The Eternal Present of Joan Houlihan’s Us Cycle, Ay the Sequel
by Michael Todd Steffen
Joan Houlihan’s previous book, The Us, named a 2009
must-read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, concluded its narrative
sequence on a note of irresolution, with its protagonist Ay wounded by an act
of malice and, in recovery, getting his first glimpse of a vision of the other
world, “ours father come as never killed, as tall/and with a look that bathed
me warm” p. 63), leaving the possibility of, if not suggesting, more to come.
Now, five years later, the poet has brought out the
sequel. Released by Tupelo Press, bearing the
protagonist’s name as title, Ay (ISBN 978-1-936797-41-7) continues
the narrative of the young survivor’s recovery, restitution and encounter with
the other world, his reconciliation with misfortune and with his assailant,
greb, another member of the tribe called the us.
As in The Us, the narrative of Ay is defined
and carried by the headings of its 5 parts. (I. Wherein Ay recovers his speech
& mobility & is treated as a god, II. Wherein Ay leaves the us &
meets the dead…)
Portraying a people in their primitive life as hunters and
gatherers, in times out of mind, the individual poems work at the counterfeit
of primitive expression, in a language conspicuously of Houlihan the poet’s
forging, keen in elementary perception of basic phenomena, seasons, plants,
animals and birds, night and day, sea and land, in a language stripped almost
entirely of concept and abstraction, of Latin or Greek derivatives or
terminology:
SUMMER
RIPE in the ground, deer fled
red-gold
in the wood. Sticks put sharp
in the
side bled the trail.
For
antlers the us downed the dying
day-long
they would build
what must
be built by digging down.
As day
burnt low the tinder piles were tossed.
Hemp
stalk held above, one took from a tall
and
torched them all to rising. In the wood, a deer,
head
bowed, showed its blood spots brightening.
(p. 6)
In light of the rudimentary and partial or fragmented
presentation of the separate poems, the part headings, an essential map for
readers, could almost be read as scholarly addenda, like indications in a
reprint of a Sioux Indian hide painting or a hunt sequence from a cave at
Lascaux. (They remind me of the Latin captions describing the scenes and action
in the Bayeux Tapestry depicting William of Normandy’s conquest at Hastings:
UBI HAROLD SACRAMENTIUM FECIT WILLELMO DUCI.)
The immediate effect of the language used in The Us
and Ay is jarring, puzzling, as risky and fragile in its emotional
venture as it is alluring, like a riddle, for its difficulty and resistance,
the abruptness of the violence it depicts and its thoroughly physical appeal.
The idiom, however, is generously sustained for over 60 pages in each book, and
readers as generous with the suspension of their disbelief will be rewarded
with pleasure and many insights, among them the convincing continuity between
the poet’s subject and its tailored language. The expectations proposed at the
onset of the work are fulfilled in its working out. Like Auden using old
English alliterative prosody in The Age of Anxiety, Houlihan asserts
herself in these books as a smith of language, plyer of medium. Readers who
tune into this will marvel at both her rigor and liberty.
Yet far from being an exercise or demonstration of
linguistic management and invention, Houlihan’s narrative resonates
substantially with potential concerns of our society today. The story of the us
and Ay apparently is set in a pre-historical age, apparently deep deep in the
past, before Christianity (hence the absence of Latinate vocabulary), when
stone sun temples like the one at Stonehenge were being built:
The us
pry stone from stone,
raise a
wall with cracks and watch
how
father makes a shape of sun between. (p.
9)
To leave the reader’s curiosity whetted, I’ll limit myself
to saying that transposing her story to an a-historical time allows the poet
creative space to comment about society without risking identification with any
specific persons of her time and place. That is partly why Shakespeare liked to
situate his stories in Venice or Denmark or pre-Christian Scotland. Maybe
another, more profound motivation for the narrative’s pre-historical setting stems
from a concern with permanent human nature. Its central tragedy identifies with
the story of Cain and Abel, and though of such a primitive region of our
psyche, to this day it continues to be a major source of parental woe and daily
news.
In Burnt Norton
T.S. Eliot says, “If all time is eternally present/All time is eternally
unredeemable.” Rather than seeing the narrative of The Us and Ay in some
remote, long-forgotten past, being that a contemporary poet has placed the
story before us, presently, we do and in a sense can only understand it as
taking place in the eternal present, not the cultural or historical present, as
the poet has omitted these from the poems. Seamus Heaney used the same strategy
in his poems on the primitive bog corpses and the Vikings who ruled Dublin in
the dark past. Heaney did this to speak covertly or differently about the
political and religious troubles of Ireland in the 1970s, in terms of ancient
ritualistic violence whose origins far preceded differences between Catholics and
Protestants.
Radical portrayals of a subject, psychedelic air-brush
portraits of Marilyn Monroe or a hunter-gatherer stone-age narrative of homo
sapiens, reveal that subject for its subtler, more hidden, otherwise imperceptible
characteristics. The primitive approach Houlihan uses to talk about them
underscores a timelessness about her characters and about human nature. It is a
nature that may yet have the chance to surprise us by outlasting our
civilization and its wonders of science and technology. We may one day be
tasked with surviving our advances’ breaking point as well. Glimpses of the
future, near or distant, in many of our minds today include survivalist
scenarios on a planet ravaged, unplugged and bewildered.
In this context, it has been wondered if Joan Houlihan’s
poems are taking place in a post-historical
setting, in a recurrent future rather than the once-and-forever past.
In the first poem of Ay, longing for comfort and
thinking of g’wen, his mother dead early in The Us, the young survivor speculates
about the mother’s resurrection in images that are at once archeological and
scientifically very advanced, suggestive of DNA research and engineering, with
a nod at Steven Spielberg:
WHO KILLS
the past
knows it
is buried
in the
same air Ay breathe.
Only a
hair is needed to keep you, mother.
Only a
bit of bone…
Giving us all that is needed to re-imagine ourselves in
what Martin Heidegger terms the “throwness” of being, our being cast into a
world, however evolved, advanced and equipped it may seem, these narratives set
us precisely in the jaws of this world, where our survival and witness toe the
line, cross that line and fall, have to get up and walk again.
In your and my English, yet as you’ve never encountered it
before, Joan Houlihan’s Ay reads with the elements of great poetry, with
an immediate simple if disconcerting charm haunted by profound resonance.
