The Trouble with Saying What You Mean
The New Yorker · Langdon Hammer ·
Langdon Hammer reviews “The Channel,” by the poet Jana Prikryl.
“Basically I hate poetry that pretends it’s possible to say what you mean,” Prikryl has said in an interview. “For me, the excitement of writing something like a poem usually resides in prodding and questioning the words that claim to represent what my brain claims to want to be saying.” This self-interrogating method makes for a nervy, difficult style. In “The Channel,” Prikryl writes run-on sentences that layer fragmentary clauses, one after another. Her syntax twists this way and that, as if it were squirming to get out of her packed stanzas, before she pulls up short with a joke or breaks off altogether, choosing silence, with new questions floating in the air. A reader might reasonably decide that Prikryl is more interested in keeping meaning to herself than in getting it across. But that would be a mistake.
Prikryl’s suspicion of easy self-expression leads her to try on other voices. “The Channel” is full of references to Shakespeare—to “King Lear” in particular, featuring extended monologues by Cordelia and the Fool. (Historically, Cordelia and the Fool could be played by the same actor, and the two truthtellers appear to merge when Lear mourns his daughter at the end of the play, declaring, “My poor fool is hanged.”) These monologues are interspersed with short lyrics in what initially seems to be the poet’s own voice. But the distinction doesn’t hold. From the first, Prikryl mixes her life story into her characters’ speeches, while the autobiographical lyrics begin to feel like dramatic monologues in disguise. In the poem “Cliff Notes,” Cordelia declares, “Backstage I’m scribbling lyric poems / to prove there is a place where I can be.”
The mingling of voices works best when the reader is unsure whether it’s Prikryl or Cordelia speaking, and when they seem to speak together. Imagine that “Chorus” is spoken by Cordelia. Then “the others” would be her monstrous older sisters. Remember how the play starts: Goneril and Regan flatter Lear when he demands that they profess their love for him in exchange for a piece of Britain, whereas Cordelia, refusing the transaction, keeps meaning to herself. “What would I do without them,” the poem ends. If this is Cordelia talking, it is an admission that her strict truth depends on her sisters’ gross blandishments. If we hear it as Prikryl speaking, it is a wry acknowledgment that her style, for all its brio and individuality, is compelled by the poetic clichés she hates and, in that way, owes something to them.
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