A Review of Alexis Sears and Luke Hathaway: Alexis Sears, Out of Order; Luke Hathaway, The Affirmations

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book review

Brooke Clark

A Review of Alexis Sears and Luke Hathaway

Alexis Sears, Out of Order
Autumn House Press (March 29, 2022)
ISBN 9978-1-637680-32-2, 104 pp., USA $16.95, paperback

Luke Hathaway, The Affirmations
Biblioasis (April 12, 2022)
ISBN 978-1-77196-485-2, 120 pp., USA $15.95, paperback

 

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Poetry uses patterns of repetition—end rhyme, meter, stanza forms—to make language beautiful and memorable. (When I say “poetry” here, I’m obviously not really thinking of free verse.) But repetition is only half the battle: good poetry is characterized by a precise balancing act between repetition and variation. A long series of metronomically perfect iambic pentameter lines risks tedium; a particular rhyme sound, if overused, can become irritating. Maybe the clearest example of the risks of repetition without variation is Christian Bök’s 2001 book, Eunoia. It is divided into five sections, A, E, I, O, and U, and each section uses only its titular vowel—so no word containing an e, i, o or u can appear in the A section, and so on. The book is an Oulipian experiment, a conscious attempt to see how far the idea of repetition can be pushed, and on a technical level it is unquestionably a masterpiece. On an aesthetic level, however, it is a disaster; it’s astonishing how quickly the repeated vowel sounds become irritating, and as each section goes on it turns into an exercise in grating monotony.
   But Eunoia is a limit case, fascinating and worth reading for what it dares to do. Not many people could (or would want to) write a book like Eunoia, but it maps the edges of the territory, and by failing so spectacularly to be poetry, it teaches its readers an important lesson about what poetry actually is.
   Alexis Sears’s debut collection, Out of Order (winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize for 2021), is a remarkable book partly because it also pushes the repetition side of the repetition-variation relationship, though not to the extent that Bök does. Sears does not always write in form, but when she does, she seems especially drawn to the intricate and highly repetitive.
   It’s fitting, then, that the book begins with a villanelle, “Sky, You Don’t Get It”:

      I’m learning something every ravishing day
      and none of it is easy. I admit
      my former self has drifted miles away.

      I’m fortunate my loved ones seem to stay
      with me (I’m sure it’s rough). They never quit.
      I’m learning something every ravishing day.

      The sky is prettiest on sad days, way
      too beautiful to understand this shit.
      My former self has drifted miles away,

      though sometimes it returns. It’s so cliché
      to have some loud internal screaming fit.
      I’m learning something every ravishing day:

      my lush best friend could end someday (we say
      she’ll end instead of die). Fed up, she’ll split,
      her former self drifting, drifting away,

      her eyelid wings now on her back, betray
      our tenderness. She won’t, though. She’s got grit.
      I’m learning something every ravishing day
      about my former self, miles away.     (3)

The poem is characteristic in its highly restrictive rhyme scheme, which uses only the “ay” and “it” sounds all the way through. The interaction of form and content creates the tension of the poem: like much of the collection, it is about attempting to move on and leave one’s former self behind, but the demands of the villanelle require that the former self keep being mentioned every few lines. The form seems to send a message opposite to the content: that our former selves can never actually be left behind, but echo through our lives as a refrain echoes through a villanelle.
   “Some Days Are Harder: A Canzone” is a similar use of a highly repetitive form, where the poet is constrained to using the same five words at the end of all the lines across five twelve-line stanzas plus a five-line envoi that uses each end word at the end of one of its lines. (For comparison, other examples of this form can be seen in “Canzone” by Daryl Hine and “About the Canzone” by John Hollander, both easily available online.) Sears uses subtle variations to prevent the end-words from becoming tedious: for example, interchanging “see” and “sea,” using “Barack” for one line that should end in “rock,” and substituting “eight (or” for “adore” in one spot. Here is the final stanza and the envoi:

