Kristi Maxwell - I am a body, language is bodies, writing is bodies, I am bodies, and we are all inside and outside of one another: He’s a husband made up of wife molecules

Kristi Maxwell, Re-, Ahsahta Press, 2012.

http://www.kristimaxwell.blogspot.com/


These poem cycles explore relationships both human and linguistic. Responsive (and responses) to the multiple connections between words, the poems create a narrative where intimacy and sensuality are revealed in the spaces between: “Logic a device that keeps wonder at bay. / The bay where they docked and will dock again.” The repetitions-with-difference of Re- suggest that the seemingly contradictory notions of stability and change are reciprocal.

“Observing the ‘he and she’ of Kristi Maxwell’s Re- at close range is like watching animals mate in the wild; we recognize the patterns of their daily intercourse as universal, such as when, ‘in unison, spoons move to their mouths . . . Like they are tracing intentionally the flight pattern of a bird.’ But also universal to couples is constant flux, the give and take of two people morphing around and into and out of themselves and each other to maintain the balance of what they’ve created together. Maxwell captures this in lines that constantly move and evolve, too: ‘When he is an ox, she alternates / between onyx and field to be tediously / plowed.’ And: ‘in the acre allotted to masculine which is nonetheless a mask / she frisked with her tongue to find the stash / of him who is both and not.’ Maxwell’s is a rich, playfully serious (and seriously playful) language that shape-shifts right in step with ‘him and her,’ leaving us agape at the layered acrobatics of what keeps a couple in sync.” —Laura Sims

The couple that travels through Maxwell’s fourth collection repays the closest attention: their odd interactions may speak to our own. Early in this sequence of short untitled poems, he and she come together in winter: “Wand-like, her touch on his arm pale as innards of gum wrappers/ and folded accordingly.” Later, perhaps during an evening out, their “bright bodies fight brightness with powder and clothes”; as they pack, or unpack, a kitchen, they learn “Fork-speak. Fork-tongued, they were undone/ by need to breach the rivers printed on their skulls,/ and dry.” Other segments (some guesswork is required) take place at a carnival, in a church, on rural travels, perhaps in bed: “When he is an ox, she alternates/ between onyx and field to be tediously/ plowed.” The title suggests that they break up and get back together, or that he and she re-acquaint themselves each day; it also warns, and encourages, us that some re-reading will be required if we are to rewrite our own domestic scripts, rather than emulating “their most precious robot/ he bought for them.” By turns acerbic and affectionate, the man and woman here regard themselves as Maxwell’s eye regards them both: if she is hard to interpret, at times, so are real people in real courtships or marriages. - Publishers Weekly

In her new book, Re-, Kristi Maxwell pursues the “she” and the “he” as the visible and ideological arc of an artfully syntactical language.   Echoed and reinforced by the title, “she” and “he” become generic appropriations of personhood, character, and identity.  These are not narrative poems, but the appeal of a lyrical bend towards language casts away any doubt of being able to appreciate the beauty of these short poems.  Maxwell has written in her author’s statement that she is interested in the “gene”, “the resemblance between the’ generic’ and the ‘generative’…that recalls patterns.”  So, re-what, exactly? Re-call?  Re-do?  Re-discover?  Re-linquish?  It shouldn’t matter in the end, save the knowledge of the prefix’s etymology: “re-“ denotes a before and an after: a once, then maybe a loss, and a once more again.  Perhaps, in the case of any tangible approach to narrative-meaning, a prior “she” and “he” and an after “she” and “he,” in all its supposed iterations. There are hints throughout, but they willingly withhold absolute
conjecture:


This image they know best:
bright light that denotes
the carnival they have yet
to attend. ..

This image of closer,
the closer they close in on
to secure an image of it.

“Closer” reads like “closure,” and nonetheless could be read as either noun or adjective, each way slyly altering the ultimate interpretation of meaning. What is definitive, however, is that “they” are active participants in the transmission of reference between the reader and these lyrics; some placement is possible. On the subsequent page of the sequence (the book is constructed of untitled lyrics in four titled sections), Maxwell writes:
In this undressing they called steam
for its pace and the lightness with which
they moved their feet from sock holes
so where their ankles had been
their ankles appeared still to be…

…they removed their garments,
for unto each other they undid themselves
individually and undulated their stadiums…

Something is obviously happening here, something concrete in the mind of the poet, but its transfer to language presents the problem of knowing. Not a problem of knowing on the reader’s part, but more on the level of linguistic apprehension and conclusion, so that what emerges in these lyrics is more than a focus on the generic; it is a generating of linguistic guiding and massaging.
Associative logic also plays to Maxwell’s strengths as a writer, as the logic never deflates or disregards the reader. In an intimate lyric, Maxwell writes of the pair’s commingling, as the “she” and “he” become more explicitly a formed union of “they”.

