I feel like I have written about my favorite poem in the collection, “King,” before: maybe that’s because I think about it all the time.

Dickman begins: “I am always the king of something. Ruined or celebrated,/ newly crowned or just beheaded.” These opening lines contain both a narcissistic grandeur and a day dreaming vagueness. Dickman is “king” not of a specific palace or country, but of “something,” an entity of which he himself was not certain. Then he writes: “I sit in the middle/ of the room in December/ with the windows open, five pills and a razor. My lifelong/ secret. My killing power and my staying/ power.” Besides for the obvious poetry wordplay with “lifelong” which could also be read as “life long,” Dickman also hints at the duality about life and death. By etching out the suicidal scene, the pills, the razors, the open window, and himself sitting there, Dickman shows that our “staying power” is twisted with our “killing power.” He has chosen the staying power, and that is his secret. I am fascinated by this “staying power,” a force that chooses to continue being a force as oppose to a force that chooses to abort.

Dickman’s poem turns when he introduces his brother. He writes:

[S]o I put on my black-white
checkered-Vans, the exact pair of shoes
my older brother wore when he was still a citizen of the world
and I go out, I go out into the street
with my map of the death and look for him,
for the X he is,

Maybe it’s the shoes that make these few lines so powerful for me. Dickman chooses a simple wardrobe piece, shoes, black-white checkered Vans to hark back to his older brother. Shoes take us places, walk the earth, and ground, and dust with us, protecting the soft and vulnerable soles of our feet from the harsh elements of the land. To me, the selection of these shoes indicates a desire to be closer to what is now missing, re-unite with a lost soul (I’ll refrain from soul/sole play). Dickman’s “the map of the dead,” his search for the “X” that his brother is, evokes the language of abstraction. How does one become an “X,” if not for in her death. X marks the absence of being, but also a treasure. Dickman scavengers for his brother, who was once a “citizen of the world” so that he can:

[p]ut the scepter back in his hands, take the red
cloak from my shoulders and put it around his, lift the crown
from my head and fit it just above his eyebrows,
so I can get down on one knee, on both,
knees, and lower my face and whisper my lord, my master, my king.

Although I have read these words, this poem, many times, there is still something that startles me as I type them out, thinking about them now. The narcissism essential to the earlier lines of this poem has vanished. Now, Dickman submits to the memory of his dead brother, and his desire to revive him. This was the brother who he idolized and now he longs to idolize him again. Ultimately, this poem is about the lost sibling, the brother who once represented everything but now can only be an X, an absence. However, what intrigues me is Dickman’s metaphoric trajectory from being the king to crowning his brother as king. Dickman. This poem is about the X: the absence. When what we revered has vanished, and we are seized only with the memory cards of what once was, we try to re create what we once admired when we are alone. This is what Dickman seems to saying to me. The void resulting from the loss of a sibling who was king to him has put him in a position where only he can be king, a position he does not fully comprehend, now he is king of “something.”

It would be useful here to point out that many of the poems in this collection are haunting elegies that Dickman wrote upon the suicide of his older brother. Earlier in the collection, in “Coffee,” Dickman writes:

Right now
I’m sitting near a hospital where psychotropics are being
carried down the hall in a pink cup,
where someone is lying there and doesn’t know who
he is.
[…]Once, I had a brother,
who used to sit and drink his coffee black, smoke
his cigarettes and be quit for a moment
before his brain turned it armadas against him, wanting to burn
down

What fascinates me about “Coffee” (and also “King”), is how Dickman just, at the end, throws it in there, like it is a by-thought instead of the crux of the poem: “Once, I had a brother.” This is Dickman’s skill. He tells you his story, intimately conversing with you as one would with an old friend, and he reminds you that although his poem seems to be about himself, what actually throbs beneath the language, words, and story, is an ache for his older brother. Dickman’s conveyance of grief is not melodramatic or saccharine, he does not make sweeping proclamations. Instead, he is subtle.

