Neighbour Procedure and Cast From Bells

These conceptual poetry collections aren't easy reads, but they're well worth the effort.

There is a perception too often bandied about that conceptual poetry is abstruse. Too difficult. Impossible. Not worth the effort. I hear this from my students and from colleagues, and I’m certain that I’ve said as much myself some years ago. But this sentiment belies a generalized myopia: why ask of poetry what we will not ask of ourselves?

The world is abstruse; it’s chaotic. Discordant images are forced into comprehensibility by the structures and mechanisms of media. In a recent entry on Harriet: The Blog, Kenneth Goldsmith claimed that the average American consumes 100,000 words per day (and reminds us that War and Peace tallies 460,000 words). Though, as Goldsmith cautions, this does not mean we actually read 100,000 words per day, it does mean that much information filters past our eyes in a single 24-hour period. The risk here is obvious: readers simultaneously become desensitized to the influx of information and cease to process the information carefully.

Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure is not an easy book to read, but this has nothing to do with what might, at first glance, appear to be “difficult” poems. Yes, Zolf begins with a poem that is formatted into three columns and comprised of names, phrases, and spaces:

But, as Zolf explains in a coda entitled “Afterthoughts,” this first section of the book is a collection of “numerous print and online sources of testimony, statistics, theory, story, fact, and myth” surrounding Israel-Palestine.

Neighbour Procedure is indebted to a claim made in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Zizek, Santer, Reinhard): “If you do not want to talk about Odradek, Gregor Samsa, and the Muselmann, then shut up about your love for a neighbor.” Odradek and Gregor Samsa are characters from two of Kafka’s short stories (“Cares of a Family Man” and “The Metamorphosis,” respectively). Odradek is an oddly shaped figure whose purpose and origins are unknown; what is clear is the narrator’s fear that Odradek may outlive him. Gregor Samsa is a young man whose life is irrevocably altered when one morning, inexplicably, he wakes up to discover he’s been transformed into a large, disgusting beetle. His family cannot stand the sight of him and cease to treat him as human. Muselmann is the German word for Muslim. It was used in the concentration camps during the Second World War to refer to those inmates who were near death, exuded lassitude and apathy, and suffered from starvation such that they remained prone, in a position that resembled someone at evening prayers. The Muselmann was an abject person.

In other words, if you’re not willing to engage with another, especially someone who exists beyond your field of reference, then don’t claim belief in “family values,” a love of “democracy,” or any other neo-liberal phrases that have been stripped of their meaning.

Neighbour Procedure engages. “Grievable” is a poem that lists names of people who have been killed:

The poem that follows is entitled “Nominal”:

Separately, these two poems are disorienting. Who are these people? What do the numbers mean? But, when reading them in sequence, one poem following in the heels of the other, the reader realizes that the names are connected to the numbers, which are ages. Ma’sud Rajab Muhammad Subuh was 65 years old when he was killed. Zaher Jaber Muhammad al-Majdalawi was 13 years old. Layer this information onto another poem, “Did not participate in hostilities” and you have map:

Neighbour Procedure speaks from an epicenter of crisis and it does so in the most arresting language. Zolf manipulates the obfuscating language of media and government that obscures the individual and, ultimately, renders it indelible and hauntingly present. One finishes the collection with an invective: What kind of neighbour am I? What kind of neighbour can I be?

<a href=" http://mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=2457

" target="_blank">Cast From Bells is Suzanne Hancock’s second collection of poetry (Another Name for Bridge was published by Mansfield Press in 2004). In this newest book, Hancock works her poetry around a conceit forged in fact: in the Second World War, bells across Europe were removed from their bell towers, melted down, and fashioned into munitions. The same bells that call parishioners to worship become the tiny, deadly shards that rip communities and countries apart.

In Neighbour Procedure, the focus shifts from the miniscule to the massive. Hancock’s work, by contrast, is firmly rooted in the lyric tradition. Like the clapper of the bell, the narrative voice swings from the personal to the global and back again. Take, for example, the personification of the bells themselves:

Here, the formatting of the poem mimics the swing of the bells as they shift from music to munitions. The round bellies of clappers are the round bellies of children; the rift between the two images is made palpable by the space that curves away from the firmly left-justified margin. Unsettlingly, as the soldiers march and Europe “turns its ear inward,” the rift in reality is righted and the images pull back together.

In a later poem, the swinging motion of a bell is overlaid onto a strained conversation between a couple:

The same cracks that appear in the earlier bell resurface in the personal life of the speaker. Hancock’s collection draws taut and often surprising connections between the public, the historical, and the intimate. The narrative here is one of things coming apart, and of those things being refashioned. The space between bells and bullets is no further – and no closer – than the space between you and me.