Book Review: The Book of Goodbyes (Jillian Weise)Reviewed by Sheila BlackJillian Weise's second collection The Book of Goodbyes (BOA editions) is a stringent melancholy fugue that like a classic opera is both extreme and strangely sublime. As meditation it is perhaps of particular interest in its ambitious tracing of the disabled body—as trope, as cliché, as site of risk, as site of romance–meaning both "relationship founded in love" and simply "story." Weise uses "confessional" modes, while highly aware of their risks and rewards–the reward of the visceral encounter with trauma, with feeling; the risk of, first and most obviously, sentimentality and second and more subtly, the solipsism that results from the need of the confessional to evoke an ever more intense or even ecstatic speaker to create the required frisson in an ever more jaded reader. A couple of things I love about this book are 1) Weise's willingness to call to indulge in plain speaking, to assert content matters; and 2) her persistent unwillingness to simplify or make too much of her speaker's privileged position as speaker–or as orchestrator or performer of the confessional/post-confessional drama enacted in many—but not all–of these poems (more on that later). Take, for example, the playful, witty, audacious, and intimately painful "Café Loop" in which Weise lays out an apparently overhead conversation about an unnamed poet who appears to be Weise herself: She's had it easy, you know, I knew her The poem bobs and weaves like a veritable Ali in the boxing ring, anticipating precisely what objections will be raised by a confessional positioning of herself as "poet with a disability who writes about it," and in doing so exposing and wonderfully complicating the discourse around "her disability," –or, more accurately, allowing for the very real complications to be voiced and turned this way and that, so we can see the layers of social attitude and personal power relationships in and around the disabled body laid bare: I mean really. It's kind of disgusting. The effect is bracing, a little brutal; you laugh though you shouldn't, and yet Weise's technique (the gossipy nature of the poem, the narrative which focuses on her but from a hostile third person viewpoint) is also surprisingly enlarging. The frame, the casual anecdote feels accurate, "true," yet just defamiliarizing enough that the minor league envy of the unnamed poets ("So New Criticism. Really I don't like/her work at all. I find it lacking." – a great joke by our amputee poet) allows the reader to grasp in a kind of super-charged Technicolor the position of "person with disability" in the wider social context, and further to grasp multiple dynamics within that trope–the matrix of relationships of attraction and repulsion, power and submission, voice and silence. Playful, mordant, possessed of a remorselessly accurate ear for how people actually talk, Weise deploys the post-confessional with flair, and yet what makes this work so gripping is precisely her willingness to tackle confessionalism and its problems with an almost retro directness and sincerity. Distrust/disdain of the confessional feels so entrenched these days that complaining about it seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Confessionalism (as we all know) is bad because it is all about the trauma, the poor sorry victim speaker-self: No one, it seems, wants to be "merely" confessional–the fear is that one's art is evocative only because it treats powerfully emotional material (i.e., the taboo, the transgressive). The poem is "good," the label seems to say, only because the experience described was harrowing–the poem makes a spectacle of experience, not language. Indeed, this is what Aristotle rants against in his Poetics, saying that spectacle is the domain of stage directors, and thus antithetical to poetry (1) Post-confessionalism is usually distinguished from such bad "confessionalism," through the irony and facility–the writerly skill–with which the "potentially" confessional material is handled: …the post-confessional poem often deploys ironic speakers, pastiched forms, narrativity inflected or made entirely by disjunction, and images that temper the autobiographical impulse with the surreal. There's a trend toward multi-vocality in post-confessional work, a preponderance of "I"'s that don't add up. The subject matter need not be traumatic; indeed, it seems that the post-confessional poem first flirts with, then utterly thwarts, the notion of taboo. (2) This certainly sounds good. Yet such artfulness does not entirely successfully address or confront the "sickness of self", the solipsism which, from the Romantics on down. has been the primary Achilles' heel of the narrative lyric speaker, a problem felt even more acutely by the confessional speaker, who often appears to be indulging in a double dose of egoism–not only focusing on that trauma but staging it for maximum effect. Yet while the confessional can appear a crude instrument in its headlong rush to lay bare traumas of the self it also contains–or should contain–within that laying out, the potential for revolt. Confessionalism fails when that startling unleashing of the taboo, that potential for revolution beyond the self (think Sylvia Plath's "Daddy") is missing. One might well therefore ask if destabliziing the content "flirting with and then thwarting the notion of taboo" makes the post-confessional more powerful, or merely more stylish, a kind of bravura "confessional