American Poets in the 21st Century by Claudia Rankine

Author:Claudia Rankine [Rankine, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780819578297
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

“Unravel the Signal”

How can we trace the currents in Hume’s “electrified mistakes”? Where do her wayward signals go? How are we to make the connections between words while recognizing their tendency for redirection? How might we initiate ourselves into this reading experience? Lisa Ruddick’s instructions for reading one of Gertrude Stein’s prose poems may be useful in considering Hume’s poems: “there are words (across sentences) that belong to the same lexical universe, so that one can spend time with the poems, linking these words and seeing if they might add up to a series of thoughts ‘about’ something.” But Stein, Ruddick continues, “simultaneously destabilizes or multiplies meanings of each of these words, so that their apparent unity or connectedness seems simply the effect of one (limiting) perspective on them, whereas another perspective—equally limiting, were one to use it exclusively—points to the spiraling off of each word into the free play of language.”13 Certainly, Hume’s language connects, conducts, and forms networks in a given poem, while, at the same time, it demonstrates its own feral capacities to resist containment and tethers.

“On Floating Bodies,” in Alaskaphrenia, consists of word correspondences related to fissures, fractures, and shifts. The poem beckons and woos: “Come to the lip and windlift” and “strike-slip / says the fault foundering. Slip into something more / pealing more unmattered and rude” (A 30). It seduces the reader into a geological chamber of semantic erosion and, at some points, alludes to a catastrophic event—perhaps the earthquake that hit Alaska in 1964 and caused a Tsunami: “Now blow / to the banks where what’s space-sick holds ground away” (A 30). Words suggest shifting ground: “strike-slip,” “vertical rock,” “rictus.” Linkages occur by rhyming and punning: “slip,” “lip,” “quipped,” “trips.” And the heavy throat sounds of “gorge,” “gushing,” “gutting,” and “guts” proliferate with phonetic likenesses, while “gush” and “slip” relate both to geological movement and to speech gestures. Hume’s self-conscious sound-play and suggestive meanings also ignite a recurring strategy of triggering latent memories by exerting pressure on the subject, thus invoking geological and anatomical trauma: “The mind parts you leaf and eyelid. Every eye is an eye / headlocked and numbered” (A 30). Forceful assertions such as these, which resonate with interconnectivity, are not meant to eclipse the experience of uncertainty and unintentionality, or, in Hume’s case, accidental revelations.

Catherine Daly has discussed Hume’s “lexicographer’s lyricism” and how her poetry turns “reading into re-wording.”14 Hume’s alchemical practices and creation of word networks enact the visceral struggle performed by the speaker who often seems subsumed or abducted by her etymological landscape: “the brain looks for its own bloom in the brain-water” (A 15). The speaker is often caught in wayward currents, then searches for a way into the future, armed with her verbal arsenal:

The scars you’ve cultivated steer you. There you will be a bellwether bomber, you dream-bomb the last place: a dogsled dream, campfire dream, pioneer dream, pioneer, lynx lynx lynx. (A 17)

Here, chain-reactive phrases generate associative meanings and cataloging of types. The incantation

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