ekleksographia

C.J. Martin
WIW?3: Hold me tight. Make me happy 
Fort Collins, Colorado: Delete Press, 2009. 
In English.

 Following Lo, Bittern (Atticus/Finch, 2008) and City (Vigilance, 2007) C. J. Martin’s third book, WIW?3: Hold me tight. Make me happy, speaks with equal quantities of intensity, resolution, and perplexity. The first installment of this poem, published in Damn the Caesars vol. IV, introduces the many threads which continue to knot, tangle, and become descriptively solid in WIW3?. Indeed, this may be Martin’s finest writing yet. With characteristic use of compression and distension, Martin employs a three-line stanza and makes frequent and playful use of ampersands, dashes and slash marks in order to maximize the doubling and tripling of semantic meaning. So too, WIW3? speaks simultaneously on two discursive registers; language is both lyric, private, emotive, and also bureaucratic, public, and impersonal. The outside is always inside, or as de Certeau would tell us, we are always foreigners to our own speech, unable to get out, yet unable to get in: 

Bystanders will go away and say
            (youth as yet, burdening sense):
            Disorder against them, even in marriage. 

The bystander who studies the scene, pronounces her judgment, and "goes away." She becomes part of the fleeting Baudelairian moment of encounter. Bystander and narrative I voice are all wrapped into the disorder and burden of complex emotional attachments. That is to say, modernity’s crowd, so often depicted as faceless and anonymous, is revealed to be more solid than shadow. By complex social bonds, social institutions like marriage––our best attempts at ordering affection––have become weighted, a burden or mantle to be taken on with joy and measure. In a similar moment of double-registered language, the "I" voice cuts through, declaring,

Whom I young firmament sea rose
            behind where professional sea figures 

The overtones here could send the reader to H.D. or George Oppen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis or Charles Olson––all of whom would enrich and complicate an already tonal and complex architecture, but WIW3? tackles more than intertextuality.

The accumulated interests in WIW3? trace a persistent and largely unacknowledged development in our emotional lives and aesthetic experience, namely the elevation of anxiety in Western thought and Western art. Full of surfaces, populated with many voices, no single subject-position dominates. Instead, a series of screens or nets allow entanglements between personal private languages of experience to abut with institutional and regimented scenes of labor. Poem "67/70" illustrates this tension:

We the really infant of
            Renew that perfection (more
            work) & still one

The stanza begins with an attempt to gather experience and express newness and singularity: "We the really infant of." But repetition and accumulation, so intrinsic to capitalist logic and modernity, break the articulation. The imperative "Renew that perfection (more / work) & still one" asks an impossible task––to renew perfection and, beyond that, to make "more," through work. The enjambment between lines two and three create end-terms that work in direct contrast to one another ("more" and "one"). Traditionally end rhyme often yokes unlike terms through similar sonic or visual patterns. Therefore the "more"/ "one" non-rhyme participates in prosodic traditions, but acknowledges the unbridgeable distance between different historical and social contexts of production. This poem is produced in a world in which labor is riven with unnamed anxiety, with attraction to and repulsion from the singular and the multiple.

In WIW3? material object and poetic content mesh beautifully with one another. The 5X7 page size suits the poem’s three line stanzas and intermittent prose poem format, neither dissolving the text into giant swathes of white space, nor raising the volume, as it were, beyond the articulation’s natural tempers. Even the serif-free letter-pressed title is indication of the same rigor of beauty and attention to concept that propels WIW3?.

WIW3? foregrounds the failure of catharsis, but simultaneously resists its initial thesis. Mesmerizingly beautiful is the contrast between, the immediacy of the singular lyric voice and modernity’s mechanized and routinized formations of the person. To illustrate this push and pull effect, take a look at the initial stanza of WIW3?:

midst that mossiness I on elm-tree from elm-tree aforesaid
            Pictures of my sonic Manzano
            Gone around, explicated pass, as material land grant 

and compare this to Maximus:

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood
            jewels & miracles, I, Maximus
            a metal hot from boiling water, tell you
            what is a lance, who obeys the figures of
            the present dance