Cynie Cory

Conceal to Reveal: Let’s Kill the Subject

The collaborative effort of poets Simone Muench and Jackie White of THE UNDER HUM arrives at a time of intense psychic upheaval in this country. The anxiety is palpable. Who among us does not feel it? In Mid-October wind gusts throw the halyards of our nation’s flag poles into sonic alarm, hammering the collective heads of Americans. I write this three weeks outside one of the most contentious and consequential presidential elections in the history of America. We are in dangerous cross-currents as we fight rip-tides that threaten our democracy.  Divisions between us run deep as the coldest and widest Great Lake. These waters are untameable. They are untenable.

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It is like no other morning, in sound and fury, the clanking and thrashing of metal and rope, rage in violent alarm, as though our forefathers’ are warning us to act. It is come. The past is here. The wind is in the halyards. The moment is prophetic.

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It is precisely to this unrest, to this overwhelming moment in history, that we as a people cannot or do not--and often against our will--heed to an internal alarm.  Whereby, our daily habits and routines remain unaltered, as though nothing can outperform our will, nothing in us will will-out the unthinkable.  We shall not acknowledge the speed at which our planet unmothers civilization. It is impossible to imagine. The Big Uncertain. The Existential Moment that triggers the amygdala, and traps us in the limbic brain.  Anxiety is our future, it is our present.  We can no longer live outside of it.

Freeze. Run. Hide.

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Think trauma, think denial, think hyper-anxiety.

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End of story. End of history.

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The deceptively quiet and chilling poems of Muench and White’s The Underhum, finally trip the breaker of surface chat and linguistic gymnastics, the feigned machinery of gumball poetry and musical luminaries. These poems are lusciously filled candies, ornaments of ribboned chocolate and tart-cherry lollypops, riddled with pre-talk and post-talk and talk in between the talk.  This over-hum is full-throttle Barbie Doll World. At a glance, the poems are just that: play, performance, and musical overindulgence.  The effortless swirl of musical devices threatens to shatter the hyper-hermetic formal structures (sonnets, sestets, golden-shovels, and more) that necessarily impose order and control, making it impossible for the reader, and writers, to hold the tension, and to see or feel the tension of the opposites.  The surface is too slippery and hyper-performative  ( “Arrow me into the ozone, I ask/of no one in particular”,  “My spit falls in silver/spears, delicate as charms”,  “The map of the marsh hides the map of the sister,” “We’re the heart’s rattle, razored at our core. Full of sharp. Full of sheen”) or in contrast the content is cement-sealed: 

Praise the dance floor ablaze with star-

spangled dresses; praise the sadnesses

scrunched into pocketbooks and cleavage,

As later you’ll try to praise middle-aged

Nostalgia, yellow scrapbooks, photos,

bundles of mildewed love notes.

            from “Rotation”

to boogieman this life. Living is enough to

 creature skin into crepe paper. Instead, let go

  of gone. You’re in the present tense here.”

           from “Tense” A Golden Shovel

It is in the above excerpts that the reader catches a glimpse of what is bubbling under the surface. It is what we’ve been waiting for.

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Think post-punk disguised as shoegaze, Electric Lady Land is a Hard-Rain’s-a-Gonna Fall. 

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Mother Earth is not just abandoning us, we are killing her.

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The poems of the UNDER HUM

1. Resist feeling

2. Use poetry to combat mass powerlessness and anxiety

3. Manipulate point-of-view to mirror the readers’ denial to mass extinction

4. Call for a philosophical contemplation of the above

5. In the hour hyper-anxiety the authors deflect

6. Distract, and deny the very subject of the book

7. Which produces a kind of fragmentation

8. In the poets, the speakers, the readers from the hyper

9. Surface silencing the under humming but not really

10.  The self-centered, self-conscious “I” represents all of us

11.  Unable to act

12. The Underhum is real. We feel it.

13. While we deny. Our human nature.

14. The hermeticism of the poems do not change the unchangeable or untranslatable—

15. To express “untranslatable” is a refusal to name, to expand, to deal with the monster under the bed.

16. The forms: Sonnets, Villanelles, Sestinas, Rondels, Ghazals, Odes, Elegies, Ekphrasis, Pastorals, Nonces, and Terrance Hayes' form, “The Golden Shovel”

17. Are attempts at control changing constantly to meet the unchangeable

18. Future

19. Left to question:

20. How do I live through this?

21. We cannot ask this.

22. We must remain in denial.

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These poems kick you in the teeth. The authors remind us that we are not alone. They, too, suffer third-degree existential grief burns. 

