Taking Inventory:

Alex Good: I guess it's no surprise that Dionne Brand has the most overtly political book on this year's list - though I think it's interesting to note that two other authors have poems with 9/11 in the title. What is surprising, at least for me, is how good Inventory is. Or at least how much I liked it (they may be different things). I've never been a big fan of Brand's in the past, but I think this is her best work to date.

The first thing that struck me was its coherence. It really is a single long poem, not a poetic sequence. The thread that holds it together is her compiling of lists, her counting of inventory, in two related ways. The first inventory is the roll call of the dead, supplied by the Iraq Body Count, particularly in the long third section of the poem. The second inventory is that which takes stock of our weapons of industrial production and its related war on nature (which is "not interested in us," and keeps "its own inventory of time, of light and dark"). This second inventory leads to a vision of a consumer culture stuffed with junk, forests destroyed to make room for "fields of prostration, / building mechanized with flesh and acreages / of tender automobiles." So much junk we're making ourselves sick with it:

bodies thicken, flesh

out in immodest health,
six boys, fast food on their breath,
luscious paper bags, the perfume of grilled offal,
troughlike cartons of cola,
a gorgon luxury of electronics, backward caps,
bulbous clothing, easy hearts

That "gorgon luxury" is good - something both gigantic and monstrous, with the additional connotation of a force that turns us to stone, sitting before its big-screen, high-def altar - and it's typical of the book's greatest strength, which is Brand's ability to turn a phrase. I don't think her handling of the line is very strong, or even the stanza for that matter (though this is sometimes used to effect). But in a poem like this, which is deliberately a kind of informal listing, I didn't think it mattered. What was important was her ability to itemize with clarity. This she does, managing to keep the inventory scrolling through places like "the unsociable funereal parking lots / with transparent children and their killing play," and images like "those spiders patrolling the windowpanes, / building quadrants of belligerent silk" (not a nice image by the way, but creepy and threatening).

I also liked the way the political message is rhetorically understated. It comes out often in a seeming-indifferent "well . . ." or the "at least" we get here:

let's at least admit we mean each other
harm
we intend to do damage

In the final section of the poem, her "favourite things" list, she even pulls herself up short when she gets sidetracked attacking those who burn the world to dust and blow up hospitals. Enough of that, back to an inventory of blessings: "okay, okay this list is not so exhausted yet."

It was Stalin who said that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. More recently this same idea is often expressed by terms like sympathy fatigue. But in Inventory Brand tries to make us feel statistics as tragedy. These lists of new cars and numbers killed aren't just numbers on a screen. Or, if they are, then so are we. So

let us all deny our useless names in solidarity
with these dead dinner guests and pedestrians,
and anonymously dead mechanics, and desultory
children and passengers, and those faceless cosmeticians

I know political poetry rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and to be honest most of it is terrible. But this book is an exception. I was impressed.

Katherine: Well, I think that to choose to only write about "your fucking gardens" as one of my friends put it the other day is a fairly brazen political act. So perhaps I'd be more inclined to call this work the only work that announces itself as political. (And yes, I realize you've qualified your statement here, Alex, by calling it the only overtly political work.)

I'm surprised that if you like this work you wouldn't have liked thirsty, which I think shares lot of strengths, and which I do think is formally stronger, but maybe that's because I had the experience of hearing her read it aloud.

And if you're going to say most political poetry is terrible, then I'm going to say most lyric poetry is terrible. but I don't think that either statement is really true or helpful. Both forms have their particular pitfalls. Poetry that concerns itself with overtly political subject matter fails when it becomes overly reductive, or when fuelled by impatience, I think, it becomes didactic. 

But Brand isn't trying to convert anyone. She trusts that the inventory will speak for itself:

I say this big world is the story, I don't have any other.

And Brand indicts herself as much as anyone else - if this is a lament for the state of the world, it's also a lament for her own failure to change it, a crushing sense of despair that I expect only those who were of a certain age in the 60s can appreciate fully.

And in the final section of the poem, I don't think she's getting side-tracked by that condemnation of those who have made it so hard to remember the good things in the world. Isn't that an eruption? Isn't the litany of the final section somewhat defiant? for "Happiness is not the point, really, it's a marvel / an accusation in our time."

I haven't spent the time with this book that I want to. But the point is, perhaps, that I want to spend more time with it.

Alex Good: I think most (overtly) political poetry is terrible because it jettisons aesthetic effect for beating you over the head with a message, allying itself more with the voice of propaganda and advertising than bad lyric poetry (which can certainly be bad too, but in a different way). 

I don't think Brand believes the inventory will speak for itself. The facts never speak for themselves.

Whether we define that passage in the final section as getting side-tracked or being an eruption comes to the same thing. My point had more to do with the "okay, okay" way she brings things back.

