Then what I had not even realized was the specter of an arc, what I had not even understood as a belief in the storyline of a life, of my life, began to disintegrate. I was sleeping on a friend’s futon. I was reading in the park in the bright hot sun, sweat dripping down the backs of my bent knees. I was eating grocery store sushi for the fifth night in a row. “Movement / toward action, no real completion or arrival,” writes Madeleine Cravens in Pleasure Principle (Scribner, 2024),her debut poetry collection published by Scribner in June of this year. Told from the perspective of a young woman speaker traveling through New York, California, and Lebanon, these poems are interested in desire and relationality, in reaching and longing toward both pleasure and pain, in the impossibility of conclusions and sense-making. Cravens’s reliance on and loyalty to the image become a propulsive, vibrating force—this is a poetics of presence, of that which is tangible—observable, seen, and so limited—and everything inarticulable that lies beneath it.
In “Leaving,” the first poem of the collection, the speaker defines “pleasure” in tumultuous, wavering terms, teetering between pleasure and its negative so abruptly, with such mellifluous rhythm and repetitive rhyme, that it’s easy to lose sight of the difference between what pleasure is and is not. The definition of pleasure is not so easily discoverable, Cravens suggests through the stopping and starting movement produced by the alternating, almost identical anaphoras—“not the pleasure of . . . ,” “the pleasure of. . . .” The collection is titled after Freud’s theory that claims the instinctual nature of moving away from pain and toward pleasure, but here we see Cravens begin to unravel these ideas in search of her own definitions. That pleasure may indeed contain its opposite is a recurring idea throughout the collection—“the pleasure of errors,” the pleasure of pain, the pleasure of the repeating missteps that make up a life.
A resistance to neat resolution serves as both thematic content and formal strategy for Cravens, whose poetry expresses an interest in the tropes of narrative as well as a formal wariness of the conclusions such structures imply. “I want to know how things will end,” she writes in the beginning. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, he defines narrative as containing an inherent implication of an end—though a narrator may be said to begin, “In reality [they] have started at the end. It is there, invisible and present, it is what gives these few words the pomp and value of a beginning.” Cravens seems to understand this, writing later in “Object Permanence,” “The end’s already in motion, the end was starting this whole // time. . . .” To exist in a moment in time, to occupy some semblance of presence, is either to be ignorant of its inevitable end or to let the inevitable end color the moment with meaning—Cravens works somewhere within the latter definition, where awareness of the end is a constant but meaning remains elusive, suspect. Though “Object Permanence” grapples with the certainty of endings and the desire to foresee their specifics, this poem’s final lines are sparklingly present, alive with an openness that exchanges the utter hopelessness of knowledge for total belief in the present moment: “I ignored the crusted amphitheater and wanted / to touch you. It was February. You wore a long blue coat.” The meaning of the scene is inarticulable, but the reality is palpable, specific—then gone.
Cravens’s work relies on this imagistic impulse: careful observations, records of the exterior. While the landscape around the speaker changes, her sharp outward gaze remains a constant, rooting these poems in their definitive and distinct landscapes even as the geography around her shifts. The speaker is on Houston Street, near the San Andreas Fault, at the “famous market” in Beirut and it’s closing; she is uptown in the Catskills where the “dead hydrangeas [are] beating / against the windowpane, “at a rest stop near Fresno.” Locale alters the image, but the speaker’s dedication to the image remains steadfast—a sort of grasping toward the solidity of a physical place, toward that which is real and tangible.
By contrast, the speaker herself often comes across as somewhat distant, shrouded. She reaches—she desires—but the self appears spectral, murky and uncertain of much beyond her errant wanting. Her experiences are described in blunt statements, facts without embellishment or nuance: “I didn’t like sex in the beginning.” “Ellen choked me against the refrigerator.” “In the nightclub bathroom, I inhaled strange / vapors, then smashed my head into a wall.” Even the self is described with a sort of calm remove, as though she is observing a stranger from across the room—the self as landscape, a sequence of shapes and movements. The self Cravens constructs is not defined by personality or generalization; the self does, the self wants—the self is carried along by the current of its actions. In “Beirut,” she writes:
And when I visited another city, in the north,
I arrived just as the famous market closed.
At dusk, a sudden rolling down of curtains.
I dreamed about my sister in Cleveland.
We still weren’t speaking.
How to reconcile this ethos of acute detachment with the speaker’s ever-present longings. “Can there be a story where a character wants nothing?,” Cravens writes. Is this the kind of story she is trying to tell? Even she doesn’t quite seem to believe it’s possible—“desire requiring more desire.” Desire as fact, state of mind. A place one inhabits rather than an active emotional state. Desire is not a symptom of a self; the self here is desire. Or else—desire is what buzzes underneath what is described tangibly—unspeakable, tumescent.
In “Desire Lines,” the long series of fragments that makes up the middle third of the collection, Cravens gives narrative a new shape—rather than the traditional arc of rising action and denouement, this poem progresses in short, repetitive movements: the sense of grasping at air. Named after the worn shortcuts between an architect’s carefully planned pathways, the poem is a meditation on and from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 19th century. Cravens describes her parents, their separation; a love affair; running—these subjects, however, do not become solid or graspable or whole in their translation to language. Under Cravens’s stark gaze, each image is blunt and then gone, conclusiveness is broken off from the whole and gives way to another image, another ending, another beginning. There is no settling here, no arrival. The profundity of a phrase like, “I have all my life considered distance,” which Cravens quotes from Olmsted, lies in the open space beyond it—that it sits there unexplained, unadorned—and that there is a section that follows it—another attempt, a reaching toward this thing that cannot quite be grasped, but is reached toward again and again across the twenty pages of this poem.
Toward the end of the book, Cravens’s narrator comes into view more clearly. In “If Any Plot Closes,” one of my favorite poems of the collection, the narrator is involved in the images rather than recording them from a distance: “In the mountains, I asked my friend how to live forever, / eating cherries straight from the tree.” The poem that follows, “An Explanation,” takes the self as subject to be observed, documented, in the same careful, frank terms as she describes her environments. In “Creation Myth,” the book’s final poem, Cravens playfully suggests causation without entirely believing in it:
Because a hand came out and pushed down the land.
Because a boy tried to hold two dogs together
Because you wrote her about it. You sent a letter.
Because peacocks made cat-like sounds in the mountains.
Such phrases have little resemblance to what follows, thus resisting any notion of real connection or consequence or plot, but this seems to be Cravens’s overarching point—a narrative as less cohesive arc than disjointed images, repeated beginnings, desire unsatisfied and so desiring again. “One can be alive again,” she writes.
Heat loosened from the air. I cut my hair with the kitchen scissors over the bathroom sink. I picked up a mattress from a stranger a few blocks away. The construction site down the block moved right outside my apartment, a new hole in the asphalt.
Pleasure Principle begins with an ending—“When this ends I hope // it ends completely,” she writes in “Object Permanence”—but the book ends by starting again. If every beginning contains its eventual end, so too does every end hold another beginning. Despite this narrator’s cool remove, her masochistic tendencies, she appears, in the end, vastly hopeful—possibility here lies less in a belief in conclusion or wholeness (which is, ultimately, belief in death; death as final conclusion) and more in the newness of images, the jerking motions of disjointed experiences, how a lack of cohesion can become, actually, more life in all its swirling confusing incongruousness. “One can be alive ten thousand times.”
