Joshua Ware, editor of Copper Nickel, Interviews Steve Mueske
January, 2006
The title of your collection, A Mnemonic for Desire, refers to a linguistic device which aides the recognition process. How does your poetry function in regard to this device?
The title is taken from the final line of the poem "The Shrike in the Garden of Machinery," which is as much an argument with our historical idea of God as it is an investigation of perception itself. These are essentially the same issues I address in the long poem "Where Nothing Grows," modeled, albeit loosely, on HD's amazing sequence of poems, Trilogy, in which she rises to the challenge of what it would be like to invent a religion. My approach to perception, arguably, is via Descartes, who ultimately decided that what he saw was given to him by God. I, too, am convinced there is some spiritual essence behind reality though I doubt our conceptions of God would be similar.
Reality is a mystery. "Why are there Essents rather than nothing," Heidegger once wrote. If I say "tree" you conjure in your mind some representative object from one or more sources in your memory. Your tree will be different than my tree. If we were standing outside and I pointed to a real tree and said "that tree," we will, of course, have the same objective source but our trees will still be different -- as different, arguably, than if there were no tree at all. Light hits the tree, bounces off, enters the lens of our eyes, where it is seen inverted, and then reconstructed in our minds, where it enters as an image. In a very real sense, we can talk about "the tree" as a sign in both examples. If we apply this to perception itself, that is, experiencing as objects of perception, we can talk, literally, about living in a world of signs. Poetry is a kind of song that orders signs, a dialectic between artist as demiurge and reader.
Correlating memory and desire certainly invokes Freudian allusions. In fact, Freud claimed that "every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit more than one interpretation." That being said, what were some of the conscious motivations and impulses guiding this work? Do you adhere to the belief that unconscious wishes manifest themselves in artistic output? If so, do you ever find it difficult reading your work in print? Does the process of writing serve as a catharsis for you?
I don't think it's poetry's job to provide a catharsis. Poetry, like any other art, is about ways of looking at the world, the strange experience of what it means to be human. For me, the act of writing is hard work, an endless process of discovering how each poem wants to be written. I have a variety of ways to approach writing, but most often it begins in a small notebook I carry around to jot down images, ideas, phrases and such; then I plant them in a seedling file to grow. Most of these files never amount to much, but every so often something will happen and the process of composition and revision begins. When this happens, it becomes a kind of irritation; poems -- with the exception of a handful over the last eight years or so -- do not come of a piece; they often do not come, even, in linear order. It involves waiting for the right conflux of events to trigger a kind of higher order consciousness to trigger the words. Even when this happens, it sometimes takes years to complete a poem. It's not so much unconscious wishes (or desires) as it is a continuous form of what Jane Hirshfield, in Nine Gates, calls "concentration." It's more than just a temporal form of listening, it's a kind of active readiness. I enjoy, very much, the whole process of being a public poet, imagining people reading the work on the Internet or in print journals, carrying around the journal and reading it on the bus or at home after a glass of wine.
Just as interestingly, perhaps, I am always afraid that the poem I am currently working on will be my last, that I'll never find those synaptic connections to make the poem cohere. It's irrational, to be sure, but there it is, and from what I can tell, a great many poets share this fear. I think it's because the creative impulse is such an integral part of our self-image.
At least in regards to content, diction, and tone, "The Morning I Become Ombudsman to the World" directly dialogues with Whitman. Throughout the course of the collection you reference Berryman, Rilke, and Ashbery. How do you understand these poetic influences acting upon your work in a broad perspective?
I would disagree that the poem dialogs with Whitman. Whitman's work is much more verbose and free-flowing; I suppose you might be latching onto the speaker's desire to unite the individual with humanity, and in that sense there is some similarity, but there is a certain resigned wistfulness in the speaker of that poem, an almost forced feeling of locating joy in quotidian experience that you won't find in Whitman, who is primarily a poet of celebration.
The larger question of influence is probably more germane. It would be foolish to think of one's work in a vacuum, isolated from the river of poetry that extends back to the wellspring of our development as human beings. Li-Young Lee once described poetry as "the mother tongue". At the time I thought the statement arrogant, typical of a poet. The more I think about language, perhaps as an innate characteristic of being itself, I've come to believe it is true. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why children say such surprising and wonderful things. As a reader, I'm constantly engaged with the poems I read, often questioning the poet about word choices, world-view, and the like. As a poet, the work of other poets challenges me to grow and try new things, to rip through that temporal veil between the inner and outer selves. I usually try to work against what I see others doing, but occasionally, as in "Red and Its Biographer" and the two Ashbery pastiches, I actually try on the voice and write from that perspective; that's pretty rare, though, and something I've only done a few times. Usually, when I signal another writer, it's to pay homage, in some way, to work that has inspired me.
