Tony Trigilio reviews The Making of Collateral Beauty by Mark Yakich

The Making of Collateral Beauty by Mark Yakich.  Dorset, VT. Tupelo Press, 2006.  29 p. $9.95, paper.                                                                                                                                      

            At first glance, the prose poems in Mark Yakich’s chapbook The Making of Collateral Beauty might seem only like a zany labyrinth of explanatory footnotes to his first full-length collection, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group and Waiting to Cross.  Each of the poems in The Making of Collateral Beauty shares a title with a poem in the first book; and each poem purports to unveil the inspiration and context for its companion poem in the first book.  But the poems in The Making of Collateral Beauty stand too well on their own to be seen only as ancillary extensions of the first book.  As this book explicates and extends Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group and Waiting to Cross, it also confronts our craving, and sometimes our fetish, for explanation.  It reminds us that comprehension is an organic experience, not a product reducible to hierarchies of the declarative sentence, the nested footnote, or the tidy logic of explication.

            Yakich adores those moments when an artist’s “explanation” of his/her work expands into its own associative extravaganza that rattles our need for explanation.  He tells us in “Index of Lawn Bowling or Index of Teenage Intimacy” that “the movie version of this poem” is “bound to be bad.”  With a mad-hatter’s smirk, he adds, “But I still hope it’s made during my

lifetime.” Language entices us, but, as Yakich writes in “Every Force Deserves a Form,” the seductiveness of form easily can interfere with substance: “In our age italics are overused.  Like celebrities.”  Yakich’s world is one where the telling of a tale is at such remove from the intentions of its teller that willful, hierarchical explanation robs “collateral beauty” of the glories of chance.  Here, even the idea of God is “an aleatory act”; metaphysics is reduced to “a moment when the pen slipped a little causing the writer to forget about the number of eggs gathered from the hens, and that the weather was usually foggy in the morning but sunny by early afternoon.”  A strange ontology comes from these gaps between thoughts.  Yakich writes that “you learn things by doing them the way you didn’t start out thinking Thy will be done.  Classical: Faulkner wanted to write poems, got novels; Shakespeare wanted to marry someone he loved, got plays; Yahweh wanted to create a small garden, got a compost patch.”

            Yakich’s debt to Nabokov’s Pale Fire is obvious and well earned.  Like Pale Fire, this book reminds us that authorship is a fiction loved too much to be abandoned.  The fictive idea of singular, proprietary authorship endures as something necessary and exacting, as another moment when “[e]ach writer limits herself to the story of her own execution” (“The Teller is the Only Survivor of the Fairy Tale Ending”).  It is too easy to misread Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” as a form of critical homicide.  Thankfully, Yakich enacts what Barthes’s essay actually argues:  the “death” of the Author produces the simultaneous “birth of the Reader.” 

            Like any experiment, The Making of Collateral Beauty demands participatory readers, not passive listeners.  The rewards for this experience is a delightfully strange and innovative collection of prose poems.  The poems are weird in ways that defy our everyday overuse of the word, as in “Dreams Hardly Ever Seem to Change Things for the Better,” a road-trip of a poem that goes everywhere and nowhere at once, coast-to-coast -- and with Algonquin, Illinois, in between -- then builds to a short romance in, of all places, Baden-Baden, and a train to Trieste, looking for “the ghost of Joyce and the origin of the color yellow.”  At the same time, Yakich’s associative logic, and nicely erratic body humor, falls for its own excesses.  In these moments, his technique is too self-aware, too pleased with itself, as in poems such as “Saturday Night” or “Matinee,” where, unfortunately, you’re left wondering where slapstick ends and surrealism begins.

            I finished a draft of this review savoring Yakich’s “Blazon” as I sat next to the left-field foul pole at a San Francisco Giants baseball game, squeezed between two families with ball gloves and sodas and hot dogs -- and re-reading odd, gorgeous lines such as, “The body truly is an amazing machine for worshipping the hug.”  Most of us in the crowd that night wanted to see Barry Bonds hit his record-breaking 715th home run.  (He did it the next day.)  I re-read my favorites from the book and jotted final notes between innings.  The woman behind me, a loud season-ticket holder endeared by all the ushers and concessions staff, detested Colorado’s left fielder Eli Marrero and cussed him the whole game.  The rest of the time, she begged Bonds to turn around and look at her as other fans took photos of him with their cell phone cameras.  (He never did.)  I tried to write faster than everything was happening.  I could not stop thinking of Yakich’s own adoration of the creative process, his self-reflexive questions that revel in their own inscrutability like snappy, absurdist koans (“If one could write out one’s life faster than one could live it, would that constitute time travel?”)  Clumps of the crowd left after Bonds’s last at-bat, in the eighth inning.  The woman behind me cursed them all: “Good riddance!  The rest of us are here to watch a ball game!”  I imagined Yakich nodding, encouraging her to continue, saying, “I wanted to sleep through the rest of the play none of us could play.  One thousand times I set down my lines; one thousand times someone else picked them up.”

 

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