AN ARCHITECTURE by Chad Sweeney
(BlazeVOX Books, Kenmore, New York, 2007)
He got me at Hello. Which is to say, this book grabbed me with the first page:
every year
the statue grows heavier
I want to put it down
on this clover hill overlooking
the library
it might roll away from me
it wouldn’t be my fault
if it broke back to its four colors
its mound of shells and water
What a pleasing music. What lovely imagery. And so I was moved to continue reading the rest of AN ARCHITECTURE. But, just for the heck of it, I thought to read it with a question in mind: “What is this book an architecture of?” Of what, referencing page 2, is this book-length poem the
bridgework
wedgework
sugnwork
seedwork
? Well, I’ll cut to the chase of my own answer: it’s the architecture of a poet’s work and life. Sounds banal. And sounds reductive (if not wrong) but there are certainly elements that bolster my answer-theory:
I sell subscriptions to my daily life.
The violet gleam of girders.
Pain in the shape of industrial pipe
whose center is everywhere
whose smoke is irony.
Worry is proof of my goodness.
I flex my worry and count to seven.
An elegiac music,
tulips yellow the water.
I speak, therefore I are.
Another reason I relate the poem back to an ars poetica of sorts is because of the mystery that remains: despite specificities of description, we can't really pin down what the project is about (in contrast to architectural plans defining what will be a specific--because it’s physically-static--building. Or consider that Goethe once speculated architecture to be frozen music.) For instance:
the library is burning
fire reads aloud
in Arabic in Greek
translating each book
into smoke
The beauty of smoke is partly that it shape-shifts. That’s what happens throughout the poem, this book. And yet as it fluctuates, the reader never gets irritated or frustrated with its elisions. Instead, this reader remained appreciative simply because of the enticement of the language that at times gets elegiacal and at times borders on rapture:
12.
by this slow burn
we live
smoldering
a tree
fire inside its wood
walks
out from the forest
the burning bush
is a man
in average moments
13.
the snake
swallowing
peristalsis of
the world
by which these rooms
are constituted
camouflage
over a city
block windswept
of copper
leaves machines and
their math—
the snake
unrolling
its throat cave
(lingual)
births
the wet days
AN ARCHITECTURE reveals the impossible: plans for what cannot be captured or pinned down. Like poetry. But even as structures are set up and then allowed to collapse, something worthwhile happened. An engagement with the reader that held true: for in Sweeney’s evocative parsings from life, desire never gets diluted:
To make stained-glass windows
for the blind
a color whose effect
not visual
touch here, the crack
the tooth
of things
Which is also to say, these poems are not so much meditating over destruction but creation:
I subtract one color at a time
to arrive at green.
Green cardinal.
Green snow.
This green is excavated
rather than built.
Looking you begin to feel
disappearance
what culture feels when exposed
to time,
a pit
in the air—
a climbing up to
no altar.
The clover,
the teeth of the horses
shine.
Green burns in the green cloud.
The notion of green might sum up, or at least relate to, AN ARCHITECTURE. Green is an additive primary color that can be used to create new colors. But, also, green is created by the mixture of other colors (blue and yellow). With AN ARCHITECTURE, I felt Sweeney meticulously choosing words to create what will form the poem, plucking words out of prior contexts to become new in his poem’s context. His disciplined approach has created something beautiful by admirably not limiting beauty to something defined (as in fixed or static) and untouched by (the reader’s) subjectivity.
*****
As remuneration for editing Galatea Resurrects, Eileen Tabios doesn't have her books reviewed here ... but she's pleased to point you elsewhere to Thomas Fink's review of her SILENCES: The Autobiography of Loss.
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