“Unraveling The Riddle”

VazamBam

by Vassilis Zambaras

“Sibyl”

Knock-knock.

~~~

No milk run. Rather than deal just shut up
Open bay keep time merciful ticking
Like clockwork hand works mutilated miracles push button
Mushroom fills rising sun expanding mind cockpit exploding
Time runs out hands your hand a miracle, a complex
Map

~~~

Across centuries
Sphinx-riddled crossroads answer no
Second coming easy death wish all seeing
Eyes caught out gouged damned site swollen-
Footed fated one mother her son nailed
To bare mountain who sees shepherds tragic figure
His daughters before that incomprehensible
Reprehensible act clues leading flash back where double-crossed
Cretan maiden heads through whorish labyrinthian ritual
Runic sounding double-axe blades cut linear swaths through meadow in heat
Beehive buzzes words sacrifice sweet round Priapian bull-headed
Masquerading Pasiphae comes out clean as a whistle stops no clue
Why

~~~

Contented Aryan cows pack slaughterhouse boxcars with inferior beef
Attention turns to rack flesh burning where
Smoke signals wend stench retching as
Reflecting pious pilgrims genuflect before Pius
Remorse fills unredeemed coffers cardinal virtue offers
Sanctimonious wares a price war off expendable beaten but still viable track
Commodity

~~~

Pithy pristine vigor swells Newfoundland
Pollyanna belly-up swims in knocked-up naïf
Bikini swills rotgut atomic afterbirth true men praise hosanna
Radio active record produces waves of delirium
Tremens and Heyerdahl?

~~~

Gutta-percha keeps vatic guts vindicated in Dead Sea scrolls most moist
Though papyrus sprouts another sold-out original
Version:   A cast a way east
Of Eden, most bountiful producer
Of spread-legged constellations
Of dim-witted starlets, black holes, forlorn galaxies,
Swollen head of a born-again junkie’s needle
Penetrating universal hymen, a singular
Still     birth     death     moving

~~~

Vision.

MELIGALAS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—5/10/10—As this is by far the longest and most bewildering poem I have ever written, I’m going to add my shortest and sanest comment so far: The less I say about this poem, the better. Let me offer instead what a close friend and fellow poet had to say about it when I sent it to him some years back. (I’ve taken the liberty of editing his 13-page response!)

Response to “Sibyl”

Sibyl—any of ten female prophets, fortune tellers

Knock-knock.

Who’s there? No lines. No more, no further, the end at the beginning, the joke reduced to not only no punch line but only one line, the standard line, the known beginning, the beginning known and the ending not there, nowhere, make it up or let it go.

Often a child’s joke, but this is no childish poem or is it?

Knock-knock followed by a period, the period, then, the joke. Who’s there more than punctuation, more than a full stop?

No milk run. Rather than deal just shut up

Open bay keep time merciful ticking

Like clockwork hand works mutilated miracles push button

Mushroom fills rising sun expanding mind cockpit exploding

Time runs out hands your hand a miracle, a complex

Map

No milk run, when you read further, seems to refer to Hiroshima. A milk run = an aerial bombing, expected to be without danger. Resulted, here, in a mushroom cloud (in the land of the rising sun). Open bay = for the bombs to drop out of. “Rather than deal” maybe refers to no negotiation, instead, bombs away. The opposites: “shut up” and Open bay”; shut mouths and open the doors for the bombs.

Where does the mercy come in? If one survives, time has been merciful, keeps ticking like clockwork, then the hand here is the clock’s, a thing of metal, a big one, a little one, but what then is mutilated? The word “late” in there, changed (“muti”) and dead (“late”), then the miracle? . . . .

“Like clockwork hand works.” The hand works, like clockwork, though the hand is mortal. A hand dies when the body dies, a clock works until it stops and then the hands don’t move nor do the clock’s innards.

Where do you stop, pause? “Like clockwork hand works mutilated miracles push button” or, with pauses inserted, “Like clockwork hand works” as a unit then “mutilated miracles” as another unit, or is it “mutilated miracles” that are hands because any hand that pushes the button, that drops the bomb, is both a miracle (because any hand is) and is also a mutilated miracle because it does something ungodly . . .

This stanza has so many possible meanings that a reader could use it, as a complex map, for as long as he/she wants and probably not exhaust the possibilities . . . There are no clear answers. Lots of directions, of hands pointing this way and that, this way or that, a limitless range of possibilities rather than the known limits when things are spelled out, spelled out of possibilities and into a kind of deadness of the too-limited, where nothing is complex enough to expand a mind.

Across centuries

Now we go elsewhere. We were in World War II.  Now we know we’re going someplace else, some other places.

(Time out for generalizations.)

I am reading an essay by Ron Silliman called “Spicer’s Language” in which Silliman is discussing what he views as the “major strategy” of Spicer’s poetic practice. He writes:

“For lack of a better term, I am going to call the strategy ‘overdetermination’. But rather than give it a strict Lacanian or Althusserian definition, I want to use it to simply indicate an effect Spicer achieves through a number of different devices: the failure (or refusal) of an idea or image to add up (or reduce down) to a single entity. Overdetermination is the essential Spicerian effect. [Italics in the original.] No logos, this implies, can be said to exist which does not, within itself contain contradiction, negation or some effacing otherness.”

