A Roomful of Machines

A Roomful of Machines by Kristine Ong Muslim (ELJ Publications, 2015)

One only asks of a poet to be continually surprising and for her metaphors to be engaging and rad. Metaphors are fragile constructions. They weave together disparate things, and they easily break. How to make a single unit things that together sit unusually?

Enigma of Socks

Like half a piece of July
on a girl’s barrette.
Would have bent double
in the drawer when whisked
with the other outcasts, the ones
assuming a distinct
shape and configuration
when used accordingly.
Could be a fortune told
by the lines of woven cotton.
Could be a crescent moon
or a miniature sphinx.
Could be a forced smile.

Socks and moon, socks and sphinx, socks and a smile. There is no end to socks comparisons. Ultimately, the wearer has to declare the fit and snug. The poet has to make a point even if, just like a forced smile, she seems to have forced her metaphor. The enigma of socks lies in the weaving.

Archaeopteryx

It’s only a reconstruction, the curator insists.
I do not believe him. I know that

the reptilian bird waits—the predatory
posture intact through the years.

And it will raze again. For now, it quiets
down, stays close to the ground where

the weak ones scuttle past. The glass box
only keeps its hunger, keeps it small.

RESTORATION OF ARCHAEOPTERYX
CHASING A JUVENILE COMPSOGNATHUS
(Wikipedia)

 

In a natural history museum, the visitor gazes at a small specimen encased in glass. For him it is the real monster awaiting its time, ready to pounce on the "weak ones". The restoration of an ancient bird accepted as the bird itself, there is no higher praise for the "taxidermist".

We have reconstruction. Then we have deconstruction.

William Carlos Williams, in retrospect

I have missed this: the upturned trough
where the white chickens bend down

to drink. All the mythical elements
blend at some point. Art books sum it up

with the laws of perspective. The red
wheelbarrow is smeared with cow dung.

It is drought season, and the cows
graze what is left of the grass.

So much depends upon a recreated poem, glazed with an inverted season (drought vs rain water), and filled with new details (trough, cow dung, cows, grass). In retrospect, this is not deconstruction but homage. This is still life. Art books sum it up: The blending of the elements is a matter of perspective. Another example of this blending: the way the evidence collected from a "crime scene" speaks loud.

The Evidence Locker

Reconstructed bits of a tragic tale
now bagged, labeled, sealed.

A leaf with a portion of a boot imprint,
a hammer, a chipped coffee cup,

a rusted knife, a glass shard—
tell us your story, teach us how

a wreckage calls out
to its survivors.

This is the general tendency of the poet—to speak after the fact, after an accident or crime or tragedy. We know something tragic or unforgivable happened because the lines of poetry had to call out to its subject to tell the whole story: a wreckage calling out to survivors to bear witness. As in the opening of "From Scratch": "There is no way / to stop me from / confessing to murder / in poetry." The images are silent with something inherently violent in them.

from Dream Wreckage

... The doors
of houses are flung wide open—
the throats of two hundred
ventriloquists stitched end to end.

...

from A family room that doubles as camouflage

Underneath the glass, the deathless
butterflies are pinned in place.
Death has not altered their symmetry.

The art of Kristine Ong Muslim's poetry borrows from the art of the detective story, with the right amount of guilt and paranoia. Hers is a performative act—the very act of deciphering in poetry. It is to her credit that her lines are devoid of self-consciousness and self-absorption.

Hers is the sometimes violent act of deconstruction and reenactment of sordid images and crimes. As in the poem "Blasphemy" where the lines began with the ending so that the entire poem loops back on itself and intimates the vicious cycle of violence. Perhaps what encapsulates Kristine Ong Muslim's general feel for metaphor is the doctor's diagnosis, in "P is for Phyllis", of what appears to be the ailment of a mental patient.

It’s your fear of the ordinary
that brings out the strangest of things.

It's not all violence and the aftermath of a murderous rampage though. She is so great and versatile, sometimes she reminds me, in her plainspokenness and matter-of-factness, of Wisława Szymborska, as in "Soul".

Soul

It slouches or stretches
to resemble me
down to the tiny mole
at the back of my left hand.

It has the invisibility
of a polite guest,
the will of an intruder,
the dreams of a child.

Barefoot, it glides
and hides behind the vase.
It waits for years
to catch me empty-handed.