Whether or not "The Monster, On Living" intentionally addresses the subject of poetic influence, the poem seems to raise questions about the issue. Lines such as "Perhaps it is/ the itch of skin that is and is not/ mine," particularly standout. "Why this desire then,/ this trembling to hold and to name?/ And what is this anxiety that hums in the root of all things" specially reminds me of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence. Assuming these issues are being addressed, how do you "swerve" from the poets in the previous question?
"The Monster, On Living" actually arose from a Halloween challenge from another poet to write a poem from the perspective of a famous monster. Since Shelley's Frankenstein arose from a similar challenge, I thought it appropriate to write about the monster. When I wrote the first draft of this, I was also working on the poem "After Surgery" and the two poems began to dialog about the experience of living -- specifically, forms of alienation from the body. I saw that the creature was flooded with emotions he was not equipped to understand because no context of living was available to him.
I think there is always some anxiety about following in the footsteps of other poets. Joe Millar once said that he often felt the influence of Phil Levine, who gave him this sage advice: "Don't give me riffs; give me lines". There is definitely an ongoing push and pull relationship in poetics. The only real important thing, though, is the poem, whether it succeeds or fails.
As the editor of Three Candles Journal and Three Candles Press, you read plenty of contemporary poetry. What trends do you see predominating or arising in the poetic world today? Do these trends infiltrate your work, or do you make an attempt to steer clear of them? With such a large output of poetry in the cotemporary market, how do you attempt forge your own, distinct voice?
You know, poetry is a funny animal. Despite the rather silly notion that crops up in mainstream essays about the death of poetry, poetry is more alive and vibrant today than it has been at any point in the past. Poet / critics like Joan Houlihan have been describing the denaturing of poetry. Literary critics have been talking about a shift to hermeneutic approaches to literary theory, a complaint which is really a thinly-veiled nostalgic yearn for a return to New Criticism. Poet Ron Silliman continues to rail against "the school of quietude". Joe Massey, Anthony Robinson and others have been calling for a New Sincerity in poetry. All of these discussions indicate that poetry is alive and well.
I think every poet, at some point, should do an editing stint. That way they'd see firsthand the bulk of submissions received over the transom often have a certain sameness to them, an unwillingness, for lack of a better term, to push beyond the relatively safe confines of ordinary experience: the I-took-a-walk-today-and-this-is-what-I-saw poem, usually accompanied by low-grade natural images and some vague epiphany; the spurned lover poem; the poetry-as-spiritual-catharsis poem. The list goes on and on. Poems need to have an engine -- linguistic, rhythmic, musical or otherwise -- that signals a genuine urge to be; they need to convince us that they had to have been written, that they could not not have been written, and that the poet was the only vehicle through which it could have been written.
As a poet, I do agonize about voice, or more particularly what I call authenticity in a poem. Since I have a rather eclectic aesthetic both in terms of reading and of writing, I'm always evaluating and reevaluating my work for consistency - which, naturally, it doesn't have. I've even gone so far as to separate out poems according to voice and try to group them accordingly. What I've decided, over the years, is to trust the process, to honor the artistic impulse and worry about of-a-pieceness and cohesion when I organize manuscripts. When I write, I try to be invisible, in a certain sense, and let the poem come to me as it will.
The collection as a whole oscillates from the natural world to the world of man, then back to the natural world once again. Functionally, how do these shifts in subject matter operate on a holistic level?
I think it is a matter of transparency. I'm hoping that the reader will ascertain a certain arc of thought, an engagement with the natural world -- a world that includes humankind. Ours is a world of questions, of continual searching, of discovery, of pain, loss, and joy; it is this complex of experience, I think, that makes poetry such a wonderful vehicle of connection. However, once a poem -- and in this case, collection of poems -- leaves my hands and goes out into the world, it becomes whatever the reader will make of it. It is my hope to provide some space to think about things a little differently, to spark a feeling or thought, to make the reader laugh or cry. Poems are the vehicles by which we get at those undiscovered territories of private space where moments of the past links up with other moments in the past in ways that inform the present.
There are many instances of transformation in your collection: water being "remade in perpetuity," butterflies undergoing a "metamorphoses glimpsed only in dreams," the speaker of a poem acknowledging his desire "to be unmade," and "the song forms, rising out of nothing" is one of the collection's last lines. How does transformation factor within your poems?
