The Black Mariah

The Black Mariah by Jen Tynes, which will be released by DoubleCross Press at the 2012 AWP, is a longish poem that alternates between sections of standard lineation and sections containing scattered lines that employ the page as an open field. Moreover, the poem focuses on the body and a series of strange transformations it undergoes. Take, for instance, this excerpt from the incipient section:

Where her eyelashes should

be: rattlesnakes on

full alarm. Her breasts a couple

mushroom clouds, vitals

full of holes where the red-

headed gunslingers missed her

apple. It looks like both a woman

and a vase inside her

pupils.

Rattlesnake eyelashes, mushroom cloud breasts, and pupil vases: the poem creates a new being that is neither one nor the other, but indissolubly both. While some may find such fantastic displacements off-putting, the speaker of these poems (and, by extension, anyone calling themselves a poet) thinks otherwise, saying as much when she states: "My head will not turn / against all the body's forms." In some respects, embracing "all the body's forms," including those of that cross species lines, hearkens back to Horace's The Art of Poetry. In his treatise on verse, the ancient wrote:

Suppose you'd been asked to come for a private view

Of a painting wherein the artist had chosen to join

To a human head the neck of a horse, and gone on

To collect some odds and ends of arms and legs

And plaster the surface with feathers of differing colors,

So that what began as a lovely woman at the top

Tapered off into a slimy, discolored fish—

Could you keep from laughing, my friends? Believe me, dear Pisos,

Paintings like these look a lot like the book of a writer

Whose weird conceptions are just like a sick man's dreams,

So neither the head not the foot can be made to apply

To a single uniform shape. "But painter and poets

Have always been equally free to try anything."

We writers know that, and insist that such license be ours.

Indeed, poets must take "license" to develop in their writing a disparate beast (to develop their writing as a disparate beast) that does not conform to "a single uniform shape," and to do so freely and without fear of the spectators "laughing."

The following "weird conception," originally published in an issue of Anti-, is my favorite of The Black Mariah and brings to bear the transformative capabilities of the poet:

We perform best when

we listen to the bird

inside the bird, dark bellied

ugly augur song that

likes to measure us out

of space. For demonstrative

purposes the body can affix

to any orphan line. My eyes are bulls’

eyes, my calves are wet,

pliable, the roped-in death

of me. My mother is

a fertility trick. We perform

best when we admonish

our animals for

the gaminess they visit

upon our routine. We are not two

of everything in

a line, following the color

spectrum. My father is a shadow

on the image. I look for a bird

inside a bird because it slips

bones out of

everything I touch.

I break the character and look

for hours like a body

no one knew to recover.

The "character" embodied within the poem's "I," literally, "breaks" into pieces and is reconfigured in ways that allow the reader to "look [at it] / for hours": constant permutations providing enjoyment for an audience who reveals in displacement and the collage of shapes into new forms.