Their favorite knot was a kiss. Loose noose of lips and gruesome
tongue like a torn-open neck or one inside out, shirt-like, should they wear
the body to where bawdy bought all ballrooms where any body can rouge up the cheekbone of a chair by lounging just so.

Maxwell has also stated, this time in an interview, “I am a body, language is bodies, writing is bodies, I am bodies, and we are all inside and outside of one another.” The statement in itself is almost a poem, beautiful in its eloquent simplicity. And this section quoted above illustrates her thoughts best, in how the kiss of the “they” moves from a knot in a noose to a tongue to a shirt, which then moves to a ballroom, and finally returning back to the kiss by evoking the cheekbone. But it is the cheekbone of a chair, anthropomorphically lounging as the reader might expect the “they” to be doing. Circular in its logic, but also very associative, like playing a suggestive word game.
The balance of wordplay throughout the collection could easily fall by the way of annoyance, Heather McHugh-like, but the seriousness of tone (perhaps an appreciation or a respect for poetics) keeps the poems from sounding commonplace, balance being superbly achieved in Maxwell’s writing. Though obvious, the wordplay is never distracting. The repetitive sounds, creating close-homonyms, speak to the elusive and debatable constrictions and limits of language itself (and its reception on the eye/ear) which these poems explore. Maxwell’s clever punning, obvious as it is, never feels like her focus, again demonstrating her ability to control language and, by proxy, her abilities as a poet. Hers is not a hybrid-style, fusing the tenets of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and “less difficult, more narrative” poetry, as much as it is an emergent voice in younger American poetics which seeks to illuminate the ever-reductive denotation of words as they bounce off one another. Think of Matthew Henriksen or Brian Teare, who both bend the colloquial in a way which galvanizes contemporary American poetry.
This of course, and thankfully, is not the mode of language in which people speak, therefore Maxwell’s stellar poems draw attention to the importance of the genre’s medium; a particular focus on words is a focus on language (read, syntax) and vice-versa. What emerges, to quote Kristeva on poetry, is “language beyond language,” in part always there waiting to be discovered, and in part waiting to be fashioned. - Richard Scheiwe



A sample poem from the book:


from Cycle: Action/Figure

Gnats deconstruct
their breakfast fastidiously, feast-tediously.
Tiniest black teeth zooming low near the lower jaw
of the manilla folder colored table.
She takes her collection of dolls and he his darkest markers:
Dentist, she pleas, clean, and the doll’s teeth
become beyond the crack in the door
where light diets to a skeleton of light
laying patient as a train station.
It works well,
the platform where they perform
this construction. Vegetables coddled
in the cutting, thus zucchini lives its less remarkable
dream dreamed for it: Periscope with nothing
to spy. In unison, spoons move to their mouths, in unison
in a way more eerie than hunger in common. Like they are
tracing intentionally the flight pattern of a bird
when its wings are most upward.
Like this intentionality facilitates something.


An author’s statement:

The impulse to write the poems in Re- was a desire to think about relationships— if connections between words would reveal something about connections between people or beings. Re- began as a practice in listening and looking—attempting to be responsive to what connections words called forth and how these connections could motivate a narrative (disjointed as it may be) about a generic “she” and “he.” Because of this, the poems afforded me a lot of surprise, and I was utterly absorbed in the writing process in the way one can become absorbed in various television series, so anxious to see what comes next that one will watch five episodes in a row—the continuousness of the writing of these poems, which I feel very fortunate to have had, allowed them to cohere and maintain a consistent energy, I hope, in a way they might have not if I had had to return to them intermittently.
I’m interested in the resemblance between “generic” and “generative,” along with the “gene” in them that recalls patterns. Patterns organize these poems. A variation of a line from the first poem in first section corresponds to a line in the first poem of the second section, variations of a line from the first poem in the first section and the first poem in the second section correspond to lines in the first poem of the third section, and so on; they share something, but not everything—a certain difference is maintained. The recycling here is a figure for reinvigoration, especially in terms of the reinvigoration relationships demand for maintenance—and each poem cycle suggests a figurative season that creates the atmosphere for the relationship between the “she” and “he.”
I wrote these poems in 2005–2006 in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to Cincinnati to begin work toward a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature. I was thinking a lot about relentlessness in poetry and teaching a class about it at Casa Libre en la Solana in the spring of 2006. If I recall correctly, I had just read Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text for the first time and was reading Marianne Moore’s letters and poems—so reading for texture, especially richness or lusciousness of texture, was at the forefront of my thoughts and obviously affected my writing practices. My choice of “lusciousness” reminds me I was reading Lane Dunlop’s translation of Francis Ponge’s Soap for the first time during this period, too. The act of reading was definitely part of the process of writing—I was reading the words that emerged as I went along as much as writing them to see how they asked to be unpacked and what word-parts could be dispersed to form new words. I hope readers connect with these poems—that they find a part in them.




