Black Ocean 2007
Reviewed by John Deming
…Now Let’s Grenade the Owls
With the exception of some asshole who told me the other day that nobody reads James Tate anymore, I think we can generally agree that Tate’s in the handful of vital figureheads in American poetry. I imagine said asshole made this claim because he was letting Tate’s success and reputation go to his head. But if you read the plethora of books that emerge from new writers each year, you'll find Tate everywhere.
I bring up Tate in order to offer you my only criticism of Zachary Schomburg’s first book: Tate, one of his three blurbers, has wielded an extraordinary amount of influence here; the notion of setting up a narrative prose poem one way, then turning another way and maybe another before all is viciously surreal and the poem turns on its head (or elbow or cashew) is something that Tate has completely mastered. At times Schomburg’s poems take refuge here; on other occasions, he shows he’s capable of much more.
Because bland guesses at Schomburg’s giants notwithstanding, I should mention The Man Suit is the best first book I’ve read this year.
The Tate near-imitations are underwhelming and a handful could've been left on the cutting-room floor. Nevertheless, The Man Suit is a mystery; everything is connected and yet not, every character is suspect. You’ll make connections here and there, but plot is seldom the point. Schomburg’s surreal little world is bent on imagination as an escape from fear, and on his sky-capped romantic twitches. He’s also willing to make you chuckle. Take “A Band of Owls Moved Into Town.” In the beginning, we’re told that upon moving to town, owls simply “shopped for groceries and ran for office, that sort of thing.” Slowly, the owls take over—new construction until the town “developed a night life and the constant buzz of yellowish electricity.”
1984 fans won’t be surprised, then, that the poem’s narrator meets and falls for a woman named Julia. It’s them against the world:
She was incredible—the most amazing eyes. We stayed awake through most nights holding each other beneath the moonlit window. We talked about everything, but mostly our disdain for the construction and the flood of immigrant owls.
And because I can’t resist, I’ll ruin the conclusion for you:
I told her, We seem to be the only two who are concerned, who notice. The only two who want…
Who want a simpler life, she said. The only two who…who…
Forget that it’s a pun. It’s hilarious. Their transition from people to owl-folk is underway, and the sideways idea that carries the poem—owls taking over—is qualified by more than just the “nightlife” they imposed. Make metaphor of the owls if you will, but the romantic relationship is the most fascinating part, as it’s squared where all fascinating relationships are squared—in the midst of turmoil and change, however absurd. A cartoon Casablanca.
Elsewhere Schomburg continues his willfully mysterious world and his inclination toward spooky romance. He is deft at pulling off what actors are trained to pull off: being real in an imagined world. There’s vulnerability at the center of the book, accounted for by the straight face the poet holds when painting a surreal or absurd premise on a canvas of romantic largesse. Look at “The Lung and Haircut,” which opens: “At a Halloween party, a lung went as a haircut, and a haircut went as a lung.” Inevitably, the two meet and become inseparable. Any time two people/lungs/haircuts become inseparable, inevitability looms large—all of their time is spent together, and losing each other is a fate worse than genocide. Back to the moonlit bedroom:
Once, when the lung got sick and couldn’t go to work, the haircut stayed home too and they watched a half-dozen movies. They discussed their biggest fears one quiet night beneath a golden moon, black clouds shifting and giving chase, planes landing carefully in the distance, one right after the other, in perfect intervals. The haircut’s fear was to be eaten by a shark, but he was lying. The lung knew it. There was a long silence between them. The blinking lights of another plane slid across the black sky. The lung said timidly, losing you.
You could argue that simply labeling one party “lung” and the other “haircut” doesn’t necessarily justify the subsequent romantic clichés. Fair enough. But by the time this poem comes around, you’re so steeped in Schomburg’s world you’re willing to take it.
Because what drives this book, what it reminds me of anyway, is the ever-dominant presence of “inverse.” The inverse of being with someone is being without them. The inverse of being alive is being dead. To have things one way is to have them the other way eventually; everything will be reduced to sand. If you’re alive, you will die, and you know it; in this way you’re already dead, so put on your “man suit” and live out your days—life as essentially comic.
The character “Carlos” comes and goes, provides some fear and stasis, especially during the scary black-and-white telephone sequence; is he alive or dead, is the narrator Carlos, no he isn’t—which phone will kill you if you answer it, which will mean everlasting life—does either mean either, does anything mean anything—and where does “Marlene” fit in? You’ll want to reread this book, and the more you do, the more different pieces fit, while the puzzle itself has no clear margins.
The Man Suit is nevertheless the result of a singular vision. The quirky section “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene” works on its own terms, for example, but the use of the character “M” keeps begging the question—is it Mary Todd, is it Marlene from elsewhere in the book, is it something entirely other. The Man Suit keeps us asking and keeps us pretending, and it never assumes itself an authority. To live in a world where people write and publish books of poetry is to mean the opposite eventually, is in fact to mean a planet with no people at all. Change, it seems, is what defines nature, nature is always in command, evidenced with jokey symbolism when a man has “chainsaws for arms” and when a girl opens her mouth and “crows and doves are making a nest in her throat.”
Vulnerability in the face of inevitability, and imaginative invention—which is keenly human—as the antidote: the sense that some kind of doom is impending, that “the things that surround us” may or may not mean to menace us, but will nevertheless equalize us in the end. To be romantic is to imagine; to impose thought on anything is to imagine. Do Jane and Winston stand a chance against the owls? Nope. But that’s not to say they shouldn’t do battle. The same can be said of the impetus for any poetic/artistic act. To be surreal, to invent new worlds, is (to borrow a Simic image) a way of threatening the stars with a wooden spoon, and to delight at the hilarity of the attempt. In The Man Suit, the reader is left to genuinely dissolve these matters, if only at the instant of a much-needed guffaw or at the soft transcendence of obeying Stevens and succumbing to our imaginative capacity as though it were a religion: “Tell me you hear laughter and the shuffling of feet as the townspeople dance in the street because of these notes and not in spite of them.” Indeed. Now get me a cup of coffee and a pen.
Of course, inverse being what it is, our narrator is so comfortable in his imagined world that he’s helpless to avoid leaving it in the end. He eats the apple, as it were, by blowing through a voice box that Carlos finds in the throat of a dead sheep: “[I take a shallow breath and blow]. I am dying, so cold without wool, and afraid.” Our poet has shed his wool, and now we can hope for something equally invigorating, even more detached and—ideally—fiercely original.
