What We’re Reading: When My Brother Was an Aztec
When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).
You know that list? That proverbial collection of poets, authors, and titles that you’ve been meaning to get to for ages? Well, move aside those other titles for Natalie Diaz’s debut collection. I finally got around to reading it and when you do, I have a feeling you’ll agree with me when I say that this book is not only fierce but essential to our time.
When My Brothe
r Was an Aztec consists of three sections, rich epigraphs, and many different poetic forms. Section one describes a childhood and coming of age on a Reservation with references to Mojave origins and tropes of the American Southwest. Section two is a hard-hitting sequence of poems about the speaker’s brother who is addicted to meth and how it impacts the family. Section three is just as roiling, though subtly so as the poems depict tactile intimacy. To close, Diaz returns to the brother through a zoo scene, and in doing so she recalls early metaphors of violence and consumption.
I would suggest this book as a study in how to write an arresting first line. In the opening poem: “When My Brother Was an Aztec / he lived in our basement and sacrificed my parents / every morning.” And “Prayers or Oubliettes” begins with this stanza:
Despair has a loose daughter.
I lay with her and read the body’s bones
like stories. I can tell you the year-long myth
of her hips, how I numbered stars,
the abacus of her mouth.
Why are these lines so affective? Well, when I look at the rest of the book, I see that Diaz often states the subject right away and often accompanies it with a problem in the form of an image that either surprises or moves. It even works in a poem which resists personal specificity, here the title and opening lines set both the tone and the moment: “I Watch Her Eat the Apple / She twirls it in her left hand, / a small red merry-go-round.” Every poem ‘acts’ like it’s the only poem in the book, so each opening line fights for the reader’s attention in a very appreciative way. And yet, the book is deeply coherent and aware of its own project. In fact, I would look to Diaz’s work as a model for how to delve into a concern both poem by poem and throughout the collection.
While the problem of the book is stated in the very first poem—the speaker’s brother lives eccentrically in an hallucinatory world while his family is maimed again and again by his violence—our understanding of that problem develops throughout the book. It isn’t until the second section that Diaz actually states the brother’s affliction in “How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs”, but without section one which contextualizes the speaker’s family, origin, and socioeconomic situation the brother might seem flat, simplified as an addict. Instead, Diaz asks the reader to understand the malignancies of poverty on a Native American Reservation, racism, and cultural disappearance. By establishing this context early on, Diaz achieves greater depth in her poems about the brother and even in the love poems in section three. In a more minute way, Diaz also builds meaning through images poem by poem. The image of a lightbulb, for instance, is repeated and each new appearance adds another layer of meaning, until the reader is left with a light bulb glowing so brightly with meaning and haunt that it might never be forgotten. This particular image builds toward the poem “As a Consequence of My Brother Stealing All of the Lightbulbs” but begins with “gutted lightbulbs” in an earlier poem, and then the significance of the image is actually stated in “Downhill Triolets” which precedes “As a Consequence”: “so he made a meth pipe from the lightbulb and smoked himself reeling.” This is an example of careful withholding; each appearance of the lightbulb is complete in itself and accomplishes a certain tone or innuendo which crescendos into a greater knowing for the reader of how impactful a simple light bulb is in the speaker’s world.
The speaker’s world becomes the poems and they are impossible to forget because of that deep personal connection that Diaz cultivates. Towards the end of section three, one poem in particular seems to me to indicate the beating heart of this book, “The Beauty of a Busted Fruit.” The final stanza begins:
Maybe you have grown out of yours—
maybe you no longer haul those wounds with you
onto every bus, through the side streets of a new town,
maybe you have never set them rocking in the lamplight
on a nightstand beside a stranger’s bed, carrying your hurts
like two cracked pomegranates, because you haven’t learned
to see the beauty of a busted fruit, the bright stain it will leave
on your lips, the way it will make people want to kiss you.
It’s stanzas like these that ring true for me, but even more so when accompanied by unapologetic portrayal of humans, human behavior, and social attitudes which are less than perfect.