Transformation is a fundamental law of being. To be an object of experience -- to enter the world of perception, in some sense -- that object has to change. Buildings shift and acquire cracks, settle and eventually fall. All living things die. Somewhere along the way, everything aspires to be something else - to be is to become; to become requires on-going change.
Part of the problem of sense perception is that an image is entered and stored in a kind of eternal space. Think of childhood friends: Are you a little shocked when you see someone you haven't seen in fifteen years and see that they have aged in an unexpected way? Memory is the one thing that seems to escape the mutable nature of time. Memories are often flawed, and added to imaginative ways, another process altogether. Despite what philosophers and cognitive scientists will claim, consciousness is essentially unknowable. The fact that we can say "I am" matters. But there is no means by which we can talk about this -- Descartes, after all, had to rely on his famous dictum "I think, therefore I am."
Have you been writing new material? If so, where do you see your work heading? What kind of transformations have you and your poetry undergone since this collection has been completed?
I'm constantly writing new material, although admittedly at a slower and slower pace. If anything my work is growing more surreal, headed, as a former classmate of mine once said, "into deeper, wilder lands". I'm just doing my part, showing up at the writing desk every day, waiting, as Li-Young Lee once said "for the soul to visit." Each poem is a learning experience, each poem a new world to be expressed in signs.
Poet Kate Greenstreet Interviews Steve Mueske
September, 2006 ()
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
The first time I saw my book, actually, was at the book release reading. I'd seen the proofs before, both for the cover and for the internal matter, but not the physical book itself. To hold it in my hands was very satisfying and yet strange in a way. I experienced a kind of mixed awareness: a sense of the time involved in writing the poems--some eight years worth of work-- and this book, this thing in my hands, was the final product, a compression of all that time into something tangible; but it was also a letdown. I think we dream about having a book for so long that the reality of it can't possibly measure up to the desire. This is not to say it's any fault of the press [Ghost Road]--they've been fantastic. I'm always at war with my work, it seems; I think this is just another manifestation of that.
Before that day, did you imagine your life would change because of your book's arrival?
Not really. I saw it as another phase of development, a new kind of beginning, as it were. I was excited, of course, but not blindly optimistic that it would change my life. In some ways, I was more excited receiving the contract than the actual book. In some sense it validated, to my friends and family, my work as a poet. I mean the idea of someone writing poetry, especially as it's portrayed in the commercial media, is always something of a joke. And this is never countered by experience. People have in their memory an awful association with poetry; and why not? It's often taught to young students through a New Critical lens, as though the poem were some puzzle they needed to figure out. I think some teachers do this because it's easier to teach something when the answers are right in front of them. It's a lot more dangerous to go out in front of a bunch of kids and say, "I have no fucking idea what this means but it sounds cool and it gives me goose bumps." I've often believed that if students could see how vibrant and exciting poetry is, they might incorporate it into their lives--especially those students who develop an affinity for literature early on.
How has your life been different since?
It hasn't really. I'm writing much slower, though. And I've developed a nasty addiction to Butterfinger Crisps.
Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
I didn't think that it would be so difficult to get local bookstores to stock a poetry title by a local author. It's also sort of annoying that a bookstore will order 15 copies of a book and send 13 of them back. For presses that are already hard-strapped for cash, this is a sure way to lose a lot of money.
I didn't think it would be so hard to get book reviews. It's daunting to compare the "books received" versus books reviewed from any journal. That's one of the reasons why I've decided to start Poetry 365--that and the fact that I'm suspicious about a link between reviews and sales. Reviews are generally more about positioning yourself as a critic. This is not always the case, of course, with every critic; many poets have written to me saying essentially the same thing. It's all part of the way things are done, though. Like getting book blurbs. I'm grateful that I found people to say nice things about me, but blurbs, in general, are nearly useless. Why do we have them? Wouldn't it be better for the poet to have a place to frame his or her work?
What have you been doing to promote sales, and what are those experiences like for you?
I try to do as many grass roots type of things that I can, like this question and answer, for example. I've conducted several interviews via email. A local paper featured a lifestyle piece and that helped generate some interest. I emailed the acquisition librarians for every private and public library in the state, including the college libraries. I called book stores, and scheduled readings. I've even read during a church service.
One thing that's very clear: there is nothing like one-on-one contact to promote the sales of a book. I'm not in the academic world and don't have a history of students and potential students so there is not that built-in audience that a lot of poets have. Just making people aware that the book is out there is important.
