This is a Story about Acquiescence

There are many ways to make words and many ways to make words work, as my friend Lynn Behrendt demonstrates in her two recent Dusie chapbooks.


This is the Story of Things that Happened

This is the story of a book. This is a story about a poem in a book. This is the story of making a chapbook big enough to hold a poem. This is not a story about Lynn Behrendt. But how could it not be?

This squarish book is adorned with an appropriated painting of a woodland scene, something Disneyish, something realistic but cartoonish simultaneously, something to tell us about the poem to come but primarily by setting it in an ironic context. Lynn's name rests in the lower right-hand corner of the cover, written across the white stripe along a skunk's back.

The poem itself is a Google-sculpted beast, something delicately constructed by texts both profound and daft collected off the Internet, and it's a wonder what Lynn can make of such texts, how she can stitch them together into something that is cohesive but also various, something that seems to inhabit every part of space at once. Somehow, but veering from the deadly serious to the almost goofy, the poem holds itself in place, telling us what stories it is going to tell us about without ever telling a story, but somehow leaving us with one:

This is the story of things that happened.
Job losses and science,
derivatives and past lives.
This is a story about giving up.

Acquiescence

The second poem, the second chapbook is a poem written in a long thin line and printed into an orihon that has pages that must, remarkably, be flipped up, rather than the left to continue the read. And, once at the bottom of the flaps of this book, we turn over the pages and continue to read the poem, leaving the reader surprised that the poem is twice as long as expected.

The folded pages of the book, which extend about five feet when fully extended, are held together with pressure-sensitive tape, which means the tape will turn the paper brown eventually, changing it into something not quite paper anymore. This internal destruction of the book seems to me appropriate for a poem that comes across as a personal one about pain, psychic pain that is hard to escape, rather than physical pain that might dissipate over time.

The book itself is comes inside a little envelope, which is made by taping together two rectangles from an atlas. On one side is a view of the Long Island Sound, showing much of the north fork of Long Island and the coast of Connecticut to its north. On the other side is a much more detailed map of Branford, Connecticut (a map so interesting to me that it led me to write a poem about it: "286. Adamic & Cartographic").

The poem "Acquiescence" is written in couplets, sometimes with exceedingly short lines, and the poem focuses on breathing and drowning, on water and air, on being a person who needs certain physical and emotional needs to be met in order to live, which may make this poems sound mawkish or sentimental. But it is a strong poem filled with a powerful sense of human emotion, which is, after all, what makes the world real.


Coda

The two poems show two realms of the work of Lynn Behrendt, two ways of making words work, and they are both worth a read. They are poems that stay with a body, become part of a body, that might not make you whole but will make you yearn for wholeness, because they are fractured poems, poems about despair, poems about living, poems about the emotional and intellectual power of words. And I have no idea if it's possible to find copies of these anywhere or if they are all distributed to colleagues and friends at the point of creation, but if you can find them, read them. Hold them in your hands, hold them close enough to your ear so you can hear them, and you will hear their hearts beating just a little too fast.

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Behrendt, Lynn. This is the Story of Things that Happened. Dusie, np, 2011.

Behrendt, Lynn. Acquiescence. Dusie, np, 2011.

ecr. l'inf.