Towering

Late July, on a hilltop in Umbria.

I’ve carried a desk from one room to another in this 12th century tower to think about humor and poetry. And instead, I sit at the window and do what one does in a watchtower: watch. Out there—hay wheels and cypresses, vineyards in neat rows, leagues of olive trees. And higher up the hill, another watchtower, and beyond that, another. In medieval times, the fortresses would have communicated with each other via rooftop fires to warn of invaders.

Today, if someone up the hill had binoculars aimed at this window, what they’d see on this desk is the narrow tower of a Kay Ryan poem. 

To read a Kay Ryan poem is to read slowly, as if one were having to feel one’s way down the stairs of that tower’s interior. Or no, as if one were coming, at the end of each clipped line, to a cliff's edge, stepping into the air that is Ryan’s logic. It’s a system of reason and rhyme that seems to invent itself as we go down––an argument or assertion or possibility assembling, locking into place in the only one way it can, in the way a Rubik’s cube might (or must).

Is there another way of talking about Ryan's poems other than via metaphor upon metaphor? Other than as the high-wire act her writing is, a wire upended?

And the dryness of her humor—think Death Valley, think Sahara. But forget me. Listen to her:

Carrying a Ladder

We are always
really carrying
a ladder, but it’s
invisible. We
only know
something’s
the matter:
something precious
crashes; easy doors
prove impassable.
Or, in the body,
there’s too much
swing or off-
center gravity.
And, in the mind,
a drunken capacity,
access to out-of-range
apples. As though
one had a way to climb
out of the damage
and apology.

Ryan’s imagined ladder brings to mind all those comic ladder scenes in silent movies and their slapstick progeny: the swinging blade of the ladder, the prop of the ladder not doing what it ought. In one antic clip, frantic guys (Keystone Cops? The Three Stooges?) on their way to a fire carry a ladder with their heads through the rungs, and, while maneuvering, keep slamming into people and things. So many scenes with ladders behaving badly––Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd. Ryan’s ladder seems to nod to them, but instead of slapstick, the poem says: this is what it is to be human, to move with this invisible contraption that’s meant to aid us but instead is a yoke that trips us up. 

In Nicky Beer’s “Drag Day at Dollywood,” what we trip over are Dollys. In that milieu, “To relieve the boredom at the Mystery Mine Line,/someone hollers “When I say ‘Homo’ you say ‘Sapiens.’”/“HOMO!” “SAPIENS!” “HOMO!” “SAPIENS!” It’s a camp scene that morphs into a fun house of utter tenderness:

Dolly, exhausted and sunburned, collapses
onto a bench, rests her head on Dolly’s breast,
who rests her head on Dolly’s breast, who rests
her head on Dolly’s breast on Dolly’s breast.

Breast upon breast upon breast. I’m reminded of Russell Edson’s poem, “Clouds,” in which a character flies in so as not to miss out: “The husband said, shall I somersault along the ridge of the roof and up your legs and through your dress out of the neck of your dress to kiss you?” Typical Edson foreplay. But for all the wacky shenanigans in an Edson poem, the emotional underpinning is far more quotidian, so the dots, or flying people, connect. 

And it’s that willingness to make connections that makes for willing (or resistant) readers. Michael Shermer has said that our brains are “belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature.” The same might be said of how the mind, sometimes leaping, finds meaning inside verse. 

The whole of Gail Wronksy and Chuck Rosenthal’s Tomorrow You’ll Be One of Us (What Books Press, 2013) depends on such leaping. Each poem in the collection is drawn entirely from dialogue in classic sci-fi movies, with lines plucked from 61 films, and reassembled, as in the classic construction of some French surrealist poems. Here’s one:

We Would Greet Them as Equal Partners in the Universe

Wait a minute. Bombs don’t unscrew.
Of course not. It’s just part of my job.
Only their shadows remain.
That book has indeed made you forget so many things.
Good night, Robert.
Let’s back out quietly.

While the lines seem random, they also feel like they might emanate from the same alien planet or spaceship––or person. It’s a cryptic, screwball kind of conversing that brings to mind Harold Pinter on drama. People think that a play is people on a stage talking to each other, said Pinter, but what it really is—is people not listening to each other.

Which is to say, the stage is a mirror of life. 

Here at the watchtower, we’ve had some of that. And also much splendor and spectacle, solitude and space. The astronomer unwrapping a telescope to show us the moon. The journalist talking art and geopolitics with her kids—the son jockeying for a new world order, the daughter sketching a lover asleep. We are all becoming ourselves. The maker among us hands out paper and scissors, foil, brass fasteners. We cut and fold and fasten and it’s past midnight as we spill down the tower stairs, outside, down the stone ramp, waving our shadow puppets. And against the half-lit tower, Ronald’s pterodactyl opens and closes its jaws. A small figure taped to a stick flies in and out of the creature’s mouth. Razia dances with an enormous cutout of a head—or is it a fish? Lydia, kneeling, makes a goat with her hands. Morris swans in a crown that falls off, is scooped up, and falls off again. Zak plays The Velvet Underground. Francesca documents. 

It’s a random, unscripted choreography, with no master puppeteer––just the seven of us laughing and casting shadows. And I’m thinking of Frank O’Hara, who, once, in Venice, gave a golden gondola to my friend Lise. “In times of crisis,” O’Hara wrote, “we must all decide again and again whom we love.”

Laughter and moonlight. Shadows. A planet on fire. 

And then we are gone.