Issue 10 – Summer 2006 – Rodger LeGrand on Kenneth Fields

Lose Yourself Here: Kenneth Fields’ Classic Rough News

 

Kenneth Fields, Classic Rough News
University of Chicago Press, 2005.  69 pp., $17.00.

 

Reviewed by Rodger LeGrand

 

In Classic Rough News, Kenneth Fields looks at addiction and insanity, establishing a cycle that explores the process of attempted recovery, using the sonnet’s structure of making assertions and drawing conclusions to learn about himself.  It’s easy when immersed in addiction and mental illness to regress and repeatedly fall back into destructive habits.  Recovery, then, is probably too strong a word.  The right phrase might be “a process of finding”, or, at the very least, “searching”, since, as Fields shows, to be addicted is to be lost, drowning in booze, flailing somewhere through the currents in the back of the mind, struggling with an illness that is as tangible as a bottle in the hand and as invisible as the psychological tension of being split between worlds—sobriety and drunkenness, deception and truthfulness, communication and self-consciousness, insanity and reason, and, in terms of the shape of the poems, contemporary and classic.   These dichotomies fill Classic Rough News with tensions that enact the collection’s purpose, to explore the problems of identity in the context of obsession and addiction, so that while recovery isn’t as possible as coping, we’re able to find hopefulness in the music of language, playful conversation, patterns and structure in words.  We’re able to look for ourselves, as readers, and when considering the relationship between a sonnet’s structural components and Fields’ application of those components, find some way to make sense of the world.
            Identity to Fields is scattered, not quite random, but displaced, removed from the self and hovering just beyond reach.  Disembodied.  Dislocated.  In this collection, identity is hidden, masked in booze or lost to the uncertainties of sober reality.  “In the Place of Stories”, for instance, illustrates the paradoxical allure of being in a bar, the comfort of “losing yourself here”, of getting lost in the implied drinking and “not knowing who you may become”, lost in the cadence of language and one-line stories.

In the Place of Stories

You tend to lose yourself here, friend.  Come in…
Come in to the dark, come in to the music playing,
Come in to not knowing who you may become.
Here in the bar, The Nut House, you hear the titles
Of a thousand stories, the head is dizzy with them—
A whole life latent in a little line—
Broken off by the cash register, the click of balls,
A nearmiss score, another record.  “Hell,
I’ve been cheating on here since the divorce.”
“Ain’t there a family man in this fucking place?”
“Don’t play me for a sap”—each wounded cry
Gone as soon as said, teasing out of us
Incomparable ghosts—“I said I was a fairy, man,
Not a magician.”  You see what I mean.

This poem functions on several levels.  It accentuates the tension between the formal and informal, the tension of writing a version of a sonnet in a contemporary voice, the tension of replacing literature with the conversation of daily life.  “In the Place of Stories” looks closely at communication, at how similar our lives are.  The discovery at the poem’s turn is shared as the poet addresses the reader in the final sentence.  We know each other through what we’ve lost, yet we don’t know each other at all.  What we have in common is removed and irretrievable, “each wounded cry/gone as soon as said”.  Fields recreates the shared experience of a bar scene, the prosaic nature of our “incomparable ghosts”.  In this way, addiction is pervasive.  It has a sound, a smell; we can taste its stale flavor on our tongues.
            Confronting this blur of existence takes resolve.  It takes the willingness to be self-effacing.  In “The Daily Mirror” we see the first serious glimpse at this resolve, which highlights neurotic tendencies in the face of sobriety.  The narrator of this poem becomes obsessive and self-conscious:  “I’m apprehensive, going to see my shrink/for the first time ever…and at my age, and without a drink!”.  The voice becomes frenzied, almost, quivering in front of the void, the possibility of learning about himself.

The Daily Mirror

I’m apprehensive, going to see my shrink
For the first time ever, and me a greenhorn,
And at my age, and without a drink!  No fault,
The best policy I can hope for now.  Alas, 
My faults are heavy on me, and at my age
So much the fabric, neither warp nor woof—
So much the tree, what can I do but bark?
I have no great manic thirsts, just little mundane ones
Here and there, while I watch myself.  The music 
From here on out in black and white is Bartok—
Atonal, strident, not yet my cup of tea—
With no bar but the terrible, binding one
Quavering with decision till closing time.

