The murk of the overdetermined licenses the luculence of art but does not explain it.
Translation, or gloss: “luculence,” derived from the Latin “lux,” for light, lucid of speech, of brilliant clarity, adjectival form “luculent,” as in “To my love (my luculent one!),” the ecstatic dedication that launches Ange Mlinko’s most recent collection of poetry, Distant Mandate (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). For better or worse, depending on your tolerance for a principled ecstasis, luculence sets the tenor for the poems that follow. A list of contested poetic virtues composed in an atmosphere of anxiety about the staying power of the truthful and the factual might well place luculence (for what it wants) and ecstasy (for what it is) in close relation. What does poetry look like after the fact and what is it, however its merits are counted, that we crave when we aspire to read it or write it or call its name expecting something to materialize? A necessary proviso: when we say we want poetry, we only sometimes mean that we want poems.
Reviews of Mlinko’s work have often concentrated on its fine, ludic finish, its tincture of Renaissance discipline, modernist precision, and New York School blitheness. Mlinko imagines poetry as a vector of joy, wonder, and legerdemain (both in the new sense, as accomplished trickery, and in the old one—leger de main or lightness of hand). In a literary landscape where poetry often proceeds (and often rightly) from positions of everydayness or trauma or a mixture of the two, this lightness of hand is distinctive. But Mlinko’s legerdemain can often, quite cannily, deflect attention from the difficult demand for luculence, for accuracy, which is also, on occasion, a definitive poetic ambition.
I think of Roland Barthes, to whom I’ve turned before in order to understand Mlinko, in one of my favorite passages of The Neutral: “In the end,” writes Barthes, and his mourning for his mother practically flares from subtext into text, “[the Neutral’s] essential form is a protestation; it consists of saying: it matters little to me to know if God exists or not; but what I know and will know to the end is that He shouldn’t have simultaneously created love and death.” How confront the discontinuous nature of lived experience and the splendid sweep of its attachments, which comprehend mortality and affection, self-destruction and designer mirrors, bread and roses? How account for the tragicomic lengths to which we’ll go to adjust our being to a world in which none of these things are entirely mutually exclusive?
One such means of adjustment might be to dwell in forms of poetry that traffic in this unruly polysemy, euphonious constraints that, like certain conventions of Gothic architecture, make heavy things appear light while not diminishing their mass by a single atom. Such a strategy might look less like coping and more like thriving, less like crawling and more like an arabesque. This is, perhaps, a roundabout way of hypothesizing about why Mlinko’s passion for accuracy—exactitude of diction, fidelity to a world that unforgivably loads its inhabitants with the burdens of love and death—results so often not in a realism of despair, but one of wit, irony, agility.
Consider “Cooked in Their Own Ink,” which invokes “Byblos—unreclaimed by the sea,” a Phoenician site in modern Lebanon, where one of the oldest alphabetic inscriptions known to archaeology has been uncovered. The poem does not ignore the successive waves of conflict that have left their mark on Byblos and environs (Mlinko lived, for a time, in Lebanon). Nor does it exile the possibility of flourishing in ongoing destruction: “orchards of pomegranate / and lemon flourish amid ruins” and “like the melting down of coins, / bells, the material persists.” The gift of the material lies in its transformative potential, the recuperation of fruit trees from spent soil, of metal from obsolete currency or clarions of celebration or alarm, though the poem is clear-eyed enough to know that transformation is not always an optimism. Those who have been “cooked in their own ink”—a poetic, if unkosher, way to be served up for a seaside dinner—are, as much as squids, the long succession of scholars, scribes, archivists, illuminators, book collectors, and poets—ink-users—who have added their own alphabetic traces to the palimpsest at Byblos. The result is a poem about the conditions for art-making as a necessary luxury in a world that often tries to enforce an impossible, generic rigidity on experience, to demand we live everything as tragedy or horror or, on the other end of the spectrum, as comedy or cozy mystery. One mode of lucidity—of accuracy—and one of the least comfortable—might be to represent, as carefully as possible, scenes of the irreducible, those places in a life that refuse to conform neatly to a received concept or an image, a narrative or an architecture of feeling. This strategy is an operation of realism in that it assumes a world in which some things tend to wicked ends—but not all things—in which some things tend to good ends—but not all things—in which some ends are definitive and others sing, without necessary ethical valence, of bodies changed to various forms.
Refrain: the murk of the overdetermined licenses the luculence of art but does not explain it.
Translation, or gloss (cont.): “overdetermined,” a word that anglicizes the Freudian German of Überdeterminierung and signifies, roughly, a single phenomenon whose causes are multiple and each, in itself, adequate to produce the observed effect so that it is impossible to point to any one cause and say that this and this alone has caused it. The Interpretation of Dreams puts it this way: “Every element of the dream content turns out to be over-determined— that is, it enjoys a manifold representation in the dream thoughts.” That dark wood, seeded in silver proxies: bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated. Dreams are a not insignificant test case for this particular term of art.
