Poems from a sparkling riffing mind
[Seuss, readers are brought along with her process of deconstruction and reconstruction. By the end of the book, we see how a painting (and the speaker’s life) have become so much more because we have taken the painting (and life) apart and expanded each fragment.
Although Seuss writes in her poem, “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl”: “Art, useless as tits on a boar,” her book proves otherwise — that art, in particular still life art, is anything but useless. It has allowed the poet to explore art, the speaker’s rural and poor landscape of childhood, the father’s death, class and the role of the female in a male-dominated society. One of the seminal sections of the book includes a poem called “Walmart Parking Lot” and explores the speaker’s childhood of riding a train to look at art by Rothko, O’Keefe and Warhol but having to return to the “smokestacks of/Gary shooting flames into a sky already clanging orange.” As Seuss says in Poets and Writers: “Our yearning ... a yearning for art represented, seemed to be in direct conflict with our circumstances — rural poverty and low expectations and something akin to isolation.”
One of the most interesting aspects of Seuss’ poetry is how it showcases the speaker’s sparkling riffing mind. In an age where poetry can so easily be simplified into small one-dimensional sound bites to share on Instagram or Twitter, Seuss’ poems aspire to complicate, drawing connections between seemingly unrelated things, flowing in and out and back and away from their initial triggers. In “Still Life with Turkey,” for example, the poem begins as many typical ekphrastic poems (poems written off of or inspired by art) begin, by describing what the poet sees: “The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot….” But how quickly the poem begins to riff about seeing: “My eyes / are in love with it as they are in love with all / dead things that cannot escape being looked at.” The poem quickly shifts to the poet’s father’s death: It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my father was there in his black
casket and could not elude our gaze. I was a child
so they asked if I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?” someone asked. Was it my
mother? Grandmother? Some poor woman was
stuck with the job.
Here, the poet begins to explore the slipperiness not only of childhood memory but also memory in general, particularly related to a traumatic event such as a father’s death (which lingers like a ghost throughout this entire book). After five stanzas about the father’s death, the poem returns to the adult speaker’s thinking, and back to the turkey, but not before riffing on a naked man: …. Now I can’t get enough of
seeing, as if I’m paying a sort of penance for not
seeing then, and so this turkey, hanged, its
small, raw-looking head, which reminds me of the
first fully naked man I ever saw, when I was a
candy striper at a sort of nursing home…
The beauty of this writing is that it showcases how when a mind tries to understand, really tries, it reaches beyond to draw connections; sometimes those connections are more obvious, but many times, understanding requires stretching and a suspension of the obvious toward the unknown. Seuss allows for those stretch connections, as if understanding a life can only be meaningful and fully lived by allowing the mind to be free.
By the end of the book, everything is larger and more vibrant — the paintings, the speaker’s life, the reader and the world. This is the brilliance of Seuss — everything is animated and complicated by her mind, a mind that has a hunch that silence holds truth, as she writes in “It Seems at Times That Silence”: …And that silence is really not bereft of sound, it’s only that a heavy
stratum of noise has been lifted up to expose the resonances below… Chang’s poetry book “Obit” will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her most recent book is “Barbie Chang.” She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Antioch University.