THE VANGUARDS OF HOLOGRAPHY

Annie Christain

Headmistress Press, 2021

99 pp.

 

When speaking of “The Vanguards of Holography,” one is first tempted to speak of pop culture, as the volume’s tutelary spirits tend toward epigraph figures such as Kanye West, Billy Corgan, and Patton Oswalt.  But a more proper place to begin is with the French avant-garde poet Francis Ponge, beloved interpretive object of Jacques Derrida.  His poem “The Telephone,” published bilingually in Poetry Magazine in September 1952, provides a suitable point of reflection.

             From a portable base with a felt sole, dependent on five yards of wire of three kinds which twist without impairing the sound, a crustacean is unhooked and gleefully buzzes…

While between the breasts of some siren under a rock a metal point vibrates.

Nothing comes out of nowhere.  After all, this volume overtly touts its lineage in the title.  Its poems take us afresh to the fascination of the surrealists and Dadaists, the “historical avant-garde,” with all things modern.  They often brought a childlike wonder, combined with adult sass, to emerging forms of technology, seeing them less as instrumental life improvements and more as sites to marvel at, but also to prompt thoughts of decay, destruction, death, those alliterative counters to life, as in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “There Is”:

There is this ship which has taken my beloved back again
There are six Zeppelin sausages in the sky and with night
coming on it makes a man think of the maggots from which the
stars might someday be reborn

There is this enemy submarine slipping up beneath my love…
There is this infantryman walking by completely blinded by
poison gas.

With appreciable wit, Annie Christain catalogues relentlessly the techno-phenomena surrounding us, defamiliarizing them by staging the multiple anxieties about them of the speaker, persona, often undecidable as she/he/it/they.  This being is mutable, alternately tormented by basic yet outrageously physical processes, yet strangely calm and even seemingly in control, even on the verge of being overwhelmed, as in “O.K., Miles Per Hour”:

No one cares about keeping the details right in period piece movies anymore—don’t you get it?

I only have until the next solar eclipse to figure out what a sun-body is and how I lit it.

<We’re kind of like attached to a moving dry cleaner conveyer roller where

                        duplicates of ourselves are assigned to other hangers.>

Whichever self we choose to embody is the front— I’m on the rooftop terrace because Einstein said that’s where my space-time won’t bend as much—keep up.

The world presented seems a flat simulacrum, even when it has four dimensions.  There is no real history available.  The closest one may come is “keeping the details right in period piece movies anymore.”  And even that forlorn reality is at a remove from a remove, the best case being to “lose oneself” in a costume drama, rather than in history itself.

“We’ll Always Have Terracotta Warriors Dusted in Han Purple, Never Looking Behind” presents what Roland Barthes referred to as a “fictive nation.”  In this faux place, real heartbreak isn’t strictly possible.  Rather, we are given a simulation of what that heartbreak might look like, when viewed as a radiograph.

What remains of the warriors is what my outside body was from the start—very ill, but human-looking from ten feet away or more. The Han Purple stacks the air unevenly, and my core self walks away on that grand staircase. My favorite concubine may think she left me, but two thousand years on Earth is ten minutes to me in the upper dimension, so here it’s like it never happened.

One thinks of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” a visual representation of the seemingly nonsensical phrase “outside body,” rather a body in motion promoting the idea that there could be a core self both psychologically and physical separate from all the other selves.  This should be normal in our age, according to the poet, governed by a flux of time in which two thousand years is equivalent to ten minutes, when it’s in the “upper dimension.”

The poems in this collection are full of that kind of offhand fireworks.  It would be a mistake to think that “Vanguard” doesn’t offer emotional depth of a kind, but it plays out and pays out slowly, the “I” too dispersed to isolate a single event, except as an ever-evolving displacement.  One may have a favorite concubine, but that lover, like the self, is always already multiple.  One cannot speak of things phantasmagorical because everything manifests as real. Everything is visible, in plain sight, but it simply shows as continuous flux.  If one contemplates it long enough, Duchamps’ nude is moving because it is moving.

A tacit longing floats through these pages, as in “I’m From the Earth Where Only Three Astronauts Walked on the Moon.”  There exists a wistfulness about the fact that in such a dynamic, hard-charging universe, everyone’s hyper-elevated consciousness makes it nearly impossible to connect in the quietly contemplative ways that were presumably easier before Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the space age.

Now I’ll never be able to touch a naked woman

whose skeleton has holes behind the eye sockets.

This submerged sorrow can only be expressed in isolated phrases, in a passing manner, as the poet-seeker-I-you-we-them-he-she-they labors without cease to amalgamate into a sentient self.  And even the most degraded of human activities is more clinically, impartially watched than ultimately judged.  From “Rolling on the Floor with Punches”:

Watching snuff films at computers, a man on clipboard taking notes. Blink twice.

In these poems, it is less relevant to speak of similes and symbols than it is to speak of phenomena.  Yet in the ingenious and theatrical, yet resolutely prosaic presentation of them, one gets suddenly surprised by lyricism.

When you can still discern my burned initials through an adult film star’s tattoo concealment, her authentic crystallization still happened no matter what, bringing out her Diamond Man, and that’s important to reveal.

In a book unafraid of ostentation, I find myself over the life of its pages becoming increasingly aware of its moral center and ethical compassion.  I couldn’t decide whether the author was modulating as she went, or whether I was, like Duchamp’s nude, gradually catching up with myself.

 

— Johnny Payne