That luculence may not be reduced to its causes (which are multiple and, in any case, singly sufficient), to its potential paraphrases (which are not the experience of the poem, though they may make transparent something of its meanings and its readers), or to its attributes (of which even a mostly comprehensive set bears the same relation to the whole as a list of ingredients to a lemon tart), becomes grist for dreaming in Distant Mandate. Some of the questions in play might be roughly rendered so:
What can art—or love, which art sometimes figures—mean after we come to terms with the practical vanity of the question of determinate causes, first or proximate? Where does love—or art, which love sometimes figures—go to die? What is living in love and poetry? How do attachments among people—and particularly lovers—find their forms? Eurydice to Orpheus, Psyche to Cupid, Beatrice to Benedick, in what shapes can attachments among people stay—or fail to stay—sustainable? In a reality constituted by its overdeterminations, how do we tell how we are historical and how it might matter? Under the faint, echoic thrum of that distant mandate, source unknown (even if we can’t resist a guessing game), does some kind of new vitality become possible, some trill of humor, lightness, grace, the rococo of our substrate, bare life? For Mlinko, these concerns are not precisely new but when she returns to the quarry—or the query, as the case may be—it’s with avidity. And this may be part of the point: to retrace air already troubled by her passage, not as repetition- compulsion, but, at the very least, as an irreverent acknowledgment of how a familiar landscape melts into its palimpsests and, at most, as a growth into new answers to old questions.
Mlinko has long been interested in poetry as a vehicle for grappling with how different histories—whether of violence, wonder, or formal inheritance— inscribe themselves in the present and so often in ways that may be intensely, unconsciously persuasive and invisible. This difficulty, which amounts to a faculty for understanding the terms of your reality as conventional and constructed—historical, in short—entails both the pain of the counterfactual (the knowledge that the catastrophe of things might have been otherwise) and the tenuous quickening of hope (because knowing that things might have been otherwise means they might still be other than catastrophic). For the theorist György Lukács, a useful term for this naturalized field of conventions we don’t even know to question was “second nature.” His version of this concept marks “a world that does not offer itself either as meaning to the aim-seeking subject or as matter, in sensuous immediacy, to the active subject…determinable only as the embodiment of recognised but senseless necessities and therefore… incomprehensible, unknowable in its real substance.” Lukács’s great, wild hope for a somewhat creakily conceived lyric poetry was that it might, in brief, sublime sunbursts, give us access to that substance from which custom alienates us: “only in lyric poetry do these direct, sudden flashes of the substance become like lost original manuscripts suddenly made legible; only in lyric poetry is the subject, the vehicle of such experiences, transformed into the sole carrier of meaning, the only true reality.” Mlinko’s poetics, which is committed to a methodical exposure of the cruel absurdities of convention, is more modest in its claims about what kinds of substance we can recover. The project of raking up the past is one way of challenging the numbing bewitchment of second nature. But where another kind of critical sensibility might marshal against second nature an explicit campaign of demystification, Mlinko’s response depends on another form of enchantment: a poetics that insists on the possibility of some kind of touch at a distance between language and its luculence. Her method for rendering this touch-at-a-distance is often a rejuvenation of received forms, devices, and tropes (rhyme, sonnet, aubade, villanelle, terza rima).
Refrain: the murk of the overdetermined licenses the luculence of art but does not explain it.
In “Captivity,” Mlinko juxtaposes Christmas’s associations with birth and prophecy and a seasonal display at a barbershop, interleaving dives into the historical with the scene of a child having his hair cut:
Festive lights are strung up, arranged
around amusing headlines on the wall:
ROSENBERGS DIE (scissors flashing);
BIN LADEN KILLED (clippers gnashing).
And that’s not all (no, that’s not all…):
MAN IN TX JAIL CELL FOUND HANGED.
The fairy lights of Christmas uneasily frame signs of aggression; jumbled headlines mark the death of the Rosenbergs (leftist Americans convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and subsequently executed by electric chair in 1953), the killing of Bin Laden (carried out in Pakistan on a CIA-led raid code-named Operation Neptune Spear), and an unnamed man found hanged in a Texas jail cell (the headline refuses to attribute agency for the act, which might or might not be suicide). Part of the horror here—that ironized “amusement” underscored by the barber’s tools with their martial motions, “scissors flashing,” “clippers gnashing”—lies in the logic of state-sanctioned violence that groups together these differently motivated examples of direct and indirect execution, as if they were consequences of natural inclination, as if they had happened entirely by free will (“ROSENBERGS DIE”), divine justice (“BIN LADEN KILLED,” but by whom?), or passive serendipity (“FOUND HANGED”). Balking this version of events, which erases a clear account of political agency and gestures too at the conspiracy theorist’s overdeveloped faculty for pattern recognition, “Captivity” plays out in alternating octets and sestets, sonnets that rhyme almost sub rosa. The rhythmic momentum conjures up the self-soothing inevitability of a prosody our ears expect to resolve according to pattern—the old metrical contract.
