Transformer—A Different Kind of Woman’s Book

Transformer by Kathleen Winter is the 2019 selection by Maggie Smith for The Word Works Hilary Tham Capital Collection. “The world of Transformer is one where survival requires transformation,” wrote Smith.

MANIACS IN FASHIONABLE HIGH TOPS

“South Huntington Apartments,” the first poem of the book finds an unnamed “you” hiding behind a closet door while some male stalker comes down the cellar steps to the laundry room.

                                                …Is it possible he was frightened

he might kill you? You could see his shoes through the strip

between hinges, high-tops that looked innocent even

when he kicked you. …

The Dresser suspects the person hiding has been accosted by this maniac before and that another time was when the kicking was done.

                                                …You stare

at green laces wrapped over his ankles.

Horses drown in the molasses time

that floods a shadow-tinted room.

Until his fear spins him around

and up the cement stairs…

What is clear is that time has slowed down to stop what? [his wild] horse impulses such that he becomes afraid and retreats. This gives his victim time to transform this Hitchcockian story and flee.

                                                     …Three flights up

he sprints but you just need to gain one floor to leave.

You just need one story

and it isn’t his.

LITTLE LAMBS AND GLUTTONS

Children are also not safe in the Winter’s world:

…

Edgar licked my desk. Did you do something

to make him lick your desk?

I’m attached to my disconnection,

fall in love with a fraction.

I want all these lambs

to escape being mutton.

Clumps of pale petals

on gray angled branches.

Thousands of lambs, each pear bough

a glutton.

…

Who is Edgar? Is he also learning fractions? Does he go outside to hear his victim sing a jump rope song that worries about lambs becoming tough meat?

…

His tongue licked my desk

I can see the spit glisten.

Asparagus comes up again

at this season, phallic,

aphrodisiac, perennially pleasing.

Under a tree, enjoy beyond

reason with the person (or persons)

whose desk you have chosen.

The Dresser sees that the victim who has now matured (transformed) in a later spring where asparagus grows once again now understands that Edgar’s craziness was an act of sexual aggression.

WHAT IS NOT RHETORIC

Men don’t fare well in this hot potato collection. Take “Henry VIII.”

Always a bridegroom,

never the bride to suffice.

When you’re picking them on the basis of paintings,

mistakes will be made.

I’d hope for someone with a sense of humor

but humors were all they had.

I’d hoped for a princess who spoke my language

but the high-class bachelorettes

were Spanish, Flemish, French.

For God’s sake, why can’t men birth the children?

…

Winter is having a good time making fun of this murderous king. She alters a feminine cliché—always a bride’s maid, never the bride—to heap faux pity on Henry. She allows him to wave away his mistakes based on the preposterous notion that like today’s online dating where photographs are shown, that he sees paintings of his future brides. Then the poet puns on the word humor which in Henry VIII’s day meant the substances black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm making up the human body. Anachronistically, Winter refers to the king’s possible brides as bachelorettes and settles with the king questioning in God’s name why can’t men birth the children? A slap in the face of men too funny to be even considered rhetoric.

Needless to say, the poem, with all its delicious sounding words, ends with a head rolling except the language mimics modern expression:  “Swipe left to cut off a head.”

WHAT IS NOT A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND

One of the most difficult poems of the collection is the unpunctuated poem that gives the book its name. “Transformer” starts easily enough but maybe this is a deception since the dog might not just be a pet.

dog hair turns up

everywhere in this magnetic

collection but the dog is himself

underhand & not reading anything

except my expression which he studies better

than my lover ever

important to mark the pupils

the lips when your dinner

depends on it

There are three stanzas and the last two (shown below in their entirety) move in large leaps that are too elusive to easily understand. However, science figures largely and grounds what turns out to be an orchestrated transformation (solid to fluid).

depend on it music

is blood circulating

half the time unremarked through

our environs till it stops the music stopped

is stucco silence un-dripping un-undulating not

even sinking so movelessly still but still

in the blood a taste a flower a colorless color

diamonds aspire to the ice cube

my dog is obsessed with his canines facet it fracture it make

a brash satisfaction a liquid obliteration

of its solid rectangular

object to its geometry to edges sharp & regular must render it fluid to

lunar to ocean to something too elusive ever again to (quite) be hard

The question is what does the ice cube represent? Is it a metaphor for the owner of the dog or that person’s heart since there is so much blood. Stucco, something used in finishing and decorating houses, is made of dehydrated lime, powdered marble and glue. Because it is still (un-dripping un-undulating not /even sinking) and is like the diamond, stucco and the diamond serve as a contrasts to the ice cube. The Dresser wonders if she should think that the stucco/house and diamond are not “a girl’s best friend.” Even the dog seems a bit menacing in his obsession with “his canines,” those pointed teeth.

There is a lot to think about in Kathleen Winter’s Transformer. She is taking back the night from bad dreams and bogey men. She is taking back the day from all other horrors that afflict women and girls.

Thanks to Hal Greenwald for reading and discussing Transformer with the Dresser.

Stuff That Doesn’t Fit in a Box—Binary Planet

Binary Planet by Henry Crawford is a book of poetry that is out of this world, extraordinary for its reach forward (Future) and backwards (Past) but prophetically speaking to our odd situation now with a pandemic virus and global protest over racial injustice. The Dresser offers this example of Future:

Driving a 22^nd Century Ambulance (excerpt)

into the tunnel comes a fleet

of self-driving flat-white

Escalades [patched] into [light

guided] screens updating the

incoming information [HUMAN

PRIMATES] reads the status

console [homing in] with

wide-area [nuclear resonance

imaging] showing a warren of

[modern humans] in the skeletal

stages of starvation

The Dresser notes that a higher intelligence speaks in this excerpt and that creatures like you and me—human primates—are not faring well.

