A REVIEW OF MONROE LAWRENCE’S ABOUT TO BE YOUNG
About to Be Young, Monroe Lawrence. The Elephants, 2021. 74 pages. $15.00
by Cary Stough
The speaker of Monroe Lawrence’s book-length poem About to Be Young, totters between the youth that is defined by age and that which is justified by experience—or most often, the lack of it. Rather than follow the typical Bildungsroman tracks, About to Be Young neither begins in youth or ends in maturity, but situates itself, its utterance, in the middle. Not square in the middle, however, but liltingly awry, like the fabled optic splinter that—illogically—refines one’s vision. Think of the figures in Bacon, at once splayed and hermetic, fleshy and all too human.
Hoops of miracle are peeling from me as I advance
(don’t look away(
they are peeling
What follows concerns an intractable quotidiana, assailing this body–and we get the sense that this is one body speaking; one that, nonetheless, “thrives // in glass.” A life threatened by metal, dinner tables, and long car rides, punctuated by “Fraying secrets,” and whatever machinations result from the “grinding cocaine hierarchy.” Or it is life that does the threatening?
A wish to die, forever
like Orpheus
Flaking the truth of my
young mouth.
This wish is mentioned early, and so the veridiction that, forgoing due process, proceeds by uneven disintegration.
This is Lawrence’s first book of poems. He is discoverable online, as many poets are, and collected in 2018’s Best Experimental Writing, as only certain poets wish to be. He earned an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2017. In fact, that is where I met Monroe. I mention this because, although I am mentioned in the acknowledgements of this book, its content came to me much as a surprise. I assume no ownership–nor editorship–over the work included therein, only friendship: writing in cafes together and, perhaps, competing artistically. I know that these pieces arose out of several projective attempts at cohesion, some of it even making the cut to be included in Masters Thesis form, but the only stable memory I retain is of the poet, himself, toiling. What an even greater surprise to be struck by such a book, whose existence in the world breaks down my best attempts at a memory of its formation.
Lawrence is explicitly a pupil of undulant language twisters like Cole Swensen and Keith Waldrop, poets who acknowledge a tradition of experiment, rather than simply reacting to dull trends, and an acolyte, specifically, of minimalist poetics from Robert Creeley and Hannah Weiner. Here, in a big way, is Martin Corliss-Smith, too, whose 2015 book, Bitter Green, with its fractured, capsuled Romantic odes very evidently influenced Lawrence in the making of the current project, its courtly pronouncing:
At the table I felt, for a time
it seemed
The world was human colours
The long
room
of thinking filled
with furniture…
There are hints, too, of Coleridge, Rimbaud, Stevens, whose poetries no doubt also dealt with age, knowledge, and especially the onslaughts of experience. At least for one of the previous, maturity came only by grave personal danger.
Although Lawrence is consciously pushed toward a style not-yet-formulated, the poems, fragments or sections of About to Be Young are conspicuously easy to follow. Rather than evidence of a failure to meet the standards of what some consider modis operandi of contemporary poetry, this ease manifests rather as a gesture of desperate friendliness. “Please,” begins one fragment, simply. Among the typical expressions of desire, “please” and “if you could” appear most frequently. Whether or not an initiative of Canadian politeness (Lawrence was raised and educated in Vancouver), it tends to an intimate proximity between the speaker and the beloved that runs deeper than sender-recipient. Lawrence labors for the same worlding as Gertrude Stein when she declared: “Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language.” There is a compulsion to reach, and to reach out, intensely.
This is, undoubtedly, a book of fragments. And it may have been disingenuous to claim these are easy poems. It disserves one to search in them for any clue to the experience that led the speaker to making any one of these brief passionate statements. Words react at the surface, though are not concrete or cipheral. Rather, they seem to assemble on the page. As such, the fragmentary quality of this work cannot be defined by incompleteness, nor can it be limited to the co-production with the reader. Even in the moments where words pile up in a flurry, exceeding the measure or seeming to undo the need to measure entirely, the utterance never gestures to a remainder, neither lost portion nor a whole. That is, even if incomplete in form, it is not in expression, pouring forth in the broken transmissions of youth. Moments where the poem skips, stutters, or seems to recur elicit a tenderness that reminds one of one’s own missteps and recursions, as well as the forgiving world of the social that allows such iniquities to pass on uncommented. After all, whom among us has not found themselves moonstruck as the
esoteric glabrous saliva made the
Lake ask suddenly of
Night such violet jagged shame it blew harm strings to the day?
