Harm.
Steve Willard
University of California Press
Every minute isn't yet fully sleeping. Lace in the corner of things I didn't say passedWaking to find oneself in the middle of a nor'easter comprised entirely of “dust-silk” is tantamount to immersion in Steve Willard's astonishing debut. This new landscape stubbornly refuses any kind of handhold other than the momentary—“Every minute isn't yet fully sleeping.” And despite geographic reference and inclusion of the specifically American (“Everyday Bostonians,” “crayonic,” “Waves of grain,” “Florida sun”) we are not, in fact, in the contemporary world but in a relentlessly shifting limbo. However, Willard's limbo is one that brushes up against the divine. “the world is only the start / of a third argument,” he asserts in “Dark Drop Hook.”
dustlike, like dusk
over a grate—flayed dust-silk—,
over grated lining. (It had to have a link to the sun.)
from “Permission To Die”
Dust, heaven, silk, grave, thee/thy, ship, love, death, darken/ed/ing, color. Given a list of words and images that Willard repeats in Harm., one might assume a kind of heavy-handed adolescent baroque. Add to that the extremely experimental syntax and punctuation, and it's easy to imagine the project gone terribly awry.
Yet Harm. flurries forward without derailing thanks to, among other things, Willard's success with imagistic layering combined with a deft and musical sense of language. From “Board of Rites”—Or if the sky sets itself of less and less dimmed tropical orangeThe contrast of the color-saturated (“less and less dimmed tropical orange”) with “that other, spare, intense world” (referencing, again, another world), noticed out of the invented-yet-intuitive “eyecorner”is gorgeous sense-touching music. But it's the final stanza's inclusion of “wires,” “time,” “mercy,” and then the near-rhyme of “spine”—an image which brings the reader back to the initial “wires”—that proves Willard's contortionist ability to create a language for the “letterless” world of his “queer and beautiful monstrosities.”
out of your eyecorner elect single clouds on the color-threshold
of that other, spare, intense world ripples and wags without
wires, without time, without mercy from you, our cold spine,
letterless among queer and beautiful monstrosities.
The organization of the book also helps make its otherworldly shifts tangible. Willard divides the book into five sections. The first introduces these imagistic layerings along with a variety of forms; Willard also weaves the color red into every other poem, establishing a helpful circularity of thought and sight. He echoes this maneuver elsewhere in the book by placing “pine” in back-to-back poems and repeating ship and archery imagery in close proximity.
The second section begins with “How To Read 'Harm' (This Book),” the opening line of which is the funny and provocative, “(eyebrows through chin) quick, as if a frame were lost.” It is in this section that he begins to use the formal religiously-overtoned “thee” and “thy,” as if trying on modes of establishing a cosmos, yet the actual world creeps in delightfully. In “____less,” he writes about monks, “why couldn't they sing the accompaniment to whatever before? / (sometimes the accompaniment is a charmed machine.)” and “I want to enter heaven this instant but / these pineneedles come to cascading / a back of my neck—”
The third section showcases a variation of voice and an inclusion of the more blatantly referential. In “Bear And Policeman II: 'Fairest, Lord Jesus,'” characters such as Charles Wesley (a Methodist hymn-writer), Without Temperance, Temperance, and Without are given voice. In particular, Temperance utters the marvelous, “People soup! That's what I'd drink, given / a mouth. . . .” Strangely enough, “The Iliad And The Odyssey” follows, yet stitches to the rest of the work with (among other methods of stitching) the line, “your head is a fountain you have had no head,” recalling the first line of the book, “what little fountains we are.”
Continued thought regarding vision, body, and belief appears in the fourth section. And again, Willard's weaving of imagery—this time, via camera frame and shingles—contributes to the whole. Here the reader further encounters the pairing of the spiritual and love with more base human experience. “so many gestures where efficiency / / takes hold: everyone sniffs glue the same way / love is around that)” Willard writes in “Endures.” And further, “The other day I saw an in-line skater, / / committing you to the grounds for your sins” (“But They Know”) and “I will choose to drink / your urine, heretofore it tastes lemon-quiet” (“Parking Timbre”). Yet the inexplicable mystical is not lost. “Why To Talk, What To Say” concludes with the admission, “The stone or edge (metal) falling is either that, or pieces of cotton. (There is feeling.) There is much to believe.”
It might be too easy to assert that the fifth section reconciles some of these tension and hints toward a more reconciled and quieter spirituality, yet it is in this section that the speaker makes some of his most candid statements. The first poem, “(Crinkled),” begins, “then the light changed—outline a palm / / so no more humanity to be written. I / / speak no other tongue,” and the second, “Not Ever = Not Now” continues, “Needed persons ministering to the happiness of a prince / or at a movement said or made peculiarly often without / any wicked purpose except the color of world changing—.” In the accomplished and beautiful “To Skystars, To Churchmouse,” the speaker straight-forwardly says, “I want to spend the dark alone less / / than I ever have,” and “Today an unseen thing, which I {must} mention and do not name, is protecting me.”
Dense, complex, and musical, Harm. very much merits immersion. Once one becomes accustomed to the moorings and unmoorings of its circular, saturated world, the unseen feels familiar and the storm reveals its logic. Or, “almost preferring a pure abstract wanting to know of song without / staring toward its point of utterance, for it fills the air” (“Ideas (Denuded)”).
- Stephanie Anderson