Despite initial hesitations, I'm thinking about putting together a few workshops to cover the nuts and bolts aspect of writing; I've either run or moderated a private workshop for several years, and have participated in many others longer. There are a lot of talented young poets out there looking for some advice to progress to the next level. As an editor, I see the same sorts of poems over and over again; I could bring a helpful perspective to younger poets. I would tell them to peel off their skins and let the wild spirit out. There are no right and wrong ways to write. What's important is to treat the craft like the art it is and trust in your ability to write. I've resisted this for a long time because I don't want to get into that rut of teaching certain kinds of poems that match up with craft-based issues. That could get stale really quickly. What I'd like to do is work on process, discovery, inner-dialog--the things we do every day as artists, that we sometimes take for granted. These are the sorts of questions I get most often at readings.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your book came out? Or, what was the best advice you got?
Right before the book's release, my friend and mentor Jim Moore said not to worry too much about sales, that I should know that the book will find its way into unlikely hands and that it will be a blessing when it does. Those words were very comforting to me. I can be very idealistic at times--I do believe that poetry is a necessary enterprise. I think he was preparing me for the inevitable poor sales of a first book. One thing I always tell the poets I work with: make sure you call yourself a poet. It sounds hokey to a degree, but I feel that it is very important that you recognize and name that creative spirit.
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing?
I've always been a kind of underdog, but that's okay with me. I don't have any delusions about ever being a well-known poet. All I really care about--again the idealism--is writing the best poems I can. What I have noticed, however, is that I've slowed down quite a bit and that I'm second-guessing my work much more than I would have previously. Louise Gluck has said that she has a period of silence after the release of a book. I'm not sure, yet, what the effect is. It's really too early. I work very slowly as it is, so if I work any slower I could race mold.
How do you feel about the critical response to your book and has it had any effect on your writing?
I've gotten some very good reviews from the book, and a few bad reviews. You have to take both. I would like to see--purely from a selfish standpoint--a deeper engagement with the text itself. In the workshops I participate in, I find that I learn more from critics who take a hermeneutic approach. I've heard the word "sloppy" used a few times and that rankles me a little because that's the last thing I'd say my work is. Some readers may not like it. Others will. But no poem of mine comes into the world without a lot of time and attention.
Do you want your life to change?
It would be nice to live a creative life without having to find a job to pay the bills. If I could find a way to make music and be involved with poetry all day every day that would be very cool. It's pretty likely that will never happen, so for now I just try to stay busy and try to do my part to build a poetry community and maintain a network of friends. No one I know is in this for the money.
Is there something you're doing now that you think will bring about a change that you seek?
I don't know. I try to be as involved as I can. I'm the editor-in-chief for the literary arts journal three candles, the publisher for three candles press, and curator for Poetry 365. I view these activities as a way to participate, to make my voice heard. Some people bitch about the state of affairs in poetry, this or that magazine, this or that program. If you feel strongly about something, do something to support it. Start a press. Start a journal. Organize a reading series. Getting involved is crucial to this art form.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
I'm of two minds about this. As an idealist, I do believe that it creates change because of its fundamental nature. I've long believed that poetry is an art that deals with the ordering of signs to create the illusion of meaning. In this way, poetry is tremendously versatile, but it still deals with the nature of relationships. Whenever art makes someone a participant, it creates a kind of vehicle for examination and self-examination.
As a pragmatist, I doubt that it makes much difference: it takes a certain level of intelligence, a certain kind of surrender and that kind of sensibility is not something our culture tenders. We'd rather focus on business, pleasure, and entertainment. If we could use poetry as a tool with younger children and work it into a standard curriculum, then yes I believe poetry would be a phenomenal tool. At the very least I'd like to see poetry taken out of its standard box and given a new freedom. Students need to see that they can engage poems in different ways, that they can make them their own and, like dream images, metaphors, and emotions, use them as sources for creative living. I'm not saying that we abandon teaching students about the mechanics of poetry--Lord knows we need a common vocabulary--just that we stop considering poetry to be a short unit in a literature class.
Originally published on The Great American Pinup blog at http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/2006/07/steve-mueskes-mnemonic-for-desire.html
STEVE MUESKE'S A MNEMONIC FOR DESIRE
Chekov believed a story could be written about anything. Ann Charters related the following anecdote in The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003): “Once he [Chekov] said to a visitor, ‘Do you know how I write my stories? Here’s how!’ and he glanced at his table, took up the first object he saw—it was an ashtray—and said, ‘If you want it, you’ll have a story tomorrow. It will be called The Ashtray.’”
