Noelle Kocot's _ Sunny Wednesday _, reviewed by John Findura

Noelle Kocot
Sunny Wednesday
ISBN 9781933517391
Wave Books, 2009
$14

Reviewed by John Findura


Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, of death, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” In Noelle Kocot’s fourth book of poetry, Sunny Wednesday, that sentiment is only partly true: everything here hurts. No page is read without feeling the sting and burn of the realization that, one day, the one you love most of all will be gone, not coming back. For Kocot it is her late husband, the composer Damon Tomblin. If there is any good that can come out of death, it is the fact that Kocot is able to create something beautiful and necessary out of the hurt that must be enveloping her.

The book has the tone of someone speaking slowly and quietly to herself in the back of an ill-lit church. It is not meant for us to hear. But how can we not eavesdrop on a voice filled with so much emotion? At times I almost felt the need to put Sunny Wednesday away, feeling guilty for finding so much to love in a book filled with so much loss. The poem “Once Upon a Time in America” starts with the lines, “Here in this room I slept in / As you lay dead and alone.” What could be more traumatic than that? What is more difficult for a reader to do than try and disconnect the poet’s voice from the poet herself when you know it is she who is speaking?

Like her previous collections, Kocot is meticulously reverent and sharp in her choices of words and their intercourse across lines. Sunny Wednesday is no exception, as in “For Damon,” where she closes the poem: “I have given up the greenness of my spirit // With yours, my toasted animal, my breath.” Perhaps the “greenness” of the spirit is indeed inexperience, but the feeling of jealousy over someone leaving also comes through, to say nothing of the lushness of this absence. The phrase “my toasted animal” also leaves one gasping, not just in terms of meaning, but in awe of how we can so closely hold spirit.

But more than anything else, Sunny Wednesday is an exercise in working through an event so horrible that it seems like it may never pass. Indeed, such loss as Kocot’s never leaves the living the same as it finds them. It’s unsettling to read some of these poems, such as “One Poem for Matthew Z.” (presumably Zapruder) where Kocot writes, lovingly:

ffffffffffff…The second time
ffffffffffffI’d ever heard my name spoken
ffffffffffffWith such care, a bum had just
ffffffffffffPut a cross on my husband’s grave
ffffffffffffAnd showed it to me. What does
ffffffffffffAll of this mean, Matthew?

That’s a good question, perhaps one the earliest poet asks, a question at the heart of any experience. It’s not clichéd, not worn and tired, because the trauma of loss here seems so authentic. The question, the proverbial “why,” is sometimes all that we are left with. Earlier in Sunny Wednesday, in “Entry,” Kocot writes:

ffffffffffffI ask myself, what is this life?

ffffffffffffWhat is this life with its risen characters
ffffffffffffWhat is this life with its new cartoons
ffffffffffffWhat is this tonality that lags

ffffffffffffBrave animal of eternal valor
ffffffffffffIsn’t it enough that I exist?

It is difficult not to yell out, “It is, Noelle, it is enough that you exist!” Towards the end of the collection comes the poem “Zero” and its ending lines:

ffffffffffffI’ve already washed my placard
ffffffffffffOf a sun rising in no particular direction,
ffffffffffffAnd given it to the last
ffffffffffffWho will be first
ffffffffffffAnd the first who will be last.

This sounds like the promise of someone giving up earthly pleasures in the course of waiting for the inevitable to finally arrive.

In the penultimate poem, “On the Death of My Mother’s Cat,” Kocot arrives at a question that is less inquiry than meditation: “I wonder what the chaos of the sun was / To her eyes before they closed.” It seems only natural and proper that the dead become one with all of the answers, while we are left here to ponder what we can never know.


***

John Findura holds an MFA from The New School. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of the chapbook Useful Shrapnel (Scantily Clad Press) and his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Copper Nickel, Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Redivider, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

Danielle Pafunda's My Zorba, reviewed by John Findura

My Zorba
Danielle Pafunda
ISBN 9780615195933
Bloof Books, 2008
Poetry, 79 pages, paperback
$15

Reviewed by John Findura

Danielle Pafunda’s second book of poems is like watching an old nickelodeon or pressing your eye to the hole in a fence while the lights are flicked on and off quickly; there is rotation, and the movement often leaves you forced to fill in the minutest gaps, coloring the book with the reader’s own ideas.

The “Zorba” who appears throughout the book is never stable and cannot be pinned down. “She said my body became a praise-shack” is perhaps the most in-depth look we get into who or what Zorba is. Later, “He drew a drawbridge, she drew a gangplank. He an awning, / she an armory.” The book vacillates between the drawbridge and the gangplank, just as Zorba morphs between a “he” and a “she.” As each poem unfolds, there is a sign of welcome, but as quickly as it is noticed, next to it is the gangplank leading us off into the murky depths. It is an apt metaphor for reading this book as each turn of the page sucks us in deeper.

“Go Starboard, Go Further, Flee” contains the lines

[…] We dinner. We deck with the captain, a stroll in the
balloon light. We deck the captain, the gunner comes running.

Snail the passages so that in the phosphorescence of shipwreck,
I will be able to find you.

The images themselves are obvious, the way of getting there, however, is wonderfully skewered: the multiple meanings of “deck” when it is used so strangely as a verb the first time, the phrase “balloon light” and its long “o” connection with “moon,” the use of “Snail” as a verb, and the image of a shipwreck in phosphorescence.

Aside from the leaps in lines like “He warned me the wool blanket”, and the distance of the word “warned” to “warmed,” what keeps the momentum going is the transfer of sexuality throughout. The narrator eventually leads to “I felt my tentacle flex” and “soon thereafter I stiffened” from the feminine perspective of “for the third time in a year, I had / become hysterically pregnant.”

In “Rallying on the Plank, the Porch Swing Leans In” Pafunda writes that

With Zorba’s fingers, I have seen the shape of the triangle.
The shape of the hole and the shape of the plaintiff. I have
encountered the shape of a blade of grass, which slips
between two doors of the porch. Screen and otherwise.

The sex is obvious, the sexuality not so much as it again teeters back and forth. The first line leaves a bit of a mystery with the relationship to Zorba. Is the speaker feeling through Zorba’s fingers? Has she taken on the role of Zorba? Or is it simply Zorba doing the showing? And if so, whose “triangle”? The second line also adds another layer of interest. By separating the images of “The shape of the hole” and “the shape of the plaintiff” we are left to believe that they are separate, with a more masculine identity assumed by “the plaintiff.” This would leave the female in the role of “the Defendant.” What is her crime? Is it letting the blade of grass slip “between two doors”?

After a large break of white, Pafunda continues “A Quarter-Hour of Recess” with

When I tried to cover the hair with pancake, Zorba
Intercepted. She patted down the razor blade. The laugh.
Later, Zorba, her own blade in hand. Her brittle.

Brittle, exactly, like this poem, like these poems. Everything seems broken, haphazardly put back into place, trying to resemble what is was before the fracture, like a child gluing the lamp he broke back together. Scattered throughout the book are words and ideas glued together like “mommyanddady” and “HanselandGretel.” We recognize the form immediately, although it is a little off, but we find its purpose now changed and agitated—its reason stripped to the outline of an object. In places it becomes the outside world being ensnared by the whimsy of a broken set of blinds.

In the end, there is a single reason to not put this book down, as well as it being a legitimate reason for picking it up in the first place: as Pafunda states in “Parsimonious Holiday,” “It would be interesting to see what happened next.”

* * *

John Findura holds an MFA from The New School. His poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Mid-American Review, Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, CutBank, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives and teaches in Northern New Jersey.