Diaz draws on her own cultural references such as Rez (Native American Reservation) life and experiences, Catholicism, or family relationships, but she also calls on more globally recognized figures for metaphor- and world- making. Antigone, Sisyphus, Houdini, Jesus, and Barbie enter this text and bring with them layers of contextual significance. Are they familiar? Yes, we’ve read poems alluding to Sisyphean efforts many times before, and we’ve seen Barbie come to life to establish a feminist stance; however, I can confidently say that we had yet to see a Mojave Barbie. In “The Last Mojave Indian Barbie” Diaz personifies America’s favorite doll by re-situating her in a world intent on her adherence to white ideas of “Indian-ness.” I wouldn’t want to read an entire book of Barbie poems, but because it accompanies other intensely personal experiences found, for example, in “Hand-Me-Down-Halloween”, “Why I Hate Raisins”, and “My Brother at 3 A.M.”, the Indian Barbie poem steps back so the reader can take in the darkly humorous critique of the stereotypes surrounding Mojave women.
In addition to Barbie, Diaz invites Borges, Lorca, Harjo, and Whitman (among others) into conversation in this text. Each reference warrants further consideration and, like any good book, sends me off to the shelves where I can rediscover these writers now with the voice of Natalie Diaz beating in my head.
Natalie Diaz writes in English, but also uses words and phrases in Spanish and Mojave—what is your impression of multi-linguistic poetry? If you don’t understand the terms, do you seek them out (on Google) or within the context of the text itself?
Bender: New and Selected Poems by Dean Young (Copper Canyon Press; 2012)
As a reader, a selected works offers a way into the oeuvre of a writer whose work I don’t know. For a writer, a collection of new and selected is a way to shape the narrative around their career. What is included and what is left out, including the new pieces, begins to tell the story of a writer’s preoccupations and formal development, though it leaves the story incomplete, open to new developments.
One of the first things I noticed about Bender is that the poems are collected alphabetically, not chronologically, as is typical for selected works. Further, there is no index of which poems are new and which came from one of Young’s previous books, let alone what book they came from. For all I know, none of these poems are new. Further, the index (or “findex” as it’s called) that is here isn’t an index of first lines—which is, again, typical—it’s an index of last lines. These subversive moves, I came to realize, are typical of Young whose poems feature a multitude of subversions, often by way of surreal images, juxtapositions, and non-sequiturs.
Young’s language is often plain, though occasionally heightened for comedic or ironic effect. In “Changing Your Bulb” his language suddenly heightens only to be flipped on itself:
Finite is our sadness upon this earth she-bop
Smoke is the voice uh-huh, hammer the moment
She-la, one magic sleep ends beginning another.
The rhythm of the lines here demands two additional syllables, which Young provides comically, but not without a comment on waking life vs. dream life: “one magic sleep ends beginning another.” One of the most effective moments of subversion comes by way of an image in the last stanza of “Ready-Made Bouquet” which describes Rene Magritte’s painting “Le tombeau des lutteurs”:
[…]a room filled
with a single pink rose. Funny how
we think of it as a giant rose instead
of a tiny room.
The surprise comes from Young’s identification of what the reader will imagine and then turning it around.
Painters, art, writers, and creation are themes throughout Young’s work. “Ready-Made Bouquet” mentions both Wallace Stevens and Magritte by name, and other poems touch on dozens of other writers and artists, from The Velvet Underground to Wordsworth. Some of these patterns and connections might have remained hidden or unstressed were it not for the alphabetical arrangement of the poems selected here. As I tend to read books of poetry straight through, some of these patterns revealed themselves in surprising ways. For instance, the poem “Rothko’s Yellow” is followed by “Rubber Typewriter” which references “Rothko’s early / un-Rothko-y paintings.” All the artists mentioned become, in a way, Young’s chosen artistic ancestors.
Young is what you could call a “maximalist.” His poems are rarely shorter than half a page and his lines frequently stretch over halfway across the page. It’s not infrequent for Young to skip from image to image, mashing subjects against one another in surprising ways. “Handy Guide” begins:
Avoid adjectives of scale. Dandelion broth
instead of duck soup, says Bashō.
