I’m the Man Who Loves You by Amy King

BlazeVOX 2007
Reviewed by Matt Hart

Between the declarative first gesture of its title, and the final line of its final poem, Amy King’s second book I’m the Man Who Loves You is a-swirl in a tornado of mixing (but not mixed) messages.  The book’s 60(!) poems, which are arranged alphabetically by title and with no section breaks, operate like transcriptions of satellite signals criss-crossing in the Vast.  At their best, they’re compositions of bright ideas, music, and noise, resulting in (among other things) the deployment of form and content against one another to create tension, poetic texture, and (paraphrasing Apollinaire) the flare-up of multiple meanings in the flames of joy.

As a result, I’m the Man Who Loves You not only has guts and attitude, but achieves altitude (meta-tude) in its refusal to say the simple thing simply—which is (tracking from the title to the final poem), “I’m the man who loves you—Yes, you.”  Thus, one might argue that “I love you” is the book’s fundamental operating system and thesis.  And yet, of course, as with actual love, it’s complicated, but (also, as is often the case with/in actual love) it’s these complications that make it interesting, risky, and marvelous (that is, both love and the book itself). 

For example, one such complication is in how the book’s “I” and “you” are constantly shifting positions, clanging and banging against one another, and at times even disappearing altogether.  As King writes in the book’s opening poem, “A Ghost Is Born,” “me into me into I unto thee,/ thyself or not,” and later in “One Bright Thing”:

            And if
you follow these two threads
with hands through a trail of smoke
you’ll find pictures of you and pictures
of me in the pockets of jeans cannot charm ourselves
into the arms of discrete belief, everlasting.

The effects here are disorienting and woozy-making, especially when the syntax goes haywire, “…in the pockets of jeans cannot charm ourselves into…”  Such light-be-headed distortions are one of King’s hallmarks, and more often than not one of the things that makes these poems not only poetically daring, but charming and smart as well.  Think: one part Gertrude Stein + one part Andrew Marvell + one part Guided by Voices (see more below); now add 2 parts Harry Houdini—and Voilà! “I am a fun loving lady/ thinly slicing bread into squares/ of handwritten text” (“Autobiographical Encounter”).  Or, on a related but different note:

Accordion adventures, they’re the best instrument
to windbag, to bleat, to push air through daisies
for an alphabet’s sake.  Androgyny and honesty
ought to play frozen roses on apocalyptic landscapes,
the landscape of Amy King’s face fused
with artificial intelligence on which hers lies
infinitely predictable.  Blindfolded books could do worse
than the diction of bedtime verse
                    (“Miniature Disasters”)

It’s brilliant stuff.  The book is well-lit, musical, and playful while being simultaneously mind-bending in its acrobatic use of what I might call syntactical, juxtapositional and associative dyslexics (and which a lot of other people have called other things) to delimit meaning and lay bare both its surfaces and depths in a coherent but (nearly always) non-linear fashion.

However, these aren’t the only tricks up Amy King’s sleeves.  Here’s an example from the beginning of her poem “Taking the Time” where she uses a rather obsessive rhetorical stance to create a maze (amazement, amusement) of possibilities for meaning, via a compelling and yet non-sequitur self/other interrogation:

When the only thing left to ask is when
will you join me in our gallery of projected
sonatas, still another inquiry feathers the birds:
How has this seasonal Sunday of continuous
flowering and everyone gliding
on sidewalks after dusk kept up
in matching short sets and white muscle tanks
without turning their emotional battles over
to the authorities?  I mean, must we all be riddled by
the need to fix closeness with distance?  In flip flops?

What’s weird in all this is that, unlike a lot of poems which are stylistically similar to King’s, these poems aren’t grounded by a narrative scaffolding, but rather by a distance from one—a deliberate attempt to mean variously (and get close) via the avoidance of narrating/telling.  With this in mind, King ends the book—ironically, almost teasingly— with the line, “there’s a storyteller within, if you’d only let her loose.”