This is not to say that Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a depressing collection. At times, Dickman is exuberant and playful, reminding me of a current-day Frank O’ Hara. His poem, “I Made You Dinner, Bob Kaufman” reminds me of O’Hara’s “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” In the last lines of the poem, Dickman writes, “I made [aioli] from scratch/ because I don’t have to be in hell if I don’t want to be.” This is Dickman’s staying power, his choice to drink coffee in the hospital cafeteria; ultimately, while this collection of poems meditates on mourning, it also realizes and quietly celebrates living.

Related Posts:

• The Branches, The Axe, The Missing by Charlotte Pence
• National Poetry Month Day 13: “Ghosts” by Brachah Goykadosh
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Portland!
• What You Lost Is What Everyone Lost
• Notable New York: 5/20-5/26

Part of Pence’s success is owed to her facility with sound; the poem’s sections are often musical, always best read aloud. At the collection’s opening, the poem’s central character, an unnamed female, pulls into her driveway at night to find a huge branch fallen in her yard. When she “grabs the branch by the base . . . her hands slide down wet-slime of turkey-tail mushrooms in bloom.” She purposefully chooses not to wipe her hands of the stain, and as the “moon seeps through to a shine,” the narrator asks, “How long has it been since she has done something as fundamental as this?” Thus the woman’s memory is catalyzed by the tree’s detritus, the moon, the cold and sodden winter; thus all collective human memory is sparked to fire, portrayed in the poem’s second section:

We were born from wood and fire.
Roasting small mammals as we sat
in circles. The sizzle-spit of fat striking

flame. And outside the circle: darkness.
Stalk of hyena. Crick-shift of his step.
Then man lifting a torch—jab-jab-jabbing

until the sounds flee back to the
quiet: sizzle-spits. Shifts of logs carboned
and bone-thin. Ashed by morning.

The language here is staccato and luminous, sonically and metaphorically reflecting the first intimations of community, of humanity encircling fire to feed and protect itself. Playful and rich, the language shifts again into the relatively prose-like, in which objective information is aestheticized, made poetry. Pence’s narrator says, for example, that “biological anthropologists are discovering that / ‘we were born from wood / and fire’ is not / figurative. // Taming fire // led to / cooking / which led to / / more calories / which led to bigger brains to / language speech communities.” The personal and intimate narrative of the woman coalesces with scenes of primordial humanity realizing its sentience, which then meld with hypotheses about the processes by which this realization came to be. In less gifted hands these vacillations between such distinct modes might have fallen to incoherence or atonality. However, these sections depend on and even demand each other, distinct as they are, because cumulatively the synthesis achieves a resonance almost pictogrammatic: images pop and information clicks immediately. For instance, one section poses answers to the query, “What was the mind like before language?” Pence handles the inevitable paradox through minimalism and repetition:

Needs.
      [A bird.]

Images.
      [Arc of bird’s chest as it rises from a bay bush.]

The section goes on to posit “Metaphor” and “Act” as the last of the mind’s pre-language sources.

Pence’s suppositions about man’s beginning are equally rich:

Maybe the first species         to strike fire

did so by all lucky-dumb.
                Some brute banging blind
pyrites against flint        in hopes
of a hammer

But the heart of the poem pulses within the central female character, a person in a contemporary world with its myriad “small fires and many small roofs. / Fathers and daughters, lovers and exe-es, / connected / by a desire to forget our histories.” I will leave the more detailed textures about the central character unexplored in hope readers will pick up this collection. It is enough to say that the character cannot forget her history; she is branded by the elemental and dysfunctional forces that form her identity. As such, Pence does not allow us to forget our histories, either.

The Branches, the Axe, the Missing, brief as it is, genuinely feels epic, incantatory: the narrative radiates like embers stoked to flame. For all its sadness, for all its acknowledgment of both origin and end, fecundity and emptiness, love and the question of whether love can exist, this chapbook is a complete joy to read, a revivifying work that deserves a large audience.

Related Posts:

• Mayakovsky’s Revolver by Matthew Dickman
• The Fortunate Era by Arthur Smith
• Notable New York: 5/20-5/26
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover