Many of the poems in Steve Halle's first full-length collection, Map of the Hydrogen World, are poems I have been acquainted with for years. I did my MFA with Steve, and the poems in this book have been gestating, mutating, and forming a cohesive gestalt since we graduated in 2006. Steve actually sent me this collection, in manuscript form, some time ago. Thus, the central features of Map; playful irreverence, measured absurdity, Pop culture sprezzatura, and a dollop of world-weary angst that lends the construct, as a whole, a hard edge; are not a surprise to me. But now (2009) Cracked Slab Books, a Chicago endeavor spearheaded by William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi, have packaged Steve's poems in a gorgeous, glossy edition, and it lends an air of formality and permanence to the whole thing, so that I have been able to read the poems again, as if for the first time. The book advertises itself as "shun(ning) the divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics," and I have no problem with this designation: it is germane to what seems to me to be the endeavor/enterprise of Chicago poetry. Chicago, as a poetry city, walks a fine line between these realms, and "uncategorizable," in the context of Chicago poetics, is a badge of honor.
Of course, this may be a moot point, because Steve is actually located in Bloomington (formerly in Palatine), several hours outside the Windy City. Yet I am able to make the metonymic association, because Map fits in so snugly to an ethos that I locate in Chicago. In any case, labels, appellations, and designations aside, it will be useful to get down to brass tacks with the book, if we want to see what makes it tick, and perhaps derive a clue as to how poetry can do what Steve wants it to do: shun the divides, take the high road, blaze a new trail without an easy categorical assumption to go along with it, and, perhaps most importantly, have a damned good time doing it (Beat, not beat). I hope my readers will forgive me for taking an editor's prerogative and starting with a poem that I myself published, in Ocho #11. This is an epistolary poem, from what Steve likes to call his "e-mail" series, all of which I have found remarkable for their liveliness, high-wire daring, and intense dedication to expressing the spontaneity of moments. This is called yao:
dearJacksonPollock'smemory,
oh well i tend to agree with the crying/passion/exhaustion argument but you've put me in a tough spot yet again. living with the enemy of our undefined yet common belief sys. don't worry abt being defensive and btw it's molehills but n e ways. what r u signing my year book or something? and this faculty meeting day makes me want to quit my job idealistically like student in Updike short story "A & P" and are we just going to become vagrants? & is that all of "what's left" to do? and and and listen to Brahms 4th like I kno what tha fuck he means? and listen to jazz like I kno wtf? and read like I no wtf? and write things so obscure even me the transparent eyeballed creator doesn't know wtf they it all means? I guess the point was I'm tired right now tired like not go to sleep tired but tired in other ways and ways I can't defend or argue abt but it might just be time to lay low & there are no readily avail. times on any foreseen horizons for such lazy nonsensical endeavors. On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer. I'm better at buying books than reading them but they don't and I don't understand why not they don't pay you for that more likely opp. and i know what's-his-name sd steal this book and all that but i don't feel like being cooped up either. I mn either. an epic struggle between man and material might unfold. lots of luck, honey.