Kristi Maxwell, Hush Sessions, Saturnalia Books, 2009


A mysterious accumulation, Hush Sessions is an exploration and meditation. It is a circling of image and thought, pieces of narrative (he & she), which begins with superstition, but comes to represent an even more ominous and heartbreaking sorrow. Kristi Maxwell whispers in hushed tones all manner of connectivity and relationship between. He & she. Husband & wife. Offspring & womb. In contrast to her first book of poetry, Realm Sixty-Four, which followed a research-based chess arc and theme (conceptual), Hush Sessions is also conceptual, but less linear and more transitive, fleeting. She uses fractured lines, math jargon, Q & A, dialogue and strong, insistent voice to build a book that hints and frets over larger themes: loss, struggle, love, trust, familial heartbreak. All these insecurities. One gets the sense that the poems themselves are hinting at something that Maxwell herself won’t admit to, trying to beat out a deeper theme, a warning perhaps, or maybe just an empathetic voice pulsing under it all. She writes, “And so a number. To be numbered among/ other numbers, then called. Culled.” and later “… my fingers aren't libraries where feel can be archived.” Beautifully stitched together, this book truly does sing quietly: “An asterisk between us: / the symbol used to mark a structure believed to have existed, but un-recorded, or recorded incorrectly.” Oh, “how you shiver like teeth or a wire/ made electric by the exit of birds./ To be the cold that holds you/ like teeth - / by roots or ruse.” - Kristina Erny


The notion of exchange circulates throughout Kristi Maxwell's superlative second collection of poetry, HUSH SESSIONS. In a series of utterly unique poetic experiences, things transform or transfer: superstition becomes science, and bodies become texts to read. In addition, family mythologies become sites of substitution and a borderland where irrationality and rationalization touch. Kristi Maxwell's poetry reminds us that words, like objects, do not exist in a singular state, and their multiplicity is activated through perception: "a veil during/ the trying on rather than the pride of/ the dress." As Fanny Howe says, Maxwell's poems "have pure, ephemeral lines that suggest much thought about time and utterance, yet they float free without any need for explanation."
The “Sessions” of Kristi Maxwell’s Hush Sessions suggests repetition and progression, play and improvisation. When a musician, for example, engages in a “session,” he/she is at work on something temporal. Process becomes the reward, and in Maxwell’s masterly second full-length book of poems, the splendid minutiae of domesticity and intimacy are the score. Hush Sessions is a collection that springs from a lyric tradition particularly interested in the materiality of language and its very real impact on our social lives, interior lives, relationships, ways of seeing, and means for collecting and cataloguing information, but Maxwell finds new ways to unravel, unpack, and riff on a repeated idea and/or image. The equations here move laterally instead of vertically. Hush Sessions’ pages are “fields of action,” allowing for the repeated image/lexicon to unravel in unexpected ways. I won’t fail to mention Williams’ other important dictum in respect to Maxwell’s verbal prowess: “poems are machine made of words.” In Maxwell’s case, the poem is the body and the body is a machine; why not take it apart to see how it works?
The book is comprised of several longer poems or poem sequences. The first, “Log of Dead Birds,” exemplifies the book’s general penchant for verbal dissection. The language of disembodiment suggests the speaker’s own fragmentation: a body reduced to parts:

