Maureen McLane’s new book, Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes contains lyrics of genre-bending meditations beyond/between the distinctions of memoir, essay, allegory, novel. Often, her mind stops at locations throughout Western history, from Plato and Rousseau, say, or the frat house, where words like queer or feminist could not yet, or would never, mean anything. And yet McLane’s poetry, that of a 21st-century Sappho, feels as ancient as it does sudden. The unstoppable, riverish fever of her enjambed, short-lined poems quickly draws one down through her mind, which is as good a prism as any I know of to encounter the external “effects” of nature, beauty, body. Her speaker (and pseudo-doppelgänger protagonist) have ideas about Athens and “Death metal,” often interchangeably. What’s so truly essential in her somersaulting, backwards/forwards time machine is the way she makes memory, inside poetry, a downright erotic activity. It’s not just the sex of her thought, but the sex of thought itself that breathes through these gorgeous poems.
—Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
MZ N HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Some are fated
to live out the history
of philosophy in their sex life.
In the cave
of illusion Mz N sensed
the realm of pure
ideas elsewhere
immanent in the sky
she would see only once
she’d left the cave and felt
the sun burn her eyes
into truth. Few
can bear
this truth
said Plato brilliant
monster and everyone
philosopher or no
makes her way
back into the cave
enlightened
or not. For her
there were no ideal forms
no ideal table
which all mere tables
could but imitate—
a real
behind the screen
of the real—
There was this god thing
He was personal
She took it personally
as if she were a Calvinist
or capitalist
and salvation and all profit depended
on her alone
her faith alone but faith
in what. Credo
in unum deum
for a long while and then
no credo. Mz N
recapitulated the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation
and several previous
minor and major heresies
in her soul inquiries & agonies years
seven to fourteen
as she would years later discover
through reading
—seven the age of reason
sd the ancients
or was it Shakespeare’s Jaques
or was it eleven in Augustine—
They are always trying to fix
reason and the age of reason
so one could consent
to be reasonable about things
one was supposed to be reasonable about—
& one can’t help but reason
said genial David Hume—
no other reason!
She would have
being Catholic
a confirmation
She’d be confirmed
if she’d be confirmed
in her faith. Kierkegaard
brought doubt into the heart
of faith though it had coiled there
a long while
not least in those anguished
souls who unsure
of their salvation
in the seventeenth century
drowned themselves.
Look into thy heart
All the historical things
may have happened
but they happen
specifically
to you
a most historical
unpoetical
thing.
A family
can create a world
sustained by other
institutions
can weave a weft
and warp of world
no other air
can penetrate
a while. Only a while
The thing
about the mind
it tunes itself
to secret strings vibrating
elsewhere. If elsewhere
another thing’s ringing
or waving or wavering the mind
plucks it out
framing a harp and harpist
out of alien air and singing strings
The grandfather died
and then the other grandfather
leaving the fatherless parents
flattened.
Where is he
& where is he
I suppose you are going
to tell me
he’s gone to heaven
skepticism
a native faculty
of even a four-year-old mind.
They told her
he’d gone to heaven
with the other one.
They uneasily remember
this sometimes the pestering
long-gone child
who can question
without authority
Suffer
the children and suffer
the parents
What is the grass
I think it is the ancient hair
of graves
I think it is the lawn
the 20th century unrolled
over America
It is a weed that sucks dry the water table
& the grass is the wind in the grass
a green handkerchief
dropped by an absconded god
§
Mz N can think herself
a blank slate
generating a world
out of sense impressions
but for the fact she feels
so uncertainly
she can’t trust her senses
Are there five
Are there eight
The humans have devised
so many systems for sensing
and extra-sensing and taxonomizing
Anyone
who awaited stigmata
is a queer empiricist
Mock on mock on
Voltaire Rousseau
And when in a frat-house
at fifteen
with a hapless drunk man
a boy really but large
technically and legally a man
how could she know
if he stuck it in
Wouldn’t she have felt it
Wouldn’t there have been blood
the palpable
something
Wouldn’t there have been
as the novels and movies and daytime dramas insisted
blood?
Wouldn’t there have been?
not to mention pain
There was nothing
a big fat nothing
Shakespeare’s nothing
is a big fat thing
worth killing for
Hero
is a heroine of nothing
Voices drifted
up through a small
window open
a crack the older girls
singing don’t do
don’t do anything
your mother wouldn’t want
you to Her mother
wouldn’t want
her to and that’s enough
for her to want to
A perfect oppositional logic
of an already enclosed field
of desire.
But what happened?
Whatever happens?
History is what happened
Poetry what could happen
The probability
is they’d fucked
or she’d been fucked
or he’d fucked her
or even in a wild unlikely construction
though one must in strictness admit it
she’d fucked him
And yet
She never really knew
what happened
And there was really no one
around to ask
This
was one of many episodes
in which Mz N had little grasp
of events
much less plot
Why not say what happened?
Why not say
what happened?
What happened?
MZ N RIVER INTERVAL
This is my river
of nothing. No one
steps here twice
& most drown in the rush
of its whitewatered ongoingness
unforgiving but beautiful
as the idea of Athens
whitely and dispassionately just.
Those that have the power
to hurt and will do none
look into the eyes
& see nothing
of themselves and thus you cry
certain of a new night
you’ll not recover from.
Death metal.
Swarm the dark waters.
The burst beat
is the beat burst the banks
burst the beat
the drums bursting
the ear bursting riverdrums
in bursts of nothing
as nothing bursts
Mz N SONG
I caught that arrow
you meant for me
and dipped its tip
in blackest ink
and wrote you out
Mz N Meadow
Somewhere after wildness
a meadow
is good for dreaming
and crickets
and remembering the word
for grasshopper
in French.
We have put down
our tankards
We do not smash
the boards in a meadhall
Our armor unlike ants’
is wholly inside
our bodies
The skin of a meadow
is grass
and wildflowers who return
as if invited
by the season to visit
a long unbroken field
to accept the hospitality
of the why not hello
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Photo Credit: Jo Edredge Morrissey.
