"ZOOMING WITH SUSAN LEWIS"
ZOOM
Susan Lewis (The Word Works Press, 2018)
by
Charles Borkhuis
Susan Lewis’ latest book ZOOM, for which she won the 2017 Washington Prize, is peppered with frisky, linguistic danger zones that squirm and twist, play hide and seek inside a phrase, and fire quick backtalk edged with sly wit. She is a master of the dangling cliché that explodes the wrong way. Her poems swirl and curl around themselves like pairs of annihilating fragments in a quantum world, in which matter and anti-matter kiss and detonate inside our head. Lewis invites us into the false vacuum of the white page, where virtual particles pop in and out of existence in a fraction of an instant, and the world continuously revives itself by “tripping off the tongue” into transformative states of awareness. What’s left is the remnant of matter’s attempt to trace energy’s wayward ways.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that we cannot know with accuracy both the position and velocity of a particle at the same time; one is in inverse proportion to the other. A camera catches either the blur of a speeding bullet or the bullet stopped in flight, but not both in the same photo. This principle finds an oblique analogy to the dual nature of Lewis’ ZOOM poems. Her precise yet far-reaching verse torques between the clarity of focus and the speed of association, between precision and projection, location and momentum. In Lewis’ poems these pairs of opposites frequently appear in the same sentence, jostling for position. Lewis’ “evil twin” keeps resurfacing like a trickster god reminding us that we are thinking too narrowly. The trickster-poet breaks our false unities and opens a crack in the dam, causing a chaotic flood. The trickster’s punning word-particle can exist in multiple places at the same time, or as Lewis would have it, poetry is “in search of liar ground.” The truth is always itself and something else. No one interpretation can exhaust the possibility of doubling or tripling the quantum spin of words on the page. There is always an “on the other hand” that haunts our conviction. How many hands do we need to make something real? How do we account for the one and the many unless they are in continual communication.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that we cannot know with accuracy both the position and velocity of a particle at the same time; one is in inverse proportion to the other. A camera catches either the blur of a speeding bullet or the bullet stopped in flight, but not both in the same photo. This principle finds an oblique analogy to the dual nature of Lewis’ ZOOM poems. Her precise yet far-reaching verse torques between the clarity of focus and the speed of association, between precision and projection, location and momentum. In Lewis’ poems these pairs of opposites frequently appear in the same sentence, jostling for position. Lewis’ “evil twin” keeps resurfacing like a trickster god reminding us that we are thinking too narrowly. The trickster-poet breaks our false unities and opens a crack in the dam, causing a chaotic flood. The trickster’s punning word-particle can exist in multiple places at the same time, or as Lewis would have it, poetry is “in search of liar ground.” The truth is always itself and something else. No one interpretation can exhaust the possibility of doubling or tripling the quantum spin of words on the page. There is always an “on the other hand” that haunts our conviction. How many hands do we need to make something real? How do we account for the one and the many unless they are in continual communication.
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In one version we trade places with our former selves & resuscitate every which way until, weary of embellishment, you close your eyes & burrow toward the future. On the other hand, there must be alternates speculating on the porous shadow of gravity or the universe as data. In further iterations I will hum the pulse of your hair or sculpt the angle of your minstrel breath, while you draw studies in exploding sparks & wrestle my restless attention.
(From the Outset) |
Lewis’ short prose poems are written in blocks of sound and image that often call meaning to take the stand in defense of its grip on reality. We are forced to watch it break down in tears at the impossibility of keeping illusion on its side of the fence. In her poem “There Is the Wear” Lewis tells us
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There is the fine particularity of subatomic particles. There is the cloud’s rosy hole through which creation peeks & beckons, then retreats.
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How like creation to burn a hole through the clouds and then play a cat and mouse game with our perceptions. How like Lewis’ poems to catch the “slips and slides” between “false advertising” and “truthful testimony” as if finally, this is all we have to go on, and yet we must make a life out of these ambiguous signals that “beckon” us forward one moment only to “retreat” the next. Lewis seems to be saying: what fun the universe has with our curious but limited minds. It might all be a colossal joke if it didn’t hurt so much. This “brutal blessing” is perfectly suited to our droll state of uncertainty and suffering, or as Lewis puts it “The treasure chest squeezed like a seed, bringing forth this dubious juice.” (In Praise of Mortality”)
In Lewis’ poems there is no respite from the twitch and stir of her inflected speech patterns that continually turn back on themselves, quantum tunneling though dimensions of associated fragments. She lifts a cool burn off the shining crystal edges of words that connect and catch on bits and threads of experience. She’s after the constant quiver of consciousness as it darts and slides back and forth between words and things – a process by which the world is reconstituted on the tip of the poet’s tongue. Yet themes keep resurfacing with subtle indirection, while at other times nails are hit straight on their salient heads.