lite?" that distracts, but does not resolve, that main problem–the difficulty of speaking beyond or genuinely "out from" the self. The standard practice of perhaps too many poets to this set of problems is to amp up the lyric intensity–more artful artfulness, more gloss on the surface of the poem, or, put another way, more and more craft around less and less discernable significant content. This is where Weise shines. While her tone is sharp–she lobs the lethal phrase time after time in exactly the right place, her language is often resolutely concrete and straightforward, deliberately deflating in tone, a lack of artfulness she takes pains to draw our attention to as when she says in "Café Loop:" …I mean the kind of language Here, and in other places in her manuscript, Weise is careful to let us know both directly and indirectly that her concern is less with the surface style than with the content it gestures toward–that, for her, content, or the mystery of "here" –of body-self-world–is paramount. She is not careless in her language but the language is part of an effort to get at the rough mysteries of being, which her words must chip at as at a frozen sea. If her style is plain, her poems are anything but. On the contrary, Weise tends to relish the most complicated, uncomfortable, untenable emotions–the "content" of her world possesses radical multi-dimensionality; there is no simple "here" there, or, rather, even the most apparently simple moments are composed of sedimentary layers, fun house mirrors that argue for multiple angles on every experience: …There was never This "big den of squawk" is animated by power and desire, a circling around connection and disconnection. Weise's themes are the big ones–love, despair, hope, sex, mortality, and the body, but her take on them is unsentimental and endlessly surprising. One of the many pleasures of The Book of Goodbyes is its inventive, messy, funny, appalling and persistently romantic "relationship" poems–the beloved here is presented under the slightly fabulous and instantly graspable moniker "Big Logos," and he is both beloved and Ego/id/ the weight of the patriarchy and a pretty cool ordinary guy. These are down-and-dirty sexy poems, poems that are in your face about all the ways love and relationships can be a lot like hate and war, and can then turn on a dime into something other, a new elsewhere. The poem "Be Not Far From Me," to cite one example, is composed of a narrative around voice messages left by a bereft and highly imperfect failed suitor–past boyfriend, crazed stalker? We're never quite sure. The poem which progresses in close third person, slides into a record of what is said, a voice poured into the white noise of phone machine: hello, you are no longer at the number I had Berryman would have been proud of the speaker's endless posturing and appropriation, the naked vulnerability and remorseless self-presentation, a wildness worthy of old Henry himself. This is a restless poem that loops and turns in on itself: Character study, manual of modern sexual dynamics, a catalogue of our follies. The result is a master class in how to revitalize the love poem and keep it real and sad, cringe-worthy; yet somehow fond. Weise is not afraid to let it all hang out in these poems. And yet–and I believe this results precisely from her unflinching focus on "content" as "content" –I never felt the exposure or the frisson of these somewhat "autobiographical" qua "confessional" poems was pushing me back to thinking about Jillian Weise poet. Her content does not collapse into a mere exercise of voice or "the non-existent I that is still the ever-present I," but remains rooted in a wider social context, a context of active power dynamics in which she has stake and agency. It is surely important to the working of this collection that this stake and agency is one highly shaped and/or delimited by a history over which she has no control and over which she feels limited ability (rather an anguishing inability) to authentically respond. For a reader with a disability (that would be me) one of the most surprising poems in the collection in terms of what it attempts to encompass and how it resonates through the rest of the collection is "The Ugly Law" which builds on Berkeley professor Susan Schweik's work discussing "ugly" laws that were used through the 19th century to control the movements of people "with deformities." Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or The poem blends quotes from the historical "ugly law(s)" with the present, materially linking the soothing clichés foisted on people with disabilities ("We are all disabled"/or "What a pretty face you have.") to this buried history, the savagery of the ugly law and all the laws, the taboos, formal and informal like it. I thought for some time about why this poem felt so critical to the reading of the other poems in the book. Weise is throughout almost forensic in laying out a multitude of possible positions or poses which the "person with disabilities" might take, ranging from silence to defiance; she also is astute in recording or marking the various responses–mostly negative–these positions tend to engender. She is sensitive to how the person with a disability is often in a quandary–powerless if silent, condemned often as not for being opportunistic or narcissistic if and when she speaks out. Yet with "Ugly Law" Weise meditates with tragic force on a kind of insufficiency or inadequacy within each of these poses–they