Abstract: GOD IS NO SECURITY BLANKET Mark Wunderlich, Earth Avails (Graywolf Press, 2014)One of my favorite Peanuts cartoons opens with a baseball game being rained out. As Charlie Brown and all the players run for cover, Linus van Pelt shakes his fist at the black-streaked sky in impotent rage, screaming Rain, rain go away, come again another day! When the sky promptly clears, Linus races for home, slamming the door shut and wailing to his bewildered sister Lucy, HIDE ME!Though Mark Wunderlich proclaims himself an atheist, his poems are colored with spiritual alarm. He talks in a process note to one of the poems in this book about giving himself permission to write a book of prayers to a God don't believe in. He wants to draw out that aspect of prayer as utilitarian, adapted to specific situations of daily life. But how is it that he encounters the God he addresses, even as he disbelieves? Early in the pages of the book he calls on the Unreadable One, and refers to a buck in the distance as an absence and as erasure.What is it that gets erased when a living creature inhabits the landscape? One is tempted to say Wunderlich's outlook is pastoral, but if it is then it eschews the older romantic sense of and moves closer to Joyelle McSweeney's sense of the necropastoral- a pastoral that includes death at its edges, that acknowledges and draws in environmental destruction and degradation wrought by human interaction with a natural world that is anything but pristine. In fact, the one time the word is used in the book, it is used to describe the way an animal who has just been struck looks at the human who struck him.A long poem called Driftless Elegy looks at what vanishes from a small town as the years go by. After cataloging the animals which have disappeared from the landscape-sheep, badgers, milk cows-the poet invokes the missing people:Who will remember the lodge hall and the good times had there?Who will remember the handshake for the Rebeccas?Eventually the people are not generic but named-Hilbert, Mutz, Chester, Babe Schwark, Bootie Schmidt, Piggy-and the feeling of desolation in the Midwestern town feels palpable and specific. Though Wunderlich acknowledges I am the end of a genetic linea family dies with he admits This is hardly a tragedy. We are not an impressive group.In fact, what he remembers most about the town is an earlier destruction: he has a photograph of a crowd of people watching a section of the town going up in flames, what he calls a premonition of the final disintegration of the town in the present day. He fixates on one figure in the photograph, a blur of girl who rushes away like a ghost. No face. Hardly a form. And though no one is alive who knows her name, it feels like the poet, who marginalizes himself in his own book, seems to take her as a totem.In a conversation with Alex Dimitrov, Wunderlich said this about the question of marginalization as it related to queer identity and poetics: For me, being a homo has always been about occupying the margins, creating and imagining alternatives to that which is culturally dominant. Marriage and the military? Seriously? We can't come up with anything better that that?For Wunderlich, exploring queer desire has always been about seeing it as marginal, inhabiting spaces away from the hetero-normalizing influences of current LGBTQ mainstream discourse. Early examples of this include his poems The Trick and This Heat, These Human Forms from his first book, Anchorage, and the fantastic It's Your Turn to Do the Milking, My Father Said and Letter to J. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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