Review: Alluvial Presents – Myronn Hardy’s The Headless Saints

  New Issues – Western Michigan Universityby Joe Hall

National Geographic Society excavations have unearthed flint fishhooks and mollusk shells amid sand dunes in the Sahara that rise half a mile high. Beneath these dunes satellite imaging reveals the faint courses of ghost riverbeds. From these remains scientists have traced the outlines of a giant, pre-historic inland sea and its tributaries on the same ground that is now some of the driest on earth.

Like fishhooks in the desert, Myronn Hardy’s best poems in The Headless Saints remind us of the alluvial nature of the present. As in “On a Bench: My Life,” the economic surfaces of the present moment of his poems suggest the imprints of the larger, messy, tectonic historical forces which have informed them.

Let’s talk about this poem.

Like many others here, the images are evocative, the diction simple, the texture of the language unpronounced but on examination revealing an ear concerned with subtleties.

Hardy also pivots quickly between thoughts and images, augmenting the often jarring effect of the book-wide device of substituting white space for commas.

We begin in an ancient Italian port:

   It’s cold

in Venezia but I sleep on a bench

the sea will soon swallow.

Here in a small jacket I’m observed by a poet

wayward in his search for a canal through his mind.

Ethopia.

Yes.

Italy to Ethiopia: two countries tied together through imperialist aggression and colonial exchange. Here the speaker reverses the typical current of capital-center extracting from colony, and, instead, through the movement of the poem, subsumes the canalled city in a vision of Ethiopia.

                        Return.

                        Yes.

                        To the desert lush as cantos.

                        The green place where we share bread is

                        all I need: my sister spinning about the room     dinner

                        of roasted fish      yellow lentils…

                        …my uncle in church

                        Speaking Ge’ez.

The potentiality of the desert is on par with the power of the Italian canto. Ge’ez, the language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Ethiopian Jews, reminds us of a religious heritage in Ethiopia as enduring as Italian Christianity (itself adopted through the routes of exchange between the seat of Roman Empire and the margins of its influence). Yet—and here is what makes Hardy who he is as a poet—as soon as place is evoked, as soon as a set of coordinates suggests and begins to narrow the spectrum of possible historical narratives, the poem turns to the speaker’s estrangement from these very places and his own cautious sense of agency:

                        In this head is all I have. My warm-poor

                        country these feet will never touch. I hope the water I

                        cup      let go      will spill over desolate land.

This is a fine example of Hardy’s restraint as he underscores his inability to conjure this idealized home. Estranged, all he does have is the poetic act of recovery, a simultaneous cupping and letting go, naming but not inhabiting.

Is there a touch of indulgence in the last line? Perhaps. The phrasing might be too familiar. This sort of undeveloped line shuts down too many poems in his first book, Approaching the Center. Ending on such a note, less generous readers might be inclined to group “On a Bench” with Charles Bernstein’s “I see grandpa on the hill / next to the memories I can never recapture” or “I see my Yiddish mama on Hester Street / next to the pushcarts I can no longer peddle” poems, a voice conforming to an exhausted model[1]. This reading depends on the reader’s willingness to relate Italy and Ethiopia and pursue the implications of Ge’ez. Persistent readers will find in Hardy’s restraint an invitation to dig into the connotational substrate of these places to make these connections, and in this push into the uncertain seams of his poems, Hardy’s work becomes not simply about recovering a sentimentalized version of the past, but about problematizing our relationship with it in the poem’s invocations of larger historical systems.

Other poems give us much less to work with. “The Living” is stratified rock:

                        White gold crowns on water      green

                        swirls into cobalt             light pieces.

                        Coral broken       a heart with exposed

                        valves        arteries      veins severed by currents

                        Seaweed circles legs but will not pull

                        another body under. This time it drags

                        a living man to shore.

Prosodicaly, Hardy accomplishes something nifty. The generally trochaic habit of previous lines suddenly reverses at “another body under.” The man escapes drowning as the poem kicks free of its dominant sonic habit. What else is here? Introducing a living man seems like an effort at putting something at stake and allowing for closure before the poem can break out of its own hermetic symbolism.

Elsewhere we find poems like “1937” which more explicitly think their way through colonialism. This one ends pointedly: “My dear friends, is fascism perennial?” A conversation about colonialism between a diverse body of members in “Tea in Perugia” concludes, “I sit beside him afraid of future’s rumble.” Whatever pleasure might be taken from the texture of the poem is subsumed by the poem’s efforts to alert us to manifestations of hegemony. These poems don’t play to Hardy’s strengths—images that are lush, terrible and sometimes bizarre within the tense syntax the white space of his pulled commas allow. Yet, in light of Hardy’s first book—2001’s terribly earnest Approaching the Center—these shifts in his second book both toward hermetic imagery and historicism represent maturation, resistance to the over-lyric “I” whose moods efface the ostensibly vital places of the poem. E.g. from Approaching the Center:

…God

If I could see the moon

just one more time

maybe this life would change.

What the divergent modes of The Headless Saints make room for, unlikely as it might seem, is the cutting, surreal imagery that emerges in some of Hardy’s best poems. In “Lobsters: Arkansas, July 1983” sun burnt white people looking at an anaconda baking in the sun are two-hundred “lobsters in overalls      straw hats.” “Damsel Returns from Ithaca” features Polyphemus playing a cop who tosses addicts and kicks in doors. The point of these poems in not to conclude that cops can be monsters or white people forfeit their humanity in consuming cruelty as entertainment, rather, these are efficient, magical givens, from which the poems proceed. The cruelty of the spectators in “Lobsters” grows legs, infects the future:

                        …A woman (lobster)

                        yelled I need some pretty boots. Did she

                        watch Turner’s death? Ask for brown lampshades?

                        Were they all there        tongues long wet as worms?

                        When it really dies        will each try for a tooth? Place

                        in a box       pass it through a family.

                        This is who we are.

And it is this regular recurrence of outstanding poems which keeps us following Hardy across a spectrum of tones (surreal, hermetic-imagism, historio-political) and places as various as Italy, Brazil and Arkansas. What emerges from all this movement is a sort of twin map—the lushness of a multitude present places set against the enduring, diffuse havoc caused by Imperialist forces throughout the history of these places—each map always in the middle of over lapping the other. It’s an ambitious project, one that seems to strain the limits of an 85 page book. But Hardy’s poems are self-contained; they do not have to be considered in aggregate, and it is this finely accomplished balance between larger thematics and the concerns of individual poems that so successfully invite the reader to dig deeply into his work.

[1] “State of the Art” in A Poetics (6).

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Joe Hall’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Versal, Cimarron Review, Handsome, Face Time: A Cygist Press Anthology and others. Founder of the DC reading series Cheryl’s Gone, Joe currently maintains a guest room for itinerant artists in his West Lafayette, Indiana home.