When someone says the poetry scene today consists of \”a lot of brilliant people with serious boundary issues\”(taken wildly out of context here) the first poet I think of is Dorothea Lasky. The images in her poems melt into one another and re-form, filling the reader with a sense of transformation innate to her writing. The created sense of urgency and earnestness strikes the reader with its wholesome sincerity, even when the voice is sulky and petulant. Much has been said about the “refreshing honesty” etc. of her voice and I don’t want to belabor that point too much, but it’s true that these are poems of a different color – a color that Lasky and only Lasky can pull off.
In AWE, the speaker is capable of becoming anything and everything, and does. Over time the repetition of narrative morphing – whether through transfiguration or birth or consumption – makes it evident that in Lasky’s borderless version of the universe, everything is a part of everything, for better or for worse. It’s an egalitarian universe that way. Here’s an example of what I mean:
In the T-Station
There is a music box playing inside here
And on the wall are tiles by children, painted one day in their art class
See, world, there is art in everything!
You are not so fond of art, you know
The dead woman here thinks she’s in Italy
It is Italy inside here, with this ancient music playing.
The dead, plump rat is on the ground.
Uninterested and blasé, still, it is strange to see a dead, plump rat.
If I were Camus, I would say there is a plague.
Both the dead woman and the rat, as one might say, have slipped
On the cake of soap of the air.
Now I am sitting by the music box player
Now two women are talking and
Their matching gloves are switched between them.
There is a woman here with a tiny baby
She puts shoes on the baby and talks to it like
A little brown bird, with its red beating breast.
She is old
I wonder if I will be that old when I have a baby
Maybe I will never have a baby
No, that can’t be true, out of my womb
The tiny babies of the universe will explode.
Outside the station, I dream and act as if I
Am a Harvard student and everyone around me is impressed!
There is a rat inside the T-station who is dead, and plump.
Inside my heart, there is a rat who
Eats soap and feeds her babies cakes of soap.
In the dead lady, a rat eats its way out of her.
In the stars, a rat eats noxious gases and then the sun.
The constellations all form in the shape of rats
And the world from above is blue and brown and slightly sweet smelling.
And inside God, the world of the heart rots and blooms.
Here, the rat becomes the agent analogous with both the dead woman, by their pairing early on, and the woman with the tiny baby (“Inside my heart, there is a rat who / Eats soap and feeds her babies cakes of soap”). This poem is filled with the breaking of boundaries; firstly, by the juxtaposition of these two characters and the rat. The boundary of place is broken with “It is Italy inside here.” Perhaps, too, the boundary of time is broken and the different women are all one woman at different points in life (and, if we’re being consistent, they are all a part of the speaker). The rat is inside the speaker’s heart, the rat is eating its way out of the dead woman. The rat is eating the sun and re-forming in the sky as a constellation. This continual progression of zooming out is also a consistent feature of this collection.
God and sex and love and self surface often, all carrying particular baggage that shifts from poem to poem. To be honest the whole God-with-a-capital-G thing kind of freaked me out when I started reading AWE – my instinct is to run in the opposite direction. But after finishing the book a couple times over I think that’s what makes Lasky’s persona so sincere. The genuine belief in something ultimate (although still always fraught: “The truth is…[t]here is no heaven.”) which has sway over our lives is touching to me, and not in the kind of pathetic cute way, in the way that kind of makes me wish I believed in anything that way.
Throughout AWE, Lasky cultivates a mischievous and tactile surrealist élan, with the funny, bizarre imagery of Eugene Ostashevsky (and a nod to Russian Futurism with the poem “Portrait of Me and Vladimir Mayakovsky”), the free-ranging “talkiness” of Frank O’Hara, and at times, the unifying spirit of Walt Whitman (“We are one thing, bleating a / Somber, scurrying lullaby to / Lapsing pinkish angels.”). In at least one poem, unfortunately, she reminds me of Tao Lin (“Love is the Answer to God’s Question”). These poems are worth the read because they are unpredictable and volatile. And yes, refreshing.
What is Dorothea Lasky in awe of, you may ask?
In her words, “All of life.”