But all of this is just arguing among ourselves. I thought it was a very good book.

Alex Boyd: It struck me as an interesting concept for one poet to explore the turbulent beginning our century has endured. There are frequent artistic statements in the months and years leading up to a new century, but for obvious reasons they can be a trifle clueless as to what's going to happen.

With a title as hard and factual sounding as Inventory, I did want more in the way of coherent theories, ideas and suggestions, but I think that's probably a fault in me, for having the expectation. I found it so unrelentingly grim towards the beginning that I almost wanted to stop reading: "the bus stations are empty and sobbing, / the unemployment lines are runny / like broken eggs, the construction sites / pile up endlessly, nothing is finished." Gee whiz, the book should have a coupon for a free hug at the end. There is a sense of change at least, as we move through the different sections of the book, but I'm not sure I felt much in the way of progression, or hope.

I also don't know that I found the book terribly memorable. Maybe it's enough for a poetry book to have sharp images ("as continents roll over in their sleep") and ultimately be about empathy, but I think maybe this book was a little too general for me, in terms being able dig in and create something memorable. Reading the book felt a little like flying over a continent - you cover a lot of ground, but there isn't enough in the way of specifics, and to me, the most effective writing finds the general through the specific.

Katherine: Alex, you suggested that I edit out my comment in my previous post where I claimed that I wanted to spend more time with the book, because of your concerns that it sounded like I was making an apology, a self-deprecating confession that I hadn't finished my homework. Well, after spending another week with the book, I would like to re-assert that comment, because it's not a statement about me; it's a statement about the book. This is a complex offering. It's difficult subject matter, heavy with consequence. Formally, it's in the negotiations of narrative voice where things get interesting. One of the things I want to highlight is how this is reflected in her use of pronouns. Sometimes it declares itself as the voice of "I," the individual, and sometimes the voice of "us," the collective, and sometimes it's the voice of that individual or collective commenting on the voice of "she." And there are a lot of statements about "them." Perhaps this helps to account for the feeling of generality Alex Boyd described, which confused me at first since the book's whole project is to document particularity. But all of the personal pronouns are vacuumed of referents (with the exception of a dedicatory poem to Maxine Greene). Of course, we can infer that the "she" of the poem is a representation of the author. But the fact that the poem creates a distance between "her" and "me" is interesting, and I want to spend more time tracking the moments where the poem makes those particular shifts.

The ambiguity of the "them" is such a comment on these times, times that gave birth to the Patriot Act, where anybody could be "them," though clearly not everybody is going to be suspected of being "them." And we have our own home-grown version of this in the Anti-Terrorism Act. And the consequences of being labeled "them" are dire.

But there’s equal interrogation of the dangers of "we":

let’s at least admit we mean each other
harm,
we intend to do damage

then she may stop this vigil for broken things,
then she can at least sit down
to eat the chrome muscles of grocery carts,
the hearts of ubiquitous concrete barriers,

we,
there is no "we"
let us separate ourselves now,
though perhaps we can’t, still and again
too late for that,
nothing but to continue

The way this book explores the nature of identity resonates more strongly with how I'm understanding human consciousness in the 21^st century than the picture offered by Airstream Land Yacht.

"But," I hear Alex saying, "I still don’t know whether or not you like the book."

I suspect that, for my money, Inventory is the best book of the ones shortlisted this year. But I’m not ready to make that claim with any confidence yet, and I'll again insist that this is not a posture of false humility or self-deprecation. I try to evaluate the success or failure of a book on its own terms. Although it's overtly the most formally intricate book on the list, I understood fairly readily what Airstream Land Yacht was trying to do - it announced its intentions very, very clearly, and I think it succeeded in its own project. Same goes for Home of Sudden Service. I think John Pass wants nothing more than to be a good lyricist, and there’s nothing wrong with that goal. But I think, despite what the official jurors say, “Stumbling in the Bloom” demonstrates how difficult it is to write good lyric verse. I'm still feeling a bit ambivalent about The Good Bacteria, because I'm not sure that I've found a satisfying way to read it yet. But given the amount of effort I've put into it, and the fact that I’m reasonably well-read in a variety of poetic styles, I suspect that the book can be, at the very least, held to account for not more clearly signaling its intentions. Or maybe it just fails.

My experience with Brand is the exact opposite of my experience with Thesen. The more I read, the more I understand how complex and subtle a project she has undertaken. Though it's subtle, it's not elusive. It rewards careful and repeated reading. But this is not, for me anyway, enough to be a marker of literary quality. That's just a measure of complexity. Once I get a more comprehensive picture of what she’s doing, I’ll be in a better position to evaluate to what use she’s put that complexity. So far, I think she’s putting it to very good use indeed.

NEXT: Taking a Pass