I apologize if Xmas offends you.
I would have written out Christmas
but it is Xmas in my log because
very little space between margins—
these are not childbearing margins. (3)
First Maxwell plays with “margins,” intimating the physicality of language, the word made flesh. That the speaker should be reduced to a “nest” of sorts undermines her authority and ability to be brief, move quickly, and keep recording. It would be too easy to say the poems cloak themselves in a range of ambient but cagey dictions (picked up as a receiver picks up transmissions) in order to mask a deeper wound; instead, these are poems that manipulate language in order to achieve autonomy.
There’s something positively alchemical, too, about Hush Sessions’ conflation of “nature” and the physical realities of the body with the more ephemeral stimuli of technology, conversation, travel. What once meant separation and division now means an expansion of experience so that the mundane and mechanical aspects of the speaker’s life become opportunities for the intellect to play: “The claim isn’t I see more, but I notice / more of my seeing—i is my needle inside bird— / I draw meaning” (5). The poems’ self-reflexive tendencies struggle for a language that yields, bends, and flies; there is desire here for movement and expansion. Even grammar and syntax becomes sensual, of the body: “An asterisk between us: / the symbol used to mark a structure believed to have existed, but un- / recorded, or recorded incorrectly” (9).
The third long poem, “Like the Earth, 2/3rds Water,” is an intriguing meditation on impending loss and projected loss. It’s a loss, nevertheless, that’s felt and conjured again and again in puns, jokes, the (mis)heard and (mis)interpreted: “my ovaries attempted paper rock / scissors but could only manage rock” (23).
Maxwell’s humor is dark and sly. Hush Session’s capacity (intentional or unintentional) for deflection and misdirection hints at a deeper sadness throughout, but it also offers, on a more positive note, freedom and reinvention. In many ways, this is a fundamentally joyful book. As a feminist poet, Maxwell not only sees language’s constraints, she also sees its potential liberties—one of the collection’s many qualities I admire.
As the book progresses, the poems increase in line-length and in structural complexity. Soon they are juggling jargon related to quizzes and questionnaires, even algebra and logic, to delineate love, marital and familial relationships. “Dominant,” for example, manipulates the language of science (and genetics specifically) so that the more poignant observations on marriage and divorce are masterfully integrated into the poem’s fast-paced, dark humor:

“He’s a husband made up of wife molecules—
molecular ceremony:
(n.): a group of [humans] [legally] bonded together, representing the [most
restricted] fundamental unit of a compound that can take part in an
[amorous] reaction” (53).

There is a tremendous mind at work in these poems, a mind constantly engaged in its own game of question and answer, static and clarity. The book ends in a powerfully lucid lyric moment with “Seasoned,” a shorter poem affecting in its treatment of love/art because it eschews the end product for process—an artist’s process. In structure, the poem banks on the subtle shifts in meaning a repeated line and repeated simile can bring:

How can you kiss me like paint when I ask
that you kiss me like paint

without my saying over wood
over canvas/skin/the bin where murals are laid
like a bale in a barn, a veil during
the trying on rather than pride of
the dress” (62).

As the above excerpt illustrates, Hush Sessions is a collection filled with beautiful possibility.
Daniel Casey







Kristi Maxwell, Realm Sixty-Four, Ahsahta Press, 2007.


Realm Sixty-Four is an invitation to engage in some serious play. Taking its name from the literal field of the chessboard, Kristi Maxwell’s first book explores the dynamics of engagement, both through and within language. These poems are interested in the strategies that interactions encompass—interactions between words, between play and praise, between illusion and non-illusion, illusion and eluding, idea and image, between speakers, between voices, and between reader and text. From the history of the chess-playing automaton known as The Turk to a series of flirtations cadged in the game’s battlefield language, the subjects of Maxwell’s poems are rarely what they seem to be.

“There is an unspeakable intimacy in opposition—well, not wholly unspeakable, as Kristi Maxwell’s extraordinary debut proves. Opponents sit facing each other, a board constructed of 64 squares between them, a realm of possibilities circumscribed by Law and Chance, each person attempting to read the thoughts of the other. So a book sits between a poet and reader. So a bed looms between lovers. A space of contention, of agony in the antique sense, is likewise a space of creation, of genius. Maxwell knows chess pieces and words share an existence. The grammar beneath our speaking charts the desire our words try to express, repress, manipulate, confess, much as the King is reduced to his feeble step in any direction, the Queen can sprint her length through the campaign, and the Knight jumps over the Pawn’s heads. More important still, beyond the intricacy Maxwell reveals, beyond the enchantment in which she revels, is her insistent demonstration that poetry, like chess, is an art of thinking, and an art of risk, at whose final move, at the last blank page, one hears in echo a voice say Check, and pays closer attention to the before unseen threat.” —Dan Beachy-Quick

“Like the minimalist sculptors we have learned to admire without their theories mattering anymore, these poems have pure, ephemeral lines that suggest much thought about time and utterance, yet they float free without any need for explanation. This can happen partly because Maxwell has an inspired sense of the look of the page. If you wanted to blur on her words, you would still see beauty, harmony and space.” —Fanny Howe

“Hold onto your hat while Kristi Maxwell whirls you through late 18th-century and early 19th-century chess games, such as those between the Turk (a marvelous automaton) and Enlightenment figures. Meditating on the moves and strategies of chess gives Maxwell the freedom to enlarge the subject to the whole game of life, as these meditations become more and more abstract. Fortunately the pop culture we live and breathe manages to always be present in the poems. The collection is caught and held together by a neat metaphysical moment: sixty-four DNA components, sixty-four chess squares. The reader suddenly clicks; the mechanism of the book is alive. I really loved this very original book.” —Caroline Knox