"The Ashtray" came to mind again and again as I read Steve Mueske’s A Mnemonic for Desire (Ghost Road Press, 2006). Mr. Mueske has that ability to make poems out of everything around him, from a “Rummage Sale”—in which he imagines a worn Evel Knievil action toy daydreaming about one last adventure with the pinprick-abused Barbi doll in the next box—to musing on the idea of “When Advertisers Finally Sell Advertising Space in Your Dreams.” Granted, this is sometimes a blessing and other times a curse, but it makes for a diverse collection of poems that is certain to offer something surprising and interesting to almost every reader.
I’ve identified three poems in Mr. Mueske’s first book-length collection that I feel represent the breadth of his work and his writing style. The first of these three poems is “On Desire,” which was first published in The Bedside Companion to the No Tell Motel—which was reviewed on TGAP by Matthew Schmeer last month (http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/2006/06/time-to-change-sheets-some-words-about.html). “On Desire” is one of many carefully-crafted poems that sustain their musical energy from start to finish. It also shows Mr. Mueske’s penchant for lush imagery and the usage of a word or two that sends readers like me to the dictionary (in this case it was thaumaturge, and yes, I did have to confirm that I really did know the definition of mnemonic).
Mr. Mueske’s work is also filled with satisfying allusions to our twentieth-century masters—Stephen Dunn and Charles Wright among those whose influence I most often heard. In the case of “The Neon Fish,” I felt the spirit of James Wright’s “The Blessing” and its climactic lines, “if I stepped out of my body I would break/Into blossom.”
On Desire
If I could burst into bloom, red
with the rose of it, with the rise and swell
of it, called into being through
the deep green, and trembling with light,
I might understand. If I knew
how light touches water
with tracery of trees, gifts
the world as it is not, I might know
why I am not a rose or water or light
but a man who suddenly believes
in witchcraft. What else
but this hollowing fire, this mark
of the thaumaturge, could make
the wild heart, so like a bird, thrash
in its cage? Imagine rain and wind,
portrait of tempest with shed: shivering
slivers of wood, the whole structure
in danger of imploding. Here under
a black sky swirling with clouds
I am ready to be unmade. The air
is charged and blue, and my hands
are burning with light.
Compare “On Desire” to “The Neon Fish.” The two poems have much in common regarding craft and style, but the ambiguities in “In Neon Fish” demanded several readings for me to get inside the poem—which, in this case, I considered worth the effort. As is typically the case for me, I can’t sustain interest in too much interpretative work when reading a collection of poems. I always ask myself, after puzzling out a poem: what was the payoff? Was there some new bit of insight gained? Some new perspective shared? A fresh image experienced? As is usually the case, my reaction was hit-and-miss in this collection. (As an example, two poets whose work I consider big on “payoff” are Bei Dao and Mebh McGuckian.)
The Neon Fish
As if the whole thing could be understood at once
she paused and looked into her bag for her private things.
The world rotated into some new kind of perspective,
some new kind of light, and all the old things were forgotten.
Something came up from the bottom,
glittering like the deepest fish,
and found itself away from home in the lessened pressure.
The puzzle is never really complete, is it?
It’s not like the picture will hold still.
Yes, there is the lipstick and the mirror.
Africa will remain affixed to the globe.
Snow will fall and tomorrow will come, indelibly.
She will open her eyes and the gentle gray light
will bring something new.
What does it all mean, moving through the day,
through the striped rhythm of shadows?
My favorite poem in A Mnemonic for Desire is “Night Call,” the collection’s sole prose poem. An elegy, it’s language is straight-forward and direct, and his metaphor of being late for the carnival is expansive. This poem is made of plain language and gets its power through understatement. Poems like this appeal to my sensibilities, and I found “Night Call” satisfying on both an emotional level and for its poetics.
Night Call
—for Chip Nelson
Mother said she was sorry, but was calling because there’d been an accident.
She wanted me to hear of my friend’s death from a familiar voice. “A drunk
driver,” she said. “A doctor.” I dressed as if in a slow dream and went down
to wander the dark streets. Sometime later—it might have been minutes, it
might have been hours—I heard reggae, and followed the sound back to an
open window. I sat on the curb to listen. The night was warm and there was
a slight breeze, a hint of morning in the sky. It seemed as though something
wonderful had come and gone, a carnival perhaps. I’d arrived late, but at
least there was still music.
