The Difficult Farm, Heather Christle

I saw Heather Christle read at NYU last Fall. She has large hair and all of her poems memorized. I kept thinking: That's good. I memorize my poems sometimes. Why doesn't anyone else do that? People seem to like it. I guess the trick is letting people see that you do it because it makes reading more engaging and not because you think your poetry is so great that it justifies being committed to memory, but the latter reason is probably why you do it anyway. She also read with a clearly adopted, airy, teenage voice which is interesting in light of how the poems are being reviewed as satire.

In the Difficult Farm, the tone is somewhat defensive (or distant) and reserves sincerity for the tensest moments. I think the defensiveness comes from tiredness. She seems weary with the physical world—“It seems sad, and maybe wrong, that there should be this many animals…” (“The Cabinet’s Advice”)—and weary with poetry. “I myself began to shrink until my head was too small to contain much of anything,” she writes in the introductory poem, “I’m down to quarks, an idea so tiny it’s something not even there and it suits me—I appear, the thought appears: quark.”

Or, I guess, in a generous, more analytic mood, I would say, the approach came from this weariness, modeled it, captured it, and produced striking results. The book is difficult (nothing secret about that), and the difficulty comes primarily from the flow of images rather than complex syntax or language. Cocorico is a good poem to look at to see what I'm getting at here. It has a seamless flow over disparate images and ideas, too seamless considering how different they are, and that's what's hard about reading Christle. She's an old-school surrealist in that way, but the lightness of many of the images/ideas is fresh and new.

Even when the poems are at their most evocative, as in those final lines of "Cocorico," she maintains a disturbing sense that there is an emptiness to the things populating her poetry/the world. “Most of the world gets embroidered in the end,” she writes in “What an Undertaker Does to his Family at Night,” “We know that. It’s a fact that we carry around like a small sack of seeds with a hole. Most of our lives get forgotten.” I feel that sack of seeds with a hole is very important to what she's getting at. We imbue objects with significance, but the object is (probably) still just an object, and its continued, indifferent existence gradually spills our feelings back into us—like, yeah, I'm lonely. When The Difficult Farm is at its best it recreates that emptiness in a palpable way, and a few times, probably, it recreates its inverse, the small part of the world that doesn't get embroidered, the objects with souls inside of them, though I guess it's not really cool to talk about those anymore.

I'm still wondering about the whole satire thing, kind of wishing I hadn't read it. If the poems are satirical, it's in that common contemporary-poetry way that's best described as “almost funny.” I look at the line and think, that’s funny, but I don’t actually laugh. At a reading, I might laugh out of nervousness, and it makes me wonder if poetry—now probably the world's most esoteric form of communication—can be funny. Joshua Beckman's "The Karate Chop of Love" is pretty damn funny and so is that poem in Tao Lin's first book about having a band, and Jonathan Swift is pretty funny, too, if we're looking back. I think that making a truly funny and simultaneously good poem is really hard, like writing a happy song that doesn't deteriorate after three listenings. The funniest poem in The Difficult Farm is "The Handsome Man":

Walking through the forest I found you,

strapped to a tree and half-fainting.

My god you were beautiful,

your sword sticking out like a sword.

[...]

You seemed

distracted, though, by the lepers'

parade as they lumbered by, singing,

Oh woe is me, my feet are cold,

I cannot find my barrel...

Still, my favorite moments in the collection occur when the framework falls away and a haunted lyricism invades. The best of these moments comes ¾ of the way through the book, placed there expertly by Christle to satisfy and keep us moving. It felt so good there, in the midst of everything else, that I feel bad taking it out of context like this. The section I'm talking about specifically is in blue:

STROKING MY HEAD

WITH MY DECEPTION STICK

Someone shut down the local shimmer

but not the police who thought

it was Sunday and so spent hours

arranging their long and pliant hair.

Constable Jacques is the best man I know

but even he won't converse with the dead.

The dead are so vain and hungry—

they will straddle your mirrors and swallow

your oak trees with their huge elastic lips.

And then you hear the screaming, not to be found

within the dead, but rather in the tiny

black pot which holds the greater part

of our mass and the difficult

farm where all the hens are black

and black are the wheatfields through which

runs a black and silent wind. Thin teachers

explain to our children: if the farm is a burgeoning

snowglobe, then the screaming's a legend, like glass.

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Buy the book here.