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Is the experience of trauma less acute if we could rescue ourselves from collective and personal denial?

Like party girls, like plastic dolls, like make-believe, frame-by-frame, beat-to-beat, line-by-line, the reader is called to play, to buy into the clever performers’ clever songs and rhymes, these sophisticated and over-achieving musical devices that rightly conceal the subject. Consider the plethora of off rhymes and inner rhymes in “Elegy Lined by Vicente Huidobro”: “Seance/radiance” “table/cable”, “frailty/finality”, “sputter/recover”, “fizzle/sizzle”, “star/scar”, “out there/our here/seared”, “strung/constellation”, “aglow/own/ozone. Sure, let’s dance and sway, we want to be taken from our anxious worlds. Yet something doesn’t feel quite right. A sinister underbelly, a manipulation? I think of the song  “Dancer” by Idles:

I give myself to you

As long as you move

On the floor

Dancers hip to hip, dancing cheek to cheek

(Collide us while we work it out)

As we go dancing, hip to hip, cheek to cheek across the floor…

Shoulders back, chest out

I’m poised like a goddamn ape, so to speak

I can taste the mood in my mouth…

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I was prepared to say this collaboration by Muench and White, is two poets having fun, look how their music defines the line! After all, the poets spring forth and back, ideas like ditties, superficial incidences and inserts of grief and loss that remind us we should worry, of what we are not sure of. Ambiguity frames the fun, the under fear. “She’s silk static and wetsuit smooth” or “She’s silk static/A shawl of dark water” depending on how you read it. The last lines of the poem "Portrait As Landscape: Shell Game” is indeed a dance, and leaves the reader ill-equipped to seriously ponder the significance of the hum. Yet there is something pulling us in the fragmented form. Yes. Of course.  At last.

Maxine Kumin’s Under Hum is here. We feel it. I named it: it’s the monster under the bed.

To deny is as human as to love.

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There are underpinnings, hints, “Hey, Hamlet, that’s Polonius in the corner!” The wit’s here. It comes in and out of concealment. The formal poems are so hermetic you can barely crack one open, for example, the sonnet, “Elegy lined by Maxine Kumin” surprises us with diction that “misleads, a slur” which is governed by the motion of a “sliding body” which then leads us to a disaster of “a flash flood of dinner parties” in which the guests have been submerged. The decoupling occurs at the sonnet’s critical turn when they are masked and “hazard-suited” in “dummy-pose(s). The poem unfolds quickly from its predicament that begins flippantly (as concealment) to its final couplet: the big reveal.  Why are these poems so tightly wound and surfaced with liquid music that speeds across the line like a hot greased pan?  These poets are masters. Like Shakespeare, they use concealment to reveal.

I also think of Dickinson, how her music pushes against the subject of the poem, and creates a barrier to the reader. It is a protective device, like thorns on a rose. Let’s not get too vulnerable.  Yet music is semipermeable; it gives. Once we recognize the surface of Dickinson (and Muench and White) is meant to distract us, to conceal the subject, which turns, like a key, to reveal its opposite: The subject. Like Elizabeth Bishop, Dickinson, Muench and White create a dizzying state in us that refuses both mind and body to locate themselves in the poems. This intentional vertiginous state creates confusion and ambiguity in us. If I cannot locate myself in a poem, where am I?

