Succulent Politics
Political Cactus Poems by Jonathan Skinner. Palm Press, 2006. $12. 103 pp. Reviewed by Amy Newlove Schroeder.
"The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work
of the imagination are two different things," Wallace Stevens remarks. "In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the
place of the imagination." As we know, Stevens wrote little, if any,
political poetry; he didn't believe in the efficacy of mixing high art
with the unpleasantness of base atrocity. In this quotation, he points
to the tendency of "real" events to overwhelm the acts of the
imagination, swallowing the delicate insistencies of lyric into a great,
blood-red maw of artless horror. While we may feel frustrated by
Steven's modernist elitism, he points to an undeniable truth: It is
extraordinarily difficult to write good political poetry. The pressure
to adhere to reality, the feeling that one's poem cannot be possibly be
as important as the "facts," can cripple even the most skilled of poets.
Moreover, political poetry all too often tends toward self-righteous
preaching, where the poet adopts the unambiguous position of moral judge
and jury. It is a poetic terrain mined with obstacles, pun intended.
These considerations make Jonathan Skinner's debut
volume seem to be even more a feat: It is an overly political work that
succeeds, for the most part, both as a collection of poems and as a work of
resistance and subversion. Skinner points us in a million directions at
once, which is hardly surprising given that Skinner edits the journal Ecopoetics. Interconnectivity and the threats to such connectivity are some
of Skinner's chief subjects; he alerts us to this in the very first poem:
"an exploding quasar…fills telescopes for less than one second…and falls
with our faces receding / light points, crowding our darkness." We're all in
it together, in other words, we're all illuminated by the light of the same
dying sun.
And what does the light from that sun reveal? Skinner's
quirky humor and light touch rest lightly upon the distressing events he
writes about - war, terrorism, radiation, politics. But do not let the
lightness of tone obscure Skinner's seriousness; like O'Hara, like Koch,
even when this poet appears to be kidding around, he's not really kidding.
One must get past the faint ridiculousness of the title, and see past
Skinner's jocularity to the fact that he does not balk at alluding to or
commenting on some of the most difficult of our modern problems. Skinner,
it seems, would most likely disagree with Steven's notion that the
imagination quails in the face of reality. "[W]hat came over us," he asks, "when the peculiar monstrose
form / reached the White House."
Skinner's mastery is most obvious in the title sequence, the spiny, prickly, beautiful heart
of this collection. Each poem takes for its title the Latin name of a
cactus; the poem is then punningly drawn from or connected to the name and
appearance of that cactus. "Ancistrocactus Crassihamatus," for example,
begins thus: "Hamas then critters / a crass kind of lover." These poems jerk
and bounce from image to idea; they are often hilarious. One of the most
successful examples of this is "Aporocactus Martianus," which asks, in
deadpan tone, "Is the President from Mars?" Elsewhere, in a poem titled "Borzoicactus Nanus," he writes
"a dwarf on a borzoi / stuffs a nan up my
ass."
Some of the "Political Cactus Poems" seem rather
schematic in their shape - they open with a witticism drawn from the title,
and then the poem evolves to a more lyrical, more lovely conclusion. For
example:
our days are long
the sun disappears
behind a fog bank
without your flashy
crimson flowers
One way to read this is in the contrast of man to
nature - human is ugly and funny-awful, and nature is beautiful and
transcendent. However, this may be a bit reductive - particularly in light of
the collection's concluding poems, which seem to point to a more hopeful
prospect for the union of man and plant. "Eriocereus Jusberti" is a kind of
cactus love poem. Skinner writes:
I stroke your yellow
felt-covered aureoles
your dark-brown, radial spine
I take your cuttings
and propagate you
The possibility of love and reproduction - even if it is
difficult and painful - means the possibility that the world will not end.
While Skinner never directly addresses the metaphorical implications of
cacti, they are, I think, obvious enough - like the world we live in,
human beings are all prickly on the outside, hard to get close to. But
on the inside, however, we are all alike, made of soft flesh, pulpy and
succulent. And above all, we are all in need of propagation, cultivation
and care, so that we can live in peaceable union with all members of our
ecology, even ones that hold the potential to harm us.