Here is the text:
Jessica
Mayhew reviews
by Michael S.
Begnal
Beginning at the
end of this collection, Michael Begnal notes the poet’s refusal “to fix
ourselves/ in time or ink” (‘Manifesto’), and this would serve just as well as
an epigram to Future Blues. This is a
collection aware of the fragility and harshness of time and language, and a
refusal to be rooted in the stasis of either. Begnal’s poetry is fluid and
immediate, and his use of textual play allows it to slip from being pinned to
the formal.
In ‘Primates,’
Begnal explores the “conception of the word/ HUMAN.” This poem examines a
photograph of a group of chimpanzees, comparing it to an early-morning glimpse
of the self in a mirror, “a face so secretly and fiercely familiar,” which
readers will be able to wryly identify with. However, this poem also goes much
deeper than the “3:10 A.M” stunned and squinting eyes, and the knowing nudges
of aging; the parallels drawn between poem and chimp highlight the “iron light
of sentience,” the harshness of knowledge.
Begnal excels at
finding just the right words to root a sentence. ‘Primates’ opens with the
line, “His eyes intimate knowledge, this chimpanzee,” the deliberate choice of
“intimate” suggesting both an ancestral closeness and the implication of
communication, and from this, the poem works around suggestion. The poet
guesses – the chimp “maybe the poet of his tribe,” and the speaker’s own
“sapience” is “unknown.” This disturbance to the ability of language to express
meaning builds to the final stanza:
tomorrow I will
kill the poachers
/I will murder the colonists
/I will cut down the loggers
/I will exterminate all the brutes
(‘Primates’)
What seemingly
begins as a threatening wish to protect the chimpanzees of the first stanza
begins to splinter, reflected in the use of the forward slashes, building to
the Heart of Darkness climax.
However, in Begnal’s poem there is no Marlow to act as editor and tear off the
postscript. The speaker becomes a Kurtz-like figure, and the violent ambiguity
of “brutes,” leads the reader back to deeper concerns of role of language as
communication.
Darkness and
language surface again in ‘Dithyramb.’ The pattern of the urban/ rural couplets
are broken when:
...I enter the
poem
and am
immediately strong-armed
into a dark
garage
where there are
no shining mirrors,
no strains of
deathless song... (‘Dithyramb’)
The entry of the
speaker disrupts the flow of the poem, and yet seems to begin the dithyramb,
which is a wild hymn to the ancient Greek god Dionysus. Begnal attacks the urge
to define:
they claim they
can define
everyone, that
I’m this or that,
a maker of
cloudy cadence... (‘Dithyramb’)
An urge which he
ultimately defies, setting the poet alone in the urban/rural landscape:
and I’m out
along the leaves,
olive-green
under the
streetlight
lampglow (‘Dithyramb’)
Begnal uses the
juxtaposition of the rural imagery against the streetlights to create a
hallucinogenic rebellion which both harks back to the ancient poetic tradition
and places it firmly in the contemporary.
The theme of the
poet existing outside of the established order is revisited in ‘In an Unknown
City, It Seemed.’ There is a distinct modernist atmosphere to the poem, not in
form but in content. The poet becomes a flâneur-like figure, roaming through a
disorientating city. Temporality is disrupted:
in this part of
the city
were buildings
when you looked
at them closer
were constructed
of Mayan ruins… (‘In an Unknown City, It Seemed’)
This sense of
timeless isolation is shattered when the speaker of the poem encounters another
figure. There is a sense of threat at the end of the poem, when another man
emerges to see the speaker, “like a priest.”
One of the
strong points of this collection is the shift of tone between poems. In ‘The Fluctuations,’ Begnal observes, “death & loss in your twisted black guts
like shit,/ in the stark stochastic scald.” This sits alongside ‘At the Cliff,’
where death/ time sits in contrast, “time wilts and willows,/ residue builds
sweet on the tongue.” Here, the softer assonance gives a much gentler
impression of time ebbing and flowing, rather than the harsh sounds of the
former. Throughout Future Blues,
Begnal consistently compliments the themes of his poems with a studied ear to
the sounds they make, which is apt for a collection at least partly inspired by
music. This attention to the aural is particularly effective in ‘Bettie Page.’
The classic monochromatic pin-up image is created in the third stanza:
black her hair
and pale white
skin,
the classic
black/white
“raven”
“porcelain” (‘Bettie Page’)
The sound
echoing through “black/classic,” and the half-rhyme of “skin/ porcelain” draws
the reader into a poem which centres heavily on the notion of darkness, not
just in colour (or lack of), but also in tone. This builds to the final proper
stanza, in which decay is emphasised through consonance, and the final rhyme
acts as an evocation of the pin-up herself:
and clay
collects in the cracks below the window
and the
furniture begins to show its age –
Bettie Page,
Bettie Page,
Bettie Page (‘Bettie
Page’)
“Sexless” is
scored through in this poem, an ironic nod to the epigram from Bettie Page, “I
had less sex activity those seven years in New York than I had any other time in my life.” Begnal’s
use of typography and textual play works well throughout the collection. In ‘Dead Rabbits,’ he introduces coloured print with the word “red,” emphasising
the visceral nature of the poem. An image of a horn is added to ‘Horn,’ further
breaking the text and bringing a visual element to a poem focusing on sound.
This typographic play could be used more often to bring more of an impact.
Future Blues ends with a ‘Manifesto,’ summing up the poet’s intents and beliefs.
This collection flits between deaths – death of the body, death of language,
death of the self – and in this movement is the escape of expression. In
‘Manifesto,’ Begnal writes, “for death is stasis/ and poetry moves everywhere.”
This collection looks to a mythic past, even as it passes through the present.
In this poem, as in the others, there is a lack of concluding full stops, which
serves to emphasise Future Blues as a
continuous, supple body of poetry.
Jessica Mayhew
is a British poet, and reviews regularly for Eyewear.
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