In Lewis’ poems there is no respite from the twitch and stir of her inflected speech patterns that continually turn back on themselves, quantum tunneling though dimensions of associated fragments. She lifts a cool burn off the shining crystal edges of words that connect and catch on bits and threads of experience. She’s after the constant quiver of consciousness as it darts and slides back and forth between words and things – a process by which the world is reconstituted on the tip of the poet’s tongue. Yet themes keep resurfacing with subtle indirection, while at other times nails are hit straight on their salient heads.
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IN THE PUDDLES
of your future: ruminants. Ruminate on this, they say, while you marvel at the float of moths spreading their pall of loss like the mad song of lonely thugs. Who is not tickled by roots of their own making? Entangled & confused with glass, hopes, fur, El Niño, & unacknowledged drones? No doubt there’s a pixel for that. Hunkered face to face with the cruelty of your victims. Who is not matchless in their need & greed? Or another salvage operation for these, our left souls. Please sir, won’t you stay your hand? & hum with the next misery, wading on through the indifferent storm. |
To zoom in with Susan Lewis as she delves deeper into the lexicon of American exploitation and resistance is to discover the different scales of desperation that intensify under the grip of closer magnifications. Abstractions are ground down to the specific pain and suffering of “our history and its discontents.” The scheming traps, lures, and endless diversions used to placate, obviate, undermine, deny, and outright lie to the abused and forgotten is ubiquitous throughout these poems.
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Sweetie Pie, managing your ruffled feet of frigid terra. Minister to bad boy angels & their miscreant moguls, spooning salvation into gawping beastly beaks. ('Sweety Pie').
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Lewis’ astute, acerbic comments are the marbling that runs through the red meat of this collection. The political undercurrent is charged with twists of bitter irony and is deftly interwoven with other cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical concerns. Her multifaceted approach makes sure that no one aspect dominates and thus becomes easy to dismiss. In this sense, she is mindful of always keeping ahead of the reader’s expectations. Lewis’ writing is never boring; she draws upon a multiplicity of vantage points in very quick succession so that we never quite know what’s coming next. She is never caught developing an idea, image, or theme past the point of intrigue; she would rather transform it into another way of seeing. Her fragments jump from branch to branch, context to context, continuously lighting on new touchpoints. Lewis keeps the pace moving in brilliant, hopscotch fashion; her sharp insights bounce off each other, avoiding the even flow of a lyrical stream. Her method is to condense her thoughts and images down to short, prismatic points of light that can turn inward or outward on a dime. ZOOM cuts to the quick in its startling crush of language particles, intensifying thought through a subtle density of sparks and echoes. It is rare to find such depth of perception illuminating the glint of waves on the surface of the sentence. Lewis’ unique blend of humor, thought, sensuality, and sound takes her poems to a level of musical integration that feels both improvised and carefully composed of dissonance and harmony.
ZOOM consciously resists a sense of closure; it is filled with openings inside openings that eschew the idea of a transcendent end to anything. In her poem In Praise of Indecision, Lewis humorously admits “Meanwhile, I waffle.” And later in the same poem she says “For stability we should sway, for ability we should pray, for mobility we should stay this baffling course.” Never trafficking in easy answers, her poems arouse new awakenings as they deepen our recognition of what was already there by “grasping boldly at what is.” Lewis’ poems locate and relocate themselves in multiple directions to glean an intuitive bearing on where our mindful body finds itself from one moment to the next. This process can be likened to an improvisational musician, so well trained that she trusts her fingers to do the thinking. The erudite playfulness, extraordinary control, and startling insights in ZOOM are immense pleasures of the text that deserve to be reread many times and savored.
ZOOM consciously resists a sense of closure; it is filled with openings inside openings that eschew the idea of a transcendent end to anything. In her poem In Praise of Indecision, Lewis humorously admits “Meanwhile, I waffle.” And later in the same poem she says “For stability we should sway, for ability we should pray, for mobility we should stay this baffling course.” Never trafficking in easy answers, her poems arouse new awakenings as they deepen our recognition of what was already there by “grasping boldly at what is.” Lewis’ poems locate and relocate themselves in multiple directions to glean an intuitive bearing on where our mindful body finds itself from one moment to the next. This process can be likened to an improvisational musician, so well trained that she trusts her fingers to do the thinking. The erudite playfulness, extraordinary control, and startling insights in ZOOM are immense pleasures of the text that deserve to be reread many times and savored.
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ECLOGUE (I)
Beyond the personal evolution of desire, aroused by the heat of the world’s gaze, the aftermath of the attack birthing confusion, threatening to consume your leaking heart. In the park, on a Sunday or any day but this one, afflictual. The sun flowing like honey. Skin humming like bees in the rippling heat, tempted to conflate the fecundity of flowers. You know what I’m thinking, you’ve been around this block before, chipped or not. Until the meal is over & we stuff ourselves like pillows dipped in sexy sauce. This despite the fug of complacence weighing us down, muddling our senses to pummeled zests. The answer is (inaudible). Clogging out vesicles, clouding our fuddled wander, egging us on. Ditching us. Itching to wiggle our toes in the turbid terra. Until this twisted skin stirs the je ne sais quoi to allude or elude. |