There is an audience-operation I might suggest for those preparing to read Bridget Talone’s The Soft Life. In involves James Turrell’s light installations. Which are always affecting to me. Like I’m always having an emotional response to the shape of light wherever it appears in the room. In the corner, or he’s dug out a portion of the wall, so the light appears to be at the same surface as the wall. My family and I make regular trips to MASS MoCA, where there’s a permanent retrospective, which means I’m in periodic conversation with his work.
Dissolve (Curved Wide Glass), by James Turrell
Engaging with a piece like Dissolve (Curved Wide Glass), feels different than a similar looking painting by Mark Rothko. Rothko is definitely tonal, inviting color type sensations. But in Turrell, I find myself encouraged to a threshold-like moment. Like first, I need to acknowledge a dominant color for my viewing. Whatever colors Turrell might have used, the dominant color has this suffusion layer effect. In the above picture, the dominant color might be mauve. And even though I see the blue at the edge of the light’s frame, I experience that blue in its most mauve-ness. Poems for Talone lend themselves to a similar dominant-ness. Which means, to me, that they are inescapably laced with affect. (The majority of the poems in Talone’s book I read through an AffectTheory lens). Something happened in the poet’s life, and the poem isn’t so interested in the event as it is the poet reacting. The poet is fraught with circumstances. And, whatever has happened outside the poem’s text, the poet holds any and all implications of the moment tight to her chest. The poem will experience those feelings, but without context, there’s a distance in the reading. So where there are poems that mimetically draw the reader into the poet’s life, Talone’s poems charge the moment with an affect of immediacy and an affect of whatever emotion prompted the poem to be written. Like a reader isn’t so involved in actions, only responses (except a poem like “Overture to a Legend,” where Paul Bunyan is shown for a drunk misogynist).
In the final poem, “Lavishly Appointed,” Talone refers to the book’s title: “That many things pertained to me. The soft life / inside a throat. The lispy tug of clams pulled from their shell.” This is the nature of the poems’ reactiveness. That soft life inside a throat. Its sensitivities precluding a complete sentence’s worth of reflection. Even to the point that a given poem’s grammar will move quickly from one sentence to the next. Reading it feels like the above photo of Turrell’s work. It casts the reader as a witness to what’s happening. I can recognize how much the events have affected the poet, even speculating about the intensity of these interactions as I look into the involved aura located inside the wall. But I’m removed from the events.
Like viewing a Turrell, I find it most helpful to use some dominant point of reference. And where Turrell works in colors, and so I experience a dominant color with my viewing, Talone’s most effective poems slide the reader through a series of images. I find if I grab hold of an especially notable image or impression, it helps fix a frame of reference for my reading. This opening to “What I Say to You Is Never What I Say to You But Something Else Instead” offers a helpful example:
Swallowed dry. It struck me that the sick man in his bed had the same thing in his voice our father had, dying. A whine between words like a body made of tail extending in anguish softening the spaces between the words as if they were what cause him pain.
The poem quickly establishes a strange tension between immediacy and intimacy. There is a generalized “sick man” and the poet’s interaction with him is being compared to an intimate memory of her father dying. How well the poet might know the sick man doesn’t seem like it’s necessary information for the poem. Instead, it’s how this sick man speaks with a whine between his words, which recalls for her the voice of her father. And where the poem is active with abstraction (for instance, the image, “a body / made of tails,” or the poem’s references to the the spaces between words), I find myself squarely present in the poem where Talone describes the “softening” spaces between words. That, for me, serves as a dominant image, and it gives me access to the poem’s central concern. Namely, that uncanny sensation where you keep trying to nail down why this strange setting has an air of familiarity. Why, in this case, the man in his bed might only be someone suffering, but not someone dear to the poet. And yet the poet feels an “anguish.”
It’s this tension between immediacy and a perceived intimacy that I find central to most of Talone’s book. Almost like a triangulation of the poetic experience. Where she holds me away from the actual event of the poem, insisting that I experience her language the way it would feel to her. Almost like a poetry of tone for tone’s sake.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.