Marfa, TX: Canarium Books, 2020. 96 pages. $17.00.
A game is something that can be described from the outside, and with as much intelligence as you like, but whose values, pleasures, and risks make no sense until you’ve sunk into its world. From the outside, it presents a fence of rules; on the inside, it manifests as move on move. Poetry, in general, but not all poetry. And though Kit Schluter’s sparkling Pierrot’s Fingernails is many things—a performance, a seduction, a chronicle—it rests in charm, in game.
So let’s get inside. The second shortest poem in the book:
Trust
When I first looked in the mirror, I thought I looked dead, but I had simply become a child.
Beside my face was a blue cake so radiant, even its light was edible.
Thirty pages later comes the shortest:
Illegibility
Watch the better days riding their magic carpet up through the windmill arms!
As ideas, “trust” and “illegibility” are naturally complementary: the first is necessary to enter the second. Our trust is what transforms a nonsequitur into a zeugma, error into capture; yet the inability to glean meaning from our work may in turn break our faith. These are mobile and unsteady poles around which this often exhilarating, sometimes frustrating, always playful book cavorts.
As a poem, I find “Trust” very beautiful. I read its title as an almost-arch commentary on the attractive, naïve voice, as in a medieval emblem book—the illustration of a virtue. Of course, trust is also, almost inevitably, the incipit of fraud, and the moment the poem asserts an objective truth claim, “simply become,” it breaks the logic of reality. One does not “simply become a child.” So the poem is also playing with the way it knows it can capture, and manipulate, the reader’s trust. (Another poem, “Inclusivity Blueprint”, vamps: “you have given me / this extension of your person.”) And yet the marvel of this little piece is how these questions of what appears to be and what “simply” is fold together into the blue cake, whose sensuousness and faithfulness to the dream logic of childhood, are entirely self-evident. It would be possible to linger on the cake and ask what it masks—for part of its force seems to stream from behind it, for what it is pretending not to stand in—but, in the spirit of the book, we leave such questions for later and say “simply” that this poem begins in questions and ends in performance. A poem, like many of Schluter’s, that does slightly faster than it means.
In the context of the collection, “Trust” is aberrant, a quiet around which the axis grinds; the louder “Illegibility” is closer to the tone of the rest. It states its risk in its title and dives in anyway, capping its momentary escapade with an exclamation mark that is half insouciance, half anxiety, and half cover for the melancholy beneath the poem. (We learn, as the book zips on, to read the underside of Schluter’s blasts of brio).
“Illegibility” shares some of the book’s wavers: a certain lightness, an excess of self-awareness, a difficulty a bit out of proportion to its rewards. But, by dramatizing (literally: hear the impresario, the imperative “Watch . . . ”) the conditions of its own paradoxical legibility, the poem also opens onto the most exciting implications of this style and mind.
Because Pierrot’s Fingernails is, il faut le dire, a book by a translator. In its first poem, we get, “the story perspires a sweetlessness, axillary as any latterday bubo”; later, “You can call me Glasscake, Cromagnonpoops, or Pigeonswelter . . . ” (“Bad Faith”; “Coochy-Coo”). One of the many things we might take away from this Nabokovian nictitation is a lesson about the essential substitutability of all language, the sense that any word we read is a placeholder. But the flipside of this insight comes through in the froth of the second quote—the sense that the irreducibility, beauty, and fun of language might be recuperated in its thinginess, the way it bounces in your mouth, the way ink crusts on the tip of a ballpoint pen.
To constellate. Frost: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Barthes: “Narrative . . . is translatable without fundamental damage.” Schluter: “the story perspires a sweetlessness. . . .” In the air between these claims are suspended Schluter’s mostly-prose poems, which, like the first drafts of translations, feel like angels bounced from a place of beauty that has the singular drawback of being inaccessible to our language. Creatures in transition, like us, half dove, half bat. As he writes in “Proem (Skeumorph)” (sending us to Wikipedia before the book quite begins): “And there will be bornes and bornes and bornes. . . .”
• •
Illegibility
Watch the better days riding their magic carpet up through the windmill arms!
From the outside, it is a metalepsis, a metonymy of three metonymies, the second two themselves immensely metonymic: “better days” (various idioms) “magic carpet” (Thousand and One Nights) and “windmill arms” (which I read as Quixote). It creaks with a stiffness that feels like machine translation. But Schluter doesn’t dwell on it; the geometry, or ur-situation of the poem, is universal, instantly legible: watching something precious escape. So, sixty pages inside Pierrot’s Fingernails, I experience this poem as a sad and necessary freedom. Even as Schluter’s language cannot help but reflect all the literature that entails it, “Illegibility” wills, bends, and mistranslates itself into the superfluous physicality of “windmill arms,” and bangs off with that gauche and earnest exclamation mark.
Pierrot’s Fingernails doesn’t land easily in a school or even an era. I hear sometimes the elegiac strains of Stevens; or we walk the crunchy brain-glass of Gizzi; or thickets of proper nouns à la Hillman sprout. Most frequent is the cocktail hour moodiness of middle Ashbury with a splash of OG Surrealism to sober it up. But this refusal to bow consistently to any single idol is one of the important things about this book, and what makes it, if not quite new, an uncanny, immanent challenge to mere newness. In a moment when poetry published in the US is as variegated and anxious as it has ever been, this is a book that, itself chameleonic and jittery, thinks well and quickly about its plight. It breaks windows out of glee; it looks you in the eye, then looks away; it begins to tell a joke, then stops, and shuffles a curiously touching jig.