love,notchaos, s
The first, and perhaps most interesting thing to unpack about this piece is its dedication, to "Jackson Pollock's memory." What I take the privilege of reading in is that Steve's compositional strategy here is an ekphrastic rendering of an Abstract Expressionist, "all-over" composition. It's painterly. The level of intensity is sustained throughout, and evenly distributed, so that there are no focal points and no rhetorical crescendos that stand out: the piece is one long crescendo. The bizarre, jagged grammar heightens the impression of "go on your nerve" spontaneity, and the whole thing practically screams O'Hara. However, the darkling overtones of pessimism and weariness ("I'm tired right now like not go to sleep tired but tired in other ways...") keep the piece from being a complete joy-ride. What we have here is a companion persona to the standard (and now standardized) O'Hara persona: let's say this is O'Hara's hetero, cynical, bitter-but-bristling-with-feeling first cousin. "Cousin Steve" doesn't quite work; perhaps "Cousin Halle" would do the trick. Notice all the culture-signifiers sprinkled throughout: first Pollock, then Brahms and Updike (RIP); this is haute poetry. Yet it features an uncertain protagonist who can't come to grips with his own cultural-Mandarin status: "and and and listen to Brahms 4th like I kno what tha fuck he means? and listen to jazz like I kno wtf?" What do I like most about this poem? It is, for want of a better word, fun; a rollicking good time, a helluva spry ride. There is a freshness here that cannot be faked, a sense of urgency that can only come in a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (leeches being gathered on the metaphoric moor). More-than-organic sensibility gets hit with a Po-Mo slice-and-dice, and we travel along the abraded lines of a just-short-of train-wreck. On a more sober note, we do have some concrete clues about "Cousin Halle"; he is a teacher, though at what level the poem does not say. All-in-all, despite the surface jocularity and the dis-ease beneath, this is a strangely complete picture of a comprehensive poetic consciousness, circa early XXI century. "Love, not chaos" is wished, but not provided for the reader, who receives, I would say, equal amounts of both. My other favorite from this series is epistrophic:
dear magellan,
the epistrophic changes. epistrophy is epistrophe. would you rather you were the bull, the matador, the red sheet or the killing spear? would you rather be turning toward diving ground? or on divine ground turning? have you discovered the act of discovery? are you that kind of discovery or circumnavigation? earth-- the shell of the turtle? has the act of discovery helped you to be discovered? has the art of discovering others who have made discoveries been the discovery? is discovery of others in the act of discovering others who discovered others before them, cowering in their own bewilderment, been the discovery you have been seeking? the same melodic material same material, melodic, is repeated is incantatory is repeated is repeated at different pitches at opposing pitches at similar pitches in the pitch of the moment in the pitch of a line of phrase is repeated in the cigarette smell on the black finger on the key the smell of the key is incantatory is repeated in the moment when the pianist who is no pianist who is no piano who has the key but is not the key smells the ivory, chanting, thrumming the key(s) feels the charge of the bull elephant in musth? the increasing tension tense taut taught like piano wire? thrumming tension in the electrical wires over the strata of fields of mind-artist deep in creation madness? do you? feel? that way?
letmeknowyouranswer, s
This poem takes its strength from strategic redundancies that do, in fact, raise it to the level of the "incantatory." Usually, incantatory poems are in service of something, of some great point the poet wants to make: Shelley's grand co-existence with Nature in West Wind, Whitman's elaborate enumeration of individuality in Song of Myself (and use of anaphora, picked up by Ginsberg, among others, who is Steve’s home-boy), even going back to the devotional lyrics of Herbert. Here, in very po-mo fashion, the redundancies and repetitions are placed in the poem, and named in the poem, self-consciously (i.e. Steve actually uses the word "incantatory"). This makes for an interesting scenario, perhaps the rough equivalent of John Cage's minutes of silence; poetic music (melopoeia) not in the service of anything, self-consciously presented. Does this make it empty? Not any more empty than Tender Buttons (stick stick sticking, sticking to a chicken). Not if we are happy to replace nouns with adjectives. "Discover," actually appears in a bunch of different forms, and seems to be the primary redundancy. Yet Halle makes the melopoeia issue explicit by bringing in the piano and the pianist at the end. After this, we know (mostly) what the poem is: music for its own sake, and to its own ends, "thrumming" hypnotically so as to put the reader into a trance-like state.
This, the poem does, or did for me. Music about music, words over words, a classic case of the meta-poem deconstructing itself before our eyes. Not as much fun as yao, but perhaps more seriously intended, more apt to make an important point; that art (music, poetry) is what we say it is, and nothing more. "Let me know your answer," Steve says, but in this case no answer is necessary; it is written into the poem: art is self-subsistent. Map of the Hydrogen World is filled with these little moments of reckoning, which turns what could be pure fun into something more serious. That, to me, is its importance; it allows us a textual good time (what Steve tends to see in Allen G), without ever quite letting us off the hook. Is art self-subsistent? Who has to justify works of art? The "transparent eyeballed creator"? The rapt audience? The passionate e-mailer? For breaking down the boundaries of the aesthetic, all the while keeping his eye on the ball of total enjoyment, Steve Halle deserves his very own Jackson Pollock, stolen from MOMA (or perhaps a Nauman neon from PMA?) and delivered to his door.