The photograph on the cover of Maxwell’s Realm Sixty-Four shows a hand reaching out over a white background, as if to move a chess-piece. But it’s a plastic hand, the hand not of a woman or man but of an automaton, like the clockwork chess-playing Turk immortalized in Poe’s sketch, the “puppet and the dwarf” alluded to in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Chess is the explicit subject of many of the poems of Realm Sixty-Four (the title refers of course to the squares of a chessboard), the thematic center of all of them.
Life is like chess (isn’t that banal?), one reflects, deep in a first reading of David Copperfield, with its repeated themes of unprepared infatuation, the “undisciplined heart.” The pieces’ moves, the basic rules – like the passional vocabulary of interpersonal relationships – are easy enough to learn, at least superficially. But the combinatory possibilities, as one grows older, plays the game more often, present themselves as increasingly rich, mysterious, complex. Maxwell’s Realm Sixty-Four is an arena in which love, sexuality, history & power are set out in the ever-shifting figures of the chessboard & its opposed, interlocked pieces. A rich & mysterious book. - Mark Scroggins     A sample poem from the book
from Correspondence Game

December 1828

M—

Snow fattens the roads—or else it’s scar tissue
warmth exfoliates19

I hope invention is the catgut with which you’re sutured and home 20
the ointment.

At last evening’s show, an exploitationist asked
for his opaque fabric patched
against the Turk’s chest

to assert his claim
an operator observed the board
from there—

we mocked him, lightly, and asserted too the viability
the heart uses skin as a magnifying glass—
that something burns through—is burned through.

These are little victories.

As for your “bronze-bent bird,” would the egg
hatch-persist?

I confess, I hoped it inedible—
that the imaginary parents the real.

Patiently, as my knight takes your king’s pawn21—
_______
19Because either option would be considered positive coming from S., as he needed to gain at least five pounds after a month-long sickness that preceded the season change, and, for scar tissue to be exfoliated, it suggests a disappearance, most likely due to healing, it is accepted that this is how S. answered M.’s plea to reconsider—an affirmative answer.

20A literal interpretation: Europe. An Abstract interpretation: M’s own person. A generic interpretation: the place in which one’s growth occurred. A literal interpretation of growth: noted by age- and inch-count. A non-literal interpretation: noted by the head from which one’s life philosophy springs.
21This is the last move recorded in addition to its accompanying correspondence, though, because the game’s complete notation (see index) was found in M.’s documents, we know the game was completed in 1833, three years before their deaths.


An author’s statement:


About is a ravenous word; it has a way of eating up all nuances and not letting anyone else in on that feast. Ravenous about. Someone asked me, after I finished Realm Sixty-Four, “so the book’s about chess?” I responded that the book uses chess, and more specifically the strategies so well represented by chess, as an engine. If chess is a metaphor, it is also (and primarily) a game, and so it is play, but also the anxiety built into play because play involves (an)other (be that an individual or an object, imagined or real). Readers don’t need to know chess to know the poems.
Realm Sixty-Four was written over a three-year period. There was a lot of pleasure for me in constructing these poems, in experiencing their constructions that I got to be a part of—for some of the “Game” pieces (all of which take their names from actual games that beginners often study to practice and to hone their understandings of the board’s potential), the actual pieces of chess play an integral role: I set each move up on a board and imagined how it would look if it were represented by a concept, by an image, by an interaction, by a movement. The pieces, and their formations on the boards and the strategies that determine their new formations, have their own associations and allowed me to move through my own, too. Much of the “writing” of this manuscript came in the form of playing chess with my partner. In play, of course, anxiety and glee are in such dialogue, which is one of the reasons, perhaps, dialogue became a part of so many of the poems; I hope the dialogue between anxiety and glee is one in which readers will take part, will experience.
Reading, as seems to be the case for most writers of poems, coaxed much of the manuscript out. The more I read, I was continually drawn to the narratives regarding technology, represented through the Turk, the first chess-playing automaton, and extended into the late 20th century through the matches between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue. What strange wars cognition spurs. I’m also particularly interested in illusion and progress, illusion in progress, and illusion-in-progress. One book that brought many words to my computer screen is The Human Side of Chess, which draws out the dialectic between intellect and emotions that is inevitably a part of chess through its exploration of the lives of chess masters, and this urged me to engage the same dialectic in the poems—my hope is that the dialectic is maintained.
Realm Sixty-Four found its leaping-off points and leapt; I hope it, as well, enables leaping.