Submission Is the Only Window: On Amy King's I Want To Make You Safe

Amy King’s I Want To Make You Safe is densely packed with “the songs of undiscovered tribes” extant by way of versions of an urban feminist tonguing. Led by a brand of narrative that is not traditional at all, these poems are “an eye to cancel [a] planet’s core out.”

In this book I experienced pleasant dislocations. A slow suddenness wherein what had previously been my own light was replaced (not squelched or snuffed out but strategically altered).  This happened by way of the quality of the language (rich with shock and jolt regarding sound: (“this immersion has made me a model / for your captivity digest, a cavity” and “she used to dive the veins / for other steeds closer to the bone” and “milk is a mythical moth” and “scream on fire, sirened).

The sound in these poems interacted with their content (“submission is the only window” and “the grief of winter without seed” and “I cry/ to remember what I saw” and “the destiny you choose is the one you live through” and “to torment your undone sin”) in ways that created in me a very specific sense of non-ease. Non-ease was existent in me because — how am I to integrate this manifold confession? There are so many inclusions (“are we still talking to the same god”) that I would argue are certainly necessary) and so many diversions in these poems (“I don’t want to hide my wine” [. . .] “the wine from which we drink free will” [. . .] “please reattach the orifice if / I’m ever to hold your love”). Gorgeous diversions to fill the space as I try to reach to meet this work and then to divulge.

How best to divulge from something so gorgeously divergent?

This sense of non-ease that I describe above made me vulnerable, which made me able to be swept up and carried off by King’s own core declarative (“I want to make you safe”). I am saying that it is precisely the destabilizations that occurred in this book, that made me vulnerable enough to need to be made safe again — and I let this happen because “to give yourself always keeps / yourself still.”

In this way there is deep alchemy! Alchemy by agency.

Next I have to admit a pleasant exhaustion in reading these poems. This does not surprise me post contact with King’s other books: Slaves to Do These Things, Antidotes for an Alibi, I’m The Man Who Loves You (and other chapbooks). In King’s work I generally find myself being consumed by a vast and incremental longing that is rooted in examinations that are current, and I find that that longing presents itself in such beautiful curves of language (“follow stigmata for dust” [. . .]“we have always been the first fruit and the first to rot”).

Stasis is impossible in King’s I Want To Make You Safe. In this book there were so many figures (Natalie Portman, Oedipus, Tim Modotti, God/s, Roman Jakobson, Mahler, Popeye, Ossian) and pledges (David Wojnarowicz) and presences and pronouns. In fact, there felt to me like an extreme importance of pronouns as bridges throughout the poems (“you think I am she. She is you and everyone who adjusts too well” [. . .]“here am I / is he” [. . .] “how much we want we”). Yes, truly, a system of wes conducted my read of this juicy and taxing book!

The poems also rubbed me as feminist via their obsessions with women and women speaking and the vulnerabilities of gender positions and what is taken during the performance of those (“I miss my DNA” [. . .] “I practice identity” [. . .] “I am that love you light yourself with / and my gender is powerless in this”). But regarding this aspect I saw King’s poems’ interests in the large spectrum of woman, not only (though certainly not excluding) in fringe communities where women fuck women. I sense these poems have obsession with “a branch [that takes] root/ and gulp[s] the sleeve of the planet in signature orgasm / Eve.”

The poems in I Want To Make You Safe felt to me like anything could exist in them, and though that is true they did not feel like poems of surplus or excess or even secretion. They felt very whittled and scripted by way of the correlation that I have mentioned throughout this review — the precise correlation between sound and content. I almost hear some spoken word in these poems and this makes a longing in me to hear them performed. I wonder if King has ever considered making a CD of this inherent amass and awash?

This Is Free Verse At Its Finest: A Review of Amy King's Slaves To Do These Things

The title of Ms. King’s most recent collection of poems never fails to evoke sentences uttered by women I grew up with, usually spoken while they toiled at women’s work, sentences beginning with “I wish we had” or “We should have.”  But these poems have little to do with women’s work or America’s shameful past (or present), except obliquely.  One could say, confronted by the intentional queering of their language, that they have little to do with anything, except obliquely, but somehow, by some poetic alchemy, using this skewed approach, King’s poems end up having to do with everything: the culture wars, Brooklyn, our sham economy, ecology, our actual wars, fashion, sex, patriarchy, food, God, loving a woman as a woman in the middle of this whacked milieu, none of them simply about any one thing, all of them managing, like a kaleidescope, to make a pattern of some fragmented vision glancing through a mixture of themes.

Upon first reading them I found myself disoriented, and, I confess, a little spooked. How’d she get in my head like that? Her syntax performs a mimesis of the subconscious. Sentences jump ship midstream. The epigraph for the book, from Baudelaire, is a clue that we’re in for a wild ride: get ready for dreamtime. The dream comes to us in the form of a five-act play. Each act has an epigraph: a poem title or phrase, the attributions of which are listed at the end of the book (adding to the sense of mystery that pervades it), which casts its spell over the poems in that act and encourages a perception of narrative arc or progression, despite the uncertainty the reader may feel at the end of any particular poem as to whether she has grasped anything more than her own shadow.

My ability to receive the meaning embedded within these poems varies according to my willingness to walk in the dark. Sometimes I get nowhere, and sometimes I get to the end and they make total sense. But even on the days when I find them opaque, they give pleasure. By King’s admission, these poems underwent more conscious polishing than her previous collections. The language is crisp in the mouth and often downright fun to say. She uses every tool in the poet’s toolbox except regular end rhyme. This is free verse at its finest. And on the days they do make sense, when like a jeweled puzzle box something clicks, opens, and is revealed, I feel myself in the company of a thinking, caring, feeling human being who grasps the world’s ugliness, grapples with its demons, transcends her limited identity, and still manages to engage the beauty of a tulip and find herself, with her lover, happy. Such a presence is good company, indeed.

To enjoy the speaker’s journey it’s not necessary to realize that the book was written during a protracted illness — the course of the journey, of descent and resurfacing, is archetypal — but it does help explain a poem like “You Believe in Everything,” in Act IV, which seems to be about the speaker, apparently not as recovered as she’d hoped, having trouble holding her food down, out late at a cocktail party. Of course, like the rest of the poems, this one is not really about its surface narrative and ends: “There. Now you’ve / subsumed just how much / I love the way you tune. / Allah, creeps, amen.” The fact that King is a lesbian is another aspect of her umwelt and aids in the attempt at semiosis with her poems. The way she herself imagines her way into the umwelt of the Other in her attempts to understand those who hate her renders her perception of the world universal. One gets the feeling, as one does with the best of poets, that King has tapped in to that part of herself, her ground of being, which she shares with all of life. As mystics have always reported, this leaves one, “happy, in fact” (the final words of the final poem, “We Are Great Songs”).

But enlightenment is a moment-to-moment enterprise, and saddled with these bodies and all their attributes, sometimes bedridden, sometimes confronted with irrational hatred of one’s simple being, it can feel like serious work. She closes the first poem of the fifth act, “Anarchy’s Tiptoe,” like so: “Enclosed in this forgotten basement, / the galaxy is an awfully big place, / and I am still feeling/the walks between steps, / drowning in part, / footed forever with this forever / project of waking up.” Indeed that is the biggest project, one that might be the most worthwhile project a human being can “foot.” And one that leaves the idea of “slaves to do these things,” or anything that would deny anyone their human rights, unthinkable. Good books help us wake up to that which is best in ourselves; this is one of them.