We see the narrator’s attempted sobriety encapsulated in the decision to get help, to need to be sober while confronting himself.  His obsession over being faulty heightens the tension:  “No fault,/The best policy I can hope for now.  Alas,/My faults are heavy on me, and at my age.”  He has no assurances; sanity and sobriety are not certain.  Getting therapy is a risk for him.  It isn’t a guaranteed cure, which, in addition to the fear of confronting himself, makes him more vulnerable.  The danger is undercut by Fields’ humor:  “So much the fabric, neither warp nor woof—/So much the tree, what can I do but bark?/I have no great manic thirsts, just little mundane ones”.   In the shakiness of reality he’s even more fragile than when lost and oblivious to reality.  He’s so self-aware that he can’t look in the mirror like a growling, unaware mutt, shameless about not knowing himself.  
            Still, he’s not comfortable with self-awareness, with the drunken veil lifted from his wakefulness, and won’t be comfortable with the “shrink”.  Fields’ word choice is careful.  The “shrink” is not referred to as a psychiatrist.  Being a “shrink”, the pejorative, the not-to-be-taken-seriously doctor, is closer to the spiritual realm, a witchdoctor mastering in creating shrunken heads.  Like a shaman, then, the “shrink” is physically real and magically endowed.  This gives the psychiatrist power and control, and this gives the narrator a way out, a way of avoiding himself and avoiding ownership of his identity.  The narrator, through his obsession and insecurity, avoids identifying as anything at all, avoids making decisions, save for the resolve of going to see a psychiatrist in the first place, avoids looking at himself in the mirror and acknowledging what he sees.  He’s responsible for nothing.
            The tension in “In the Mirror” is heightened with the sounds in the language.  In addition to the repetition of “and at my age”, an awareness of time passing and running out, the poem opens with the hard nasal rhyme of “shrink” and “drink”, moves to a string of “icky” back of the throat sounds (“fabric”, “manic”, “music”), and settles on I sounds (“strident”, “binding”, “time”).  Even in the sound of his words, in this poem, the focus ends on I, even if that I is vacant, unknowable, and scared.  And isn’t this the point of the collection, that as hard as we try, we still can’t fully know ourselves, drunk or sober?  Identity becomes an unobtainable figment, a shadowed sense of self that is defined as not defined.  
            The confusion of identity raises a question about the function of writing in exploring and revealing the self.  Does writing function as a process of recovery or revelation in the sense that there is no recovery other than bumping along in a state of normal unhappiness?  The repetition of his use of the sonnet, a form that establishes assertions in order to draw conclusions, becomes as obsessive and clunky as the narrator’s attempts at sobriety and sanity.  Some poems, “Opening Line” for instance, gather together some of the formal elements of a sonnet.  Though not in strict iambic pentameter, most lines maintain a five-syllable stress, and then the poem closes with a rhymed couplet:  “Love me, that I may die the gentler way ,/tomorrow is just another name for today”. Other poems seem to strain to meet the shape of a sonnet, becoming versions of sonnets, removed from the form, finding their shape just beyond the sonnet’s formal structure.  “In Another Country”, for instance, is flecked with iambs, creating the illusion of a sonnet’s rhythm, yet strains to fit in the collection as a sonnet.  Here’s the paradox.  Fields has presented a contemporary collection of sonnets focused on the incomprehensible nature of identity and a large number of poems in this collection would never be mistaken for sonnets.   This enacts Fields’ point.  Things aren’t always what they seem.  Identity isn’t prescribed.  It isn’t a predefined template we can easily grasp.  And neither are sonnets and other literary structures.  As Robert Hass reminds us in “One Body:  Some Notes On Form”, “the form of a poem exists in the relation between its music and its seeing; form is not the number or kind of restrictions, conscious or unconscious, many or few, with which a piece of writing begins.”   
            The shapes of the poems in Classic Rough News are created with a blending of the formal structure of sonnets with the rhythm and cadence of Fields’ grappling with identity.  Essentially, Fields establishes patterns and repetitions.  Building the shape of these poems around the structural elements of the sonnet provides a sense of order for the reader, a stable backdrop against which we see the chaos of identity play out.  As the poems progress, we see the confusion of identity embodied in Billie, Billy, and Burton, characters, in the tradition of Berryman, who seems to have influenced Fields’ wry style of self examination (as well as his fondness for personae in his poems). 
            The relationship between these characters exemplifies the difficulty of gaining control while slipping further from reality.  In “Realizations” and “Imprisoned Lover Singing Freedom”, we’re confronted with the hard truth of self-effacement and the terror of isolation.  Billie, in “Realizations”, becomes aware of herself, “…she wasn’t someone else,/…Not since yesterday”, while her brain “seemed like numberless galaxies”.  This knowing is fleeting and rare.  In “Imprisoned Lover Singing Freedom”, Billy, Billie’s male alter ego, introverted and scared, humiliated in a Post-Vietnam PTSD haze, is like the reflection that “trembled in the glass beside him all night long.”  Billy is only superficially present, a tremble of himself.  By the end of the collection, Fields addresses this tumult of personae in “The Hinge”:  “The Billies, Burtons, secret, schizophrenic,/ these fearful suspects of my dormancy,/the black stars doubling everything I saw”.  The narrator’s perspective is hinged upon addressing these divergent personalities and acknowledging the early start of his terror.

