Opening the Camp
Kenneth Lee
2019
ISBN 978-1-7923-0063-9
$10: available from Harvard Book Store (https://shop.harvard.com/opening-camp-kenneth-lee)
Reviewed by David P. Miller
If a person has the good fortune to reach older age in
decent health, more or less stable circumstances, and of sound mind – and yes,
that’s a lot of ifs – it’s possible to develop a double consciousness about
your life. You can look at its decades as a phenomenon, a strange occurrence
not taken for granted, a curious tale about a person who happens to have your
name, face, and Social Security number. This isn’t only the province of aging,
of course. Back around 1980, David Byrne put it memorably in the Talking Heads
song “Once in a Lifetime”: “And you may find yourself in a beautiful house /
With a beautiful wife / And you may ask yourself, well /How did I get here? …
You may ask yourself / Where does that highway go to? /And you may ask yourself
/ Am I right? Am I wrong? /And you may say to yourself / ‘My God! What have I
done?’ ’’ I wonder what he would write about this now, forty years later.
Kenneth Lee’s poems often show an acute sense of amazement,
sometimes bemusement, regarding the fact of his life. I find that his approach
to autobiography evokes my own personal incredulity. Let’s spend time on
“Memoro Ergo Sum.” The title riffs off Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum,” often
translated as “I think therefore I am.” Lee substitutes memory for reasoning,
suggesting that one’s identity is more deeply rooted in what one remembers. The
first stanza features his characteristic specificity of description, in his
treatment of the streetlight, unusual perception of the snow’s color, and its
vanishing intensified by simple repetition of “disappear”:
Black snowflakes, backlit by the
streetlamp,
drift across its yellow megaphone
as I stand on the corner of Palmer
and Griggs
looking up at them as they
disappear
and disappear into the blackness
around me,
age six, late winter of
forty-seven.
So far, a simple, nostalgic picture, immediately complicated
in the next stanza. The snows of 1947 weren’t evoked by wintertime in later
life, but by the poet’s double in an anomalous moment:
Except that it’s summer of 2017
and I, on the self-annihilating
point
of the present, trolling in its
wake,
have hooked a snow-filled interlude
entered that night by my recorder
standing with his notebook beside
me.
Notice the density of this. The instant of recollection
disappears as soon as it arises, “self-annihilating.” And yet there it is: a disappearing
mental event, in a summer seventy years removed, evokes black snowflakes in
street light, and the poet’s double-consciousness manages to snag it. Who is
the “recorder?” The final stanza says it’s like Samuel Johnson’s constant companion
and biographer:
My Boswell, with his instinct for
the highlights,
to document my growing
apprehension,
that life was real and I’d been
placed inside it.
The “growing apprehension” is the six-year-old’s, becoming
aware of his own awareness. His Boswell, by his side since childhood, made sure
even then that this sensation – black snowflakes in a megaphone of streetlight
– will be permanent in the memory bank, to surface who knows when, for who
knows what reason.
It can be sobering, even frightening, to consider that every
aspect of your present life exists only because of every specific thing that previously
occurred. This means an infinitude of forking paths past. Never mind “the” road
not taken: it’s more like a four-dimensional universe of disappeared paths
multiplying at every instant. And so we have “What Never Happened”. It seems
that his parents lost the chance to put money down on a house, and so “we grew
up in River Vale, not River Edge.” Against the too-similar neighborhood names,
Lee concisely imagines the shape of an alternative past, shaped by “all the
kids who went to high school there”:
whom I never fell in love with,
never married
to father kids who never existed
with,
or become old friends I’m out of
touch with.
I lived my life, grew old, and
never missed them.
Of course, non-events only exist because actual events did happen.
In retrospect, these seem so inevitable that one can make “The Case Against
Free Will.” Here Lee casts his memory back across a varied set of happenings: a
risky walk home by himself at six years, an expensive auto repair estimate, and
his marriage proposal, concluding “I don’t remember choosing to be
naughty, / electing to accept that estimate, / or opting to
commit myself forever.” The poem “Pleasing God” unpacks his life’s stages using
a different framework. Lee’s awakening into art and matters of the spirit was delayed
by the command to obey a parched idea of God:
the gospel drilled in by those
jack-hammer nuns
that anything painfully gained
pleases God
caused me to dismiss English, Music
and Art
as pleasure gods, unworthy of my
worship.
