"I Won't Harm You": Ethan Paquin’s The Violence
Opening poems are like the opening tracks on albums: in both cases the artists need to capture the audience, and to promise something more. It’s an act of faith, reading and listening, and it’s an act of courage for the artist, daring to record his voice. Do you have anything to tell me? the audience asks. And the artist says, Yes. But the interaction that follows is made up of so much anonymous space and time—thousands of miles and generations, even—that the artist speaks into a sort of chasm, and the audience listens only to the echoes of the internal process that forged the work. Opening poems must direct the audience and move them forward into the thick of the text where the artist’s voice is clearer, closer.
The first poem of Ethan Paquin’s The Violence strikes me as just such a startling and promising entrance. It begins,
people are killed out here, wherever there’s clouds like
this.
The poem, “[people are/wherever there’s clouds/starry curvature],” is designed as two blocks of text, divided halfway down the page by blank space and a small plus-or-minus sign (±). The plus-or-minus sign reinforces the larger themes of the poem, and I would suggest, the book itself: the accumulation of images and words, in the mind and then on the page, is a link to a time and place, like an artist’s personal hieroglyph. And yet there is always that possibility of disconnecting, of absence and loss, in relationships, in the world, and between the writer and the reader.
The first stanza is a sort of eulogy to innocence. The first line hovers over the rest of the stanza, marking the estrangement of the thought “people are killed out here” with the wild, vast landscape of “the child”:
[…] i know who the child is! who dreamt of the widest sky
ever starry curvature royal blue and being marooned
crushed neath it nearly and there came the animal in the
dream there they ran over dune one dune two grass o
shake he’s behind it. and now it’s all done for child is
a malleable meat
The enjambed lines sweep into each other, and certain words (especially that “for” near the end) sway between sentences, wary of punctuation that would break the flow. Paquin’s use of space creates a push/pull dynamic: the long lines without punctuation reel toward the end, while the blank spaces around words and phrases create pools of meaning that invite contemplation. Throughout, there is a sense that the words are interacting on more than a traditional grammatical level, as if the speaker’s own grammar makes meaning by relating space, words, and page.
The second stanza makes explicit the processes of language and the endeavor of writing:
The second I thought it, wrote it, the world’s tallest dam collapsed. Would
I suffer blame? And if not, why not? I am meant to We all
Relate, connect
The dam—or rather, what it contains, water—is an important symbol, and it continues throughout the book in the form of rivulets, lakes, rain, and boats. The way water flows, or does not flow, or is diverted for human use, or overcomes human use, is the same way language flows, or does not flow, or is diverted for human ends, or overcomes us, over and over again, in its inability to measure out the totality of our experience. It is a powerful instrument, and one that should be wielded, as Paquin suggests, with reverence. “The second I thought it, wrote it” is describing the spark at the moment of artistic creation. “The world’s tallest dam collapsed” has the ring of something both monumentally catastrophic and intensely personal. Once written into existence on the page, events become very real, very large, and flood with emotion, with evidentiary truth.
Paquin continues the themes of this first poem throughout The Violence, concentrating on the intersection of human constructions (including language) and nature, personal and larger human tragedies, and the artist’s constant struggle to exist and express. The most effective poems are the ones in which the urgency of the language overrides grammar, traditional poetic form, or narrative coherence in favor of dense images and emotional depth. “Detritus” changes the orientation of the page, so that the book must be turned on its side to read the lines, and comes with directions for reading aloud (“(#) = single space denotes a holding over of last hard consonant sound from the end of previous line, or a drawing out of the last vowel sound from the end of the previous line”), in addition to making architectural use of the white space of all three pages. In the text itself, there is a lovely, rather un-self-conscious irreverence, such as in these lines, near the first turning point in the poem (imagine you’re reading this sideways):
[…] I walked along a street called Franklin Street the other day
and the sky was like melting away. Sky misted into buildings. They:
stocky brick buildings and people live in them and that means they await:
in them. OK.
The street name becomes a title, as if to a story. The story is in the poem, but it isn’t necessarily—or, at least, primarily—about the people who live in the buildings. As the poem progresses the speaker performs a ritualistic gutting of a lamb, over a porcelain sink but declares, “there is no christ imagery at work here but//rather I merely wanted to eat a lamb for//i was hungry.” But the gutting of the lamb and the walk are linked, as the imagery of bloodletting and bearing witness to the sky and buildings collide. The irreverent tone belies the grave image, and a sadness under the surface, as the unseen but ever-present people “await.”
In “Range Peaks” the interior/exterior imagery continues: “Come on in, basilisk!//Come on in, cathedral!//I won’t harm you!” The speaker calls to architecture, monuments, and later, sky and beach, and boats, the natural world and the vessels humans build to navigate it. But in the middle of the poem, the direct address stops, and an internal voice takes over:
I hate it here. I am damned by the quiet charge to
Live in the thrust balance between weight and height,
between black and white as in one of the paintings.
After I have left her insides I start to go colourless.
Like a ghost in a play whom only the audience sees and hears, this speaker addresses another dimension of experience, one that is trapped between the interior and the exterior, and one that feels deeply personal.
Among the themes Paquin covers—an ambivalent or even antagonistic God, the deterioration of the natural world, the decay of the physical body and human structures—the most poignant are the betrayal between lovers and the difficulty of human connections. In “The Silence, the Rain and the Road,” Paquin expresses a sensibility wounded, “bruised,” by loss and being lost. “Who’d have guessed we’d traverse a territory so cleared/of hard pain, yet full of the storm of beauty.” The natural world and its processes are a mirror for the vast internal spaces ravaged and rebuilt by human relationships. “Rain/plies onward in restless sleep, re-gathering over the lakes and all,/and so do we. And so it goes with all these gone places, now silences/made salient by hard roads not so interested in us at all.” Here, Paquin plainly speaks the sadness that is hinted at in “Detritus.” The “gone places” and “silences” mark the changes, the internal and external losses, and the grief for those losses. What makes this poem, and all of The Violence, engaging is Paquin’s ability to evoke those gone places. The poem continues, “But the wind is pleasant to walk in!,/and so I walk in it. […] I know how to enter the wind.” Paquin knows how to enter language and walk in it, so that his experience seems remarkably universal.
The power of the opening poem, with its arresting spaces and urgent rhythm, with its obvious care for the sound and texture of words alone, and words together, relating to one another in new ways, never lets up throughout The Violence. Some of the most pleasurable moments come not in discovering the profound connections between these poems, but in the moments of language epiphany. Like sounding out the line, “cutin greens and custards, navies,” or in the lovely repetition of “Little leaf little leaf little leaf” (both in the perfect, graceful title poem). Paquin can’t seem to help himself. He indulges joyfully in the beauty of words, and for that, his audience will be thankful. Thankful for words like, “metalature,” and “mung,” and “fealty,” and “tendance,” and (my favorite) “thigmotaxis.” The Violence delivers on the promise of its first poem. When the last word of the last poem has registered in our minds, we cannot help but turn back to the beginning. We want to enter the book again. |
