Fugue Figure , livre ebook

FUGUE FIGURE
WICK POETRY FIRST BOOK SERIES DAVID HASSLER, EDITOR  
The Local World by Mira Rosenthal Maggie Anderson, Judge
Wet by Carolyn Creedon Edward Hirsch, Judge
The Dead Eat Everything by Michael Mlekoday Dorianne Laux, Judge
The Spectral Wilderness by Oliver Bendorf Mark Doty, Judge
Translation by Matthew Minicucci Jane Hirshfield, Judge
hover over her by Leah Poole Osowski Adrian Matejka, Judge
Even Years by Christine Gosnay Angie Estes, Judge
Fugue Figure by Michael McKee Green Khaled Mattawa, Judge
MAGGIE ANDERSON, EDITOR EMERITA
 
Already the World by Victoria Redel Gerald Stern, Judge
Likely by Lisa Coffman Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Judge
Intended Place by Rosemary Willey Yusef Komunyakaa, Judge
The Apprentice of Fever by Richard Tayson Marilyn Hacker, Judge
Beyond the Velvet Curtain by Karen Kovacik Henry Taylor, Judge
The Gospel of Barbecue by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Lucille Clifton, Judge
Paper Cathedrals by Morri Creech Li-Young Lee, Judge
Back Through Interruption by Kate Northrop Lynn Emanuel, Judge
The Drowned Girl by Eve Alexandra C. K. Williams, Judge
Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia by Lee Peterson Jean Valentine, Judge
Trying to Speak by Anele Rubin Philip Levine, Judge
Intaglio by Ariana-Sophia M. Kartsonis Eleanor Wilner, Judge
Constituents of Matter by Anna Leahy Alberto Rios, Judge
Far from Algiers by Djelloul Marbrook Toi Derricotte, Judge
The Infirmary by Edward Micus Stephen Dunn, Judge
Visible Heavens by Joanna Solfrian Naomi Shihab Nye, Judge
Fugue Figure
Poems by
Michael McKee Green