Mr. Mueske’s first book-length collection of poems is worthy of attention. Production value is high and the cover art, an intricate photograph by Elena Ray, provides an intriguing indication of what awaits the reader. Ghost Road Press can be proud of this book, as can its author.
Review originally posted on The Alsop Review's book review board at http://www.alsopreview.com
A Mnemonic for Desire
by Steve Mueske
Ghost Road Press
ISBN: 097712729X
Reviewed by Cheryl Snell
Steve Mueske's debut collection, A Mnemonic for Desire, touches not only on memory and desire but articulates a way of looking at the world. It reconciles the lyrical with the grim, examines the impulses toward hope and despair. With so many poems so remarkable in range, the work looms large. The book itself is long for a first collection--116 pages, with characters as varied as a black and yellow spider, a small blue god, Phillip Glass, Frankenstein, and an Amazing New Device That Brings Back the Dead in Lifelike Holographic Images.
The theme of survival surfaces with the first poem, "This Far in August". Mueske observes that "Every wild weed believes it has only one season," and a nearly extinct butterfly "knows only the pang of hunger/and a new season with the freedom/ of wings." The world continually transforms, and this might be one hinge of these poems, the idea of survival through change.
In "The Morning I Become Ombudsman to the World," the speaker must steel himself to join his fellows, fight his own urge toward solitude. He assures us, however reluctantly, that "I will go out/into the world, to love it, unequivocally,//in all its belching verdure, its/endless complaining." Interior and exterior landscapes reveal the ambivalence of the lonely man, who still, as in the dazzling "On Desire", asserts, "I am ready to be unmade."
"Poetry is a kind of song that orders signs, a dialectic between artist as demiurge and reader," the author says in an interview with Joshua Ware. Mueske creates a place of what is misplaced. The poems arc over the physical world and our part in it, spread out into all kinds of imaginative tributaries, and return to nature "...where the song forms, rising out of nothing,/with little more than a few ideas about itself."
The pleasures of the collection include esoteric tropes as well as homely ones. "Where Nothing Grows" is a long poem modeled on HD's "Trilogy," and deals with idea of God and the nature of perception. HD wanders the rubble of war looking for a coded message that will reveal order under chaos, while Mueske looks for the meaning in what is. In the title poem, "The Shrike in the Garden of Machinery," the poet argues with the historical view of creation.
iii.)
Listen. There are three ways to speak.
One involves hiding in the weeds, covered
with stories. Though you may be tempted to,
don't call me Adam. I?ve never been here before.
I come out of the redness of earth.
My eyes are on fire.
The solid weight of the Pomegranate is a real thing.
Everything else is a mnemonic for desire.
The work explodes with related ideas; rhythm and music and language propel imaginative leaps. There is shape and invention, an appetite for sound. Surreal elements present in some poems, archetypes and dream symbols, yet the elements are recognizable-- a fly with "a bit of spit in hair", cannibalistic butterflies, "thin black pancakes" stacked on an old record player.
"The Monster, On Living" is another well-grounded example. "Perhaps it is/ the itch of skin that is and is not/ mine...Why this desire then,/ this trembling to hold and to name?" says the monster, unable to parse emotions he does not own. Another type of detachment from the body is detailed in "After Surgery". Physical fragility is contrasted with nature's cycles throughout this book.
After Surgery
Five days back from the dead
and I'm touching my face in the mirror.
Can this be me, this ghoul from the pit of knives
with his piecework of bandaged skin?
His abdomen is stapled from sternum to pelvis,
caked with blood, and smeared
yellow. I touch the catheter tube
growing like a bean sprout from my penis.
A bag of urine is strapped to my leg.
My heart is a box of mold.
...I'm one of the lucky ones.
In a moment of vulnerability, the reader is given a paradox about the beauty of living; the poet does not hesitate, his voice can be trusted. Mueske makes it both beautiful and believable.
"The Art of Measured Breathing" is one of my favorite poems. Dedicated to a friend with ALS, Mueske traces their friendship from a time when they were "lit like struck matches: untouchable." The phrase "As the years peeled back," signals the turn, and the young man begins to succumb to disease; the language quiets and "His arms grow heavy/with wings, a small price for the sky."
Chosen with craft and skill, each word in every poem in A Mnemonic for Desire earns its place, supporting the tone of the whole, resonating with connections that lead to a larger statement about being human.
This poet's voice comes out of his emotional honesty-- authentic, unflinching. The self may change, but Mueske is not afraid of the dark; and I'm convinced that only he could have created that small blue god who "sings to the sky because it looks/so much like him, big and full of hope."
