The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning. It belongs, in literature, to the holy fool and cryptic sprite; in religion, to the visionary or the seer; in philosophy, to the Sphinx and the Zen master. It is animated not by an objection to meaning, which it intends and reveres, but by a refusal of the restrictive governing of meaning by will and logic. For the tools of reason, it substitutes the resources of magic; against the rigidity of the absolute, it suggests the hypnotic power of the evanescent; for narrative, it offers collage or prism; for conclusion, hypothesis.
Such art asks, inevitably, a kind of consent of the reader. Or, in Peter Streckfus’s unforgettable first book, more active cooperation: what is transacted here between poet and reader has less to do with the reader’s being convinced by elegant or passionate argument and more to do with seduction. And the instrument of our seduction, for once, is not charm but mesmerizing beauty:
Great Banquet in Heaven; you see,
illustrious, plentiful, a forest, and a library kept
in its understory,
pages and pages of paper for the bureaucrat or scholar;
a woman at the edge of a field bounding on the forest,
an umbrella yellow in her right hand,
her fingernails of jade,
on her finger a worn ring of five-color gold;
a cuckoo
and a cowbird about their usurpations,
and (such were the animals present)
white tailed deer, the flags of their white tails
seen out over whatever water that is.
Why is there a woman and not a man? Why is there not a child?
And what has this to do with heaven?
Because you are the man, a slender penis between your legs.
Of this we shall speak more later.
—“EVENT”
It would all fail, of course, the effect of the spell dissipate, were the universe of this art less profoundly original, less richly imagined. An atmosphere of luminous high-mindedness suffuses Streckfus’s poems—high-mindedness not in any sense constricting or pedantic or puritanical. Nonsense and mystery are not substitutes for truth; they are its consorts, engaged with it in perpetual dialogue. And the realm in which such dialogue occurs lists among its attributes purity and, to some extent, unworldliness.
The actual and the fantastic, the historical and the imaginary do not so much collide as interweave; Streckfus uses realities piecemeal, his phenomenal ear alert to continuities. Like Frank Bidart, he uses, to his own ends, materials from existing sources. He shares with Bidart a feeling, too, for ritual; there, for the moment, resemblance ends. Streckfus’s characteristic mode is allegory or parable; his characteristic metaphor, the journey. (Equally characteristic is his reluctance to specify, or his disinterest in, a journey’s object or purpose, as though the need that there be a journey precedes any particular catalyst.) What survives of the journey is not the dramatic arc of narrative but rather archetypal form, a kind of infinite passage, neither driven nor haunted. Streckfus’s odd compressed epics, like “Event,” like “The Organum,” seem almost tonal analyses of narrative, so eerily exact as to compel precisely as a story would, though there is no story, merely the story’s shape and cadence—no one, I think, has quite discerned the template in this manner. More remarkable is how much feeling survives: one wouldn’t expect heartbreak to be among the effects of such a method, but it is.
Nor would it seem the province of this voice, a term that seems curiously inadequate or inappropriate to so disembodied an instrument. Calm, floating, speaking sometimes in the manner of the ancient soul, sometimes as the initiate: it is a voice from which all turbulence has been expelled, leaving a tenderly attentive detachment. And yet it can turn, for all its uncanny remoteness, stricken, ecstatic. Nothing in contemporary poetry sounds like the ravishing end of “Event”:
Because I’d seen them so often come here
to the most remote part of the garden and rub the centers
of their bodies together beneath their changing petals,
I considered them part of my own. And they considered me the same
coming to me as they did on this day.
They took one of my fruit and gave it to her, and then taking my
branch and stripping it of all its leaves,
and stripping her garments, they beat her with my branch,
the white flesh of my fruit running through her fisted hand until it held only my seed.
If it is true, as the lemons say, that he is a god, then this must
be the way it is done. I saw her stiffen, from blossom to dead
and pregnant fruit, the white flesh almost beaten away, her
body rolled to a ball.
I saw a kind of shell within her open, its contents taken by the wind.
Ah, so this is how they are borne.
