Who Wants What Edge: The Poetry of Denise
Newman
Dale
Going
ROOMS, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer 1999
Fish, fowl, human, mushroom
all gilled and seeking––
is the opening moment of
Of Later Things Yet to
Happen and could stand as epigram for all Denise
Newman’s work. Koanicly odd, it at first seems untrue, like
the statements in logic exams where one must circle the
word that doesn’t fit, this is to that as that is to this.
Humans and fowl have no gills. Are any but human
seeking? But I’d flunk––a fowl’s wattle is its gill, a
human’s, the loose skin under the chin. And yes, concede,
all seeking. As Newman writes it, all human. Her poems and
novels are full of inquiry, as dialogue and discourse, a
flaying of layers to “that shy island back behind memory,
back before the blood fish egg beginning, the tree and
body, layer preceding all layers.” Her questioning begins
with “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” with the answer
being, “Yes.” Erotic sources are mineral, salt water and
the blood of stone, her origin as island, as sea creature:
“there was iron in the rocks back home”(BF), “not yet
seeing herself as a limbless bolus of sucking
gestures…imprecisely that which the two would be…rolling
sea water without rupture such as inquiry”(OLT). The sought
place is that origin beyond seeking yet it is got to
through seeking. The Blood Flower is a catechism of erotic
origins. Its Christian form gives way in
Of Later
Things Yet to Happen to a flood of other cultural
references, but a watery, undifferentiated world continues
to prevail as the desired source and destination.
All potential has its erotic push
bound to it––blood yolk
with an ocean source
––[OLT]
Her lyricism is operatic or Gothic, the dark Grimmness of a
northern fairytale, “stone cold genitals of black winter
earth/flowers” [BF]. Yet the clarity of her hermetic verse,
a kind of delicacy and plainness of space and breath and
speech, seems more like fragments of Sappho, in a third
generation xerox, blown up and nearly empty.
a Greek god tourist in photocopied love time…but they look
so real…He is fake…Camouflaged as a
person/anyone…Twice-born god…in a boat/on a plate/chipped
and cracked…No warranty…As is, I’d been saying/as is, is
as, as is ––[WP]
“Is as” is metaphor, not origin. As is, with no warranty––
its meaning worn, chipped and cracked––in a boat on a plate
not at all the same sea ride. Is the original available in
language, or is all language worn metaphor? Is
questioning––idea––by its nature derivative?
Her questions are koanic, her metaphors resemble the
Persephonic haiku by Issa about the field of flowers being
the roof of hell. [can someone supply it?] “Not the ‘dead
floor of Hell’ catching corpses as they fall/nor dirt at
the end of shovel squirming wormy things/ but tamped earth
rubbed red by soles and shiny as chestnut/To return to
after idea lets go” [OLT].
She is Persephone; her hell is of the pre-adolescent
verge/virge, that moment of clarity, desire, horror at the
blood cusp of girlhood and womanhood. Just as one really
starts to think, sex and death comingle in a black blood
bath under the tree of knowledge of the loss of self.
Newman’s vegetative world is inhabitated by trees, by red
and yellow flowers, each with its meaning. (“The flower is
yellow is sweet like heavy eyelids––its name is/ freesia/
free, out of doors by sea and heads of these yellow
sweet/bells quivering madly/light touch of your cheek
(erotic is in the/contrast).” [BF] “Skins touch
passing/human forest” [WP]. There are the pupa, flies,
serpents associated with cycles of transformation among her
botanica. Her animal world is littered with the familiars
of childhood, distortions of the nursery-rhyme rhymes,
rhythms & cast––cats, rats, lambs, birds (being eaten,
if not in pies, at least “in light sauces”[B&C], or
hopping about “unsure…Is it allowed to/be sexual in the
street?”[OLT]). The origins of nursery rhymes themselves
were in the violence of the adult underworld––the Ring
Around the Rosey/ London Bridges Falling Down death knell
of the Black Plague, the various political machinations
satirized in child chants (Humpty Dumpty, etc.). There is
an impossible nostalgia for the songs of innocence
acknowledged in Newman’s songs of experience.
As in a dream where the dreamer is represented in each of
its elements, Newman’s identifications of the human float
among the animal/ vegetable/ mineral and the four or five
elements. When she writes:
You could be a star/You could be someone
…
already in the big sky travelers
are floating lights
each with a window asking
is this it?
––[WP]
the reference to fame seems only secondary or tertiary to a
more elemental, literal, aerial reference. “Give us that
perfectly/eluding all and earth bird/talent” [WP]. An earth
bird is Icarus or a pigeon, not a gift of the gods (“a
star”)––despite the prayer––but something riskier or more
plodding.
Here are her risky, shifting borderlands:
to divide?/No, devour
…
what’s a window––/which side?
…
Surface as absolute limit/of inside, lacking
…
Nearing/distance/person having nothing to do with place
––[WP]
One part want/ one part memory
all of it a loan
Her desire ingests the image
where it once was so complete
…
Who am I then he asks
as though he’d recognize himself
…
I only pretended to climax when I did she says
as though just now introducing herself
And all along I envied your pleasure, he tells her
See then how we resemble each other?
Moving deeper into debt with reader she fears there’ll have
to be some kind of justification explosion to get out
…
hunter and hunted
trading coats every hundred feet or so until they both must
die or together live
––[OLT]
The danger, the desire, the devouring, the defiance, are in
the word, the mouth, the tongue:
Licking around outside/the bloody sack wants in–– [WP]
Lips have a blood source/tongue licks and again/I am
hungry, so hungry [End]
This wine illusion of oneness/tongued to death [WP]
Two look out of the word/kisses,/ one shut/ the other/–Am I
dying? [End]
He warns: Lick life gently behind its ear so as not to
be/noticed/She inserts her tongue in his and blows [OLT]
Animal, vegetable, mineral ? is only the first of twenty
questions. To continue the game:
2. Have you ever gutted a fish and found eggs inside the
dead white belly?
3. How do we know when we can’t go deeper?
4. What color will your dress be? [BF]
5. Am I sleeping?
6. Tell me, who wrote it––But first,/how may I get out?
7. Is the only egress/indifference?[Tristis: the boy]
8. Where is Place?
9. Missed it?
10. Am I dying?
11. And then? [End]
12. As if to evaporate rubies into chaos?
13. Couldn’t we go on climbing into infinity like lambs
quaintly passing time?
14. I mean if only I were this whole lake myself
staring––then what?
15. Who is awake to feel alarm…[OLT]
16. Is there money for this?
17. What is it you came for?
18. Tell us please…what is personal? [Please]
19. Are we almost there?
20. why passion, why pear? [WP]
NOTES
“Who Wants What Edge” is from “Whose Bull Her Blind Hat”
(ROOMS, Spring 1996)
BF: The Blood Flower (Em Press)
OLT: Of Later Things Yet To Happen (Meow Press)
WP: Why Pear? (Em Press)