Don’t put the giraffe on the trampoline.
Don’t even think you’ve ever seen a meadow.
On the surface, Young’s poems seem random, and they are, but they all resolve into something like coherence. In the end, Young’s poems are less about a logical narrative and more about creating a mood within the poem.
Young has been publishing for over twenty years and there’s nothing to suggest he’s slowing down. A selected works is a place to start getting a sense of a writer before moving onto individual books or moving on, and I’ve been diving in: I also read Strike Anywhere (1995) and some of Embryoyo (2007), both of which are excellent. Young’s subversive, surreal voice has remained sharp, and continues to surprise. Bender is a great way into Young’s work.
Has a selected works ever started a long-standing love affair between you and a writer’s work?
What We’re Reading: 50 American Plays (Poems)
As a writer, I’m interested in hybridity and genre blending, so, as a reader, I’m always excited by hybrid work as well. I find it fascinating to see what parts of various forms artists use and how they infuse one genre with another. That being said, I was excited to find out that Matthew and Michael Dickman, whose individual books I’ve read, collaborated on a collection of poems. Since the Dickmans are twin brothers it is perhaps unsurprising that they would collaborate eventually. Their book 50 American Plays (Poems) was recently published by Copper Canyon Press and took me by surprise. I tripped over myself to get it to the cash register of the book store I found it in (shout out to Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle!).
The Dickman brothers have each published their own collections of poems (Michael just published his second) and won accolades for their distinct styles. Matthew prefers a longer line and a sprawling poem, reminiscent of Whitman; Michael’s poems are more sparse, though he spreads them out over multiple pages. Both, however, have a straightforward diction and are unblinking when addressing the poverty in which they grew up. Take the end of “Scary Parents” from Michael’s first book The End of the West:
Ian broke his mother’s nose because she burned the pancakes She left hypodermics between the couch cushions for us to sit on
Matthew is more optimistic. His poem “Trouble” name-checks almost two-dozen artists who tried or succeeded in killing themselves before ending on the line, “I want to be good to myself.”
Despite their stylistic differences, both Dickmans are obsessed with “The West” and America in some way, though, so their collaboration delves deeper into that obsession. Contrary to the title of the book, there are actually 52 pieces here—one for each state in alphabetical order, and ending with one each for Guam and Puerto Rico. It would be easy to criticize the brothers for not fully representing all of America in these pieces, though they clearly know that. You could spend a lifetime writing poems about only one state and not cover everything, so their limitation of a poem per state seems at once ludicrous, and the only solution to the problem. Indeed, such limited confines force the reader to imagine her own plays for each state, creating a shadow play to each of the pieces she reads.
While not necessarily meant for production, the poems in this book take the form of plays, with stage directions and a wide cast of characters, some of whom reoccur from poem to poem. The poet Kenneth Koch appears in 6, always working on a production of Hamlet. More often, characters enter once and are never seen again, as Sacagawea does in “Sacagawea in Oregon” who “sits covered in a fever blanket” and says, “I’m on a coin!” The poem is 4 lines long and manages to touch on the horrible treatment of indigenous peoples while maintaining a levity found in the rest of the poems.
Many of these “plays” are almost unperformable—how does one cast the parts of “Trojan Horse,” “Alaska,” “Baked Alaska,” or “Bus Stop”? Yet the book almost demands to be performed. The energy on the page forces the poems to careen into one another, making characters from Rhode Island and South Carolina fall over one another to get “onstage.” That energy is something all theatre artists strive for in every show.
In a brief 52 poems, the Dickman brothers attempt to recreate America, all of the funny parts, tragic parts, and bizarre parts included. These poems unfurl across the vastness of America and multiply in the imaginations of the reader. They blend genres and move freely from reality to a fantasy nation where snow soliloquizes and a bear praises a ranger on his prowess as a ranger. I wanted to read these poems because of their hybridity, but they reminded me that I love where I live even though this is a hard nation to love. I’m glad the Dickman brothers love it enough to show us.