      . . . I tell myself not to go back
      to constant reminiscing. “Never rock
      the boat,” I tell myself, “by thinking back
      to everyone who screwed you over.” Back
      to basics: deep breaths, pasta. Of course, writ-
      ing. Maybe a tat across my back:
      I heard the news today (not Don’t look back
      in anger). Why get a tat you can’t see,
      though? So why not something I can see?
      On my shoulder, maybe. In the back
      of my own conscience, I know I’d adore
      a floral one that tells me to “adore

      myself.” Yes, I remember. I’d adore
      myself if I were edgy. I don’t see
      the point of anything these days. Why rock
      a smile if it’s not authentic, right?
      Mine once was. Yours, too. Wanna go back?     (12)

It’s difficult to make a form like this work, and the risk of using too many tricks (like breaking “writ- / ing” across a line for one instance of “right”) is that they can come to seem almost as labored as the repetitions they are seeking to vary. Sears’s insight here, as elsewhere, is to make the form do the thematic work for her: again she seems to be suggesting, on one level, that it’s hard to avoid going back over the past in your mind when you have to use the word “back” at the end of so many lines. The form becomes a metaphor for the mental process itself, the repetition of the canzone representing the way our minds obsessively go over elements of our own personal histories.
   The pinnacle of Sears’s interest in repetition comes in the two sonnet sequences in the book. The first, “Objet d’Art,” contains six sonnets, where the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next. Then in the final sonnet, the last line harks back to the first line of the first sonnet. So the first sonnet begins, “My best friend really is a work of art” and the final one ends, “are any of us really works of art?,” which creates the feeling of being caught in a cycle.
   But that’s just a warm-up for “For My Father: A Sonnet Redoublé,” which fills the entire second section of the book. Also called a crown of sonnets, it’s a sequence of fourteen sonnets where, again, the last line of each one becomes the first line of the next; the whole series is then “crowned” with a fifteenth sonnet composed entirely of those repeated lines, in the sequence in which they originally occurred. The length and complexity of the sequence makes it difficult to quote from in any helpful way, but here’s the opening poem to give a sense:

      If you were here you’d know how I believe
      in signs. No, not astrology, but signs:
      the dream a sexy drummer smirks, declines
      my tired flirtations while I play naïve,
      and stand, busty with purple lipstick, pining.
      The biker gang I almost hit but dodged,
      and Robin’s epic nineties speech still lodged
      too comfortably inside my psyche (dining
      beside my other thoughts): It’s not your fault.
      You might not know, but I write poems now,
      and read, while bathing, Rilke, Salter, Howe,
      and Jericho, decaying minds like Walt.
      Today’s book starts Dear Father. Yes, it’s true.
      So, Dad, this crown of sonnets is for you.

The rhyme scheme doesn’t fit easily into either of the usual divisions of “Shakespearean” or “Italian/Petrarchan.” If I’m not mistaken, it divides into two quatrains (rather than an octet) and then a sestet, and rhymes: ABBA CDDC EFFEGG. This first poem introduces us to the speaker of the entire sequence, a slightly diffident or insecure young woman, a prey to self-consciousness and prone to self-questioning and overthinking, and with maybe a bit of a thing for musicians. The poem also sets up the address of the whole sequence to the speaker’s father who, we learn, committed suicide, and it is an attempt to wrestle with her relationship with him and what his life and death mean for her. In its concern with issues of identity and trauma, the sequence feels very contemporary; what’s more unusual is Sears’s use of traditional forms to express these concerns. Here is the fourteenth sonnet, which brings the cycle full circle, the final line picking up the first line of the first sonnet with one of Sears’s characteristic variations:

      Perhaps I’ll see you someday, maybe soon,
      is not a solid way to end a note
      to anyone, much less your father. Quote
      me on that one. Just trust me. Rooms are strewn
      with Lay’s bags (which we already discussed),
      and bottles of psychiatric meds run dry,
      the eyeliner I’m learning to apply
      with such finesse, a clock that needs adjust-
      ing, desperately. But do you need to know
      what my new bedroom looks like, or my house,
      or even what I look like, how I douse
      myself in face wash, if it makes me glow?
      For either of us, would it be reprieve
      if you were here? You know what I believe.

