To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books Feb. 11, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/11/poetry New world orders Two new poetry collections, one that toys with the ghosts of the 20th century and one steeped in the pleasures of the here and now. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Melanie Rehak No one can quite get over it. It is summer and revenge lies sweetly in the fields with her legs open, her Bo Peep petticoats in ribbons. Welcome to the 21st century, courtesy of Rachel Loden, whose first book of poems, "Hotel Imperium," is filled with ghostly -- and ghastly -- mementos from the past century. If you think the violence is over, however, you're wrong. It's goodbye Cold War, hello hideous global underbelly. As Loden puts it, Love, revenge, remaindering ... is this the end? -- The world pumps on, with all its gently pitiless muzak. Inspired by everything from Lenin's corpse to the fate of Ronald Reagan's overcoat, Loden makes the fragmentation and senselessness that are the 20th century's legacy dance with a kind of macabre glee. Even the King can't dodge her bullet; it turns out there's another man named Elvis Presley buried somewhere in this fine land of ours, and Loden brings the two together in a prose poem. "Who was this guy? We can confabulate something of his mother's state of mind from his date of birth, 10/24/57, after EP #1 left for Hollywood but before he went into the army." This is, of course, mind-boggling -- another Elvis Presley? -- but to Loden it's just one more piece of millennial fallout, and she uses it to call into question our illusions about clean slates. Sure, it's a new century, but that doesn't mean the old one, with all its confusions, is simply going to fade from our collective unconscious. Instead, it's all about making intelligent transitions from one era to the next. Writing about a model in a 1960s lingerie ad, Loden comments: "She is ether/air. See how she struts/her stuff ..." The poem next moves on to genuine celebrity: Liz Taylor and her honeymooning breasts lie out with Eddie on a beach in France, but do we care about these fleshpots of the idle rich? Their tongues are dust. A cleavage opens between what we crave and what we (bluntly) are. Which is, perhaps, to say that our unsullied heroine is just where we would want her, out of touch, the eighteen hour support she promised but a ruse. By the time another generation rolls around, the rules will have changed for the better. False ideals with be replaced with honesty, vulgar as it may be. Loden deftly catches the shift, pinpointing its inception in a brilliant choice of spokeswoman: "Madonna's still/a glint of silver/in her father's eye," she writes, and then, looking back at that '60s lingerie ad one more time, "Our girl/is not material. Ours/is a wind, a slitted/sheath, a lie." (Of course, Madonna was more than a glint by the '60s, having been born in '59.) No one, however, is a more insistent presence here than Richard Nixon, who turns up in "Hotel Imperium" as relentlessly and with as much audacity as he did in life. His face even appears on the cover of the book, and Loden has written an entire poem composed of words from his last will and testament. What is this obsession all about? Perhaps the answer lies in "Bride of Tricky D," where Loden seems to be mourning the loss of the only man dastardly enough to guide her through the next millennium. Imagining him rising from the grave to squire her, she writes: ... it's so deadly smug out on the new world order battlements. "Let's slip the Constitution, Richard, cut the red ribbon on the virgin century. Teach me tonight ..." I find his fierce beard lovely and the shadows long. Asleep with Pat and Checkers by his side ... "We could do it," he'll say, "but it would be wrong." Indeed. But maybe all Rachel Loden wants is to make sure nothing and no one, not even Tricky Dick or the man who built him a bowling alley in the White House, is forgotten. After all, as she writes so eloquently in "Carnal Acknowledgments," "there is no suffering so great that human minds cannot transform it into some kind of spiritual stretching exercise or wretched experiment. And we want a Greek chorus the way we wanted someone to watch us learn to walk, we want miles and miles of microfiche and jars of crumbling papyrus." Even though he only appears once, the hermetic artist Joseph Cornell is a kind of negative patron saint of Malena Mörling's "Ocean Avenue." Mörling marvels at his ability to remain apart from the world around him, his capacity Not to arrive, not ever to know how to arrive or how to live even here on Utopia Parkway in Queens. This is for the Soap Bubble Sets and the Sun Boxes and for time that moves like a silent film through a projector. Mörling's own work has a sensibility similar to Cornell's famous boxes; like those unclassifiable works, her poems are also suspended in time, filled with the objects of her private vision of the world. They're somehow insular and universal all at once. She feels tiny at certain moments, separate from the cosmos to the point where she's able to write lines like: In the shape of a human body I am visiting the earth; the trees visit in the shapes of trees. Standing between the onions and the dandelions near the ailanthus and the bus stop. But unlike Cornell, Mörling is acutely aware of and constantly examining her molasses-like progress through the world. "I don't live more thoroughly/inside the mucilage of my own skull/than outside of it." Her eyes are wide open, in other words, and she wants to know what she's doing here and just why she experiences time and space in such a maddeningly conscious way. The result of this psychological quest is that "Ocean Avenue" is filled with journeys: the author on a train that ... departs at dusk from New York the neon signs begin to bleed their letters the light goes into buildings that pass like so much else that I notice and forget and don't notice and remember. Or the author on her way to the train station, admonishing herself Walk slowly now. It doesn't matter if you miss the train, it doesn't matter if you miss all the trains. Or the author envisioning the larger journey of her life in terms that are vast and simple all at once: On the earth and in the universe that does not end, that has never had an end and no center either, I am here in my room breathing. There's a certain hazy magic in Mörling's work that has the power to make obvious truths marvelously complicated. In a poem called "Like Tile" she records one such experience: The "29" on the awning has lost its meaning and become pure form. Nothing exists the way it appears to; the memory of a room changes as you enter it. It's like reading Kant; as we move through the world, are we seeing things in themselves, or merely appearances of those things informed by our own experience? And in the end, does it really matter? After reading "Ocean Avenue," one tends to think not. The book is so steeped in a heady enjoyment of the here and now that it makes you want to go sit in a field somewhere, or at least on a park bench, and ponder your own role in the universe. On top of that, it has a wonderful matter-of-factness that tempers its dreamy languor, so that a poem with the almost ecclesiastical title "In This World" begins: You may think nothing of it, but in this world there is no health insurance coverage for the dead, but there are retirement plans for those who are not yet born -- And though we are registered in the Offices of Vital Statistics we still ask the questions: "Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?" Whatever the answers turn out to be, Mörling knows one thing for certain, and she passes it on generously. "What will you bring with you when you die?" she asks in the book's title poem. Not your name. Not your body. Not a single photo. Not a single flower. The list goes on, but what's the use? We all know we can't bring a single thing and that is what in the end makes this world what it is. So go out and get it, while you can. salon.com | Feb. 11, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Melanie Rehak is a poet and critic.