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Mark Yakich wrote a book a few years ago called Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross. It is a book I love and a book I reread often. All the titles of the poems in his new chapbook, The Making of Collateral Beauty, winner of the 2004 Snowbound Series Award, judged by Mary Ruefle, and published by Tupelo Press, are titles that were used in that first book. How exactly does one read a “sequel,” or as Mark Yakich calls it on his website, a “doppelganger?” Surrender and just start reading.
Twenty-eight poems make up The Making of Collateral Beauty beginning with the introductory “A Note on the Notes” where promises are made that none of this “is necessary in order to be entertained, instructed, or mauled by the apodictic poems in Mr. Yakich’s [previous] book . . . unless you are a native speaker of German.” Yakich next compares German to French in its beauty, and further makes the claim that the “most beautiful word in German is actually Austrian: Zwetschkenknödel. It means plum dumpling. Plum dumpling would be the most beautiful word in English if it were not two words.” Here is this beautiful thing. The absurdity is all there. Two plus three is six, and if you can’t see that, try again. This book is full of beautiful intonations that allow the poems to rely less on what is being said as much as how it is being said.
And so begins the gorgeous absurdity of a poet explaining in prose the “reasons” for poems he wrote. They sound like this at their beginnings: “This poem begins with a line found under my sister’s hat;” “Having nothing to do with my sister, I wrote this poem in one sitting. It was 138 lines long. After many revisions I trimmed it down to three words: ‘Dick had Grace;’” “The shirt in the poem was real, the house was not, and the last line was stolen from a philosopher who was in love with a 13-year-old boy;” “New Yorkers assume that the pastoral scene depicted here takes place in Central Park. Chicagoans assume the location is Grant Park;” “Based on a Hal Hartley movie, yes. Based on an Amish love of Parker Posey, yes. Based on a crime scene photo, no.” This essential and direct “let me let you in on a little secret” tone of voice at the beginnings of each piece makes the poems make us gullible, and the introduction of the prose renderings only increases our gullibility. These seemingly direct references to the previous book, in the name of explication, eases up the reader for belief in whatever follows. Often times what Yakich mentions in these explanations seems untraceable if, with your detective kit, you decide to read the two books side by side. For instance, in the poem “Saturday Night,” the line, “Based on a crime scene photo, no,” tweaks the dedication of the poem, “Saturday Night” in UIFAGWTC, which reads, “after a crime scene photograph.” This irreverence of the author toward himself and his willingness to negate the previously published reasoning for a poem, first makes one think, oh, he’s being honest, and then, oh, he lied, and then you forget which came first, and are struck by the fact that he can make a reader care to wonder which it was without feeling betrayed. And perhaps even be appreciative for having some options.
The Making of Collateral Beauty is a most inventive project, in which Yakich has created a sort of imagination within an imagination. The juxtaposition of the first against the new incarnation illuminates a flimsy and unstable quality in the original verse not previously apparent.
Take, for good example, the poems “You Are Not a Statue,” first from UIFAGWTC.
And I am not a pedestal.
We are not a handful of harmless
scratches on pale pink canvas.
Today is not the day to stop
looking for the woman
to save you. What was once
ivory is wood. What was once
whalebone is cotton.
My coif and corset are duly
fastened, and your shirttail is
tied in a diamond knot.
You may be the giver
of unappreciated nicknames
and the devoted artist
who has given my still life
life. But we can never reach
each other’s standards.
You want to condemn me
to eternity. I want to make you
no more perfect than you
used to be. We are not
together, we are not alone.
There is good and quiet rumination in this poem. The short lines slow the contents down even more. It requires patience to think about these lines, the same patience it took for the ivory to become wood, and the whalebone to become cotton. Now see the poem, “You Are Not a Statue” from The Making of Collateral Beauty:
Life began as a translation from the Danish original. I wrote the
original not knowing Danish myself, but only a Danish woman named
Eva Green. She was a friend of my friend “the Viking” who threw
dependable, starched-shirt dinner parties in Copenhagen. Eva and I
met over the cod chowder. I proceeded to discuss the finer points
of New England clam chowder and how best to get me drunk. The
shirttail in the poem is real. But I have no idea how it got tied into a
“diamond knot”—if anyone could tell me what a diamond knot is I
would be grateful. I assume it’s a mistranslation from the original.
If you are a believer, this subsequent “story” version of the original poem undoes any stature or quiet the original may have had. What reader might ever imagine an author to have written a poem in a language he admits not to know, rather only knowing a woman who spoke that language. Yakich is exceptional at deflating poetry, and when he deflates it, it is with his prose. A big block of let-me-tell-you-what-really-happened. The speaker of the prose poem seems to wave a dismissive hand at the previous incarnation in asking for assistance from the audience: “if anyone could tell me what a diamond knot is I would be grateful.”
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