Mark Statman’s Hechizo

 Mark Statman, Hechizo, Dialogos Books, 20220, ISBN 978-1-944884-96-3. 

 

 

In his previous collection, Exile Home. Statman rode the stimulus of the landscape in Oaxaca and an enhanced intimacy with the Spanish language to create an elegant, subtle, and lyrical poetic mode. (

 

Statman easily could have mined this mode for three or four books, made this more refined, Stevensian posture the frame of the latter part of his oeuvre. Instead, Hechizo goes in the opposite direction: jagged, unfettered, letting its art stem from the soul. An incantation, but in a speech more excitable than gaudy. (“Mexican songs” begins with the poet saying that their “sound sometimes/holy sacred to me/ like/synagogue prayers/ from when I was young.” But the sacredness becomes more than merely incidental: “despair softness our condition/ that’s our turning to song/so that we in love/lost love/abandoned love/our tears/can say at night at/dawn we wink the sun.” ( 

 

    The cry is direct, almost brute, yet deeply felt, sonorous: “we in song long/for peace/long for return/we long our spirits need/lifting far how fallen/we wonder at the life we wanted/so wanted.” The pain and longing are so blunt they actually almost careen into the non-referential; at the border of the truest speech and the sheerest sound. The poems also touch borders linguistically. “Chachalaca Pálida” says, of the bords, “there are fewer/these days/people/caught so many.129)to eat sabroso muy/sabroso (delicious)/they don’t lay many eggs/the eggs sabroso too.” ( 

 

   Statman is far more involved with Spanish than most Anglo-American poets. This does not mean the work  is bilingual, hybrid, diasporic, or readable under the rubric of ‘la frontera’; nonetheless, it gives the poetry a very distinct timbre, and makes its sound like no other. The ‘sabroso’ not only operates as a linguistic bivalence but as a thematic one: what makes the birds delicious is what imperils them; our desire is locked in the Anthropocene, and any human joy might also be ecological devastation. That language this direct can be this polyvalent is the shocking, discomfiting revelation of Hechizo. “we in song long for peace long for return/” The vision and soundscape of Hechizo are full of desire and spirituality, touch and yearning,attack and tranquility, and above all irrefutably, tremendouslyalive. There is ecstasy, but so unhindered as to be free and verge on anonymity: “we/could renew vows/reclaim what was never lost in/late buzzing afternoon…”:

 

 

The poetry on one level is spontaneous, personal, and occasional. Statman’s life in Oaxaca; his love for his wife Katherine; the recent death of his own father and the more distant yet still resonant passing of his father-in-law, KennethKoch, are frequent and direct subject of reference. Yet it would be a grave mistake to see the poems as either diaristic or unpremeditated, Indeed, Statman has achieved  somethingremarkable, gaining the freedom and motility of personal poetry while garnering the verbal beauty and artistic resonance of the impersonal or pure poem. What might be ‘hard’ in its  pursuit of beauty becomes softened, and what might be ‘soft; in its easypersonal reference becomes filtered through a perceptual scrim. I was thinking recently of a professor of mine in graduate school, the late Geoffrey Summerfield, who tried at once toempower students to develop their own personal voices but also made sure they knew that the personal voice was not the only voice, that they were not ‘stuck’ and they had other options that could give different perspectives. Thus along with intensely personal material there is this admonition:

 

let Ariadne do the 

talking let Borges 

do the talking let

Vergil let Sappho let 

It be some other voice

Other music other

Part of the body (96)

 

In a sense, the most realized self is the self so realized that it can just, as Statman recommends, shut up and listen. The personal self is still there but, as it were, on vacation, on a break. One could derive this wisdom from any manner of formal literarytheory. But with respect to Statman’s poetry this more operational, mobile philosophy, of the personal being necessary but not inevitable, helps us appreciate the work.

 

 

That the book, in its title and its magnificent closing sequence, refers to magic, witchcraft, sorcery also testifies to a sort of mediation between the personal and the artistic, or moreprecisely between will and craft. Magic is neither clinical nor subjective:

 

Magic older

than Hecuba older

than that which priest that older

tree it’s a pochete tree it divides

earth from sky those older branches that

older river

we are at the river older older and

older the fire (175) 

 

 

The primal, elemental, even stark vocabulary belles the fine-grained quality of the thinking here. We are ‘older’ in time, in biographical trajectory, but the elements are also ‘older’ in a more absolute way, and magic itself is older on an even more inaccessible ontological level. Magic becomes the intermediary between the speakable and the unspeakable. It is a boundary-situation of ecstasy that is soothing quite different from the exotic or the fantastic.. What is actually privileged here is what might be called the ‘middle’ level of older, the older of the branches and the river. In “after the trees” the speaker says that tress “do not/live forever though. growing up. I believe they did.” (167). Trees can and do live far longer than people. But there is an ‘after’ even there (one compounded by climate change and human destruction of nature) and that ‘after’ is also the space of what is after our most elevated and abstract emotions.  “after/loving having loved/have been loved/what’s/the point” (167-8). The absence of punctuationhere and the repetition of similar words in different grammaticalforms and levels of meanings epitomize both the fluidity and the difficulty of Statman’s verse. But the emphasis throughout is, again on that middle level of the primal, that layer just beyond our grasp but accessible to it. It is close to what ElizabethBishop meant when she spoke of “Life/and the memory of it”: a layer near to life, accessible to it, but larger than it, like the trees, and then pointing mysteriously magically, to that other layer of what is after the trees.

       This is a phenomenon of nonconvergence, rather than estrangement or even exile. As an expatriate Statman is aware of displacement, and the Spanish language functions in his recent work as an index of both unspeakable joy and a sense of exteriority,: a tongue the poet loves but never quite knows from the inside. This condition is made abstract and categorical in “expatriate”:

 

On the late night

Internet radio

The announcer said

snow in Central Park right

now  I could see it

see crystal see

lights and trees

their invisible ice coat (86)

 

Crucially, the ice coat would be invisible even if the speaker was there. Territorial displacement doubles a more elemental sense of how the inaccessible in perpetual terms is also so tantalizingly there. Statman’s ability not to treat this as a dilemma of mental perplexity but as a galvanizing contradiction enabling celebration, growth, and incantation is truly magical in the deepest sense of the word. This unfettered, liberated book knows that revelations of this magnitude do not come easy.