American Fractal

Timothy Green
Red Hen Press

In one of her songs, Alanis Morissette asserts that one plus one is two, yet our cultural and biological habits cause us to engage in erasure when we enter any type of interpersonal space; we collide, entangle then meld. To where do these pieces of ourselves go? Perhaps, they go into synaptic hibernation, but science and its language (best used in Bruce Beasley’s Lord Brain) can only take us so far. The entrance of psychology into mainstreamAmerican culture—smiling serotonin neurotransmitters come most easily to mind— is now so lifeless as to offer no possible wedge to loosen individuality. To move beyond this, an author will have to address dimensionality. Lurking behind the architecture of Timothy Green’s poems is a nod to the fourth dimension of time and a poetic sensibility that loops worlds together. For Green, exits become entrances and the subjects of his poems are often coming together while breaking apart.

This reconstruction is best illustrated in the poem “Cutlery,” which is among several poems in the book that move laterally and, in so doing, eschew grammatical conventions. Green negotiates this form with much success. The white space on the page threatens to subdue these poems, just as the words threaten to subdue the white space, thus the tension of the poem is visually apparent. In “Cutlery” a shower of utensils rains upon a woman who hasn’t “left the house in five years.” Her cognition and consciousness then becomes obsessively engrossed with the “tinny drizzle.” Though the obsessive nature and the strangeness of the obsession is compelling, what is even more compelling is the way that the poem circles back onto itself. At the end of the poem, the speaker states, “there’s so much to sort by sunrise,” and with this she conveys the structure and chaos of her daily life. Before sunrise she honors the equation to become two.

Green addresses such expansive concepts as permanence and representation in the poem “Diorama” where everything in the world (except for some people) becomes chalk outlines, mere suggestions of their former selves. Green writes:

When the televisions vanished we watched
           the rectangles on our
living room floors, any ant or insect’s aimless
           march the perfect metaphor
for life, until it too snuffed out like a candle
           in one brief puff of
granular nirvana, its stillness too small for
           even a calcium deposit

to wrap around.

Here the chalk is insufficient in representing the ant, but here, too, the speaker (as speakers often do throughout the book) suffers from the grim reality of a looping world, the one that wakes each day to the same skull, the body the same “cellular prison.” The chalk outlines have not destroyed a perfect ideal since the ant’s existence was already a “perfect metaphor/for life.” The failure of representation is no great tragedy in this poem. The escape from such a fate is not metaphysical; the escape is tangible, obvious, and temporary: the car. But the car is simply “the box where the car had been.”

This reliance, even if it is entirely elusive, on the physical to diminish the horror of repetition is complicated in the poem “Cheers” where the speaker attempts to wrangle with mathematical certainty. Both he and his partner watch a couple who could easily be themselves. He is a voyeur who wants to find what fills the “fleshy certainty of the body as it tries on disappearance;” however, this disappearance cannot diminish the presence of the numeral one:

It took the human race
five thousand years to invent
nothing as a concept, I think,
my headlights flashing their
coupling of ooh and aah,
their addition by subtraction,
long division into unity,
two faces to one mouth—
a numeric ideal found
faster than zero, harder
to lose.

Many of Green’s speakers seem to desire to disappear, to re-work the equation for subtraction. It is the frustration caused by a world that fails to allow disappearance which provides this book with a convincing uncertainty. Green’s is a world where one cannot distinguish between the ending and the beginning simply by the sound of the applause.

- Michael Turner