I refer to these ideas of Silliman because “Sibyl” seems to me to have that kind of “overdetermination” as its major effect; that is, it can’t be reduced to a whole, it refuses (here it seems to me to be a refusal, rather than a failure) to “add up (or reduce down) to a single entity.” . . .

A phrase that Barry Ahearn uses in his book about Zukofsky’s “A” to describe a poem by him seems also applicable to “Sibyl”: “. . . unexpected, discordant precisions.” He also talks about Zukofsy’s poetics that reminds me of what I think you are doing in this poem:

“This ambiguous language constantly frustrates attempts to pin “A” down to a single meaning . . . Even those passages that seem to be lucid and straightforward turn devious after close inspection . . .  Faced with the endless duplicity of such a style, we have no recourse but to read ‘in pieces’. Our minds cannot hold all the meanings in any one the movement’s forking lines as a single conception, any more than the eye can see duck and rabbit simultaneously in the famous optical illusion.”

I “fall back” upon Silliman and Ahearn, perhaps to fortify myself for my next attempt to discuss my thoughts on your poem, a poem in which I believe you set out to purposely thwart and tease the reader. As I recall, you said that, at least in part, you started (and continued?) “Sibyl” with the thought of parodying the Language poets. Thus freed, I think, you allowed yourself the huge freedoms that Language poets have given themselves, to call conventional “meaning” nonsense and call what some readers would call nonsense “meaning.” This poem is far from nonsense, but also far from being simple. Many of your previous poems, almost all of them, are multi-directional in terms of their meanings because of the word play, but they are also limited, so to speak, by their brevity.  By which I mean that they open up in many ways, but because of their length a reader (or at least, I) can think that it is possible to understand, to enjoy and love, where the words are going.

Across centuries

Sphinx-riddled crossroads answer no

Second coming easy death wish all seeing

Eyes caught out gouged damned site swollen-

Footed fated one mother her son nailed

To bare mountain who sees shepherds tragic figure

The first word of the section’s first line is “across” and that quickly (four lines later) includes a crucifix, as does the “cross” in the second line’s “crossroads.” Of course, there is the reference to Jesus in “. .  .no / Second coming . . .”

Riddled. Riddled with holes. The poem is riddled. The poem is, in part, in many parts, riddle, riddles. A riddle is “1) a mystifying, misleading or puzzling question posed as a problem to be solved or guessed often as a game: conundrum, enigma, also; 2) something or someone difficult to understand: a problematical event, situation, or person: MYSTERY.” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary)

But here we are Sphinx-riddled. Egypt. And the sphinx of Thebes who according to Greek legend destroyed all passers who could not solve the riddle she proposed until Oedipus did and caused the sphinx to kill herself.

No easy answers in this poem. The very beginning is a truncated beginning, the opening of a well-known kind of joke, but it goes nowhere, not even the beginning of an answer . . .

—I stopped this commentary about three weeks ago; it felt too daunting. I don’t think I can keep it up, so I will send you this beginning. I suppose it would’ve gone on another 20-50 pages if I could have kept it up. Why can’t I?

One reason is that your poem has as much of, or more of, the irrational in it as the rational and it is hard work to try to pin down what does work but defies being pinned down . . . Your poem goes in so many ways all at once; this multi-directional thrust works well in the poem but presents a demanding challenge to a critic trying to explain, whereas it presents a delight to the reader who can simply sense all the ways the poem is going and then sense that again, with new ideas and feelings upon each reading.

The final word is “vision.” Part of what is daunting to me about trying to define or, at least, to touch upon my responses to your poem is that in some ways it is like a large series of paintings or images or a series of collages and, as with a painting or a collage, it is seen all at a glance no matter how complex and also seen are the elements that tie it together, e.g., dark shapes and how they relate to light shapes, or how the shapes rhyme or don’t, the relationship of figure to ground, what stands out, what the rhythm of space feels like, how the whole thing vibrates, what is disruptive in it and what isn’t, how it can be coherent and, at the same time, fight against an easy coherence. Your poem is far from being easily coherent—its riddle-like quality announced as immediately as the first line of a joke: knock-knock. Knock your head against this. In your poem there is myth, politics, lyricism, sex and more sex, doom and yet life-affirming energy of language used sometimes euphorically, baffling passages adjoin what’s clear, and over and over knocking against the reader the pleasure of language obviously employed with delight and purpose and freedom and plenty of humor (“true men praise hosanna”).

So, anyway, I failed in what I hoped to offer you. I hope you understand, though. Clues, no why. Someone could write an entire Ph.D. dissertation on this poem and not exhaust it. Perhaps some day some critic will try to unravel this witty poem that speaks of dim-witted starlets as well as forlorn galaxies, the bomb, countless fucks, tragedies and stench, mostly tragedies but on the page in such jumping language, jumping around from meaning to meaning and seeming to jump for joy as well as to land in pain, to entertain and lament at the same time. Knock-knock. Who’s there? That’s the body of the poem, that missing Who’s there inquiry and, then, finally, the answer: vision is here. And what a vision it is.