The Hinge

These visions of my death, my comings back,
The Billies, burtons, secret, schizophrenic,
These fearful suspects of my dormancy, 
The black stars doubling everything I saw.
The surviving twin and premature, I was 
At four pounds thought too little to mutilate
So my circumcision came when I was five,
A tonsillectomy thrown in.  I was
Scared I am sure and mad—I must have been,
After all it had worked fine up until then,
And I saw no reason to make it shorter.  But,
What I remember vividly was the ether,
The mask, the backwards counting, as I breathed,
I said, “I like this, it tastes like bubblegum.”
Then I was nothing indeed.  The next morning 
My throat, to say nothing else, was too sore to eat
The ice cream I had been promised.  The nurse told me 
“I’ve seen a lot of little boys dragged in here
For this business, but nobody, not a one of them
Ever said he loved the ether.”  I know now
If anyone ever gives you a drug 
And you wake up in pain and they’ve cut off 
The end of your dick and you think it was a good trip,
You’ve got a drug problem.  Now I admit it,
I read as a boy of Dali, himself a boy,
Sitting in a public stall fervently
Repelled by a piece of mucus on the wall,
Until he wrapped some paper around his hand,
And wiped it off in holy terror.  Dried solid,
It sliced his finger to the bone.
I have not told this story more than three times
In thirty-five years.  There have been many others
At every door crying their secrecy,
I have not shaken them.  Now as the sun returns,
I let these stories in and let them out,
Suzuki Roshi’s door blowing in the wind
Open and shut, the spirit where it listeth,
The breathy constellations overhead
Turning the season.  This was a winter’s tale.
 
The discovery in this poem, as Fields funnels us through the clump of personalities and focuses on the body, is crucial.  This poem’s discussion of late circumcision and tonsillectomy enhances this dissection, the slicing up and tossing away of elements of his body, of a complete sense of self.  He loses himself here, as in “In the Place of Stories”, both literally and figuratively.  The late circumcision is violent and brutal.  The boy’s body is mutilated, a repeat of the loss of his twin to premature birth.  At an age when he has already learned where his body starts and stops and is only recently really gaining some control over its functions, pieces of it are pointlessly removed.  “After all it had worked fine up until then,/And I saw no reason to make it shorter.”  The humor in these lines is a relief.  But the seriousness is not lost.   The boy is chopped up, inside and out, and the pieces that are cut away are discarded and never found.  Even further, this is the moment, even though only five, when drug use seems to pose a practical alternative to reality:  “If anyone ever gives you a drug/And you wake up in pain and they’ve cut off/The end of your dick and you think it was a good trip,/You’ve got a drug problem.”  At this point, I suppose, Fields anticipates that we’ll suspend our disbelief.  The quotation is extreme, and it is unlikely that the narrator, having not “told this story more than three times/in thirty-five years,” would recall the nurse’s phrasing verbatim.  This detail, then, is also an example of his self-consciousness.  It gives him an answer, a starting point to his disarray, a reason for being lost.  The story is poignant and locates us at the root of his trauma.  The interaction with the nurse serves the purpose of scrambling for credibility and answers, since, as established in the bulk of the collection, the narrator’s memory is as blurred and problematic as his sense of identity.
            “The Hinge” pulls Classic Rough News together.  It links the body’s atrocity with the terror of the body’s insides coming out (tonsils removed and being “Repelled by a piece of mucus on the wall,/until he wrapped some paper around his hand,/and wiped it off in holy terror.”).  It links the ethereal presence of multiple personalities and lack of centralized identity with a physical starting point and introduction to the escape of substance abuse.  At five, then, it is likely he had very real problems.  Those problems, though, were probably not a drug problem from one experience with ether.  Rather, his issues seem to be more generally body centered.  The importance of his ether experience is the awakening of the clash between his internal self and physical self.  We see in this poem the physicality of identity as the narrator acknowledges that he’s always been aware that his body constantly moves toward an ending.  His disembodied identity then is located in the separation of his sense of self and his body.  He learned to separate from his body, to detach, that his body is not him.  Ultimately, he identifies as bodyless.  Ghostlike.  A figment.  
            And when the haze is pulled back for a moment, as “the breathy constellations” (human-like forms that only exist when we connect the dots) “overhead/turning the season”, we get a glimpse of the break in the clouds, a sense of positive options, possibilities.  The poem “Right Now” illustrates the struggle of gaining and maintaining control, if only for the present.

