North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2020. 55 pages. $17.95.
“I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out, would be another, and truer way,” writes John Ashbery in The New Spirit. This statement serves as both an epigraph and vision statement for Exclusions, Noah Falck’s second full-length collection composed of single-stanza poems, each titled “Poem Excluding. . . .” A good part of the joy in reading this text comes from exploring the possible ways the excluded word or phrase haunts the poem from the margins. Most interesting to me, however, is the way this collection affects the reader. When I read a poem by Noah Falck, I have the uncanny sense I’m in the presence of a living thing. In Exclusions, we acutely experience Falck’s breathing idiom. Each poem is an ever-expanding moment of Falck’s imagination, an echo growing louder as it gets further away from its source.
Falck creates this effect through his unique use of metaphor. Typically, metaphor provides the vehicle (the figurative language) to help us see the tenor (what is being described) more clearly. Metaphor’s movement is one toward verisimilitude, toward meaning making, toward closure. It’s a descriptive gesture. And description, by necessity, forecloses other possibilities. Description narrows down. It focuses. Which is why Falck’s use of metaphor is so counterintuitive. Falck’s metaphors open up what is possible. Take the following as an example
Poem Excluding Shopping Carts
The air moves through the window
like it knows something you don’t.
Imagine the first mosquito. Imagine
us baking cakes in the shape of our
future children. They look more like
mountains in a world without people.
Outside the sky grows up. And a
single cloud moves over the backyard
and rain comes down like jeweled
knives in a folk song.
Here, Falck’s metaphors, in the form of similes, are machine pieces in the perpetual motion engine that is this poem. The air moves “like it knows something you don’t.” The cakes look “like mountains in a world without people.” Rain falls “like jeweled knives in a folk song.” In each, the vehicle is so unexpected, so seemingly incongruous, it forces us to reimagine the tenor. It does not provide us with a sharper understanding of the described but rather a sense of radical unknowability of the subject.
Somehow, even definitive statements unpin, rather than pin down, the poems in Exclusions. The subject-verb-object construction of declarative sentences, one of the simplest ways to create meaning in writing, not only fails to create boundaries in Falck’s poetry but also erases them. In “Poem Excluding Shower Scene,” Falck writes
The entire world is room temperature.
Sunlight bleeds over the city,
and the mallwalkers gather
to form a sort of nervous system
or fatigue performance, we say.
Consumers storm the sale racks.
It sounds more and more
like music through pregnant skin.
And today every child is born
into whatever space is available.
We wait for snowfall—maybe
learn another language.
A language built around
the idea of far, far away.
Simple statements comprise the entire poem. Indeed, the most common verb, “is,” constitutes roughly one quarter of the verbs in the poem. Falck’s syntax would indicate a unidirectional poem, moving closer and closer to a subject. A line like “Consumers storm the sale racks” seems definitive, but when followed by “It sounds more and more like music through pregnant skin,” the reader becomes unable to see how these two sentences accumulate into a fully reified “thing.” Instead, each sentence points further away from any kind of cohesive subject as the poem endlessly unbuckles.
Falck puts two other methods of achieving closure—time and causality—to antithetical ends. The indexing of time, using markers like “first” and “then,” usually predicates an ending and implies a causal relationship between the items in the series. In “Poem Excluding Equinox,” though, we see Falck use the two terms to create the opposite effect:
At first, the sky was a tank top
on a clearance rack, a language
spoken only during funerals
at after-hour clubs with puddles
of sweat on the dance floor.
We say it all with our eyes.
Then hitchhike until everyone
around us has some form of
homemade tattoo. Rain falls
in the periphery. It mimics the
synapses of a pit bull’s brain
while chasing a rabbit,
while making love to a sandal.
The poem opens with “at first,” which carries the tacit promise that there will be an explicit ending. The movement of the poem encourages it, too. Later on, Falck writes, “We say it all with our eyes. / Then hitchhike until everyone around us has some form of / homemade tattoo.” Here, the use of the transition “then” after the first sentence shows one happening after the other; however, while time has passed, no real causality has been established between the nonverbal eye gestures and the decision to go hitchhiking until everyone has a stick-and-poke tat. The events in the poem occur and occur and occur, seemingly infinitely.
This unending feeling of expansion, generated in the reader by Falck’s poems, is what makes them so affecting. Falck’s poems create the “vastness” described by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. “The poet does not describe,” Bachelard writes. To Bachelard, a poem does not succeed because of the reality it depicts but rather because of the one it creates. According to Bachelard, a poem “accumulates its infinity within its own boundaries.” He continues to explain that “[p]oetic space, because it is expressed, assumes values of expansion.” The poem has the potential to be “immensity with no other setting than itself.” Since the poem occurs in its own reality of imagination, it is boundless. Poems exist in their own worlds, ones we must inhabit to fully enjoy. “It is not enough to resort to ‘impressions’ in order to explain them,” states Bachelard, “[t]hey must be lived in their poetic immensity.” Exclusions is indeed a book that needs to be lived in its poetic immensity. I’ll close with the short “Poem Excluding Answers,” which has not stopped echoing inside me since I first read it:
Someone spends her entire life
dreaming of how it will end.
It makes her sad. We sail
a small boat within her heart
and discover another heart,
though it looks more like a moon
lit from within by a single
exploding bottle rocket.
The strange radiance of Noah Falck’s Exclusions will light you from within, long after you’ve finished reading.