Reading Novalis in Montana by Melissa Kwasny

Review by Andrew Wessels
Tags: poetry

Reading Novalis in Montana, Melissa Kwasny. Milkweed Editions. 96pp, $16.00.

In her third collection of poetry, Reading Novalis in Montana, Melissa Kwasny retreats into the natural expanses of Montana. She has not headed into complete seclusion, however; she has surrounded herself with other writers, from Novalis to Eliot to Artaud, whose words keep her company on her trip into the vastness. The poems that erupt from this journey are an attempt to better understand the self as the verses wind through a dialectic between the natural world and the culture we use to understand that world.

In the opening poem, which provides the collection’s title, Kwasny establishes an origin point:

The dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese first in my lungs.
Faint hieroglyphic against the gray sky.

The reader is lulled into an expectation of naturalist poetry. One expects the geese to develop into a touchstone providing an understanding of humanity and the poet herself. What will the geese say, we ask? What lesson about life will we re-learn through them? Then, interruption:

Then, the brutal intervention of sound.
All that we experience is a message, he wrote.

The predicted pastoral scene is interrupted by words Novalis wrote hundreds of years before. The question raised in this moment becomes: what is the experience? Is it the geese, what one sees out in the world? Or is it the message, the cultural and personal distillation of that experience into language, an unnatural entity? Kwasny wonders how we discern nature from culture, finding them bleeding into each other.

Following the initial allusion to Novalis, names crop up quickly: Artaud, Breton, Apollinaire, Dickinson, Hopkins, Oppen, Eliot, Pound, and H.D., just to begin. Names from nature abound, too: thistle, deer, willow, chokecherry, and spider. Kwasny wonders at these names:

. . . We have tried to name without knowledge
of the Native names for willow, initiates, confused
without an order or invitation.

We are separated from the “Native” names, the names imparted to the plants and animals ostensibly in Paradise. What we call them now has no necessary connection to what they are—they tell us more about our own culture than they do about nature itself.

Though Novalis is best known for his development of the fragment as a poetic structure, Kwasny’s own incorporation of the fragment is subtle. If one considers these poems as fragments instead of an assorted collection of poems, a purpose to their arrangement comes into focus. Themes and common structures are weaved through the poems deftly to pull the collection into a single unit. The structural device Kwasny most relies on is the hypothetical question:

They have left me behind like one of their lost,

scratching at the gravel in the fields. Where are they
once the sky has enveloped them?

These questions open doorways into otherwise seamless poems. Like the Novalis interruption in the opening poem, these questions defy straight reading, showing Kwasny’s own reticence and doubts about following either the path of the naturalist or the path of the scholar. The loss of “they” could refer to either the deaths of Novalis and Keats, who are previously named in the poem, or it could refer to the geese passing out of view. Both have abandoned Kwasny in physical form, yet both linger in her memory, affecting her.

Though at their best the hypothetical questions produce these interesting openings, some fall short of sparking such a response:

Yet when the old Cree man prayed in front of me,
I kept my palms flat on the earth.
I had never heard a person pray with such reluctance.
He was afraid of what he prayed to.
He splashed water over the rocks. Is it true
that if we have no objections, we have no self?

This question does not arise out of the internal logic of the poem. The move to the self is abrupt, not signaled by any clues elsewhere in the poem that might inform the reader’s thoughts. Would one consider arguing the negative? If not, the question fails to attain a point of conflict that would give it purpose.

The strongest pieces of the collection are the multi-section poems, such as the twelve-part “The Waterfall,” which ranges in style from straightforward litanies recalling Whitman—

May your nephew from Fort Peck be healed from the leukemia
May your sister find her courage and drop her crackhead boyfriend
May Sam get a kidney he goes three times a week for dialysis
May your grandson who has started to have seizures from the Ritalin
May the young man who was stabbed — a good ranch hand they say
May my aunt with diabetes give up her Carlo Rossi

—to brief, concrete images recalling the Imagists:

No water falling.
No water to cross over the damp sand
between rocks.
Moss on the rocks still green yet.

These disparate styles are woven into a single thread as Kwasny makes allusions and homages into her own image, turns them into a single statement spoken with her own voice. The power of the overwhelming litany, detailing the challenges of life, and the striking of the sparse image produce a synergistic effect for the reader. The litany is particularly interesting in its incompleteness. Lines fall off before reaching a conclusion—we never know what happens to the grandson or the stabbed young man—becoming a fragment of a moment. The brief images of the later section tell a story in Polaroids, leaving out vital moments whose importance lingers as the images build upon one another.

The poems continue to vacillate between nature and culture as distilled from language and writers, from “Black Geese in the Honey-Stubble of Fields Near Spring” to “Reading a Biography of Ezra Pound in the Garden.” Between these two extremes a single consciousness arises. In the final poem, “The Under World,” Kwasny claims:

When I broke with the earth, in grief, the animals still gathered. . . .
……………………………………………………………………………………………
. . . If I am progeny of thorns,
I am also mother of a sea of roses. If I am sea, I am anaphora. Casting a
calm above the undertow. Speak to me, work, or I will be forever lonely.
Help me to remember who I am.

Reaching the end of her path through these poems, Kwasny realizes that she has not gained any self-knowledge either from nature, from which she has now broken away, or from her words or the words of the other writers that have thus far guided her. Instead, this concluding section features sixteen uses of “I,” “me,” and “my.” Both nature and culture having been deemed insufficient, Kwasny ends with an acknowledgment of herself as all that remains, at last a moment of true isolation within narcissism.

Kwasny comes close to claiming that poetry is only of value, then, to the poet who writes, possibly as only a private endeavor. Her disdain for naming and the power of words further distances her writing. With all this discarded, what remains of value? This is the unsaid hypothetical question that lingers at the conclusion of the collection. If the poet has descended into narcissism, we understand her descent—it is earned, and we feel equally isolated, equally surrounded by a combination of calm and disquiet.

Andrew Wessels has lived in Houston, Los Angeles, and Cambridge. He currently is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He also writes A Compulsive Reader.

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