As a college student, he “filled [his] empty attic” with
engineering study. But the repressed returns. He fell into poetry near “the age
of poor Shelley’s last birthday,” music at “the age that took Mozart away,” art
at an age “approaching the one that stole Rembrandt.” He concludes with the
ironic reflection that God required engineering “so I’d cram my left brain to
appease Him / that my right might remain a pure virgin / until she was primed
to be ravished” as he achieved the ages at which those artists disappeared.
Still, his years of college cramming are given music and meter:
I analyzed the water weight of
salt,
I gauged the shear and tensile
strengths of steel,
the time it took glass ingots to
anneal.
Lee’s capacity for close and fresh description has been
noted. Although this is hardly the exclusive province of age, if sharp
perception endures, experience itself may become more precious. Opening the
Camp’s penultimate poem, “Shades of Gray,” is a brief, exquisite essay in
re-learning to see. The speaker views a range of mountains on the morning after
a rainy night, realizing that each one “represents [a] sovereign state of
grayness: / ashen, smoky, pearly,
leaden, iron, / all fringed with filmy evanescent tassels, / and here and there perceptible between, / a
streak of iridescent green, a blush of blue.” It’s a cue to this reader, at
least, not to let the title phrase simply rest as a cliché for relative
morality.
In “Pleasing God,” Lee tells about being cracked open to the
arts; ekphrastic poems bring his powers of observation into this realm. “Clash
of the Great Powers,” a title hinting at the grandiose, ironically frames two concise
quatrains. It approaches the puzzle of contrasting civilizations by considering
two artworks. An outdoor work by the Japanese-American sculptor Noguchi, a
“great grey mass of twisted stone,” allows “infinite replies to light by form” as
viewers have the freedom to experience it from different angles. In stark contrast,
the same viewers, in front of Titian altarpiece “set fixed above / a grand
Venetian altar” are “forced to view / the same magnificence from every angle.”
The narrow response compelled by an authoritarian context is reflected in its slighter
description: there is simply less to say. Among other poems devoted to music
and art, “Of Art, Of Craft” responds to an Eva Hesse exhibit at the Museum of
Modern Art. Here it is, complete:
Of wool, of rope, of wavy plastic
tubes:
of simple and of sparse and yet so
strong.
How are they not like a boat in a
bottle
or a glued and beveled solid walnut
table?
The question is doing a lot of work. It invites a close
comparison of Hesse’s pioneering and controversial work, using perishable
materials and labeled-feminine processes, with traditionally labeled-masculine
crafts. At the same time, as Hesse’s work has been established in the realm of
art, what does that suggest about other forms of making not given that status?
(And kudos to Lee, in any case, for giving Eva Hesse, who died far too early at
34, a place in this book.)
There’s evidence, throughout Opening the Camp, of
Lee’s sensitivity to the slightest events and simplest images as portents of
far greater things. “Scavenging My Earliest Memories” provides insight into
memory’s its origin in early consciousness, linking concrete images – “Brown
chickens on a lawn beside a barn, / white dunes along a shore seen from a car” –
and the mature reflection that, with these, “agency sought entrance to
awareness.” At the stage where images first imprint and persist, the child’s
sense of self as a separate being with a history takes form: “a rock-rimmed
goldfish pond, / a tiny stucco house beside a well / precipitates from blankness
into time.” Personal time begins with recoverable awareness. (My own sense of
myself as an individual person began with self-aware fascination with gold
Christmas ornaments shining in a window.) This original self-consciousness may,
mysteriously, reappear in moments outside any logic, as we see in “Still
Going,” the collection’s concluding poem. On a September evening in the
Adirondacks (the transition to autumn pictured as summer “pulling up a
Caribbean blanket”), Lee watches Orion sink below the horizon, then turns to go
inside. “Then, as I straighten and turn for the door, / I’m greeted by the
basic core of me.” And what is this? Not the older adult occupied with present
concerns and past regrets:
No, it was the one, untouched since
its inception,
by memory, anxiety, or age;
the one that first congealed when I
was three
who comes unbidden intermittently,
to bring me the good news that he’s
still going.
The great good fortune of Kenneth Lee’s poetry expresses the
anxieties of impermanence and time (with its terminal effect on each of us),
simultaneous with joy in the present and often in recollection. This balance is
not given to everyone who arrives at a later stage of life. It is
rediscoverable at the most ordinary of moments. A final example will be the
simple, formally elegant “Smoke Break in the Courtyard,” in its entirety:
Meanwhile mid-March restokes the
coming fire.
And I note that since my morning
smoke
a crocus shaft has thrust its
fervent bill
outside earth’s startled shell in
one sharp stroke.
But, where within a crocus lies its
will –
how can a gristly bulb invoke
desire?
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