Sound/Chest by Amish Trivedi
Coven Press, 2015
82 pages – Coven Press / Amazon
What mystery is a poet best suited to investigate? One answer is, “When you don’t need a solution,” when the mystery must remain. That’s not a particularly satisfying answer to the layperson though, not in this economy. These days, a new office job is more likely to birth a thick business card with a vague title that implies specific results. “Senior Strategist of Human Solutions” embossed in new font type next to your name as if it’s embarrassed of being asked, “So what is it that you do, anyway?” That’s life these days in an economy where everything can be specified and quantified and strategized, and poetry and mystery are not permitted to remain.
In Sound/Chest, Amish Trivedi dares to burst right through the specificity that language can imply, in order to glimpse at signifier and signified together, wholesale. Amplified as it is with historical fact, voice, and resistance, this kind of poetry is impossible to gloss over at your office job (Lord knows I’ve tried and failed). It’s poetry about the abandonment of an organizational system of symbols lost and found in the basement, and lost again, and I mean that quite literally.
“Poet as librarian” may not have the credit-card-ready aloofness as “Strategist of Human Solutions,” but it does imply a hell of a lot of writerly administration and a particular rigor. Librarians, after all, are a writer’s friend. Trivedi, in real life, came across an abandoned card catalog in the bowels of the University of Iowa library, a discarded cabinet with pairs of words printed on labels on each of the drawers along with a four-digit number. He then began to conceive of what these words could possibly mean together. He explains in the book’s afterword (stylized as “After/Word”):
[A] librarian’s best guess is that [the catalog] was used for a custom filmstrip collection. What the words and numbers are in relation to has been lost. The filmstrip, though, is that archaic bit of grade school technology that required the teacher to assign a student to turn a knob when the supplemental audio urged her to do so, usually through the use of an annoying beep that caused the inattentive turner to startle and flip the knob quickly but always too late.
So the investigation begins, he tells us. Trivedi’s goal is to to “create a relationship” between the words and also the numbers (which consistently resemble years from both the 17th and 18th centuries). Thus, by “manufacturing” the relationships of the words on the forgotten catalog (i.e. creating a poem based on these words), levity can be restored to these symbols conquered by history.
Trivedi assures that due to the loss of the catalog sometime during the floods in that area in the summer of 2008, this book remains the only record of it whatsoever. This is the unique occasion for Sound/Chest.
The poems themselves certainly seem to take on the task of asserting life over erosion or political censorship, whether or not one skips to the afterword before completing the collection. I myself could not wait to read the afterword. “After so many feet / of rising water, / what isn’t tied up // in resistance / is tied up / in facts …” (“CLUSTERED/BRAIN 1728”). The rising water is both a physical burying of history and also a virtual divider between the ruling and the rebel. But aside from that relatively easy conclusion, the concern of these poems seems far scarier than that – it’s as if the organizing principles of mankind (including time and definitely war) are always behind the door of everything, and they have been diligent in their clearing of human debris. It’s because this project is most certainly tied to a real physical discarded catalog that its surrealistic imagery and matter-of-fact voice embody such a poised, powerful series of fears. It’s poetry about a real ghost. The persistence of this feeling of fear is performed by the self-aware voice in all of this and, survived by its wit, it can speak for the past as if it’s present.
This is the bread-basket
of print generation: the dots
are specs of motion. Every
copy I’ve seen reminds me
of a long about-face
in which I’ve seen a car
become a puncture of space. I’ve
lost a lot of blood here and
there up on the wall, but
the floors are bare
and brushed. If I
had another
set of lungs, I wouldn’t
breathe with these
anymore.
(“DOOR/TWO-FACED 1702”)
As promised in that afterword, the titles are extremely important to this collection. The sheer athleticism that Trivedi gets out of them is truly affirming to me, both in serial collections and occasional poetry, how titles can complicate a re-reading of a single poem. Some seem to form a compound word or simply an adjective and noun (like “clustered brain”) or verb and direct object (like “study treason”). Other times the titles are ghostly variables and the poem serves as an equation – often the way the meaning was “manufactured” has to be solved. The poem becomes an area under the curve. All of this of course is discovered through the process of reading.
At some point, however, matching the micro-poems of the titles with what the poems say is strenuous (in a good way). One could sit with one poem for quite a long time in this way, working over the poem with the title as cipher.
The use of short lines, surprising enjambment and sudden declarations, which at times work against the grain of the line breaks, creates some convex edges where meaning seems to focus all of a sudden. Or at least that’s what we are pointed toward. The title poem is a great example of all the moves Trivedi is employing.
. . .
. . . All the trouble
you’re in is the
fault of unborn
children who must
be punished. I’ve made up my
mind about
California: this time
I’m rescuing
skin cells. Before,
I was lying: you are the design.
You know the words I use—
these are not them, but
tangential, I’ve been blinded
by alabaster skin
or foils. Another reason
for discretion is anemia.
You talk like a horse
about mollusks and
all the parades quit
due to outpourings
of sunlight.
. . .
It’s one thing to render surrealistic imagery as fact. It’s another matter entirely to render fact as surrealistic imagery. Trivedi’s poems keep this kind of imagery always in this realm of mystery at a break-neck pace. When a poem seems to settle in some kind of more realistic world or lay out its content in a more documentarian fashion, it seems especially odd. “His seat fell / backwards and he was lying / down when they pulled him / out. She claimed his car / was just a dark blur at impact.” Prosaic moments like “she claimed” seem much more curious than they would otherwise be. It’s not readily clear that that was indeed possible. And when a bit of prophesy comes, it blinks through the portals and creases in the forward slash between printed words: “I was told this generation / would be built for the / massacres ahead.”
Something must also be said of the characters acting in these poems. There are many examples of loss, miscommunication between lovers, and also a ton of violence to heap onto the already dark world the poems inhabit. Fear and helplessness are linked with a pursuit of justice – justice for the world at large, yes, but also justice for the truth words could be symbolizing. Justice for the loss of history that is created just by being born into this. A very present sense of loss. “A mantra is a noise / black and nihilistic like / lungs across / the rapid fire / regeneration” (“Read/Further 1683”). Or conversely, if one achieves anything through action, that is itself a miracle and our ways to communicate are forever disrupting it. “Sometimes / we just memorize the things we / want to say so no one / can forgive us” (“Partition/Terror”).
In each individual poem, one by one, the relationships between the words of the catalog give the poems an opportunity to have meaning. So as a record, being such a precise discovery and occasion as it was for for the author, the poems are only backed by an actual disappeared catalog, a (once) physical link to their construction. In reading this collection, I am held abreast of both oblivion and pure creation and it’s extremely unsettling. Both the physical link to the words (the catalog) and whatever the hell the catalog was “truly” made for in the first place are lost, but the poet does not abjure the words’ power due to this doubling of historical obliteration. The poet instead restores them all simply by becoming a reference point beyond time. There is true homage being paid to the words, and this kind of care taken by Trivedi is a relentless and meaningful project. The loss of meaning and violence performed in the voice and imagery is just as obvious – and not unlike OG surrealist poetry, which opened holes in spacetime for the horrors of World War I, the struggle to fit the whole truth of obliteration into a poem is not the job of the poet. Instead, it is the responsibility of the reference librarian pointing us towards the realms of ghosts lost to history and to the flooded basements where we can escape obliteration.
