the worm king's lullaby
- A Review by Dante Di Stefano
- Aug 4, 2015
- 3 min read
War of the Foxes
By Richard Siken
In order to solve the Navier-Stokes global regularity problem, the mathematician Terence Tao imagines an infinitely self-duplicating machine made of pure water, built not out of rods and gears, but out of interacting currents. Similarly, Richard Siken’s second collection of poetry, War of the Foxes, reimagines poetry as an infinitely self-duplicating machine made out of interacting currents drawn from painting, fairytale, and the language of mathematics. Siken’s canvas is the self—searching for meaning and testing the limits of expression—in order to solve a proof about the nature and uses of all art. The first poem in the book, “The Way the Light Reflects,” ends with an italicized question about art: “to supply the world with what?” The final poem of the collection, “The Painting that Includes All Painting,” ends with the lines: “What does all this love amount to?/ Putting down the brush for the last time—.” Each word in War of the Foxes inches forward toward a greater resolution of these quandaries like “a holy pilgrim/ moving through the stations of the yardstick.”
Siken, a painter himself, employs a variety of techniques gleaned from the visual arts; his poems are at turns Baroque, Cubist, and Impressionistic—shaded chiaroscuro and stippled with light. Like Caravaggio, who painted his own face on the severed head of Goliath in David’s hand, Siken paints his own terrific self-portrait in the interstices of these poems. In the third section of the poem, “The Field of Rooms and Halls,” the poet writes:
Hard to say, even now, what it was, this extra room. He
put his foot in the door of it, kept it open. He painted
himself and others appeared. He painted his hunger
and suddenly table, the soup fully illustrated in the
depth of its bowl. He used the wrong colors to make
it right, selecting them for what they felt not what
they said, so that everything became a set of relations
outside the realm of simple minutes and their named
accumulations. Bruising Day, The Month of Pears, The
Year of Infestations.
Siken channels his hungers—and the wrong colors of words whose meanings derive from their feeling rather than their etymologies—in order to thrust the reader into an experience of the world outside the realm of simple minutes, inside the kingdom of fierce imagination.
Siken populates this kingdom of fierce imagination with foxes, stags, blank and heavily caked canvases, moons, birds, hayfields, millipedes, landscapes, still life paintings, the canvases of Picasso, Raphael, and the aforementioned Caravaggio, thoughts, arrows, red wallpaper, the square root of negative one, pears, quivers, trampled fields, questions (“What does a body/ of knowledge look like?), and canvases discoursing with turpentine. In the poem “Turpentine,” canvas tells solvent: “You came to me while we/ were sleeping, we were both sleeping, and you asked me/ to hold this for you. I am holding this for you.” What both canvas and turpentine hold is the promise of all art: to undo the damage of haste, to draw on an essential blankness that is contradictorily motley and heavily pigmented, to create, to dissolve, and to restore all at once a purity forever beyond our mortal grasp. This is the worm king’s lullaby: the moonlight that holds us in place, the love song we sing to our most vibrant ghosts on the brink of the grave.
Dante Di Stefano's poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea Gonzalez Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He works as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.
For more work by Dante Di Stefano, check out his page at our Online Sundries site.
Comentarios