Broadsides to Books: The Language of Empire
Again
by Jennifer Perrine
Airlie Press, 2020
ISBN: 978-1950404032
Review by Katie Schmid
Three Questions from Broadsided Press; Three Answers from Jennifer Perrine
Bsided: I was really struck by the collective voice in this book and how it felt alive, complex. At times it felt frustratingly naïve, at other times it felt powerful and dangerous. What was your relationship to the “we” as you were writing this book?
Jennifer Perrine: That collective voice remains mysterious, even to me. I suspect some part of my subconscious pulled that voice onto the page to try to make sense of the collective that is America–a we that often frightens me, enrages me, disappoints me, wounds me, especially when that we is set in opposition to an other, a them. As an American who has heard the siren song of the we, the us, and who also is frequently perceived due to racism and xenophobia as an outsider, as one of them, I think the collective voice might have been a way to navigate and inhabit that duality, to try to make a voice expansive enough to encompass the sense I often feel of being simultaneously powerless and a threat, of being both complicit with and defiant toward the American project.
Bsided: In your broadside, “Ex Ovo Omnia,” you write about motherhood and corruption, a womb infiltrated by the world via the gaze of the mother. I think you’re referring to the old wives’ tale of mothers being able to corrupt their fetuses merely by looking at something contemptible, but this poem also reminded me of the subtle implication and corruption of the speakers in Again. How do you think about the role of implication in your work?
JP: I composed all the poems in Again during the first hundred days after the 2017 presidential inauguration, and I was definitely thinking about how we got to that moment in our human history, who was implicated in making the choices that led us there. Some people and corporations overtly influenced that outcome through money and public rhetoric. But I was more interested in the people who weren’t vocal about their political beliefs, who perhaps cast their votes quietly, who thought they were making choices in their own best interest, not reckoning with how those choices might harm people in their families and communities. My work isn’t interested in blaming those folks, any more than it’s interested in blaming “maternal impression” for marking a child in utero. Poetry is a place for me to carve out a practice of inquiry, of empathy, to attempt to understand what it might be like to be the parent of a child who is condemned to death for its “monstrous” appearance or to understand how a person might come to believe that their survival can only come at the expense of others.
Bsided: I found your images quite beautiful—can you talk about how you make and refine image in your work?
JP: The process for this book was quite a bit different from most of my writing. With each of the poems in Again, I chose a title word and mulled it over, sat with it, allowed associations, definitions, connotations, and contexts to arise. The images were born from that slow, almost meditative state. With Again, I also chose to work in strict syllabics and a set number of lines and stanzas determined by the chance roll of a set of dice. Those structures often transformed the loosely connected sprawl of my initial, ruminative drafts into tight, tense poems, and pushed me toward images that I hoped would function as gleaming facets, shining some hope or heart or courage into the often grim worlds I was depicting.
The Broadsided Poem:
“Ex Ovo Omnia,” words by and art by Julie Evanoff, published on April 10, 2010.
Jennifer Perrine’s harrowing fourth book, Again, explores how a president’s language can create a nation mobilized in opposition to a feared other. The poems here range widely in tone: at times the voice speaks from the midst of horrific violence, while at others, hilarity and grief mingle together. The images are crystalline, disturbing, and precise as they create a world of apocalyptic dread: “…we keep watch / on the supplies, each other, / the guns,” they say in “Disaster,” “We sip shallow breaths. / We remain buried, alive.”
In the first section of the book, Perrine explores a collective voice, a “we” that fears and is implicated by the violence of the country they live in. In succinct lines and deceptively spare and potent images, the poems implicate the “we’s” comfort in consumerism and the “we’s” desire to hide from what is happening outside their door. “We are of but not in it,” the speakers say in “World.” “We withdraw into our flesh. We relax / into astonishment, watchers behind / glass.” The damning images accumulate as the speakers admit their passivity in the face of fear. Responsibility toward the collective falters under this fear. In what feels like a response to this failure of collective care, the book shifts to an individual voice in the second half, and the articulation of an individual self comes with a high cost: in isolation the self becomes a target for violence and for commodification, and, locked away, becomes animalistic, feral.
Throughout the text, the poems are titled using the totalizing language of a demagogue, and with titles like “Terrific,” “Pathetic,” and “Tough,” the effect is brutal; the speakers of these poems are crushed under and enclosed by hyperbole, by turns, as they desperately navigate a shifting landscape of abstraction. “Nation” is particularly effective at illustrating the cost of a reckless use of language, as the speaker is told to “go back where you came from” and retreats into isolation in their house: “boards nailed over every window / and door, no entrance, no way out.” The poem seems to enact nationhood in the way it shuts the “I” inside and outside of a border of the country and, simultaneously, inside and outside of the home. The concept of “nation” enacts a self, (or a citizen,) and an other, (or the non-citizen, the unperson). Though “Nation” is one of the shortest poems in the book, it’s one of the most arresting.
Is there hope? In this book, probably not much. If there’s any, it’s to be found in the “I” at the end, formed out of language that colludes in a denial of selfhood. It is this proving ground of language that creates this wily, resourceful “I,” strong enough to shape language to her needs, and to help her understand the cage she’s been placed in, a knowledge that comes late, but comes all the same: “It takes ages to grasp what needs / you were built to suit, whose wishes / invented you, which hands labored / hours in secret chambers to form / you, kiss you awake.” And then she wakes.
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Katie Schmid is an NEA Fellow in Poetry and in the first cohort of the Writing Freedom Fellows, a fellowship awarded by Haymarket Books, The Art for Justice Fund, and the Mellon Foundation for writers.