“Upon Being Asked What I Believe In,” near the end of Christine Rhein’s Walt McDonald Prize winning Wild Flight, is a key to the whole collection. She begins with language: “I say, for starters, the word in, / the way it dumps quicksand before / love and trouble, or after belief / and jump right!” (90) This delight in the smallest of words and what they do in relation to others serves Rhein well – and it is the relation, the dumping of quicksand, more than the sound or the shape, that first captures her attention. The list that follows in this poem is full of ordinary words naming ordinary objects full of life. The poet describes, but she also invites readers into a world of wooden spoons “meandering through thick lentil soup / with basil” (90) – a world rich with “music from unexpected sources” (90). This is a working world best known by working, not watching, just what one would expect from a poet-engineer – but also a wonderfully distilled instance of poetry’s experimental possibilities. In Rhein’s hands (and she is always anxious to get them on the working of the world), the experimental possibilities of poetry have less to do with the poem’s form than with its action. She speaks of “the temple / of science and poetry” (91); but the temple is also a laboratory and a workshop. Poetry – itself a making – is about knowing and doing as well as feeling, one of the things that made it a serious rival, not simply a frivolous alternative, to philosophy, if we are to believe Plato’s dialogues.
The book begins with a series of recollections of the poet’s father that inform the whole. There is an interesting parallel between the insistence on “German suffering” articulated by a Jewish woman speaking to the poet’s reflection “In the Women’s Room” and a pervasive suburban angst that resonates through poems like “How to Tell It,” in which a childhood friend who stayed in the city when the poet’s family fled looks the poet up in the suburbs. As the friend drives away, the poet, waving from the porch, knows she won’t phone “as promised, our friendship frozen / like a cartwheel mid-turn, my lawn too vast, / too green, no sidewalks heaved up by roots” (37). While it may be difficult to muster sympathy for this poetic persona with a vast green lawn and no sidewalks. it seems the collection is in part a struggle to thaw such frozen relationships in close encounter with objects that are full of life. And that is where music enters, making poetry of a collection that begins dangerously close to chopped prose. The beginning is poignant, no doubt; but breaking it into lines does not make it sing.
Rhein’s words do sing, though, beginning with “During Plans for War, Crows”: “This flock, explicit ink / in a landscape of snow, // as if there were no buried layers, / grass and root, rock and bone” (19) and “Story Problems”: “Edvard Munch painted different versions of The Scream. / Plot the size of the howls against / the intensity of the blood-red sky” (21). Plotting sound’s size against the intensity of sky’s space stops us long enough to catch the rhythm as well as the problem posed in those three lines. And each verse of this poem takes an equally illuminating turn, as in this little homily on a pericope of Stalin: “Stalin said, A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths / a statistic. Prove his theory using AIDS victims. / Solve for grief in Africa” (21). Is this nothing more than a trite criticism of Stalin’s atrocities? Does it raise the possibility that AIDS policies are equivalent to Stalin’s – thereby raising the question of who plays Stalin’s role? Does it simply cast Africa as victim and contain AIDS related suffering there? Does it call into question the act of “proving” a theory by using “victims” rather than encountering persons as persons? Perhaps all of the above. And, particularly, in the last possibility, we see some of the subtlety with which Rhein sets about thawing cartwheels in mid-turn.
Rhein uses words to experiment with ideas about objects in the world, but she also uses words as objects on which to experiment with vision – as in “Self-Portraits, Three-Way Mirror” (27). It is tempting to read this as two poems – one left-justified, one right – reflecting each other as they reflect two sides of the poet’s personality. The left is an engineer, the right a poet – dangerously close to a simple repetition of the stereotypical division of left and right brains in popular psychology. But the title directs us to self-portraits (plural) and a three-way mirror: the poetic persona is not simply reflected in a mirror, and the two sides do not simply reflect one another. If we encounter the persona at all, we do so in front of the mirror, reflected on three sides, turning the way a person standing before a mirror in a fitting room turns. Suddenly, the blank space spiraling down the center of the page appears. the closest thing we have to looking the poet in the eye.
And “In Code” (40, 41) is both visually arresting and conceptually explosive. It begins with an excerpt from The Detroit Free Press noting that “It was the complex software created at Michigan’s Gene Codes Corporation that made most of the 1,571 successful World Trade Center victim identifications possible” and that “the Gene Codes staff is working on Version 137 of the software called Mass-Fatality Identification System, M-FISys, pronounced emphasis.” One might just stop at M-FISys, staggered by the fact of 137 iterations of software designed for mass fatality identification – and counting. But Rhein writes a computer program down the left margin while she juxtaposes “tiny vials cradling / flecks of charred bone” with “parents, siblings, children / silently opening their mouths to offer / a swab of their cells, the tangible scrape / of something carried within” and “your four-year old son / building towers of LEGO, / knocking them over / with his Fisher-Price plane” (40). The program, running down the left margin, ends “Read Only / Object Stream / Description Hold // End If” – while the text running down the center (the way we might expect a poem to run) ends “hope packaged in manila envelopes, / in a lipstick or razor, toothbrush or / pillowcase a spouse folded / and smelled for the last time / or maybe the first” (41). The program on the left margin and the stanzas running down the center are staggered, so “Read Only” appears in the gap between the last two stanzas, while “End If” appears on the line after the last stanza ends. Reading left to right, line by line, there are no stanza breaks, though the gaps between the “program” and the “poem” make the two appear to be in separate columns. As if there were no buried layers.
“And the Beat Goes On” (67, 68) is a “found” pantoum that uses advertising slogans and phrases from popular songs (while evoking, at least for one generation of readers, visual and aural images of Sonny and Cher) to shed new light on “Another day in paradise.” It comes at the beginning of the fourth and final section of the collection, set in motion by a comment from Fran Lebowitz: “Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can’t close your ears…” (65) The poems in this section circulate around the world’s noise – but also its processes – our processes – of tuning, nightingales in London and Berlin that “now sing fourteen decibels louder / to be heard by mates, quintupling the pressure // in their lungs” and a poet in the suburbs musing on silence while trying not to hear the “boom! boom! boom! / from the shooting range” two miles away.
So many ways, contra Lebowitz, to close our ears…
And this is a wonderful first collection by a poet intent on using some of them to open our eyes to unexpected music from unexpected sources, prodding us (the way engineers often do) to get our hands on the working of the world if we expect to know it.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Christine Rhein. Wild Flight. Texas Tech University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-89672-621-5.