Recollections of an apocalypse
A Review by Aaron McCollough
Tony Tost, Invisible Bride. Louisiana State University Press, 2004.
A Calvinist ideologue might have called Tony Tost’s Invisible Bride a book of lies or a school of abuse. It is a congeries of brazen worlds, inhabited by wide-eyed lost souls. How fitting then that what makes for terrific poetry in Invisible Bride is more often than not a mephistophelean language of coping, delivered with all the grim conviction (if less manipulative malice) of Kit Marlowe’s devil:
“Hell hath no limits nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be.
And to be short, when all the world dissolves
And every creature shall be purified
All places shall be hell that is not heaven!” (Doctor Faustus, II, i., 127-132)
As in Marlowe’s play, the phenomenal world in Tost’s book is at once realistic and phantasmagoric. It is a place that can sustain hells and heavens.
The poems in Invisible Bride are all written in prose and are often without titles. This is not to say that they are “prose poems” in any proscriptive sense. More than anything else, the prose here conveys a round, voiced quality to the language—a quality that would likely be compromised if other verse options (formal or projective) had been included. Sometimes, the voice in Invisible Bride feels like the flattened-out excess of contemporary mannerism—the mixture of hyperbole and nonchalance that characterizes the style of ennui common to Joshua Clover and the poetry that keeps coming in his wake:
“My first ambition was to make a film to be premiered on a small black
and white television set.”
More generally, however, Tost’s woozy prose fragments come together to produce remarkable atmospheric effects and, most impressively, an intensely romantic sense of language’s potential to build habitations out of inhospitable conditions.
Although Invisible Bride offers a few idiosyncratic navigational signposts (most significantly six numbered but untitled sections), its organization pivots around one longer piece, “Unawares,” located roughly in the middle of the book. In this poem, the speaker establishes what might be best described as a ‘Pataphysical conceit for the book’s most powerful concerns: the limitations/liberations of the physical world and the potential recalibration of our imaginary models for experience beyond the physical. In “Unawares,” the speaker speculates in earnest about numerical and spatial relationships between letters in the word unawares, between plums in a tree, between spaces in the alphabet and spaces in the world. He concludes,
“If two objects are nearby in one direction, then a world
separates them in the other: the ghost-distance. Tony thinks the
alphabet is a circle: what comes after z?”
Tost’s attention to the “ghost-distance” in various forms is what most unifies Invisible Bride and what gives the book its own distinctive character. Tost’s speaker takes us inside and out of subjectivity’s cloister in such a way that it becomes hard to separate interior and exterior experience:
“that same sun which ripens my beans illumines an inner
ward which is a nightmare of smoke and flames and the screams of
horses and men.”
The effect is something like Keatsian negativa with a twist. The reader’s self, with the speaker’s, is a little bit annihilated by all the furniture of the world and the furniture of the mind. The speaker’s beans are ripened by the sun, but the beans are his beans. The same sun—presumably his sun—lights “an inner ward” which bears more resemblance to political reality, “a nightmare of … the screams of horses and men,” than the speaker’s external, pastoral surroundings. The implicit critique of possessive individualism in Tost’s poetry manages to avoid empty pieties through its peculiar metaphysics. We are left with a tangible sense of ghostly encounter, but whose ghost we’ve seen is unclear. In one sense, the ghost seems to have been our own. In another, the ghostly seems to escape ownership altogether and to stand, instead, for the nightmare of the real in which we may only find partial selves.
The metaphysical is a sincere concern in Invisible Bride but it always refers back to the physical for its shape and meaning – it always recurs to a “physicality so distinct that it [has] a spiritual effect.” Insofar as the book is about being or being human, it is about establishing the limitations/liberations of identity in physical things. In an early poem from the book, a hostage begins to identify with his external surroundings rather than any internal sense of self:
“Once alone in nature,
no one spoke to me, nothing else had a will of its own, and my iden-
tity was limited only to what I could perceive. I did not have to imagine
my identity, for it was visible, it had color and made noises all through
the night.”
One can’t help but hear this as a riff on Keats’ letter to Fanny:
“When I am in a room with People … then not myself goes home to
myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to [for
so] to press upon me that, I am in a very little time an[ni]hilated.” (158)
This famous rejection of the egotistical sublime is operative in the natural world’s permeation of the hostage’s sense of himself. When the hostage dies, however, his ghost holds on to his physical hunger as a crucial characteristic of who or what it is:
“‘To not carry it with me,’
he says, ‘would be like the ghost of Bette Davis tearing out its eyes.’”
Thus, Tony Tost frames his own negative sublime. It is not a Faustian morality tale or Keatsian veil of soul-making. Ultimately, Tost’s sublime requires a trip through the repudiation of self and a kind of haunting return to the intersections of matter and feeling. The notion of identity survives in Invisible Bride—in fact, the book finds its own literary identity—by means of concentrated attention to the contending forces of annihilation and possession.Invisible Bride finds, in annihilation, a way to locate a style of self-possession that is productive and harrowing at the same time.
Aaron McCollough is the author of Welkin (Ahsata Press) and Double Venus (Salt Publishing). His blog can be found at http://aaronmccollough.blogspot.com
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