I read the second edition of A Roomful of Machines. The first edition was published in 2010 in the UK. My copy of the book is courtesy of the author.

Bonus link: Kristine Ong Muslim's translation of a poem by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles in Asymptote (link).

Insomnia (Kristine Ong Muslim)

Insomnia by Kristine Ong Muslim
(Medulla Publishing, 2012)

Try Again

Sleep is an eel coiled
around itself. Tail

crammed inside the mouth.
Tongue inside the hole

in its tail. And judging by
its lack of teeth,

it will not last
the night.

Terse beauty. That just about sums up this poetry collection for me. As with Night Fish, Kristine Ong Muslim's whimsical voice is profoundly wedded to her arresting images. She is a poet who sees miracles in the mundane and whose way with language is unobstructed. The lines often start in a conversational tone, drawing the reader in to every conceivable possibility.

Sleep is an eel coiled / around itself.... The first couplet of "Try Again" is a laconic statement of the state of insomnia, pining for the onset of sluggish nightmare. It is one of the most trenchant variations of Ouroboros. Sleep as an eel, from tail to mouth, tongue in hole, toothlessness. The unobstructed passageway assures the sleeping form that sleep, closure, termination, is a process of infinite regress. The metaphor metamorphoses into itself.
 

Nothing like the malice of objects: the dank mouths of a sponge, the bent posture of a desk lamp, the sickness of a rickety chair. On the shelf are those books of eyelids, how the cracks between their pages let the light slip in all the wrong places.
[from "The Eater of Saturday Nights"]

Reading Kristine Ong Muslim's insomniac poems is like watching a low-volume late-night zombie movie. The quiet scenes first unfold in a clarity of unnamed terror. Suddenly her ordinary images take the shape of violence.

A legless ballerina performs her last pirouette. We would have applauded if only we have hands.
[from "No Possibility of Waking Up"]

The lines deliver the punch that is felt hard in the gut. “You wonder whether you are the landscape or the one taking in the scenery. You wonder why the shadows of curved things remain straight.”, she wrote at one point in "The Eater of Saturday Nights".

Whereas Night Fish was concerned with an alternate future reality, in Insomnia the reality is grounded in the secrets of suburbia that spill from an open can of worms. The poems here stare the reader hard in the face until he is inured to the final image. The worms squirm and take root in the mind.

There is a hint of feminism in the collection. Women are represented as limbless objects—"whoever looks into the window and sees the girl-torso looking through it will never notice her lack of limbs, the absence of life, the impossibility of the house housing the girl by the window" ("Impossible House")—living a loveless marriage, the objects of pornography, the victims of hate/crime, or the subjects of an autopsy in a cold morgue.

The perspectives of the wife or husband on the dissolution of marriage, the portrait of a recent divorce, deep cracks in relationships, these are explored through a pile of cutting irony.

Nobody became a widow here; some-
one just turned out to be a frozen head
of a bee after abandoning its stinger
somewhere. One could not hold the dark
long enough to fix it in place. It was like
flicking a feather caught on the maple syrup.
[from "That Portrait of the Missing Socks"]

From the bee voluntarily losing its sting (like giving up its life force, its drive, its appetite) to the feather on a maple syrup (a wonderful image of desperation and futility), the mixed metaphors create an enjambment of sense-impressions. They nudge toward a diagnosis of a suffocating relationship that is slowly and then suddenly entering a quicksand.

Insomnia exposes "the bedrooms we only see in our minds" (as in "Preface to a Pornographer's Dirty Book") through lines that stun and mystify. Muslim's themes cut through the surface of ordinary, sleepy life and stitch new threads of alertness to existence.



My thanks to the author for a copy of her book.

Night Fish (Kristine Ong Muslim)

Night Fish is a 13-poem chapbook written in the language of a hypothetical (future) reality. It opens with the title poem, submerging the reader in a world without landmass. Everything that once stood on high ground is reduced to the level of the sea. Despite the uncertainties accompanying a watery life, humans learn to adapt (“Everyone will learn to paddle towards the nonexistent shores.”) and form an aquatic community, an emergent race of water people. Kristine Ong Muslim, the poet behind these lines, has imagined an alternate environmental habitat in which sea level rise is the state of nature and adaptation to an extreme environment is the way of life: "The sound of oars cutting the water clean will be the most familiar sound in the universe."

