What Was It For by Adrienne Raphel

There’s a fine art to saying nothing. A well-calibrated bit of gobbledygook can access psychological, emotional and philosophical truths that lie outside the purview of conventional grammar. Although recent trends favor economical, naturalistic literature, poets as pedigreed as Shakespeare, Lear, Carroll, Pope, Stein and Joyce regularly indulged in phonological gymnastics. That tradition is sustained and expanded in Adrienne Raphel’s irresistible debut collection, What Was It For.

These are dizzying poems. Raphel trades in nursery rhymes, limericks, tongue-twisters and fairy tales; punning and mondegreens and doggerel and spoonerisms. She seems to take particular joy in paradox and syntactic ambiguity. In lesser hands, these stylistic flourishes could read as ostentatious, haughty or even coldly mathematical. But Raphel revitalizes them in a contemporary context. She writes with emotional delicacy, keen self-awareness and, most importantly, palpable joy. Consider “An Owl,” which employs jaunty dactyls and an enclosed rhyme scheme to explore the titular bird’s desire to dive into the ocean. The third and fourth stanzas read:

But O down still more into levels of sea,
Clear to the dark until water is water—
Magnetic senses, spiraling inward,
Pulsing and pulling concentrically

To the center of centers, wound and unwinding,
Original color in imminent light—
And the animals rotate alone to their right—
Life-in-death, death-in-life, in the upending sand:

Raphel’s form beautifully suits her content. While we’re on the topic of concentric ripples and unwinding spirals, she uses assonance and repetition to sonically mimic the imagery. Even the rhyming pattern and indentation of the quatrains call concentricity to mind.

A similar strategy animates “To the Fountain,” a haunting but playful travelogue of a city whose baths have dried up and been converted to tacky fountains and a traveler who can relate to the feeling. “On the Carousel” and “So Many Metronomes” heavily utilize litany, repetition and double-entendre to both imitate the rhythms of their subject matter and convey a rather idiosyncratic neurosis. Frequently, the speaker is burdened by an intense desire to wring poetry from the tedious, bizarre or disheartening. There’s a stammering to Raphel’s voice, an obsessiveness. The singsong prosody often scans as some kind of mnemonic device, as though the speaker were trying to keep an idea from drifting away.

This approach is acutely pronounced in “But What Will We Do,” one of the many apocalyptic nursery rhymes to be found throughout What Was It For. I’m especially drawn to the following stanzas:

The tree thick with chirping without any sparrows
The church full of honking without any geese
Duck-yellow lemon-yellow gray-yellow gosling
Things getting closer I’ll turn on the heat

…

The heat it turns out has been on the whole time
What will we do when the pipes are all hissing
What will we do when the piper starts hissing
Don’t let the rats come it’s not time to start that

Here, the speaker’s preoccupation with home maintenance helps her cope with encroaching despair. Those silly, lingering passages about heat and pipes (the likes of which appear throughout the piece at large) manage to crystallize both the physical and psychological setting. The language evokes aging, paranoia, illness, depression, perhaps even insanity. We are glimpsing a deflating world through squinting, jaundiced eyes.

But Raphel’s craft isn’t limited to expressions of mania. “Note from Paradise,” the first poem in the collection, uses paradoxical language as a vehicle towards serenity. The piece opens “Somewhere in a Spain I think of as France,” and continues to describe “fields and fields, or one, of lavender.” “It is late summer, early winter.” “It’s fall. It’s spring.” “It was something like flying. / Well, it was very like something.” “Something supposed to be seen / is seen. Something’s supposed.”

Syntactically, none of these lines or phrases really communicate any concrete setting. But that’s the point. As the speaker’s roots bore deeper into this particular soil, the minutiae of time and space become irrelevant. The last stanza is a kind of statement of purpose, one that twists the preceding nonsense into focus:

What am I but a half-life
what do I do but I have
to do, to face these fields where they are
lavender first and by far.

Her blissful resignation is something like spirituality and something like intoxication. But first and foremost, it derives from and thrives in the pleasure of words.

An unassuming passage in “Glockenspiel,” one of the book’s less affected poems, reveals volumes about Raphel’s vision in both a literal and a figurative sense. The speaker is returning from an eye doctor’s appointment in her old hometown, which she is suddenly able to regard with newfound clarity. As she surveys her surroundings through a nostalgic lens, she recalls:

I did the jumble two ways
and both ways were right.

