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All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every
time a difficulty appears. Then it is easy to
dance, for the thought of death is a good dancing
partner, my dancing partner. Every human
being is too heavy for me, and therefore I plead:
Let no one invite me, for I do not dance.
And this is the memorial verse that kicks-off
section one, “The Red Pearl”:
what must go goes what stops stops with—
water way lake poverty—held clear
water sparkle air pump daily
from bottom daily naked oblations to master
accident—be my means facing stop
water eyes woods to sheer words can’t adhere
water goes goes with stops stops with go—
What must go is life, like water. What stops is
death, the “master accident.” Newman notices
that life is one perceptual, phenomenological,
psychological and social accident after another;
unpredictable, uncontrollable, beyond human
agency. Accepting this vulnerability is accepting
a god, a force greater than us, a sort of classical
greek god one can actually work with,
instead of sheer human avoidance, pretending
you know what you’re doing, the distinctively
human pretense that you know what is happening,
or going to happen, at any given moment.
Newman asks, what is my vehicle for this trip
What is the meaning of it And how is life meaningful,
not merely empty or absurd, if there is
no God As a Zen teacher recently pointed out,
one doesn’t really transcend anything in this life,
that’s a cop-out, a betrayal.
in the vigorous bloomtime
bring it on, struggle to be
peaceful in one’s rod, rule, nonstop go—
that is, time, and how the older ones lean on it
The second section is called “I Went Out New,”
as in the heuristic practice of accident. From the
start of the first poem, entitled “The First Rip”:
then I went out new in my accident to see
if humankind looked new
and it did
looking up at people moving freely above the station
each living thing influential in its ability to move freely
along more or less the same lines
not that I was new but I was shiny and well tuned
with a new buoyancy limb, that is, my accident,
which hasn’t happened but I know it
on instinct as I once was my animal,
animate, breath in that way . . .
In the penultimate section, “The Silences,”
Newman uses a funny conversational jag about
the false consciousness of “a total managed reality”
in our dance with death. She introduces a
character named BLANCO (blank, void, death).
She wants to dance with him, but shit that he
is, he refuses. The final poem in the series is
“The Divine Naming.” The poet’s vehicle is, ultimately,
language, the naming of things, fears,
emotions, loves and hates, plus all sorts of
weird images seen with the eyes and the heartbody;
felt, heard, seen out in the “real” world,
with its common ordinary speech:
when we call it “song” or “life” or “light” or
“accident”
when we call it “mystery” or “misty” or “palace”
“overabounding”
we’re actually saying “in a manner of speaking” or
“count me in”
in other words,
to say is to divine. . . .
Who is saying all this Who’s there actually
wobble said
water said
dark said
and all things said in this vein
i’m of time
awe of wave
if of life
and all things said in this vein.
Newman has moved beyond the uncertain
structure and prosody of her first two poetry
collections Human Forest (Apogee, 2000) and
Wild Goods (Apogee, 2008), and landed in a
solid and admirable clarity. It is at base, I think,
an existential and phenomenological clarity,
comfortable with her selfhood in the complexly
gendered San Francisco cityscape.
Brian Unger is a doctoral student in American
Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and editor
of Zen Monster.
STRAW
GATE
David Mills, The Dream Detective
and Lydia CORTÉS, Tom SAVAGE,
Stephanie GRAY, Bill KUSHNER,
Valerie FOX
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