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In
her sixth collection of poems, The Sense Record, Jennifer Moxley
gives a densely lyrical account of the poet's experience – an experience often
marred by disappointment. Blending the sexual with the literate, the personal
with the abstract, and emphasizing a uniquely female perspective, Moxley
creates a group of poems whose power and complexity are as undeniable as they
are intoxicating.
The book's opening poem, 'Grain of the Cutaway Insight', makes reference to
the poet narrator's awakening to her craft. That craft, as Moxley sees it,
is a condensed, reflective part of 'the sudden of taking [and] the larger
of giving',
that make up life. The narrator's realization, however, is a melancholy one,
and looking back on lost innocence, Moxley ends her account of the poet's
beginning on a note of thoughtful resignation. She acknowledges that poetry,
while not remedy enough to stop life's pain, is one of the only remedies a
poet has:
The poem therefore must
be
a fit
condolence, a momentary
and ordered form of
emphatic
question, around which continues to gather,
despite habitual
despair,
the
moving
and needful Company of
thought, attentive
to existence, quiet and
ever
perpetual.
Through her poetry, Moxley offers the solace of shared experience, the shared
need for consolation in the face of uncertainty. Though aware poetry cannot
defeat sorrow, the narrator recognizes writing as her strongest weapon, and
she uses
that weapon as though compelled.
Moxley's verse is at is most effective when focused on the subjects of memory
and childhood. In her descriptions of a lonely girl growing up, the sensual
world of the body melds with the physical world outside. Thus, the narrator in 'Where Was I
Going' becomes inseparable from her environment:
On a ravine of bright grass, velvet even
dense in a breath shaken body, warmth
and comfort I ran towards it, it was a blanket
of wind
The highly lyrical style is appropriate here, employed in the description of
youth seen through its nostalgic halo. The ghostly figure of the narrator's
'mother in heather', recurs throughout the collection, and helps establish
a convention of shifting from abstract to personal detail. This is one of Moxley's
strong-suits – balancing high romanticism with a conversational idiom, and
the metaphysical with concrete minutia. Thus the poet follows the highly stylized
If in my leafy retreat
I remain, white-faced
and ever work-a-day,
with the more colloquial
mouthing retarded lies
This balance between nearly period-style language, and the simpler tongue of
childhood, creates a
compelling shift that seems almost bizarre, until one
realizes the poet has effectively recreated the dizzying world of being a
girl and a young writer,
absorbed into the world of verse.
One of the highlights of this collection is a long poem entitled 'Impervious
to Starlight'. Again, Moxley opens with a reference to nostalgia for the
innocence of lost youth. Her description of the apathetic and resigned
existence that awaits one in adulthood is harrowing:
The turn from the heart
of easy youth
to a soul-hungry adequate
frame
rocked in vacant luxury
to the half sleep of
slight regrets
Remarkably, Moxley is able to breathe new life into traditional lyrics. The
phrases 'easy youth' and 'soul-hungry' attest to the fact that the language
in Moxley's imagination is not limited to everyday speech; moreover, this
poet is not afraid to draw on styles of the past to create lines
intrinsically her own.
Moxley determines that, if there is any pleasure left to us in life, it is
the experience, or at least the remembrance, of the sensual. In 'Impervious
to Starlight', she continues to weave together threads of lyricism and
conversational lines, the effect being one of dazzling language. To pair the
heavy abstraction of
Every repressed failure
corroded
more of the sheen from
off
the simple miraculous
starlight
surrounding his
scandalous anecdotes
with
He poured his beer over
ice
is a breathtaking linguistic move. The seemingly ordinary detail of the beer,
which might seem dull on its own, sparkles when set against a passage of delicate lyricism. Likewise, Moxley's
lyrical turns become new and revitalized when infused with an injection of
contemporary vernacular. In this way, the poet follows in the tradition of
John Ashbery and other New York School poets, collaging whichever types of
language best suit a particular piece.