I got VERSE and LIVED
and RANKED and VEINED
and ENVIED and DANKER
and DEVIL and SEVER.

Raphel’s poetic persona is empowered by the malleability of language. Her past, her future, her internals and externals – they are all products of a phrase’s multitudes. There’s a taut weaving here between self and expression which can be felt in the morbid gibberish of “Hobson Jobson,” the Dylanesque ironies of “Boardwalk Block.” When Raphel perverts the sonnet in “I Go Ballooning” or presents a coyly feminist twist on the limerick in “Artic Exploration,” she isn’t merely playing with form in some rote, academic sense. She is operating technique in the service of imagination, and what she discovers in the process is spellbinding.

The Correct Other

I enjoy a book when the experience is challenging & entertaining, but for me to recommend a book I need to learn something from it, something no other work of art could teach me. It’s hard enough to write in such a way that holds an unwavering mirror up to yourself. But Andrea Rexilius teaches me what happens when a writer holds a mirror up to herself & finds someone else looking back. It reveals an intimate being with the same role as the self. To me, as a reader, it results in an endlessly exciting exploration of the self in relation to another, as a sewn-together object.

Rexilius writes:

“I returned home from visiting my mother in California. My father and I lived in Illinois. I returned home and another girl was wearing my clothes and sleeping in my room.”

The girl, almost the same age as her, was her new sister. They shared everything. They slept in the same bed. They became telepathic. Through effortless intricacy the book’s opening sections explore the nature of this mirroring of self. It is as chilling, beautiful & thoughtful as a Remedios Varo painting.

Later sections of the book center around the images of stitching, sewing, hemming. Rexilius obsesses over the nature of conjunction, of coming together. The nature of sisterhood & sororial love extends outward to the work of love & the presence of the body in the world. She writes:

“The body has been said to mimic the act of sewing. In The Symposium Aristophanes defines love as an impulse that has its impetus in our constant search for a second half. This half was once sewn to the back of us.”

And this act of seeking the union is one that happens in the writing as well. She writes in “History of Reading as Stitching” that:

Every remove should correspond to a passage. It is how we know who we are. Mary Rowlandson ate raw meat and blood ran down the edges of her mouth. Dickinson a manifestation of this same uncertainty. To shut the door more fully. She stitched her poems into pamphlets. One’s physical location locked away. One’s body becoming less necessary, or more so. Dressed in white blank paper. Teach us how to read.

I find myself following her, fascinated by every extension, absorbed in Rexilus’ exceptional mind, & delighted to be so.

While the ideas of the book fascinate, what is most exciting to me is its constant feeling of correctness. Rexilius ignores any barrier between myth & reality, between the logical & the absurd & this makes the real dreamlike & the fantastic real. She relates incidents from her life that actually occurred, such as this performance:

  . . . a series of still movements taken from Muybridge’s photos of the human body. I would pose as one of the stills for one minute (counting out this minute in my mind) and then turn, into the next still (repeating my count). I wore a blindfold during the rehearsal of the performance to experience how I would be affected when I was not able to see the audience. Counting out each minute took a great deal of concentration. I could think about nothing but the unit of time and what number I was on in my count. No longer being able to see away from myself, I found I was able to become the sentence my body was making.

At other times, she relates incidents of interior understanding, such as this, from one of the poems entitled “Essay on Sisterhood”:

“A sister is an echo chamber. She is a nun, but the naked kind. Having religion is having a sister to speak in tongues with.” Yet between these two incidents, I have a hard time feeling like one is less real, less the world I actually inhabit.

This sense of correctness is hard to come by. It’s something I look for in my own writing: that feeling that the idea could not be said any other way without it being untrue. While I love Rexilius’s dazzling use of image & metaphor, it’s this correctness that draws me through the book, seeking a wisdom that arrives through the concurrence of disparate ideas.

To Be Human is to be a Conversation opens endlessly, each poem & each image intertwining, suturing to another, as the meaning is made more full by the reading. It is a book you’ll learn from, a book you’ll keep in your bag for months, always dipping into briefly for small bits to dazzle & oblige you with its beauty & truth.