/of Auld Lang Syne”(21). It is the classical
unknown: “unfinished/symphonies/over the well edge”(27). It is the life that
emerges from nature into song: “we can start/with the names of trees insect
life the orchestra/of indigenous birds/that sang to us Mein Schatz”(28).
Despite shifts in scenery or detail, the incidence of music persists as one of the
many forces in the text that is constant because in its changing.
One of the most notable elements of this text is the ease with which uncertainty
presents itself, which allows plurality the ability to fully manifest itself.
Exploration and discovery signal the narrators’ emergence into the chaotic
world, where the narrators are both the discovered and the discovery:
we came first, inverted as a momentary merger of light
and dark,
the most immaculate luster becoming us
in the haze rain had set in
our clothes were gone (18)
“We” are both witness and the event that is seen. This constant simultaneity of
self and location allows this text a thoroughly textured site of discovery, one in
which we are confronted, head on, with the perils of understanding the ways
in which plural existence functions in a world both split and defined by time
and space.
DJ Spinoza’s Dozen
Eugene Ostashevsky
The DJ is a compiler, a compressor, an anthologist who lines together tracks of
music, samples, and full songs so that they may speak to each other. This is
Eugene Ostashevsky’s task in DJ Spinoza’s Dozen. He lines the contemporary
with the past, the absurd with the profound, and the ironic with the sincere in
order to see where the lines between them meet. Ostashevsky’s poems speak
in contradictory beats, from different times, in order to present contradiction as
a viable form of dialogue.
Taking DJ Spinoza as his narrator that paces us through the sometimes
surrealist, sometimes metaphysical world that inhabits this book, Ostashevsky
pits him in battles, conversations, and ambles that end up being absurd in
their complexity, or, complex in their absurdity:
Listen DJ Spinoza I had enough of your logocentrism
Words are justifications only
Only physical power
adjudicates the quizzical hour
Only the fist
differentiates between resist and desist (9)
Ostashevsky often points to these slips in language, placing near homophones
side by side in what is equally an act of linguistic questioning and sonic play,
enacting the gesture of the DJ. While this text at times wrestles with the
relationship between signifier and signified (as when DJ Spinoza discusses the
“chair-ness” of a chair), the answer here is laid out simply as violence
usurping the strength of language.
In another of DJ Spinoza’s conversations (this time with God), the
contradictions inherent in language is taken to task:
God: Baruch, how about you be my mirror?
DJS: Mirror? But God spelled backwards reads dog!
God: Don’t be so literal.
Tell me something nice
about myself, tell me I exist.
DJS: You exist.
God: No, say it like you mean it. (21)
This is a universe in which God readily questions his own existence, in which
a philosopher need reassure him of his presence.
But like God, maybe we’re taking this a bit too seriously. After all, irony is a
pivot of this text—what could be seen as obvious becomes less so in the light
of humor. Baruch Spinoza here can walk around as a DJ with his companion
MC Squared, wearing slogan T-shirts, and he lightens the load of his name by
rooting back to and representing the often-lost definition of irony: the use of
words to mean their opposite. So here, opposites need to exist with each other
precisely because they represent each other: the opposite of “God” is “God,”
not “dog.” Contradictions sustain this text, and Ostashevsky emerges as a DJ
that revels in the dissonance that arises between beats instead of the
commonalities that align them.
Goodnight Lung
Samuel Amadon
Samuel Amadon’s Goodnight Lung questions the shifting self’s location within
a similarly shifting world. The narrator continually questions and affirms
placement and existence, saying, “you see I am here & not there/out those
thunder” (30) and asking, “what have I ever been?”(7). This is not only a
question of “where” but “what”; location in the body is not necessarily a
secure enough standing.
The word “exist” recurs frequently throughout the book, expressing a concern
for what is, and where we can place ourselves within and between what exists.
But for Amadon, dislocation doesn’t necessarily mean disarticulation. In a
“world/that moves without attention,” possible constants emerge—dialogue,
language, travel, companionship—though all surface as equally unreliable
presences:
If I differ
time of day from location, will it be more
apparent I should be waking to
the idea that my feeling about living
doesn’t matter more with planning?
How same will always into same
uncomfortably. (9)
This is not the quiet resting in an undetermined self, but a striving for reason, a
questioning that begs for answers. The poems do not revel in unreliability;
they are instead wary of it, and seek steadily for some answer, an answer that
seems to shape itself in the presence of the “you” to which the narrator speaks:
“you want me to know something”(14). But the “you” doesn’t answer, or at
least we are not privy to that answer. This is a call for reassurance, for
placement, that is never satisfied.
What simultaneously unsettles and roots these poems, however, is a concern
with violence, specifically the violence of war. The poem “No Countryside”
takes its structural and imagistic cues from Auden’s “Fall of Rome,” and
“Declare! Declare!” is comprised of words from both America’s formal
declarations of war and “Tis a Gift to be Simple,” as described in the notes to
the chapbook. If “without an unmanageable mistake/the day doesn’t happen,”
(10) then event relies on the singular tragedy. In order for something to be
memorable, it must be shocking, and this is a surprisingly modulated text for
such a claim to be made. The poem “Nebraska” allows this violence in with a
directness that is almost unprecedented in the text:
Neighbors lugged corpses as far
as Sullivan (man as farmward as any). Hounds
bayed the mule. Men took Eldon’s intent
& put it past farposts to forget. He’d not quiet.
How I turn from flat water, where you allow
a beast to swell, to prosper. Here is death
pulled forward. Let brambles coil by my cause.
Although this poem is called “Nebraska,” there is little within it to let us
believe any constant site. Images are juxtaposed, but never located. Violence
and death inhabit the same indeterminate realm as daily life.
The poems in this collection are of no particular location; they are about
moving, traveling through the undefined world, but almost unwillingly, in a
space where “people are pulled places for not wanting to go” (20). Where are
we meant to rest in this text? It seems as though Amadon will not have us rest
for a reason—the world cannot be securely defined, and the containers into
which we feed ourselves are temporary, confused vessels.
back