It is this balance between the lyric and the conversational that
distinguishes Moxley at her best, and she pushes the lyric form to its limits
when using romantic language to talk about sex in a graphic way.
Most of the poems dealing with sex in this collection are imbued with a sense
of loss, adhering to a female perspective of sex in a male-dominated culture.
Moxley accepts the only solace from lifeÕs eating loneliness is sensory
experience, and few experiences demand more from the senses than sex. Yet,
in someway, this form of solace is denied to women, because of the way
femininity is commonly perceived. Female sexuality is consistently portrayed
by mass media as innately passive. Likewise, sex is cast as an act of
invasiveness, one requiring women to forfeit their bodies' privacy. Thus, in
'Impervious to Starlight', the poet recognizes the entering of a vagina, as
a sensory experience that, though seeming to offer comfort, is actually
'somehow . . .an illusion'. Moxley writes:
I moved my hand inside
her cunt
and knew it was not my
trapped fingers
between the pillow of
muscle
and the frame of hard,
abstract bone
but the idea of her
pleasure
that aroused me. Just as
your cock
grows hard at the thought
of what
I might now be thinking.
Here, Moxley's critique of the replacement of women's sexual pleasure with
passivity is both devastating and relevant. It is not her pleasure the
narrator (presumably female) experiences, but the vicarious pleasure of the
woman whose vagina is entered. And even this female pleasure is not the
narrator's own to enjoy – rather, it passes to a male voyeur. This male gaze
of judgment, so pervasive throughout human culture, and so instrumental in
teaching women to evaluate themselves, not based on what their bodies can do
or experience, but on whether they will appear acceptable to male spectators,
can block even a poet from the solace of sex. Thus, pleasure and the chance
for respite in sex, pass away from Moxley's narrator, bestowing themselves instead on a hard
cock.
The poems in The Sense Record become increasingly pessimistic about the
possibility of sensual pleasure as comfort. Moxley simultaneously accepts
that limited sensual comfort is all the poet can have. The sex act becomes
more intrusive, as the sequence of poems progresses. The womanÕs role grows
more passive, as though the narrator were trapped in a system designed to
deny her bodily delight. In
'Aide-Memoire', Moxley writes:
Through the fragile
portal you push, and,
Heedless of acidic
secretions, enter,
the nest is moist and
dark, inside its lattice . . . .
This passage is startlingly powerful, the beauty of the language mingling
with the disturbing description of a woman succumbing to force. The male poet
or artist may sink into the 'nest' of the vagina for warmth and comfort. But
where should the female poet seek her peace? Her pleasure is overshadowed by
the enjoyment of another, and thus, in a moment of pathos, the narrator of
'Little Brick Walk' speaks of a male acquaintance:
'how I envied him .
. . those many husbanded years
. . . . 'I have no
wife,' I spoke to the dust . . . .
In a long tradition of wives providing artistic husbands with labor and
support, it still seems unlikely for a modern female poet like MoxleyÕs
narrator to find the support of a 'wife' in a male partner.
In the end, the poet continues to hold to her girlhood dreams, though a life
of experience has taught her those dreams will never be fully achieved. In
the title poem, the narrator finally admits:
I continue to dream of
horses
The tranquil leaps of a
bookish soul
above material
impediment.
To simply know and no
more.
To see my long abandoned
hope
refracted in your foliate
eyes,
translucent and, if I
remember right,
careening toward
disappointment.
In whose eyes are the narrator's hopes refracted? The eyes of her younger
self, whose fantasies will not come to fruition? The eyes of an indifferent,
or even solicitous lover, who, despite his benign intentions, cannot
appreciate the importance of the solace of activity, which he is granted
freely, but which she must continue to anticipate? Perhaps the eyes are the eyes of a world still saturated
by the view that femininity is passive, dependant, and second-rate. For all
these sets of eyes, no matter their status or sex, Jennifer Moxley's poems,
though heartbreaking, are necessary. Their beauty, their lyricism, and their
open devastation, cry out for a comfort women artists deserve and crave.
© Stephanie Cleveland 2004
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