The list of items feels random, as if we were just glancing around a room, but it has clearly been carefully selected to characterize the speaker and suggest how fallout from her father’s suicide continues to affect her. The way the psychiatric meds are dropped into the middle makes that clear, and the Lay’s bags pick up an earlier reference to “doing things I shouldn’t do / like eating chips”; the face wash repeats the speaker’s insecurity about her own appearance, which has already come up, for example, in the description of herself “eyeing photographs / of me, the same ones always, as I try / to spy a crumb of beauty.” The inconclusive ending suggests that the speaker’s feelings remain unresolved and points up one of the central features of Sears’s poems: they don’t progress so much as they circle back, going over the same territory repeatedly without reaching a resolution.
   The fifteenth sonnet reiterates this point; it ends up being a sort of cento of the repeated lines from the earlier sonnets. Having read them in their original places, each one carries its own resonance, but quoted on its own it doesn’t have a lot of cohesion. It is, however, another instance of Sears’s habit of going back and repeating, reiterating, and reinterpreting her own lines with slight variations, in the way one might remember a significant event in one’s life over and over, but with a slightly different emphasis each time.
   What’s relevant here, more than the specifics of form, is the way form reacts with content. All through Out of Order, the same multiple thematic concerns recur: the suicide of the father and its effect on the speaker, and the question of the speaker’s identity as a biracial person (she speaks of “my black / father” at one point, and at another refers to having “to work / through . . . a racial crisis”). The issue of how her racial identity is “read” by others comes up several times; in “What is History?” the “white boys on the school bus” call her “not black” and “the syrup-skinned girls at the Black Student Union / asked ‘What are you?’ and ‘Why are you here?’” (16), and in “Hair Sestina,” “Some bus driver says, ‘You’re “black” / in name, but you will never really know / their struggles.’” (67) Clearly writing—as the poems state several times—is one way of working through these issues, and more particularly, writing about them in formal verse is seen as a way to order the experiences to make them less hurtful; in “Intimacy,” Sears writes, “Formal poetry makes me feel safe and sane. Perhaps that’s why I stopped / writing it.” (23)
   Ironically, the collection as a whole suggests precisely the opposite interpretation.
   The recurrence of formal poetry, and in particular the use of forms that are so heavy on repetition (and so demanding on the poet’s art that one might almost call them punitive), suggests that there is no moving on from the past or the questions of one’s own identity. Form exerts a gravitational pull that can’t be evaded, but draws the poet back over and over again just as the material of her own past draws her back. The book is actually a powerful portrait of formal poetry as something approaching a mental and emotional prison, where nothing can be resolved because everything is always repeated. The past can’t be escaped, and the idea that it can is just a fantasy we use to fool ourselves. We are always tied to it, reliving it, repeating it, inescapably entangled in it like a poet in an unforgiving rhyme scheme.


 

Luke Hathaway’s new collection, The Affirmations, is focused on ideas of change and transformation, and that focus is reflected in the various forms and styles represented here. The poems range from brief lyrics, some with lines only a few syllables long, through two longer poems originally published as separate chapbooks, all the way to a full libretto for Bach’s “St. John Passion.” One has the sense of a poet restlessly searching, trying out new things and saying an emphatic “yes” (as the title would suggest) to every challenge. Along the way Hathaway weaves in references and responses to centuries’ worth of English-language poetry, from Shakespeare, Wyatt, and Donne, to Keats, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and recent Canadian poets Steven Heighton, and Richard Outram—and that’s without mentioning all the biblical allusions. Such an introduction could make the book sound ponderous, but it is anything but. Hathaway is such a generous writer, and has such a light touch, that the density of reference here becomes not a barrier to push you away, but rather one of the many ways Hathaway welcomes you into his collection.
   It’s hard to know where to begin with such a rich book (and it will be, I suspect, impossible to end), but let’s try “New Year Letter,” a poem consciously modeled on Auden’s 1940 poem of the same title, and originally published as an independent chapbook. The basic pulse of most of the poem is iambic tetrameter, often but not always rhymed; the tone is conversational without seeming chatty or prolix, quiet and intimate, combining personal reminiscence with images of striking beauty (“the river’s white parentheses” (18) being just one example). Here is the beginning of the eighth section:

