A Review of Christianne Goodwin’s and Stephen Proski’s Oracle Smoke Machine

Oracle Smoke Machine, by Christianne Goodwin and Stephen Proski. Staircase Books, 2025. 32 pages. $28.00

by Noah Robie

On the soft lilac cover, the glyph above “Oracle Smoke Machine” arrests the reader’s eye in its
seeming inscrutability: Is it a comma transfigured? a kind of speech bubble arising from the
depths like smoke? Proski’s devil horn and eye inverted, the first work and poem in the book? or
perhaps the cousin to one of the daemonic musical diacritics found on Proski’s sheet music, next
to Goodwin’s “The Clarinetist”? In some sense, the mark on the cover is all these things, and its
openness—the comma, bubble, face, diacritic not closed—articulates the openness with which
Proski and Goodwin approach their artistic process, allowing poem and artwork to play in the
same spaces, and influence each other and what the artist sees.

The notion of seeing—that is, foretelling, seeing beyond—resounds in the collection, beginning
with the title, “Oracle Smoke Machine.” Poet and artist assume prophetic personae of antiquity:
Goodwin as Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, the high priestess to Apollo, the god of the sun and
poetry—and Proski as Tiresias, the Theban prophet of Apollo, who, also blind, was transformed
from man to woman and back to man by the gods. Goodwin’s lyric prophecy shimmers with an
Apollonian “wash of gold” one finds in work from Klimt’s golden phase.1 Given such a classical
and auroral poetic propensity, one would be remiss not to mention the great poetic prophet of
English letters, John Milton, who wrote his epic, Paradise Lost, after he had become blind in his
adult years. In Milton’s own paean to sight and Holy Light, his divine inspiration for his writing
of Paradise Lost, he exclaims:

So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate. There plant eyes. All mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.2

Goodwin and Proski both act as our eyes, or plant eyes within us, and, like Milton, tell of things
invisible to mortal sight. Although the poet and artist follow Milton’s inspired practice and
philosophy, their inspiration is slightly different, inflected by Americana, Russian and Hungarian
art at large, and the mechanical-digital age.

In the beginning of the collection, in “Ophanim,” Goodwin alludes to the Biblical priest and
prophet Ezekiel and the many-eyed wheeled creatures that he sees in his visions of God, one of
the first moments in Oracle of mechanism, a potential form of the titular (smoke) machine.
Goodwin writes, “We were alone, but there are eyes everywhere, / Bursting from bark knots and
barley hulls,” selecting the pronoun we to express this plurality of perspective, and writing in the
present tense for her reaffirmation, “There are eyes everywhere.”3 She continues, “We covered
ours, and found // the way home, led by the sun-grow guardians”: Goodwin cleverly breaks the
line and stanza after “found,” emboldening the lyric with the sense that not only did they find
their way home, but that after they covered their eyes, they found, in a more spiritual revelatory
sense.4 In the accompanying lithograph, Proski superimposes a vestigial “POKOL”5—i.e., “Hell” in Hungarian, as the poet later explicates6—in the field of eyes, an artwork we find later on in the
collection, as both an oracular foreshadowing of artwork to come in “Beginner Words” and a
continuation of the devilish theme commenced in “One Night Only!” The multiplicity of eyes,
written and illustrated, becomes a multiplicity of Is, which speaks to Goodwin’s and Proski’s
artistic flexibility, “portaling [us] to paralands”—a Bulgakovian pandemonium or a quotidian
American paradise.7

We witness the absence of a fundamental in “The Clarinetist.” Goodwin describes the very end
of Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, wherein Juliet awakes to find her love dead by her side
and decides to take her life in turn. Goodwin’s naming of the ballet as “Prokofiev’s Romeo”8
portends Juliet’s self-eradication, and torques Romeo’s verse, “But soft, what light through
yonder window breaks? / It is the East, and Juliet is the sun”9: we no longer have Juliet, the sun.
Proski articulates this absence by darkness, a grayscale sheet of music with empty staves.10
Prokofiev’s final movement, “The Death of Juliet,” appropriates many of the ecstatic youthful
themes established earlier in the ballet in “The Y oung Juliet,” and transforms it into a
melancholic dirge. The clarinetist, the agent of the problematic of the poem, misses “The
leitmotif…!,” a musical representation of the solar Juliet, Goodwin perhaps punning on the
German “leit” [to lead] and English “light.”11 It seems that only the “sleeping woman”12 notices,
“the distinct impression of something / missing, forgotten.”13 The poem ends in darkness despite
the audience’s full-throated standing ovation. It recalls Prokofiev’s East, an East with which
Goodwin herself is quite familiar, but not Juliet. But the collection does not end in darkness. On
the contrary, as Goodwin assures us in “The Techno Poem,” “We have our own horizon / of
green laser light.”14

1 Christianne Goodwin, “Sunrise,” in Oracle Smoke Machine (Cambridge, MA: Staircase Books, 2023), line 4, p. 22. All further references, of Goodwin’s poetry and Stephen Proski’s artwork, will be from Oracle Smoke Machine unless indicated otherwise.
2 John Milton, Paradise Lost (New Y ork, NY: Norton, 2021), 3.51–55.
3 “Ophanim,” line 3, p. 4. Emphasis added.
4 Ibid., lines 8–9.
5 “Ophanim” [artwork], p. 3.
6 “Beginner Words” [artwork], p. 11; “Beginner Words,” line 9, p. 12.
7 “Feychild,” line 7, p. 18.
8 “The Clarinetist,” line 2, p. 24.
9 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library), II.ii.2–3, p. 69.
10 “The Clarinetist” [artwork], p. 23.
11 “The Clarinetist,” line 24, p. 24.
12 Ibid., line 28.
13 Ibid., lines 34–35.
14 “The Techno Poem,” lines 22–23, p. 34.

Noah Robie is a writer who sometimes lives in Massachusetts and other times in Paris.