Becoming the Sound of Bees
By
Marc Vincenz
Ampersand
Books
ISBN:
978-0-9861370-0-6
91
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Over
and beyond the pages of his new collection, Becoming the Sound of the Bees,
Marc Vincenz’s poems swarm, transcending set structures and standard dimensions.
Some pieces align to the right margin. Others crawl down the width of the book,
accommodating elongated lines or spacing anomalies. Never placid, these verses
seem to vibrate out filtered memories and existential queries from a multilayered
cosmic buzz. The vertiginous reader would be well advised to focus on a nearby
item of solidity (try a bookcase) as a necessary counterbalance to this noise
that in harmony becomes silence, a sacred silence.
Stiff,
salt-encrusted nautical images limn and define Marc Vincenz’s opening poem
entitled Transmigration. The poet describes the movement toward rebirth and
hope as a gravitation force conveying feelings and language and flaws. The poet
details the anticipated moment of genesis,
…
scars trace icons
of
a recurring past, crystal heaped
in
ions as fleas creep into our rags
and
rats’ eyes quiver like insect eggs.
Voices
are rigging and sails
that
creak and snap, and through
knots
and cracks above, the light,
finding
little access, ceaselessly bemoans.
And
when we emerge, some of us less
than
half the men we once knew,
in
one blinding flash, as dog greets master,
that
curious light comes running.
Playing
God or poet usually ends poorly. Vincenz in his poem Crank-Handled describes
the unsightly process of creation in mechanized terms. Even those temperaments well
suited to the process mostly fail. Abandoning the fabricated mess often is the
best option. The poet cites the Neolithic Cucuteni culture, who developed a
model of constant destruction and reformation in their densely urban, but
ultimately nomadic, way of life. Vincenz brings his piece to a
Frankenstein-like crescendo in a neat under-the-hood description of reverse
engineering,
Wrench-spinning, you insist nonetheless.
&
not until you strip everything down to cogs, spokes,
sprockets
& springs, exposing that frail skeleton,
a
crude beast of brass. Miffed, stooped, stumped
over
yourself, you discover your own speechlessness.
And
then—course, I’ll give you full credit—you
cough
it up: Nothing ever came from hydrocarbons.
What
is it actually good for, if anything? & as you rid
your
fingers of grease and muck, oily-gluey gunk,
it
sputters & rumbles, moans & coughs &
for
a tremulous moment it’s almost coming alive.
Out
of the empyrean noise the poet in his piece, Yet Another Reincarnation,
channels his muse/medium into being, bringing a certain omniscience to bear
upon the temporal world. Time compresses radically and everyday subsistence
takes a back seat to oracular rantings and ravings. Imaginings generate little
miracles and demand complex preparations for the next iterations of new life. Vincenz
opens the poem with business acumen,
I
pay my soothsayer in hard-boiled eggs, chicken wings,
gristly
claws, livers or gizzards—she believes in the due process
of
tempests, visions of omniscient butterflies. An old woman
scrubbing
floors portends violent crime or racketeering;
finch
in hand, fraud or incest; beetle on the mantelpiece,
ill
health. She snatches invisible lassos from the air, spins dizzy
larks
above my head, everywhere she sees living dead,
centuries
of men on the low road to the country fair, millennia
of
citizens ensnared in menial tasks, plowing, sewing, reaping,
daydreaming;
mostly she knows where lightning will hit,
who
will combust …
I
exist therefore I am, said Jean Paul Sartre famously. In his poem
Weightlessness Vincenz picks up this thought and runs with it. Man acts in the
midst of weather. Outside forces affect man’s acts, sometimes re-enforcing
them, other times deterring them. Yet man must still make decisions, act on
them, and be held responsible. In existential thought the problem of Cartesian
duality does not exist. Vincenz seems to agree with this take. Being is not just the starting point, it is
the point. Even storm-tossed families afflicted with Obsessive Compulsive
Disorder and with daughters run amok are governed by these demonstrable but
effervescent strictures. The poet puts it this way,
It is only in our decisions
that we are important.
It’s
not always about the matriarch, you’d said,
more
often it’s about the habitable zone and what you make of it,
how
primitive life forms
react
to sunlight,
how
dinosaurs eventually rise
from
single cells,
how
creatures like us
learn
to take
wind,
water, fire, and earth
shake
and stir, and recreate life in test tubes.
Desires
drive Vincenz’s protagonist, Ivan, onward. His protagonist’s muse or dead wife
seems just out a reach. Her siren song transfigures man into boy again, bestows
the youthfulness of wonder. She understands the sacred universal drone—the
eternal beehive. Wasps and wild dogs momentarily interrupt their quest, but
only momentarily. Other natural organisms wave them on. The poet mines his
memory for queries and clues,
…
the thrushling flutters on, dangles, bounces, wavering on twigs,
it’s
then suddenly I realize, as we emerge from the undergrowth
sweating
and dripping, scratched through our faces that Ivan, no
Buddhist,
believes her to be the reincarnated spirit of his wife.
He
asked me once: Did you eat your way into this life, like me?
Did you devour your share of the
proceeds of your well intentions?
Or, did you live for something more like
love or affections?
Those
were the days he still made sense, now mostly little
matters,
not the grass, nor the sky, there is no stirring
or
yearning, & yet, with nothing left there was still more,
like
the thrush, like the sunlight on ice, like the industry of bees.
A cache
of caught sunlight in the realm of Being and Nothingness can make all the
difference. Vincenz’s richly illuminated visions and commanding oracular verses
in this momentous collection do just that.
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