Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry:
The Kingdom of the Subjunctive
I love Suzanne Wise’s poems because they’re droll and cavalier, magnificent and terrified, all at once. With all the invisible poise of masculinity – which she doesn’t care to possess – she manages to flip the responsibility governing her poems so that what’s secretly driving them feels like everyone’s problem. And that seems like a grand success. As if a vast and almost patriotic distress signal were being sent out.
— Eileen Myles
I remember my first encounter with one of Suzanne Wise’s poems. From the late 90s, I was signed up to a daily poetry newsletter, edited by my friend Ernie. I had met him at a party – actually a couple of different parties – all at a photographer’s studio in Soho, and he was always collecting email addresses for his newsletter. He said, “I sometimes wake up the next morning after a night out, and my pockets are filled with scraps of paper with email addresses on them. I don’t even know who these people are.” I got my whole family on Ernie’s email newsletter. It was called Everse Radio. That newsletter was a huge part of my life (and it has now morphed into a blog). Ernie is a poet himself, and recently came out with his first collection, which I reviewed here, and I believe he has a second collection coming out as well. He put this thing out, by himself, every day. It was an intellectual feast, a little gift every morning in my email box. It only took 5 or 10 minutes to read the whole thing – you’d get a poem, a quote that started the whole thing off, and then a bottom section with funny/interesting Top 5 lists (some sent in by readers), and other stuff. I loved it. Suzanne Wise’s poem “The Kingdom of the Subjunctive” was featured one day and it immediately captured my attention. (I was introduced to a lot of new poets from Ernie’s newsletter.) There was something about the poem that really spoke to me, and I kept thinking about it. I printed out that newsletter so I could keep the copy around.
A couple of years later, Ernie was hosting a night of poets at the Whitney Museum (the one that was opposite Grand Central), and Suzanne Wise was on the bill. Hunter and I went. It was February, and I remember it was absolutely freezing that night. You really couldn’t be outside for too long, it was bitter cold. 4 poets read, and Suzanne Wise was one of them, and she was already built up in my head because of my response to that one poem on Ernie’s newsletter. It was so cool to see her in person. She has a bizarre mind, and one I really relate to. She develops her images to almost absurdist levels, seeing how far they will take her. Her poems are not strictly autobiographical (she has one poem called “Autobiography” which is made up entirely of first lines of poems by other women), and when she uses “I”, it is never clear what she means. There is something fractured here, or fracturING (in process). Who is this “I” of Suzanne Wise? She, the poet, seems curious about that as well. Is she her biographical details? Is she the books she has read, the information she has amassed? Is she a box checked on a tax form? What does it all MEAN? She is inquiring. Her poems can be quite funny – and just her images alone can be startling (there’s one poem I like called “Descent” where the “I” of the poem plummets down through a house, grasping at things along the way, trying to stop her descent), and she seems to be fascinated not just by her own experience, but by language itself. How does language work, how are words put together, how did words develop, and how does that impact how I use them? These are concerns that fascinate me.
On a table at the Whitney Museum were books by all the poets who read that night, so I bought a copy of Wise’s book The Kingdom of the Subjunctive, which I wouldn’t have even remembered except that I wrote it on the title page of the book (Sheila O’Malley, Feb. 25, Whitney Museum Reading) … and the entire night came rushing back to me.
I’m so glad I bought the book. It’s slim, but tremendously deep. I love how thought-provoking it is, and how gloriously almost dizzily evocative it is. I can see the streets she talks about, but they are skewed. Her vision is skewed. She can’t help it. The world is actually alive.
While there are a lot of wonderful poems in the volume, I will go with the title-poem since it was the poem that started my interest in Suzanne Wise.
Lunchtime in the Kingdom of the Subjunctive
A spoon propels itself out of its soup
as a bone sprung free of skin
or a tuning fork
trembling into the background,
then arcing and returning
as a boomerang.
Meanwhile, the glass of milk glides up and out
of your hand, quietly streaking a gloss
of stars through your suddenly glowing hair.
Meanwhile, toast combusts in a golden dust.
Butter drops from clouds that release an ochre rain.
You grow misty-eyed, nostalgic.
This feeling is alleviated by a sense of dread
and instability as the tabletop turns metallic,
tips and revolves as a chain-saw blade
slicing the floor into windows
you slowly and gracefully crash through.
Splintered glass sequins your skin.
Your hands reaching for the doorknob
sharpen to cones. The door soars.
Your legs run too fast, lose their feet
to curls of smoke drifting up the stairs.
You spend hours, or possibly years, floating around like this
light-headed, fuzzy-brained,
cotton-mouthed. You have fallen in love
with the way light refracts in impossible ways.
Later darkness barges in horizontally,
It is night without shadows
and everything is way too shallow.
You are too close to the picture
to see if you’re included.
You fall headfirst down the drain
sucking the bright out of colors.
You become somber, colder, a kind of high-quality vinyl,
and, in some places, an old damp velvet.
Meanwhile your head continues to plummet,
has become a potholed highway
splitting into stalks, going to seed
as you talk yourself into the distance.
You are telling yourself: Do not be afraid.
You are begging: God help me.
You are whining: If only
If only I had some kind of anchor
in here. If only I could disappear.
You know you should be ashamed.
This is the kind of compulsive behavior
you are always being criticized for.
It’s that soup bowl,
and singing, sparkling like a god and spitting
its empty refrain in the faces of all your best selves:
If only ______, then ______.
If only ______, then ______.
