“RECALL WHEN, in Waiting for Godot, Pozzo cracks his whip and commands the man-donkey Lucky to “think.” The abused creature unleashes a torrent of theological collage, his only lines in the play.”
“The desperate proliferation of arch language reminds us (once again) that the established taxonomy of deep truth does not always attach to anything very deep, or to anything at all.”
“The immediate and total ironizing of intellectual labor carries for the reader an anxious recognition: our own efforts are probably better only by degree.”
“The engine of Sarah Schweig’s first collection of poems, Take Nothing With You, is an investment in the act of thinking (and its inherited vocabulary and modes) that holds this tension.”
“Elsewhere, the book deploys such cumbersome locutions as “Freedom,” “The Necessary Meaninglessness,” and “the Arbitrary.” Such words are likely to say both more and less than we mean by using them. We’ve inherited damaged materials.”
“If Dickinson’s capitals intensify (“when the King / Be witnessed – in the Room –”), Schweig’s capitals empty out. The terms become like the statues of venerable men on horseback in the center of public squares: we recognize the self-important pose but can’t quite recall who they were or what they were meant to have done.”
“There’s a wry awareness that we may be trafficking in dead cargo.”
“Few books of poetry so willingly acquiesce to the negative potential of their constituent words as empty signifiers.”
“And yet the words gain something for what they lose, like containers which, by being emptied of contents, diminish in cash value while becoming more variously useful.”
“This is not writing desperate to flee banality; it does not feign a special capacity for feeling nor delude itself that all is radiant and thick with consequence. Schweig instead gleans force from her own ambivalence, from a sense of distance and divested attention.”
“In the spirit of the book’s titular allusion to the Gospel of Luke, we travel light. There’s no grasping at cheap prizes (“Clarity over emotion, remember. Story over sentiment”).”
“This renunciation makes space for surprise.”
“A friend once remarked offhandedly that Schweig, an American woman, can sound in her poems as though she is ventriloquizing a German man. (Fragments of the taxonomic register feel vaguely mitteleuropa Romantic, and inquiry is often directed at acquisition: “Today I will obtain EVIL IN MODERN THOUGHT.”)”
“About the speaker, I imagine someone who has endured a formal philosophical education which has come to feel like a burden, a useless but unshirkable encumbrance. This is someone who seems to have practiced intellectual scales that, once learned, never quite fall out of the hum of consciousness.”
“A kind of understanding remains the thing sought, but there’s a sense that intellectual discrimination is a morally equivocal operation.”
“Her thinking can demand more of language than its architecture easily accommodates.”
“Take the poem “Sehnsucht” (the German word for “longing” or “nostalgia”), which begins to tear through the constituent sounds of its title:
She’s cunt, chest,
cutest, sun-est. She stuns.
He’s thus: He’s tense, he’s uncut, he’s
nuts. He hunts. He shuns, he
cusses, he cuts nets, he cuts hens,
hunts. Tense? Tensest, he cuts
suns. Then, thus: He & She.
Thus, the “us” stunt.”
“Few poets put phonemes to such strenuous work. An easy flight into nonsense or the play of pure sound is denied us — the game is not only sonic but logical. Meaning, or its potential, is always at stake.”
“But meaning is not sought here in experience itself (romantic entanglement, in this case) but in the language that the processing of experience forces on us.”
“In the book’s next poem, “Schweig,” the poet must even consider what to make of her own name — related to the German schweigen, the command “say nothing” or “be silent” — which weighs like a judgment against her vocation (“She’s hush”).”
“Maybe logos knows us before we know it: in the beginning was the word.”
“Schweig’s is not the thinking of the conquistador of knowledge, nor of dispassionate inquiry. It’s the enactment of thinking as working-through, as therapeutic maneuver made below the radars of certainty and world-historical system.”
“Even if the speakers here often seem to have inherited the high diction of Western Thought, their investment is in the teleological program of holding shit together.”
“The emotional polestar of human life in groups is belonging.”
“It’s sought first in a family, then in the village. When the exchanges of dependency work, we gain something like the solid ground from which the adjustments of the “well-adjusted” may be made.”
“¤”
“A self comes to seem like a natural possession. Ease in the presence of others is possible, and possibly joyful. We are capable of love and work.”
“For the array of speakers in Justin Boening’s Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last, something has come fundamentally unstuck in this staid narrative of health.”
“These speakers careen through each placid scene, through every plausible life, knowing what everyone else has been acculturated out of knowing: that civilized life is still life in the wild.”
“So falseness works and love is contingent. The people speaking in these poems, whatever their resource or bravado, don’t recover from this wisdom.”
“The tenable lives of others (everyone has an act) are untenable for them.”
“These voices exist on a Freudian continuum: the child is the father of the man, and the man remains a child a long time. The book is a choral arrangement of one life.”
“The dance of personae is dizzying and obsessive.”
“But we don’t get revved up like this for the sake of pyrotechnic storytelling; the payout is more often in decrescendo. The waves of bad behavior or ego fantasy wash out, and in their quiet wake our speaker finds himself more truly and strange.”
“Boening is capable of a remarkable music of longing, and sometimes a music of the flailing and fantasy that screen for longing.”
“Aside from Kafka, I sense kinship with Mark Levine’s cracked landscapes, Mark Strand’s serene self-effacement, and Lucie Brock-Broido’s extravagant menagerie.”
“Extravagance — it’s worth pausing over, since the book has it in spades — can be a defense, a resistance to the confining fiction we call “what really happens.””
“He (the plural person speaking through these poems) wants to know what he belongs to, other than this rumble of desire, aside from these torsions of unmet need that keep repeating as contemporary experience. But any answer would reduce him, would be smaller than his quest has forced him — allowed him — to become.”
“The book exclusively uses the first-person, but its tales (however imagined or real their sources) are often driven to the pitch of parable.”
“Parables suspend irreconcilable forces in tight forms. We feel the recognition of truth, even as our pretensions to knowledge are undone.”
“This formulation returns us to Schweig, and to a reason we might return to poetry: to have our unwarranted and limiting certitude unwoven, to feel what we might come to know if we were less easily assured about what we knew.”
“Or in Boening’s case: To have our constructions of self shown to be flimsy, revisable fictions composed from need; to fathom an experience of being less moored to conventional sublimation.”
“The title of Boening’s book comes from one of Kafka’s shortest parables; “not on the last day, but on the very last” describes the moment the messiah is fated to arrive. It’s hard to say how “very last” qualifies “last,” except that it makes God feel farther. The messiah is coming, we’re assured, but only after he’s no longer needed. There’s a life to come, but it’s this one. We wait only on ourselves.”
“Brandon Kreitler’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Web Conjunctions, Indiana Review, Eoagh, Sonora Review, and Maggy. His criticism has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Proximity, and Village Voice among others.”