Barrelhouse Reviews: The Fact of Memory by Aaron Angello

Review by Elizabeth Knapp

Rose Metal Press / April 2022 / 132 pp

One of the challenges of writing about Aaron Angello’s The Fact of Memory is trying to categorize it. As the author explains in the introductory note, he tasked himself with writing a prose poem a day meditating on each word of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29.” While many of the poems relate directly to the word they meditate on, others do not; still, the book as a whole responds to Shakespeare’s poem through an exploration the formal space of the prose poem/lyric essay/memoir in verse, while reconstructing memory as a storehouse for the imagination. The result is a work that teems with the clutter of daily life, which, when filtered through Angello’s attentive gaze, glistens with a “shimmering virtuality, resonating nothing but pure potential.”  

In addition to literal and figurative spaces, the issue of genre is one of the principal concerns of this book, as the author seeks to define his own work: “Some define lyric as a moment out of time, the opposite of narrative.” Fittingly, this sentence and many others recur in the first and final poems, reinforcing the circularity of time. Not only sentences, but images and characters also recur, adding to the déjà-vu effect: “The light outside the window is intensely familiar. There is a band of sunlight that runs horizontally along the neighbor’s wall. It’s almost as if I understand the spaces around me and the things they contain, the light and the sounds and the air.”

As the speaker wanders through the rooms of memory, reliving and recollecting the experiences and characters of his past, he finds that the process “allows for a reverse-transubstantiation; the flesh becomes the book, becomes the guitar string, becomes the dandelion leaf. This isn’t a religious experience, it is a function of memory.” Metaphor becomes one of the functions of memory, and the boxy paragraphs become dwelling spaces for the many homeless and itinerant characters who occupy them, including the speaker himself.

In addition to “house” and “home,” the word “apartment” appears a few dozen times throughout the book. In one poem, the speaker recalls a former apartment in Venice Beach, California, from which he could constantly hear couples in a neighboring building having sex, which, instead of being an annoyance, “was an ongoing reminder…that there are people everywhere who are connecting, sharing space, touching each other, loving each other.”

Isolation versus connection is one of the predominant themes of the book, along with other binary oppositions—self versus other, light versus dark, lyric versus narrative. The word “outcast” in the original poem assumes an even greater significance in Angello’s meditation on it:

This is our body, our personal space. Our skin feels, even without touch. We forget, though, that our bodies continue to extend outward, out from the chair in which we sit, out across the room, through the books and furniture and walls, out along streets and through buildings, across the countryside, into eternity.

Here, “outcast” functions as a verb, as the speaker considers the word in relation to the self and world, and the individual body becomes the collective body. In “Cries,” for example, “A cry is a body responding to some stimulus…It is, in that moment, aware, not of its isolation, but of its connection to other bodies, other beings, other things.” His memories of interactions with other bodies—broken, homeless, addicted—remind the speaker that “every body is made up of multiple smaller bodies,” and that he is part of a greater whole, a larger consciousness that, in its Whitmanian sweep and scope, encompasses “the web of bodies, machines, natural objects spreading across landscape and cityscape, across circles of time, fractaling in upon itself and out toward heaven.”

While the intimate tone and gestures of this book echo Whitman, the poems recall Anne Carson in their philosophical inquiry and classical allusiveness, and James Tate and Charles Simic in their narrative and surreal tendencies. In terms of subject matter, Elizabeth Bishop is a prominent influence, especially in “Myself,” which directly alludes to Bishop’s “One Art”: “I’ve lost the words. I’ve lost the chords…I’ve lost two libraries on two separate occasions. I think I lost my liver.” In other poems, such as “And,” Gertrude Stein is the patron saint of objects and lists:

A chair. A chair and a table. A chair and a table and an old book. A chair and a table and an old book and a lit match. A chair and a table and an old book and a lit match and a grassy hillside. A chair and a table and an old book and a lit match and a grassy hillside and a young girl. A chair and a table and an old book and a lit match and a grassy hillside and a young girl and a yellow sundress. A chair and a table and an old book and a lit match and a grassy hillside and a young girl and a yellow sundress and a Victrola. A chair and a table and an old book and a lit match and a grassy hillside and a young girl and a yellow sundress and a Victrola and “Yakety Yak.”

As the objects and prose poems accumulate, the reader feels, paradoxically, a sense of lightness moving through this book. We, along with the speaker, “begin to understand life as aggregation.” Like the prose poem form Angello so deftly handles throughout, “It has become a container for the small and significant, the shimmering minutiae that evoke entire worlds.”

Elizabeth Knapp is the author of The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize, and Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2019), winner of the 2019 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. Her other honors include the 2018 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and a 2017 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and Quarterly West, among others. An associate professor of English at Hood College in Frederick Maryland, she is also a poetry editor for The Baltimore Review.