The Kent State University Press
Kent, Ohio
© 2018 by Michael McKee Green
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2018007992
ISBN 978-1-60635-356-1
Manufactured in the United States of America
The Wick Poetry Series is sponsored by the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Center and the Department of English at Kent State University.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Green, Michael McKee, 1994- author.
Title: Fugue figure : poems / by Michael McKee Green.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, 2018. | Series: Wick poetry first book series
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007992 | ISBN 9781606353561 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3607.R435 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007992
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for my mother; for the intersections
CONTENTS
Foreword by Khaled Mattawa
Acknowledgments
With Concave Heads
Family Portrait (2011)
The Black Triptychs
Family Portrait (2001)
Blue Portrait
Family Portrait (1991)
The Fold
FOREWORD BY KHALED MATTAWA
A devastating set of circumstances lies at the center Michael McKee Green’s remarkable book of poetry, Fugue Figure . We learn of an accident that occurred to the speaker, and we learn that the speaker’s mother also suffered a similar accident, and that both resulted in brain damage. This narrative hook is not introduced to us in the beginning, and the book does not proceed to a plot out the sequence of events. Clearly our poet wants to do something else with the story, or is compelled to do so—something more beautiful and more ambitious. Something transcendent, I might add.
The result is a poised rendering, layered and complex. This is what makes Fugue Figure such a marvelous and courageous debut. Just looking at the first page, we are offered a challenge to our ordinary reading habits and expectations, one that is worthy of the book’s daunting subject matter: The flora The flooring that was that was born boarded in this thin brief so briefly there when the fire gave a weather weathered look          I unfold and drop      I watch the air’s torpor
How do we read this text? Do we go down the left side column—“The flora / that was / born / in this / brief / weather”—and then the right—“The flooring / that was / boarded / thin / so briefly there when the fire gave a / weathered look”? If we look at both columns, we sense that the couplet “I unfold and drop / I watch the air’s torpor” is a meeting point. So how do we get there? Which column/poem do we read first?
Very likely our eyes will not stay in one place. We’ll go down a line or two, then the gravitational pull of the left column will pull us across the page, and down again and up again, and across again. We will read, reread, unread multiple times. In the case of the passage above, we’ll probably read our way to finding what makes the ending couplet most satisfying. The challenges that Green poses for us turn into options, and our reading becomes composition.
I should note that the divided page is not the only technique employed in this ingenious little book. As we read on, we’ll encounter lines that slash across the text as if the page had been ripped apart and reattached, or as if two separate texts are brought together. The vertical middle line gives way a third of the way through the book and is replaced by bent lines staggering under the task of dividing words that wish to join each other in multiple combinations. In “The Black Triptychs” a rectangular box divides the lines and stanzas. Is it a ditch or a moat, an elongated grave? Later on, we encounter a triptych column of stanzas, and our eyes begin to hopscotch between them.
The poems in “Blue Portrait” struggle with a box that frames them. Boxes and horizontal lines inside them begin to arrange words in an order that we inevitably defy. “The Fold” brings us stanzas spaced around the page, perhaps spoken by voices that have become distant or that recall events and images no thread can tie together. By then, the book has taught us to create our own poetics of lyrical space, where, as Maurice Blanchard says, “it is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality,” or to let the parts of the story arrive as they may, in parts more evocative than the whole that they could make, and with results that exceed their origins and original intent.
We can perhaps understand Green’s choice of compositional style as a way in which form responds to content. We have two people who have suffered from the same trauma, a mother and a son, hence the multiple columns and perspectives. The nature of the accidents, brain trauma, with its perceptual and cognitive impairments, is perhaps replicated in the blank gaps and in the nonlinearity of the rendering: a divided line to separate the mother’s trauma from the son’s, or two lines of narrative running alongside each other to emphasize their similarities, as well as other geometrical shapes that speak to the content’s fragmented nature.
Such configurations of mimesis and verisimilitude can perhaps be useful ways to read Fugue Figure . But as the title indicates, we are reading (or listening to) a musical composition where multiple variations on a melody are repeated and reiterated, entering and exiting in counterpoint and harmony to make a single interwoven work. The importance of the “fugue” is not that we read about two parallel narratives and sensibilities and variations on them. Rather, it’s in the poet’s desire to compose a musical, or lyrical response, not a narrative one. He wants to sing, vocalize, groan, and hum, not to tell a story. And we have to take him for his word.
Furthermore, our poet is not writing in the style of poets but in the manner of painters he admires. Here we encounter poems after (or in the manner of) several modern masters: Euan Uglow, whose method of portraiture is exact but also subjective in the way it places us within the process of composition; Eva Hesse, whose abstract expressionist works rebel against painting and even sculpture; Francis Bacon, whose works are masterpieces of grotesque portraiture and distortion; Genevieve Figgis, whose portraiture is blurred and haunting; Frank Auerbach, whose style features thick paint and vertical and perpendicular lines that cut across faces and landscapes; and Howard Hodgkin, whose seemingly obsessive geometrical shapes defy and overtake the frames containing them. Green takes these painterly inspirations to heart and paints his pain, grief, and perplexity, moved by their style and their dedication to powerful expression and mystery.
These painters’ works also help us understand the “figure” behind the book’s title. At once spectral and intimate, the figure appears when the accident is mentioned; he also becomes the speaker’s mother:

you, Figure,
have lost your voice
In you, even the language
of eyes is lost,
your glass box of
body I want so badly
to be a chest
of toys
A source of “infecting violence,” the figure taunts the speaker and “waves … with his keys.” Unwilling to be culpable, he escapes being portrayed. Nonetheless he occupies “the place between” the speaker’s figure and his body, and “Is always close / Is always closing in.” The phrase “figure” also becomes a verb that reverberates within the book, indicative of the speaker’s sense of doom or “curse,” and also “a figuration” of death that he “glow[s] of.”
These painterly approaches alongside the structure of the fugue guide the compositional process of this book. But the poet’s choice of an open text has an ethical component as well. The accidental nature of the trauma that the speaker and his mother experienced is so unexplainable and philosophically jarring in its unfairness that it can be rendered meaningless. There is simply no recourse, divine or secular, to bring vengeance or justice. And in terms of narrative, there is no known closure or point toward which the text, or the experience, can direct its energy. What remains is the process of making meaning, and it is our fortune as readers that Green ends up finding multiple mechanisms for creating it, while also questioning what is meaningful or what can be meaningful.
These mechanisms that invite multiple readings of the speaker’s experiences and impressions become op