are something, but they are not enough. Several years ago Mary Gaitskill published a story "The Agonized Face" that possessed something of a similar thought process–the story concerned a woman listening to woman who had been a prostitute and was now a feminist academic lecturing on her past and her sexuality and the speaker in the story was having a hard time listening because, in a sense, there was no viable means of encompassing the historical fact or entirely or legitimately encompassing the historical fact of centuries, millennia of brutality to women in the present-day stances, the present stances as a result all seemed somehow incomplete or problematized; the speaker seems to suggest that the truth is in the knowledge or presence of that agonized face, that this face must somehow be protected or preserved. Weise's "The Ugly Law" ripples through her collection in a similar way–suggesting the weight, the hard content of the history of those with disabilities as a kind of boulder or obstacle that charges or torques all the responses the world, outsiders, herself make to her present body. I am not poor. I am not even unsightly. What a pretty face Confessionalism is often seen as a primarily dramatic form–less concerned with real autobiography than with creating a series of staged scenes that reflect on or dramatize autographical or personal material in revolutionary ways. The confessional poem is at root a performance. Weise's The Book of Goodbyes underlines this theatrical element in the very structure of the book with sections divided into acts divided by an "Intermission" and a "Curtain Call." The "Intermission" section is the one in which the collection makes its most audacious moves out of what we might remotely consider the confessional, becoming in the process faintly operatic; it is also the section in which Weise seals, as it were, the radical ambitions and achievements of this remarkable book. The poems in "Intermission" concern a small group of "courageous" finches—who like a retelling of Mozart's The Magic Flute or Aristophanes' fantasy The Birds, love each other and form a small society "behind Iguazú Falls, the Argentine side." The conceit is that these finches are more human than we, but they are also birds and strange to us. …For now Bitto delights the people These allegorical finches have love affairs and think big thoughts, which lead them in different directions, but often nowhere in particular; they flit in and around people who appear and disappear around the Falls, coming to see them, leaving again, possessing their own problems. The finches have distinct personalities: Bitto who is optimistic and hardworking and happy, Marcel who is a loner, an intellectual who doesn't sing so much. These finches read Hesiod; yet also concern themselves with the making of nests, the laying of eggs; they describe the people who watch them as outsiders looking in, as other beings possessing similar, though not exactly the same, kinds of dreams and desires: Bitto tried to explain to Lydia These birds are trenchant, even philosophical, fond of a good aphorism. Marcel notes, for instance "To be happy requires it seems/some lying and good timing," and they reflect on the same issues of romance, connection, mortality, and being that concerns Weise in the other poems in the book. Yet there are some differences in style, in form, in what these poems do. The language in these poems appears airier, more baroque and expansive than in the rest of the book; Go on high ship. "I told my biddy, The lines and terms employed contains echoes of Stevens and his supreme fiction, echoes of older poetic forms–the ghost of blank verse–evoked through skillful use of "surrogate tone" as Tony Hoagland defines it–namely, using the inflated romantic diction of past poetries in a way that is half-sincere, half-ironic. The tone is delicate but also magically convincing in the sublime way of pure theater performance, an opera where a person sings an aria and perishes, where emotion is distilled into something no longer even remotely personal, but so immediate, piercing, like Isaac Babel's famous "iron to the heart." In a recent review of The Book of Goodbyes, Seth Abramson said of the finch poems "I won't ruin the endings of these three poems except to say that they almost made me weep, and it's been a long time since poetry has meant that to me," and I agree with him; somehow in the allegory of the finches, Weise finds a remarkable way to gesture at notions of love and longing for connection, the grief of time and embodiment in a way that makes perfect sense within the book's varied meditation on so-called strangeness and repressive normalcy, the aspirations and limitations of the self, the process of marking and letting go. As she says in the poem from which the book gains a part of its title: They were drinking and someone Such a moment of exchange, the recognition of layers and layers of meaning and intent, that feeling beneath of what such exchange is–this is all the testament of The Book of Goodbyes, what makes it real and aching and also sublime.
Notes: 1 and 2: Both quotes on confessionalism above are from "A mini-essay from the poet and scholar: James Allen Hall: "In The Ruins of Confession," published on "Critical Mass: The Blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors," May, 25, 2008 http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/SMALL_PRESS_SPOTLIGHT_JAMES_ALLEN_HALL.
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