Of course, part of why these poems work is because they don’t tell stories, and they aren’t loose either (esp. formally, musically).  However, they are perhaps indebted to that other sense of “storytelling,” a.k.a. the fine art of fabrication/imagination.  Or, as Oscar Wilde so delicately put it, “the fine art of lying.”  And this leaves the reader and “you” and “I” ever on an ambiguous note—one that serves to echo, highlight, and remind us of the limits of understanding and sense-making.

Another such moment occurs with the poem “Robert Pollard’s Kind of Wrong,”—a reference to Bob Pollard, best known as the lead singer and songwriter for Indie Rock royalty Guided by Voices.  Here, King creates multiple meanings and enlarges poetic space right from the start with the ambiguous syntax of the title.  “Robert Pollard’s Kind of Wrong” could be a statement, where “Pollard’s” is a contraction for “Pollard is,” as in “Robert Pollard’s kind of wrong about thinking the Reds will win the World Series this year.”  Or, it could be a way of describing something qualitatively, where Pollard’s is a possessive modifier, as in “Those shoes are Robert Pollard’s kind of wrong.”  Furthermore, this “wrong” in turn could be either a good thing (That’s so wrong it’s cool) or a bad thing (The war is just plain wrong).  King’s book in general, and this poem in particular, remind us that what’s “wrong” is often what’s important and, by extension, perhaps what’s right—the thing that drives and spurs us on in the search for meaning and solace, “Remove your blouse and become a kind of free     on me/ and have a brilliant face…” the poem begins.   And later, via a series of switchbacks, which build in intensity and complexity, the speaker remarks:

Each morning, I wear clothes of an industry,
a closet climate, regions I afford
are extras in their roles with an extra s for good breath clouds

Later drive through
                                               me with your irresistible you

At risk of sounding too “Rah! Rah! go Ms. King” about things (though I see nothing wrong with that really), I should mention that this is a book that must/needs be read SLOWLY over time and ACROBATICALLY.  One must be willing to read around, back and forth, and sideways in/between the poems—not merely left to right, top to bottom down the page.  The music and connective tissues of the book work best when they’re allowed to speak to one another.  The first couple of times I read through I’m the Man Who Loves You (top to bottom, etc.) I felt a sort sameness about the work—that some of the poems suffered from too much post-avant glitter and not enough “I’m the man who loves you” substance.

Certainly, one criticism might be that not all the poems here are necessary—that occasionally one is left with a sense of “so what” or a desire to cut things out/move things around, which perhaps points to a material management issue.  Furthermore, the alphabetical ordering of the poems (rather than a more deliberated organization of them) may seem to some a little easy.  However, one often has the same feelings reading the best works of Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, or even while watching the best Woody Allen films (all of whom are invoked in King’s book in various ways).

I realize that some people may object that I’ve failed in this review to note the book’s obvious Wilco references.  Yes, the book’s title is the same as the title of a Wilco song from their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  And it’s also true that the book’s first poem “A Ghost Is Born” is the same as the title of Wilco’s 2004 album of the same name.  My sense, however, is that King’s book is of the sort that’s full of cultural references and markers, which will be of interest (or not) to readers depending on what they bring to their reading.  To put it simply, getting the specific references (like the Bob Pollard reference above) may say a lot more about a reader’s interests than it does about King’s poems.  Notice too that what’s important about the Pollard example is the ambiguity of the title’s grammar, not Bob Pollard or Guided by Voices.  Perhaps on this point it’s enough to note that King’s poems are embedded in their moment—its various props and sets and scenery, which are more interesting for their placement within the possible world of the poem/book than they are for what they specifically reference.  By my lights, the poems provide formal and contextual clues that help a reader read all of King’s materials in terms the book’s larger issues and its swirl of meanings. 

On the whole, I’m the Man Who Loves You works beautifully, and it’s a book worth spending some time working through.  For all its flashy machinations, the book remains surprisingly human and knowingly lovely in love.  As King writes in “The Bowl from Whence You Came”:

I’ve assumed
your love for me and am having issues with instruments
over for a strain of immortality.

Truly, the pay-off here on multiple readings is huge, and “At first taste,/ a blue streak bleaches the entire sky.”