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The fun sensorium of images and themes: world as body, body as world – and the meta-play dizzies the reader with an insistent compulsion for authorial control. These poems hungrily manipulate the reader and the speaker to undo the reality of hum beneath us, that of the planet’s current act of dying, and humanity’s ultimate collaborative co-extinction.

In this collection, history is framed by titles hinged to poetry’s precursors. Often the poets use first-person self-conscious insertions to nearly name what this late century fears most – (Say it) Mass extinction! I am worn out by the well-controlled, compressed, tidy poems around grief and loss that cannot possibly contribute to an honest account of our collective psyches gone wild in the face of an imminent apocalypse.

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Yet the poets of this collection refuse to drop the mic.  The voices are often similar, as are the themes.  But isn’t that the point? Repetition breeds a poke in the head. The poets here give authority to the speakers who attempt to say, to name what it is, but rarely, if at all do the poems get to what this UNDER HUM is. The existential crisis. We hear or imagine the echo and reverberations of the title. It is a mistake not to notice the profound hermeticism of the poems is a response of denial, that which becomes the delirium of indulgent self-talk, a diversion, the prettification of surface.

I imagine these two poets, like most poets, write in isolation. Isolation can breed anxiety, and depression. We humans are social animals, we thrive together in friendships and in groups. I imagine collaboration remedies the loneliness of a poet. Two or more poets writing together may create greater work; they may learn from the exercises, mistakes, the surprises of the other.

We may agree that we are now sandwiched between the peril of the past and a future that is disappearing. How do we survive this moment in history? How do we survive the end of history?

We are presented with a collection of poems that deny their subject through the hyper-immediacy of cleverly lexiconical structures in nature, (no pun intended) in that much of the sixty-two poems demonstrate the extreme hermeticism of formal poems, is obvious.

We cannot help looking for the under-hum. The title is there. We feel the rush of adrenaline, the speed of anxiety from its mention, however ambiguous. We are experiencing, at the moment that I write this, the end of nature, the end of the total existence of the planet. How these two poets present this subject is next to genius.

The  darkness in these poems cannot be understated. Yet this darkness is intentionally swept away by clever lexical structures, music whose lush melodies ultimately place pressure to create an often slick and fast-paced line, resulting in a tone of burgeoning frivolity and no-cost currents of voicing responsibility, danger, or certainty of uncertainty against the subject of the poems of which the title is named: The Under Hum.  The collaboration of two poets,  firmly individually established, create the fun sensorium of images and themes: world as body, body as world – and the meta-play dizzies the reader with an insistent compulsion for authorial control. These poems hungrily manipulate the reader and the speaker to undo the reality of the hum beneath us. By keeping the mania of denial alive in each of us, these poems serve us with what no one is prepared to handle: the active dying of our planet and humanity’s ultimate co-extinction.

The volley and play of linguistic urgency and chatter,  is an auditory hyper-response to the tensions of the existential rot of our time. This is the genius of the poems—the tidy, tight, concise prepurposed like prefab houses designed in earnest sincerity, to house those middle-class unfortunates in an overwrought world, bearing the overwhelming question…

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The Idea of North, Glenn Gould teaches us is “No longer do humans combine to defy, or to measure, or to read, or to understand, or to live with this thing we call Mother Nature. Our number-one enemy, instead of being Mother Nature, is of course, human nature.” And with this stick in the eye, sorely deserved, I clearly see my hypocrisy, my incorrigible judgment of the ethical responsibilities.

I see that Muench and White hold up a mirror to those of us who refuse to look at ourselves in any honest way. We who stand by and do nothing, whether we are overwhelmed, or we think it is someone else’s responsibility. The speakers of this collection seem to swagger in self-pity, in a moment of death that has already happened, that the decay and extinction is something that they have given themselves to. Without a fight, but with real causes and effects. What is the moral equivalent? At the turn of the twentieth century, William James said there was no moral equivalent of war. Well, here we are. We are against this thing, this Under Hum. William James asked us from Harvard, so many years ago, how many of us can afford to stand for something? These poems smash over the head with this fundamental question.