Matt Hart. Who’s Who Vivid. Slope Editions.

Let us start with the Apollinaire connection, because Hart begins his book with an epigraph from Apollinaire, “I know nothing anymore and I can only love,” and borrows the title of one poem in the collection, “Giant Traumatism,” from Apollinaire’s poem, “Les Fenêtres” (“Windows”), where the phrase appears in the following context:

There’s a poem to be done on the bird with only one wing

We’ll send it by telephone

Giant traumatism

It makes your eyes run

(Trans. Anne Hyde Greet)

Apollinaire (1880–1918) is associated with symbolism, surrealism, and simultaneism—what Octavio Paz has called “an art made up of temporal and spatial conjunctions that tended both to dissolve and to juxtapose the divisions of before and after, front and back, internal and external” (69). This technique is associated in English with the poetry of Eliot and Pound. More recently, it can be seen in the work of poets such as Tony Hoagland and Dean Young. And it abounds in Hart’s work as exemplified in Who’s Who Vivid; for example, in the lines of “Giant Traumatism” that are after the lines of Apollinaire quoted above:

There is a message to be written on the changing of the season

From carriage to pumpkin, Cinderella had her fun

Small contaminant pieces

But what’s to be done in the aftermath’s gloaming

That’s a good question. Another good question, I think, is what this type of poetics, used by French poets to mimic the possibilities of cinematic movement and exploited by Anglo-American modernists to explore the social and spiritual history of the West, are doing in the work of an early 21st-century Matt Hart. After a century of catastrophes that have been associated at least in part with abuses of language—Communism, the Holocaust, Mutual Assured Destruction, Apartheid, and AIDS, to name just a few—aren’t we more than ever wary of giving language the chance to slip away from us? Perhaps that is precisely the fear that haunts Hart, as in these lines from the first poem in Who’s Who Vivid, “Completely by Accident”:

From the myths of beginnings to possible worlds,

I have often been wrong about philosophy in public.

When I boiled this evening’s lobster this morning,

I screamed and invented a monster.

While the surrealists and modernists used simultaneism to juxtapose disparate elements and allow new kinds of meaning to arise, Hart seems to question the possibility of meaning, or at least of knowable meaning, as the poem “In the Gloaming” suggests:

I’m not much in the way of understanding

the things I do or why that loaf of bread and not

this one with the sunflower seeds overwhelming.

The failure of language to appropriate reality and convey meaning is an ongoing theme for Hart—a failure that rests not only with the signifier, but with the recipient of the message. In “Poem Where the Message Trails Off,” the speaker asks, “[H]ow can I describe to you/ the place where you can find me,” and wonders, “Does anybody out there have their ears on?” And in “How I Know I’m Still Missing,” we see how maddeningly unpredictable the process of communication can be:

I lay my eggs neatly in the crest of a wave

and tell them to wait there until I get home.

Sometimes they listen, sometimes they don’t.

Several poems suggest that wringing meaning from language demands violence. “One way to move a reader/ is to smash a bottle across the bridge/ of her nose” (“Criss-Cross in Every Direction”). Similarly in “Shag Carpet Gala,” where the context is more sexual:

But when you say eternity and then twirl your body,

forcing your dress to come up over your knees,

I feel immediately an expressive urge

to respond with singing, but singing

with all of my might in your ear.

To me it feels like hitting you with a hammer.

Similarly disturbing images of sexuality, violence, and the female body occur in other poems. For example, “I’ll see your blue dress and raise you/ by your hair into the clouds” (“In Fifteen Minutes”). And yet, rather than suggesting misogyny, there is a sense of the Beckettian complicity of men and women in the absurdity of existence, as in the poem that contains the book’s title phrase, “Who’s Who Vivid in the Moonlight in Pain,” where the speaker confesses urgently,

             […]Goddamn it, my darling, everyday

     I come to you conflicted, and I’m sorry. I kiss you

          on the fire escape, out in the yard. How

uncomfortable to be uncomfortable, to be churning

     with poems, to be messed-up and messy,

          exuberant-green… Anymore what I mean

               is like new, wet cement.

                   I speak and I’m stuck in it forever.

Ultimately for Hart, the world itself is full of music, full of language, but the poet struggles to discern the poetry in the sounds, to discern the meaning in the cacophony, as in “Throatings,” where the speaker washes dishes and listens to ceramic wind chimes: “In the wind/ the chimes sound like voices, but voices/ in a language I can never make out.” The book concludes with an apology, “To Those Who Know Better, Let Me Say in My Defense,” in which “[t]he sky is full of words,” but the poet needs help to understand language, the world, and history—help he asks for, “pleading/ with the surf/ to respond in kind” when he sings.

— Michael Broder

Works Cited:

1. Guillaume Apollinaire. Calligrammes. Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916). Trans. Anne Hyde Greet, with an Introduction by S. I. Lockerbie. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: The University of California Press, 1991. 26-27.

2. Octavio Paz. Poetry and Modernity. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Delivered at the University of Utah. October 18-20, 1989. Available at http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/Paz98.pdf.