It’s nineteen years today since he last held
A drink in his hand or held his breath while smoke
Filled as much of him as he could stand
Till, letting it out, he sought oblivion
Of the trace of memory or anticipation,
And his life fell into a death spiral.  Since then
He’s been around folks like him.  When he’s been asked,
And sometimes, eager, when he hasn’t been,
He talks to the ones who aren’t even sure
They want to learn how to stop killing themselves.
That feeling still seems close to him some days.
Right now he’s okay, and that’s enough, right now. 

Even the breathing of this poem emulates control.  The opening sentence is broken in such away that our breath is manipulated.  The first two lines have unnatural stops that, rather than quickening our breath and rushing us to the next line, jar and hesitate our breathing.  When we reach “held” at the end of line one, our breath is held, suspended for an awkward blink of time.  And the second line moves forward, picking up momentum, until it, too, is cut short, broken off at such a point that our breath is cut off.  Fields, in his attempt to enact the struggle of maintaining control, literally, controls the reader’s breath.  The third line lifts the pressure a bit and opens up with a series of iambs, which is undercut by the disregard for the mechanics of the sentence as we approach “oblivion”.  By the end of this poem, when it’s confirmed that suicide is always a lingering possibility, we get a sense of how fleeting coping with addiction can be, since it’s enough that “right now he’s okay”, if only for a moment.  That moment seems to stretch out at the end of the line.  We have control of our breath again.  Fields has let go of it as he focuses on the present.
            Classic Rough News closes with “Poetic”, immersing the reader in cadence and the playfulness of language:  “not even mouthpiece, but the lovely fipple/(‘Hey, that’s like nipple,’ my little daughter laughs)”.   

Poetic
            With a line from Basil Bunting
“It might be from a handbook on recorders.”

For one thing, its on the air, you can hear music,
Knowing inflected by the ear.  Not wood,
Not even mouthpiece, but the lovely fipple
(“Hey, that’s like Nipple,” my little daughter laughs),
And the conveyor of this joy’s a player,
Whose breathing tunes the hollow that she fills,
Empties and fills again.  I am caught up 
In the roll and the hull, this ecstasy of naming,
This gathering up of more than fifty years
In a wide harbor, a life made of words,
All of them here before we finally heard them,
And consolation rolling upon the tide:
As the player’s breath warms the fipple the tone clears.
Ardor, attend us as our stars descend.

Finding the possible magic of the universe in music and words, the presence of the daughter, future generations, extended life, possibilities, gives us a sense of hope.  Music and language, rhythm and communication, form a greater sense of the universe, a greater structure in which the narrator is able to find himself.  Using words, “the ecstasy of naming”, becomes the ecstasy of creating.  And while “a life made of words” is hollow, intangible, reality once removed, it is also full of breath and rhythm, the music and cadence of the human voice, as pervasive as the tide.  Love is what we’re left with as our place in the universe inevitably falls.
            Fields doesn’t find resolve in these final poems as much as he finds a way of coping, of accepting and processing the conflicts of finding identity and coming to know himself, the push and pull of being trapped in his mind while accepting his mind and the limitations of his body so to ward off addiction.  Identity is vaporous and formless.  It’s as predetermined as a sonnet.  We might be predisposed to certain character traits due to genetic composition and family lineage, but our environments also play a role in how we self identify.  Sonnets are no different.  They are structural and traditional.  They have a history and lineage.  They have character.  Still, as Robert Hass writes, “we speak of sonnets as ‘a form’, when no two sonnets, however similar their structures, have the same form.”  
            As Fields grapples with the restrictions of a sonnet the struggle with identity is played out.  The Billies and Burtons, the “incomparable ghosts”, locked in his mind will always push for power and prominence.  Sobriety and sanity are difficult work to say the least, and at times we might fall back and loose pace to the brutal confusion of addiction, the haze of possible insanity, and the equally painful haze of sober reality.  But we need to make the most of it, Fields seems to write, listen to the music of the world, find its rhythms, its language, and, should at some point we lose ourselves, hope “ardor” will “attend us as our stars descend”.

 

 

Rodger LeGrand teaches writing at North Carolina State University.  He is the author of Various Ways of Thinking About the Universe, a short collection of poems.

 

 

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