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REVIEW Wendy Lee Spacek, Psychogynecology, Monster House Press, 2015 Reviewed by Zack Hatfield |
My attempts at maintaining a dream journal have always ended up in failure; no more than a few nights would pass until I forgot to pen an entry, misremember my dream, or had simply endured a night of dreamlessness. On mornings or middles of nights that I did remember to jot down my unconscious experiences, I couldn't evade the feeling that simply rendering certain episodes or images on the page was a betrayal of that actual dream. That dreams belonged to their own specific language. I suppose people feel this way about history too—the lie we inscribe about past experiences, the paradox of erasure that we corroborate by creating a written record. These political and personal erasures are brimful in Wendy Lee Spacek's slim poetry debut, Psychogynecology, a collection published by Monster House Press that finds both solace and malaise in memory and the self.
Spacek embraces the poem's instruction, looking at very small things so closely that their textures resemble something galactic. But what is a very small thing? Life, Spacek insists, is a very small thing, or maybe it is something that requires the endless carrying of small and large things, things that can break you or things that can lift you.
These lines, from the opening poem "One Thousand Black Cats," introduce us to Spacek's voice, one of wavering conviction. She achieves a perfect degree of clumsiness in her language, one that demands not only rereadings of the text, but also unreadings—approaching the poems from different angles, reliving them the way one experiences a dream undreamt, voluntarily forgotten. In my experience, recurring dreams rarely feel like reruns of the imagination, but instead as if, with each iteration, a different cinematographer is hard at work. Spacek's internal cinematographer inscribes these poems with multiple textures and meanings. * Maybe there is no such thing as a poetic self-examination. What I mean is, don't Spacek's interrogations of the psyche, the body, the spiritual, youth, and memory become the light that develops our own image? Photography plays a vital role in Psychogynecology, if not an obvious one:
* Spacek's words begin to feel like those of a somniloquist. "I'm the kind of person/who could understand just about anything," she intones in "Night Gardener." Other poems combine a phantasmagoric lyricism with an impulse for narrative, as in the Lynchian "The Battle on the Second Floor Landing" after a man asks the speaker if she could find a gun to kill him with:
The enjambment here can feel like more than just a poetic apparatus or negative space, but more like a distance of void, apneas in a dreamless sleep. Psychogynecology seethes with such haunted imagery, the sounds of bruxism between adolescence and adulthood. * In the song "Wendy," the Beach Boys croon, "The farthest thing from my mind/was the day that I'd wake up to find/my Wendy/Wendy left me alone."
Read it again. What else could I do? What other options would be left? How could I go deeper into life? Maybe Psychogynecology has picked up where Mayer left off—with this line showing us, with abstract clarity, the way to keep going, and what else one can do. |