“What’s the difficulty? Just read the words on the paper,” the ‘difficult’ Stein once entreated a friend. This book works hard to court a universal expression through the sieve of experimentalism. The universal in question: growth, both biological and confessional, although it is not clear where the distinction resides. This is a speaker caught in the impersonal process of life’s transformation, discovering in language both a facility toward freedom and spiral of endless signification. Still, there are moments where the complicity within which this language exists between subjects–whatever its degree of slipperiness–acts out of a shared presence, a way of being with others extremely un-solipsistic.
I told my gran an eye trick
She told me how to do
She told me since I told her that
A trick she longer knew
The discovery here, which pops up throughout, seems to be that the structure of family–certainly the boldest of human connections, whether by blood or choice–has something to do with the structure of learning. And that this in turn has something to do with the reaffirmation of what has already been established, an echoing between instructor and pupil, like the rhyme between “do” and “knew.” The words rhyme sonically, not visually. It takes work, though pleasurable, to meld them, especially as the poem dangles the words “dew” and “new” in a virtual space above the reading. That the poem encourages moments of close reading of homophonic possibilities should, again, not be seen as coming from a cynical play of totality and incompleteness, but reveal a bit of the author’s own energy, his very choice made evident to the interpretive consciousness of the reader.
Combined, then, with conspicuous archaism of rhyme, this equally conspicuous act of selection removes the curtain a bit, a gesture that flies in the face of typical avant-garde heuristics. Again, the fragments clearly want to coalesce–though lacking the necessary resources–into a normative expression. When the interpretive effect is the same, is such an expression even necessary? This final line, a-syntactical as it is, touches the heart with no diminished force. Though perhaps the speaker has not learned the words, it will do its best to teach the ear to bend around the notes it believes are missing. At points like this, where the poem teaches us how to read it, anything is potentially a lesson. Verbs of progress arrive imbued with instructive charm: “Growing // rain upon my face.”
Finally, alongside this internal drama of knowledge are the vivid, startling triadic images that constitute the poem’s sole tolerance of intentional form: the stacked adjective-adjective-noun clause. They come out of nowhere. The irruption of “Tactical smoky limousine,” for example, operates in one sense by shifting the sonic perspective of the page, where neither the repeated “ee” sound, nor the toothiness of “tact” had yet occurred, and does not occur again. The adjectives are tactical in themselves as descriptions of whole states of being. The doubling of modification in phrases such as “slovenly human leisure” or “beautiful vaseline emotion,” loosen the hold of the single attribute-object pair, modifying the modifier sot o, and proposing an ever expanding universe of reference.
That is, in some sense, what aging is all about: the further particularization of common experiences, grafting onto the subject as memories. However, in another sense, and on the opposite side of the lifeline, willful singularization becomes part of the fight against stultified generalization, of becoming too universal so as to wipe out any possibility for newer differences.
The book ends with a plea, in fact its final oneiric desire, for heightened visibility:
Tonight if you could drive
your car, by
dream
The interior light on, so I could recognize
So you recognize me
…
“That / would make it / really last,” it ends. Against the authority of motor safety guidelines, not only visibility, but recognition–a subject’s best case scenario for survival–serves to justify the possibility of danger. Maybe only then can an act be fulfilled, or a wiley language hit its mark. About to Be Young tarries in an emotional register that can seem manic, helpless, but proves ultimately devoid of doubt. An articulable trust in belief is exceedingly rare in contemporary poetry, which has never in recent memory seemed more elegiac and untrusting of the world (not that it is unjustified in doing so). If philosophy begins in wonder, then art, and especially poetry, prolongs or re-catalyzes that beginning. Obviously, as the speaker concedes, “Obviously, there is a bold, shitty / Kind of / magic to life.” Lawrence’s book is a brief and powerful testament to that.
Cary Stough is a poet and library worker in Massachusetts. Recent reviews are published or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Cleveland Review of Books, and Annulet: A Journal of Poetics.