The Dresser offers this example of Past:

Driving Across a Bridge (excerpts)

                                   …I cross

the Whitestone bridge into Queens

wondering [who I’d be] on the

Edmond Pettus Bridge

mine is a tribe of immigrant

factory hands [raised] across

the Rikers Island narrows

…

[measuring ourselves] by

the hats and coats of others

[fearing what we do not have]

Protected in the [normal] ways

…

                        …of hate

It’s always 1965 on the Edmund

Pettus Bridge [some locking arms]

some wielding [billy clubs] some are

[praying] others firing [tear gas]

others [walking] some on horses

some will [roll up the windows]

lock the doors [look straight ahead]

[stay in their lane] as the bridge

arcs over a river of lost history

bleeding out of Selma

The excerpt positions us in 1965 but the situation on the Pettus Bridge sounds like what happened in front of the White House on June 1, 2020, when police violently cleared a peaceful protest sparked by the brutal death of a black man at police hands (or rather a knee) in Minneapolis.

DEFINING THE BINARY PLANET

 

Black or white, true or false, one or zero—Crawford defines his binary planet. Yet he opens wide for what is outside these parameters. His poem “Machine Language” is an overlay to the binary ASCII code of zeroes and ones that is the last stanza of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” Here is what the poem looks like on the page.

Here is the last stanza of Plath’s “Daddy” in English:

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Here is Crawford’s poem separated from its binary code:

[we’re in here now]

[ where everything ]

[passes] [bottom of the machine]

[ our words ] [ finally ]

[ made just ]

[no Jews]

[no Germans] [ no vampires ]

[up there]

[ you unmasked ] [ the bastard ]

[here] [the skins of words]

[ in sequences ] [chalked

in whitespace ]

[ bastards all ]

[ and never ]

[ enough ]

[sun]

The Dresser will pause here to reflect on Crawford’s English words which seem to both acknowledge and negate a huge prejudicial load with words like passes (often used in the context of a biracial person presenting as a Caucasian), Jews, Germans (in juxtaposition with Jews, Germans are seen as oppressors of Jews in WWII when Hitler targeted Jews for extermination), bastard (a child born outside of marriage and therefore outside of protective inheritance laws and societal acceptance of a certain period of time), skins, whitespace (these words point to racial differences). Does machine language (the code of zeroes and ones) cleanse the difference? Probably not, since there is “never enough sun” to do it. This ambiguity flies in the face of binary—black/white and true/false.

TAKING OFF THE EDGE: A LOVE POEM

Remarkably, Crawford offers another overlay poem where he does not use machine language and he doesn’t use brackets. “The Love Poem of an Average Man,” which ends the book and forms its own section, overlays his long poem on fragments from Gertrude Stein’s book-length love poem Tender Buttons. Crawford then repeats Stein’s fragments, such as “a large box is handily made,” “no window is useless,” “broken in more places and mended,” “red rose and pink cut pink.” As he did in “Machine Language,” Crawford’s poem appears in bold font and Stein’s poem appears in gray characters. The Dresser’s collaborating analyst Hal Greenwald said, this [poem] is an exercise in boldness. If you take a look carefully at the end of the poem, Crawford’s bold words start to fade. It’s an interesting design touch that Henry Crawford said was his editor Nancy White’s idea. White did the design layout and it is a handsome book. White gave Binary Planet more attention to page layout than usual, because Crawford’s work has an artistic element that requires seeing the poems on the page.

For a love poem, “The Love Poem of an Average Man” has a low threshold of violence, starting with “pretend your beauty /as a gun pretends /its aim /this is the tumble /this is the end of fortune /throwing off our gold /bailing out /a drowning boat.” A little later in the poem, the violence becomes more intense: “we /wield /the sharpest /knives /bleed out /the wounds /expose the cuts /a river of blood.” What this poem puts forth is dirty realism and a concluding possibility that “there is something in nothing /it is possible /to be someone /it is possible /for us.”

WHATEVER YOUR MOOD OR SITUATION

Binary Planet addresses the high arts: music—Bach in “Fugue Before Lunch,” art—“Walt Whitman Ekphrastic”, writing—“Sketch of a Poem in 10 Broken Lines” as well as the low: video games—“Game [ON],” television—“Twilight Zone Reboot,” boxing—“Taking the Fall.” Whatever your mood or situation, Crawford has something for you—“Sex and Its Discontents,” “Cowboy Dreaming,” “A Night at the Drive-In,” “Getaway Car,” “Elegy for a Spin Instructor.”

The Dresser wants to leave you laughing though there is plenty in “Happiness” to remind you that in our time of the invisible killing virus, communicating this emotion might be dangerous for your health.

Happiness [excerpt]

Happiness must be possible [else why would we pursue it]

but wait a minute [it might be something like] “world peace”

which we think will happen someday [but it’s hard to imagine]

so what would happiness look like [does it come in colors]

white? black? blue? green? …sizes?...

…[will they let you take your happiness back if

it doesn’t] fit [how long does it last?]…

               …and what if your happiness lasts longer

than four hours [do you need to contact a medical doctor]

…

The Dresser acknowledges that Binary Planet by Henry Crawford is a book published by The Word Works. Thanks to Hal Greenwald for long and enjoyable readings and discussions of Binary Planet.