      On a westbound train to Union
      Station I have just, like you,
      reread Auden’s New Year Letter,
      thinking, Who could write a better?,
      knowing that Himself now sits
      upon the jury with the wits,
      the metaphysicists, the liars,
      the soothsayers, hanging fire
      while I step onto the stand
      who would presume to try my hand
      at a verse letter to a friend
      on the occasion of the end
      of an old year or the beginning
      of a new.     (21)

Hathaway is echoing Auden’s description of himself taking the stand in a courtroom before a jury of other poets, including Dryden, Catullus, and Rilke, to defend his work against their judgment. Now Auden himself has entered that pantheon, and become one of Hathaway’s judges, and that metamorphosis is only the first of many in this book. But notice the sheer fluidity of the lines, the way they roll effortlessly along—clearly Hathaway is right when he says, a few lines later:

      . . . And yet his measure’s
      home to me. It gives me pleasure
      just to hear it in my head
      after Auden’s sense has fled.

It is a joy simply to watch a poet write so well.
   “New Year Letter” comes second in the book, after a poem called “A Nativity” no less, so it’s clear that new beginnings are in the air. It’s fitting, then, that Hathaway concludes “New Year Letter” with the Welsh folk song “Levy-Dew,” traditionally sung at New Year’s, which includes these lines:

      Sing reign of Fair Maid
           with gold upon her toe,—
      Open you the West Door,
           and turn the Old Year go.

      Sing reign of Fair Maid
           with gold upon her chin,—
      Open you the East Door,
           and let the New Year in.     (24)

This sets the theme of transformation, which will reverberate throughout this book of changes. And Hathaway’s “New Year Letter” is itself an act of transformation, clearly in dialogue with Auden’s poem but also different from it in important ways. Auden’s poem, written early in 1940, is to a large extent a poetic engagement with world events, in particular the Second World War. At times in the poem Auden seems to suggest retreating from society at large into the “polis of our friends” in search of an escape from the reality of troubled times, but at other points the poem turns toward world events again. Hathaway’s poem is very different from this: it doesn’t engage with the larger political or social world, but rather is an intimate address to one person—as readers we feel almost as if we are overhearing a private conversation, whereas Auden’s poem often sounds more like a public speech. And if Auden was seeking a polis of friends, in Hathaway’s poem the polis seems to have shrunk to just two people, the speaker and the recipient of the letter.
   What’s the reason for this shift? Partly it could just be that in 2018, when Hathaway wrote his poem (12), there wasn’t an event on the scale of World War II developing around him. (The world looks different in 2022, obviously, with a global pandemic and a war in Europe raging.) But poetry does, I think, have less appetite for the grand gesture and the public address than it used to. There is an audacity to Auden’s speaking so directly about world affairs that most poets would find embarrassing to attempt today. The intimacy of Hathaway’s address is attuned to our own historical moment, when so many of us live within a cocoon carefully woven to match our own preferences.
   Like “New Year Letter,” some of the other transformations in the book are literary:

      A willow grows aslant the brook
      that shews its tresses in the stream:
      there with garlands did she come,
      clambering to hang them on
      the boughs—one broke and down she tumbled.
      With her garments spread around
      her mermaidlike she drifted down
      the river, writing poems like one
      incapable of her own distress—
      Nay, that’s not what follows next.     (89)

