An Informal Misreading of Lucie Brock-Broido
I find in Lucie Brock-Broido (LBB) an insistence on revealing that which deserves but does not demand to be exposed. And I share her fascination with the seemingly insignificant.
“What a privilege it is to be so insignificant,” LBB writes in the closing line of “I Don’t Know Who It Is, That Sings, nor Did I, Would I Tell.”
Seeming insignificance becomes, in a sense, lofty because of its complete potential for the ultimate significance: to become alive, dynamic, strange—to be the subject of poetry. LBB says of poetry in an interview with Henri Cole that “it’s a book of poems’ job to be strange. If it’s not then what has it revealed, or what did it invent?”
LBB goes on to state in the Cole interview that she is “driven by the sensation of the sensational, and unabashedly so.” This drive is apparent in her choice to write the five-page poem “Jessica, From the Well,” which appears in A Hunger (Knopf 1988). The event of “Baby Jessica” being lost in the well for an extended period of time epitomized, at one point, sensationalism in the media. “This is what it was like:” the poem opens, and highlights the poet’s ideal. The task of her poetry must be to go to the places where certainty and authority cannot exist. And to shine a narrow beam there, which necessarily reveals more and at the same time less than what actually happened.
In a recent interview, Jessica McClure, who is now an adult, stated that she has no memory of the event itself. Since she was the only person present in that confined space, there is no way to know what actually happened during those dramatic hours of her life. The account that LBB gives us, however, does not attempt to speculate about what might have really happened, but instead, it seizes the opportunity to ponder the state which is lost to most of us due to an apparent inability to communicate accurately: early childhood.
LBB writes from the persona of baby Jessica, “I’ve never spoken aloud yet to anyone / alive, but I know all the words.” This line leaves open the possibility that Jessica has spoken within herself (but not aloud), and that she may have spoken to people who are not “alive.” Once again the lack of authoritative knowledge (or in this case, authoritative speech) provides space for imaginative understanding that may well go beyond the speakable world.
The poet enters this persona completely, leaving her adult understanding behind (a reliance primarily on the necessity of logic and speech), entering the limitless space of childhood imagination and following its thread: “Even without food, I am growing / & I find this frightful that my body / will become too large to live here comfortably.” In the voice of Jessica, the speaker considers her essential needs in the immediate situation, instead of obsessing on how to escape what would be viewed as catastrophe by the informed mind of an adult. In Jessica, LBB is able to offer up what her readers probably crave: insight only available from a state which may be forever lost to the world of experience, just as the actual world (with all of its limits and potential) has been lost to baby Jessica in the well.
LBB pursues this fascination in The Master Letters (Knopf 1997) some ten years later through a less sensational subject in “A Brief History of Asylum.” She writes in a note that the poem “was, in part, inspired by Jonathon Miller’s documentary, On Madness.” Madness is similar to early childhood because it arises out of the inability to reconcile the internal world with the external world through accurate or authoritative communication. LBB opens the poem with the following: “My innocence diminishes in the thrall / Of a New World symmetry….”
Miller’s documentary centers on what was then the miracle cure for Schizophrenia, lobotomy. The “symmetry” which the speaker blames for her loss of “innocence” is the need for the “New World” of medical experimentation to equalize the anomaly of madness by removing the outward expression of that madness. Both madness and the lobotomized mind are akin to early childhood because of the seeming disparity between the internal and external worlds (which is grounded in the false security of certainty). This encroachment by the external, concrete world into this internal, abstract world is nicely illustrated in the following lines which are near the close of the poem: “At a century’s torsion, they began the trespass / Of the cranium ….” Ironically, LBB figuratively invades that world as well in her insistence on reporting that which cannot be reported with any authority except the imaginative authority of the poet via the poem.
LBB, in the Cole interview, says of these poems contained in The Master Letters that “more and more, over time, they have become me. I.” The demarcation between the absolute, external “I” for her becomes more and more blurred with every imaginative leap that her expeditions into personae require. This blurring seems evident in the closing line of “A Brief History of Asylum”: “For memory or love—I am subject, subjugate, inthralled.” Even the alternative spelling of enthralled, replacing en- with in-, suggests that her movement into “the other” is now collapsing back into the internal world of the self—the singular expression of that which is at once one thing, and everything.
LBB finds opportunity for her exploration of the unspeakable world in every corner of our culture. Her books contain poems which eke their insight from the most unexpected opportunities. The poet has been criticized for this inclusiveness by some; she even earned the dubious title of the “Poet Laureate of People Magazine.” In fact, her books contain so many non-literary allusions that she has chosen to include extensive notes in both The Master Letters and A Hunger. In the world of poetry, LBB can be seen as anything but conventional.
Not only does LBB claim previously undesired ground for her exploration, she also rebukes the binds of political correctness. When asked by Henri Cole if she sees her master letters (which LBB states are a female voice speaking to a male master) as politically incorrect, she responds with the following quip: “It’s so deeply politically incorrect that it’s politically correct.” I admire the poet’s deep understanding of the irony of her own situation, for irony exists in the space between actual and literal meanings. Because of LBB’s insistence on undercutting the absoluteness of either of these semantic positions, she can comfortably exist (as does the voice of “Jessica, From the Well”) within the penetrating joviality of an irony of her own creation. When speaking on the nature of poetry in the Cole interview, she says that she sees poems as “unnatural artifacts.” This sounds right to me, considering the type of other-world reporting that Lucie Brock-Broido has chosen for herself.
Chris Gus Pappas, Jr.
(Revised by CP on April 15, 2012.)
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