All this makes a frame for the rather older versions of American captivity narratives that Mlinko raises from the dead in the rest of the poem: the stories of Mary Rowlandson, an American colonial of English extraction who recounted her period of detainment by Nashaway/Nipmuc Indians in a sensationally popular memoir published in 1682, and Rachel Plummer, whom the Comanche Indians captured and held for just under two years at various sites in what is now the state of Texas (she too wrote an account of her experiences, which was published in 1838 and would also go on to be widely read). “Captivity” is a poem preoccupied with firsthand accounts of earlier editions of American predicament; it contends with the viciousness of the colonial project, to which formalized damage is not collateral but agential and primary: “It’s a bad omen;” runs one of the refrains of the villanelle “Frontier,” “it portends some kind of agon.” And to this anxiety about a dialectic in which only agon—conflict— repeats itself, Mlinko adds a consideration of what marriage and motherhood can mean in a culture that so frequently conditions human interaction as captive to the forms of aggression: a shotgun wedding for the ages.
Marriage, in guises angelic and decidedly more realist, is of more than notional significance to Distant Mandate. Mlinko’s general explanatory note (a genre I love for its siren song of authorial intent) specifies the collection’s subtending myths as Cupid and Psyche and Orpheus and Eurydice. The wryly titled “Epic,” which follows a contemporary Psyche during a sojourn in Brooklyn, tracks a separation and ends with the return of the beloved, whose imminent arrival enables a more generous connection to the social past:
A letter awaits Psyche. Dearest, j’arrive!
And for a moment history is a vine
like a motif of grape that comes alive—
I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis—a joke so old its satisfactions have fermented. But this vivifying power is only one possibility for poetry and romantic love: the collection’s opening terza-rima piece, “Cottonmouth,” revives and kills again the shade of Eurydice, a scene reimagined in the genre of Southern Gothic, complete with festoons of Spanish moss and other climbers of the air. “Marriage as Baroque Music” negotiates these questions less euphemistically; its setting is a performance of Buxtehude’s “Liebster, meine Seele saget,” which takes its text from an Ernst Christoph Homburg poem that draws, in turn, on the Song of Solomon’s bridal hymn. The poem limns a picture of a marriage whose “hiatus is on hiatus,” whose ongoing progress takes its colors from lines of music in which “the sopranos and the violins part ways.” “Uncertainty of what they’ll sing” is, the rhyming culmination tells us, “[what] makes the composition interesting.” The poem suggests that the marriage plot after the marriage knot is nothing is not a series of active accommodations: “The marriage-scale./ It starts with do.” Even in—especially in—a contemporary moment that demands, more than ever, innovative ideals of love, partnership, intimacy, and poetry, the problem of how to negotiate inherited social and poetic forms, whether sonnets or marriages, persists and these are the particular constraints with which Distant Mandate concerns itself most attentively.
Refrain: the murk of the overdetermined licenses the luculence of art but does not explain it.
Distant Mandate depends on the difference between what art does and where art began, work that speaks directly to the collection’s title. Drawn from a chapter of the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s episodic novel Seiobo There Below, the phrase “distant mandate” refers, in Mlinko’s reading, to a “speculat[ion] on the obscure origins of the Alhambra and, by extension, art itself.” The Alhambra, the fortress or palace that dates to ninth-century Muslim Iberia, is often associated with visions of Al-Andalus as a golden age of art and cross-cultural tolerance. Its etiology is unknown and irretrievable as the name of the first song. If the making of art takes place in the twinned shadows of the nomothetic—the law-giving impulse and the utopian ideal—then the impish proposition is that the content of that stern law, that perfect point of origin, is irrecoverable and—perhaps—better lost to time. For only in the knowledge of the mandate’s remoteness do the improvisatory, situational gestures that art requires become possible: a little room for play, for making adequate to a fallen world that could, nonetheless, be other and better than it is.
And we should laugh more. Against all, this, what the nonce demands from us, the detailed, heuristic-resistant business of actually living or reading or making in the time we know, what use some grand pronouncement, risible as a popinjay in a pigpen, about the nature of art or poetry, some mandarin declamation like “the murk of the overdetermined licenses the luculence of art but does not explain it”? Do all such propositions start to sound specious the moment they begin to insulate themselves against humor? Do they know they’re playing the straight man? Can they be chivvied out of oracular pomposity and into a brighter accuracy, something made for wearing lightly?
In Distant Mandate are all the feints and fidgets, the baroque verbs and the usual characters from her antique bestiary: the centauresses and Shakespearean heroines, wonders out of myth and landscapes out of hell, alphabets living and dead, cries and whispers, words not rarities or hapax legomenon, the world that’s too much with us and the one that’s not yet with us enough, traced on the rigorous vector from obscure Alhambra to unknowable omega, which, nonetheless, may be walked—in fact, always in fact—as a tightrope is—the nimble ethic.
This review is in Chicago Review 63:03/04.