That's the headline caption in last Wednesday's Los Angeles Times front story about Clinton's mission in securing a pardon for the two captured reporters who illegally found themselves over the border in Korea, thereby sentenced to twelve years hard labor. " Making It Formal" caught my attention, or rather the setting caught my inner eye. Kim Jong II and President Bill Clinton and six other formal, official-looking officials, in nearly all black, sit in sober repose for the historically-pertinent photograph. Beneath their feet: a bright chartreuse green carpet covered in giant flowers, reminiscent of the Hello-Kitty items my daughter loved when she was a little girl. Behind them, a massive all-wall painting of the raging sea, in the glory of its green-lit waves, white foam and scattered seagulls—perhaps something one would see in a tacky Las Vegas lobby, themed for exotic beach lovers who never made it to the beach. This is poetry.
The intuitive art of juxtaposition makes lively play of the mind's associative practices. Juxtaposition, like metaphor, carries-over one image to the next, one idea to the next, one insight to another. Yes, it is anything but "formal" however, I think it is the key to shifting our perceptual attention toward formal subjects, especially dark ones. Juxtaposition delightfully alarms us : they interrupt and disengage, present dissonance as part of the rhythmic and imagistic variety within perception. From lack of immediate recognition comes recognition.
L.A. poet Douglas Kearney (Fear, Some, Red Hen Press; The Black Automaton, Fence Books 2009) fevers his subjects into the natural chaos of juxtaposition. I listen and re-listen to the musical build toward repeating images some of the poems have, until they almost become something else. The "hidden" subject is the juxtaposition the reader must make when confronting forms of allegory. In his poem "The Six Cities" a child "un-becomes" through identity, race, ecology, and geography in order to become the place he is, "a city, a green one.'
…teach your child that people can be places, can be coppices,
can be groves, a stand of trees. and I learned this. I’ve been so many places
in my life; once, perhaps a city with emerald colonnades and spires
like a thousand jackets hung on steeple-backed chairs.
but that wasn’t it. I was a forest whose roots hadn’t destroyed
a green city but had tasted it into themselves, even as I did,
when I found myself at the mouth of the place you are called river.
and when I drank to be changed, I became a gully. right there,
in the hollow below the city that was not there at all—
but distant, like a place in a brochure. still, we had become several
rushes, so to dream of paper would be to dream of children un-becoming—no,
I am riverbank, silt pulled slowly back into the current, where the salmon,
weary in its crimson envelope says: children are a place; drift too long
they will be behind you. you look at me to name the place we become.
Juxtaposition moves the poem into sensory action and dislocation. The shifts of consciousness work as leaps of faith and gladly kills predictability.
Judith Taylor (Curios, Sarabande 2000; Selected Dreams from the Animal Kingdom, Zoo Press 2003) unleashes this art of indirection. Here's her poem from Slope #25:
The Cards’ Last Laugh
The doll’s dilemma: should she be lyric or play the sax?
If you wander, there will be a sequel, not an exit.
Shall we try and solve the riddle of fossils and decorative clothes?
Ship ahoy! The wind’s insistence that you walk across the bridge.
It doesn’t matter if you button up, it always comes undone.
Another Californian poet, Juan Felipe Herrera knows, in Giraffe on Fire, what comes undone:
My leg stiffens. The crutch that holds me has become my aromatic rosary.
My exact duplicate sits behind me. He wears the same sickness.
The cabinet in the front is halfway open. Dali says that this is proper,
that I should find the ecstasy on this shore, in the form of a wooden box,
in Van Gogh's love for green boats sliced with bloody stripes.
The sea goes through me.
I remember my mother's death this way: the last taxi
in San Jose, the wrong street, 4th street to the abandoned
apartments of the homeless instead of the hospital…
Polyvalent associations are what make poetry the wild chocolate truffle melting at the center of the tongue. Also here at home: multi-award-winning poet Molly Bendall, who created her own style-mythology of sensory & linguistic experience, is one of the most unusual and best at this. Poet and non-fiction writer Susan McCabe, the new winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize (please also look for beloved Shahid's poetry!) also has some great choral-like shifts in consciousness, working together in line and in subject matter. Yes, juxtaposition places Pandora's box at the center of our brain… shall we open it?