By positioning his speaker in a tree, Streckfus has managed to transcribe the great mystery: a soul passes from its body into air; the human species is carried off like a seed. The tree, I think, wishes to learn how it is done, this being human, since it has been the tool of a human act, an act in this case murderous. This is a world of transformations, mutations, the physical transformed to the spiritual and back again. The fluid long poems move in shapely scenes and lyric episodes, in puzzle pieces: ideas, phrases, figures recur, appearing and disappearing. Streckfus’s predilection for anachronism intensifies the impression—time becomes, in this poetry, a series of overlapping transparencies; we are meant, I think, to sense what might be called eternal shapes, as though, if it were possible to move back far enough from transience and change, one would see, clearly, the large recurrences.
Peter Streckfus’s quiet authority is uncommon in contemporary poetry, especially uncommon in one so young. We expect, I think, other strengths: intensity, technical virtuosity. Or delicacy, the perfection of the small thing. Not this confident serene mastery, this soaring, Streckfus’s strangely distant intimacy and peculiar pageantry: he lives deeply in imagination; the quotidian, the social, impinge very little. And the constructs of that imagination owe their scale to the breadth of Streckfus’s sources; he seems, often, like a seer raised in the world of George Lucas.
He is not afraid of grandeur. He is willing, like the cuckoo, to appropriate; he borrows his nests. And his evasions seem purposeful and necessary, an enactment of his refusal of the confinements of sense and firm conclusion—doors do not close in this poetry, rooms are not sealed off. And yet he dignifies a reader’s need for finality, for clear answers, for solid, verifiable ground. Though he will not accommodate that need, his acknowledgment of it results in solicitude, a gentle invitation to move beyond the known, the secure:
Let me tell you a story. A woman farmer had two she-goats.…
And the story proceeds, in the leisurely fashion of a fairy tale, a bedtime story:
Springs before she’d left off milking,
she always had a few kids
hopping in the yard like cupids.
The billy she penned separately so the milk wouldn’t taste like sex.
Then, death approached with the rustic
twittering of juncos, the place a shambles, the tree rats
deep in the brush.
I know nothing
of goats. I apologize beforehand that they become tangled in
my story. The billy will wish it’d never had horns,
its whole life spent
licking its own penis and scratching those castles on its head
as if they were boils that needed lancing;
the she-goats will be in chains, put on a run by a well meaning city-man …
A parable, an allegory, whose title, “Why I Slept with Him,” invites the reader to expect certain satisfactions. But for Streckfus, that is the problem, that expectation of satisfaction, of the single answer. To know how it felt to be the other? Because there was no choice? Perhaps, perhaps not:
… —See? How he pulls
the black one’s leg from the chain about the little
one’s neck in the moon light? And how, understanding
goats as social animals, he will inevitably run them
out again the next day?
And then it is the next day; the imagination draws confidence from accurate prediction:
… Let’s go down and untangle them.
We’ll take their places.
Here he is with his well meaning hands.
The pupils of our eyes are sliced off at the top and the bottom
and we’ve lost our voices. Have you ever seen how sad
a goat’s eyes are? Look into mine.
The poem ends elusively, in a teasing evasion: it works like a riddle—you will want an answer, a decision, it says; I will give you the clues from which response may be inferred.
It is a move this poet understands deeply. Refusals and evasions that, in a lesser artist, would seem irritating or tricky seem, in Streckfus, subtle instruction: in tolerance of ambiguity and irresolution, in patience. The wish for an answer, like the wish for stability, is at bottom a wish for self-deception; Streckfus will not honor it.
In that sense, he is something of a moralist. Unmistakably, he is a seeker, his quests and journeys unlike any I have encountered. The reader is less required than invited. And how formidable the delight of accepting, how rare the adventure:
Here is a wall. The strange empty space above the wall … what is it for? Here, a little boat, a canopy of silver plastic rattling above it.
Listen to the babe-scare cry of the wind.…
And then:
There’s no place for that weapon here. Come on now, you have no choice. Trust me.
I’ll speak nonsense. You speak truth. We’ll see what comes of it.
—“AFTER WORDS”
2004