The universe of Muslim's poems exists, as another poem ("Hypergraphia") puts it, in some “watery city of typography”. It is a city where the boundaries are fluid and meanings dissolve at the edges of bodies of water. "Hypergraphia" is a poem about a lake which "opens its doors the way a detective pries and yanks wooden floor" to find the murder weapon(!):

Sometimes, this door is mishandled and someone drowns. Sometimes, too, it allows grief to run its course, gets a novel written by some stranger inside that glass lakehouse. Lake water laps at the shore, gravel and silt sliding in and out. A watery city of typography. All the pebbles are letters desperately forming into words. The handwriting is not quite legible yet.

Grief is taken as inspiration for novel writing. The interfacing between shore pebbles (land) and lake water straddles writing and grief. The lake as possibly the liquid symbol of tears. The land trying to make sense of the murder or drowning in the lake, its source of sorrow.

A key poem that acquaints the reader to a general idea of the whole collection is “Heat Stroke”, a condition where moisture has left and hellish grief has triumphed. It is in direct contradiction to the watery city, this time the severe heat wave razes the landscape. It is also again an elegy for someone who may have died: "what remains and what we remember is / someone else's absence, the slam of the doors."

The poem then provides a way to read its contents, a way to cope with the rising temperature and the sense of death all around, through its own navigation of heat:

We ultimately learn to slice impressions,
separate them according to texture.
Smooth-skinned on top. Rusty underneath.
Grit and cruelty crammed in the middle.
Heat presents itself in the form of waves
melting the world away. Squandering nothing.

This poem, like everything in Night Fish, is very brief, and each rereading reveals an ambivalent voice of a prophet. When language and image liquefy in short lines, meanings condense in a small space, “squandering nothing”. Every image, every texture ("smooth-skinned", "rusty", "grit and cruelty") is contained in the simulacrum of transience, meanings arising from grief brought about by floods and heat waves, extreme conditions that challenge the homeostasis of the human organism.

The rest of the poems display a consistent interest in night times, bodies of water, and desert-like environments. They evoke the edgy atmosphere of noir science fiction, through nocturnal meditations, not in a speculative mood but in terse meditations about an altered future landscape and the place of man in it.

The structure of the lines – in prose or short clipped lines – usually enact the very ideas they profess. The self-reference gives way not to a metafictional consciousness but to an awareness of the limitations imposed by the fictional artifice. (I tend to emphasize 'fiction' in these poems, perhaps a way to underscore the essentially narrative content in Night Fish.) For example, the way the last line fades out at the end of the second poem (“Night Swimmer”) – "Sometimes, one plunge is enough / to cut the water clean, the splash / merely an afterthought" – trails like an afterthought itself. The final stop is an inevitable punctuation of a thought that meandered beyond boundaries. Similarly, the end of "Art", the penultimate poem, gives itself away when it declares that art is not "[s]ome flimsy rowboat that can be disassembled into exactly nine pieces". A puzzle that alludes to the nine full stops in the poem, corners that don't exactly define its boundaries. In fact each piece, sentence, or line resists the kind of objective deconstruction that puts a poem in a box (or bowl) resting on the table. Hence, "Art is repulsion floating in a bowl of soup. / Sometimes, it is the soup."

The primordial liquid in which Muslim's poetry is soaked in is the puzzle (or riddle) of existing in a mirror world. An ecological interpretation of the poems can be: that they are cautionary poems – not in a hard-science fiction way – that give us hope that poets will not give up and will ensure that poetry will still be written when the worst of climate events runs its course. Poetry, in fact, appears as a viable strategy to adapt to climate change. Even if the lines can be disturbing or unsettling, they can teach us ecological resilience and resistance. As with any literary hypothesis, this interpretation is valid only in the imagination.

Another theme of Muslim's that one could detect in some of these poems is that of stray souls and "random ghosts". But that is another work of fiction.

December

This cold has taught me
about the nature of souls.

Although I have known
a long time ago that the body
is meant to be a sieve for
the soul fermenting inside,

I am still surprised by the fog
of breath coming out of my mouth.
So dense. It seems that I am not the only one
who is exhaling in this frozen yard.

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of We Bury the Landscape – a collection of flash fiction and prose poems – and the upcoming poetry collection Insomnia (Medulla Publishing, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review and Southword, among many publications. I received an e-galley of Night Fish from the author.