Here Hathaway presents what is essentially a précis of the famous lines about Ophelia’s suicide from Hamlet, but in changing Gertrude’s statement that she “chanted snatches of old lauds” (IV.vii.176) into “writing poems,” he transforms Ophelia into a creative artist, a poet—another form of Orpheus perhaps?—not repeating old songs but creating her own original works as she floats away. (Orpheus—or his singing head, at least—makes an appearance on the next page.) In a book so concerned with change, Ovid is naturally a touchstone, and the poem “Caeneus” refers directly to one of the stories from Book XII of the Metamorphoses:

      and the sea went over
      or the girl went under
      hard to know whichever
      and the sound

      begging him to change her
      to a boy forever
      so they all would know that
      she had drowned

      could have been her voice it
      could have been the waves though
      could have been his voice it
      could have been the waves though.     (80)

There are different versions of the myth, but the essence is that Poseidon transformed Caenis, a girl, into Caeneus, a boy. Everything is fluid in this water-centered poem; it’s an exercise in the acceptance of uncertainty, a refusal to let anything be pinned down. The line “hard to know whichever” resists making a choice between two ways of viewing the same event: did the sea go over her, or did she go under the sea? And what precisely is the difference? And again in the final stanza we have the shift from “her voice” to “his voice,” which presents both sides of the gender transformation at the heart of the story, and then the repeated “could have been the waves though,” where the poet refuses even to state definitively whether the sound is a human voice or just the sound of the ocean. In its appearance on the page the last stanza itself captures the idea of change, with the first three words of the first and third lines always the same, and then slight variations in the latter halves of the lines, though still using almost all the same words (“her” and “his” being, significantly, the only difference), as if to remind us that at least in this transformation, the materials have remained the same even if what they add up to is different—or is it? Is Caeneus still Caenis after all? The poem presents us with the question, but withholds its answer, if there is one.
   “Go and Catch a Falling Star” is another transformative literary response poem:

      I am true
      so I am fair:
      the two are one,
      I’ve got you there.

      If I was fairly
      false to you,
      but beautifully,
      were that not true?

      Or let you see
      my unkempt hair
      au naturel:
      were that not fair?

      You’re lucky I
      see fit to cleave
      to you, my love,
      believe you me.     (94)

In taking up Donne’s famous claim that “nowhere lives a woman true and fair” Hathaway’s speaker invokes Keats’s equally famous (or perhaps more famous?) equation of truth and beauty. Then in the second two stanzas Hathaway takes the poem in his own direction, leading up to the pointedly unresolved ending, where “believe,” which should provide the closing rhyme for “cleave,” is displaced to the beginning of the line, denying us the closure we expect—and perhaps, along with the poem’s ironic, almost mocking tone, suggesting that the addressee will face similarly frustrated expectations? (Reading the poem, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Hathaway was also thinking of the song “You Are Too Beautiful”—a favorite of mine, I confess—which makes similar play with the idea of the connection, or lack thereof, between truth (in the sense of fidelity) and beauty.)
   Similar is “As the hart panteth after the water brooks” (title from Psalm 42), which takes up the Dickinson poem that begins “Water, is taught by thirst” (poem 135), but reworks it until Hathaway comes to the conclusion, “Thirst is also / taught by water” (41). Other instances of change run through the book, too many to enumerate. Even the libretto for the Saint John Passion, titled “A Poor Passion,” engages with ideas of transformation: Peter’s transformation of himself from one of Jesus’s disciples into an unconnected onlooker when he denies Christ, and the crucifixion of Christ itself, which is another sort of transformation.
   Which brings me to “The Temple,” the other long poem in the collection, which was originally published as a separate chapbook in 2018. It’s divided into brief sections with titles that clearly invoke the story of the birth of Christ (and childbearing more generally), like “Annunciation,” “Conception,” and “Birth.” Here is “Annunciation” in full:

      Nothing asked me
      to keep mum:
      how could nothing,
      being dumb,

      put the question—
      not to say
      present it as
      accomplished fait.

      Nobody asked me
      and I heard
      and I answered:
      flesh, word.     (28)

This poem displays Hathaway’s mastery at using short, allusive lines to say a lot in just a few words. It is not a traditional annunciation, though, in the sense that the speaker is not told something; nothing is announced. Rather there is a question—or the question of a question?—that takes up most of the poem. The answer, “flesh, word” given at the end, is clearly one of the affirmations the book is named for. This is the only announcement in this annunciation, and it is made by the speaker—the mother-to-be—not some otherworldly messenger. The sequence concludes with “Birth”:

The darkness doesn’t
fathom light,
the sea the land,
or death, life

but out of the other
comes the one.
The sea delivers
up the sun.

The sea delivers
up the sun,
the sea delivers
       up the sun.   (34)

This is one of the most remarkable poems in the collection. As “Annunciation” punned on “mum,” “Birth” closes the circle with the “sun/son” pun. Its lilting rhythm and short lines give it a beauty that seems so simple and yet so powerful that it’s hard to believe any person actually wrote it; it has an ancient feeling, like something that has always been there, complete and sufficient, discovered rather than created. (This impression is, of course, one of the highest tricks of art.) But it’s the conclusion that stands out: the image of the sea giving up the sun is a gorgeous metaphor for birth (the “sun/son” pun adding to the point, not merely decorative or ostentatiously clever)—but the confidence to recognize its beauty and simply repeat it three times is astonishing, breathtaking really, and shows the judgment of a master. There are some things in poetry you can explain, and some you can only stand back and admire, and this is one of the latter.
   The sequence is also remarkable in another way, though, in that its concern with birth and motherhood seems odd coming from a male poet. Other lines in other poems, like “When I was pregnant, I had my boys to heart” in “Hunger” (95), might give a reader similar pause. And here I have to delve a bit into the author’s biography (though I’m generally averse to that), as Luke Hathaway identifies himself in the author’s note as “a trans poet” and remarks in another place, “What am I, post-transition, but an old tune with new lyrics?” (52). I’m not sure where these poems fall chronologically in Hathaway’s writing life, but some of them certainly seem to refer back to pre-transition experiences. And this shifting of perspective is one of the other unique qualities about this book, one that makes the voice of the speaker of these poems strangely resonant—we can’t ever quite pin it down. The voice has a slipperiness that causes it always to escape our grasp, and the poems seem to speak to us from a place where the divisions or categories we think we know or understand have been transcended.
   The book, however, is not a record of a transition—in fact there is surprisingly little specific personal detail. Instead of the diary-like approach used by so many contemporary poets, Hathaway has found a way to talk about personal experience without addressing it directly—to “tell it slant,” to borrow Dickinson’s famous phrase. In moving between experiences and perspectives the same way it moves between forms and genres, the book enacts the kind of fluidity that makes trans-ness possible. This unfixed quality, the refusal to be any single thing and the insistence that change is the only constant (metamorphosis anyone?) is the central feature of the collection.

There is much in this book, I’m sure, that I did not understand. Many of the poems have already repaid multiple readings, and there are others that I will doubtless go back to, but Hathaway’s artistic and spiritual horizons are so large that it’s difficult to imagine you can really take them in. There are also moments where Hathaway reaches toward, and brushes up against, things that can’t really be expressed in words. It’s as if a wing had brushed lightly against the surface of your mind, and when you turn toward the feeling a new space opens up before you, a space you never knew existed and yet one that seems to have been there forever. Those are the highest moments in this collection, but also the ones that can’t be explained or analyzed, only experienced: you feel a communication of something beyond the poem, or feel its presence near you (if that doesn’t sound too mystical).
   Hathaway describes this himself in “New Year Letter”:

      There is that sound beyond all language,
      cry of all that’s sad and strange,
      coyotes howling, wynde and rayne.
      I hear it sometimes too in poems,
      in the perfection of the rhymes.     (18)

This is a book that will be read and reread by those attuned to its pleasures. For myself, I can only say it could have gone on forever; once I entered the mental world created by The Affirmations, I never wanted to leave it.