Evan Gray. Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars. Ithaca: Garden-Door Press, 2023. 80 pages.

 



            The world is a poem, maybe. Or composed of poems, to which a poet might direct one’s attention. Or which a poet might deform. Or misapprehend. Evan Gray’s Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars directs his reader to—what exactly. An Appalachia that is real to him, he says in an interview, or, (from that same interview) a place that is not Appalachia but intransigently becomes it when conveyed to whatever elsewhere, anywhere, where that place could be seen as Appalachia. Gray seems, in that interview, resigned to Appalachia to being made Appalachian. Perhaps, as the interviewer suggests, he’s resentful of it. He certainly is resentful of its commodification, of its transformation into a product or selling point: “Appalachian culture has become increasingly commodified—maybe it always has—but now it’s become less about the region and more about extraction. It’s a self-serving extraction,” he says in another interview. Nonetheless, Thickets is made Appalachian (“Thickets Swamped In Fence-Coated Briars is haunted and rooted and wild. It’s Appalachian because that’s where Evan’s from. He can’t help it,” writes the interviewer). Two of the three blurbs for the book mention Appalachia (one of which comes from Elizabeth Catte, the author of What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia), and the one that doesn’t invokes a common trope of Appalachia (failing lungs of the miners—presumably from black lung). The book description calls it a visionary evocation of contemporary Appalachian life and labor.

So, while Gray may be ambivalent about Appalachia, or against it, it’s also seeming like, from where I stand, the grounds on which his poetry can stand. Correspondingly, he feels a responsibility to it, to, as he says in the first interview, write against the prevailing stereotypes about it—that it is a romantic place untouched by the modern world, or that it is a backwards place apart from the civilized world, rotted out by poverty. My take, on the other hand, is that the warp he wends is not against representational practices concerning Appalachia but against Appalachia itself, which is its own sort of representational practice. “I didn’t know I was from Appalachia till I went to college,” he writes. So then if Appalachia is not on the ground, it’s in the air, 30,000 feet up as the policy and management scholars say, weaving its own kind of place out of the land far below. Whereas Gray and his poetry inhabit everyday life: “Instead of a voice speaking from on high or from the ditches, see face-to-face with the issue of life and music, its leaving,” he writes in a book review.

I’m sniffing out a few figures lurking in my reading of Thickets, or maybe a conceptual grid—a schematic of getting fucked over and (also) getting on with it, a clackety meaning-making machine making my own warp out of the everyday Thickets has spun for (or with) me during my time with it. This kind of hermeneutic technique might spit out something approximating Gray’s work, or on the other hand my own misapprehension or interpretive deformity but which in any case is a kind of reworking emerging from an encounter, hopefully a useful or interesting one. The figures spun from this encounter are compost, ruin, the subjunctive, and monologue. I see compost as a technique, a method—ruin, subjunctivity, monologue what the world, inflected through the eye, mind, body of the poet, becomes as cast in the form of the book. Rotted-out figures rotted out by their figuration.

I’m understanding rot, decomposition, as a compositional and bodily process—a metabolism between the world and the writer, or a particular understanding of perception and its subsequent (or prior) rendering. (Pre-)Figuration is a matter of breaking down.

Gray approaches composting in a romantic vein. In the first interview mentioned above he articulates his poetic practice as one of observation, invoking Walt Whitman’s line from Leaves of Grass: “I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen.” Composition is a matter of taking in and “taking apart,” as he writes in a piece for my (small press) writing day, a digestion of the other of experience, of the not-self. Poetry is something alien he writes in that same piece, needing translation.

The poet, and Gray’s buddy, Nathan Hauke, I think, is a pivotal influence for Gray here. In his piece for my (small press) writing day, Gray mentions he learned the practice of compost journals from Hauke. “Generate as much material as possible and don’t look back,” Gray recalls Hauke telling him, “reuse everything, nothing is waste.”

In a review of Hauke’s Indian Summer Recycling, Gray writes,

I get afraid to go to sleep before 10:30 sometimes. I'm afraid I'll miss it, something that I've been waiting all day to happen. It could happen shortly after I turn-in. For if I don't experience it, what good is it? Energy wasted. That is an unnatural thought. I remind myself of this as I write a few poems using various how-to garden manuals. Their language is about flowers, growth, moving, rain, fertilizer. I use my words, and it's like I had a say so in what was going down. Shit, I just held on and wound up here.

He reuses this passage in Thickets, but instead of “Shit,” he writes “I realized” (51). Why the change? I wonder what the gap between shit and realization is, between flat telling and the telling of the epiphany.

Gray repeatedly reuses passages in this way. I’ve found ten such instances in his two reviews for DIAGRAM. “Thoreau, in ‘Walking,’ claims for the walker to build their home in unsteady soil of the swamp: “the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives,” Gray writes in my (small press) writing day. The decay of one’s own literature, too, forms the other in the undifferentiated sensoria eligible for metabolization.

What is poetry, here? Is it the thing poets shit out after eating the world, or is it the world itself?  In his review of Indian Summer Recycling, Gray notes that Cage said that music is permanent, but listening is intermittent—and so too, I guess, is poetry permanent, but the concentration that yields its transmogrification into words on a page is intermittent. “Composting depends on the practice of attention. Poems are happening around each of us,” he writes. Later on: “See, it isn't that we shouldn't create, we can try; but as Hauke suggests: artists don't create, they simply concentrate. Creation is done. It’s over. It’s nature. That's not a human labor, hallelujah, we don't bare that burden.” Or following Gray’s use of Charles Olson in his Hauke review, poetry is a transmission of energy (“a high-energy construct,” “an energy-discharge”) from a source the poet resources, through the poem (and I guess the body of the poet no doubt?) through to the reader. Gray poses questions: “How is energy transferred from poet-to-page-to-reader? Is it through the sound of the voice? Music? If energy isn't transferred and dies out, where do we go to find it?” With that provocation I’d conjecture that the mode of rendering mutable, dead, undifferentiated poetry intelligible entails its decay (decay feeding on the dead). Transmission is a refraction, a digestion, a decomposition, a deformity, and deformity is the grounds for truth. Bodily transmission is the vector for representations faithful to the world.

As Gray’s recycling of his own compositions teaches, representations themselves become material components of the living that is poetry, with material effects, which instantiates them as candidates for decay. Which rendered Appalachia—the cryogenically frozen representation living within and floating above the communities made Appalachian—compostable material. Against its own paratext, Thickets metabolizes Appalachia, a social formation that renders a place Appalachian in the process of immiserating it, towards a more faithful account of everyday life as whoever he and his family, friends, and friendly strangers are.

The anthropologist Bradley Jones writes on compost as social practice, that it is nourished by “imperial debris.” This debris “is cycled and recycled into hybrid formations fashioned from the actual shell of the old.” Gray writes,

That is the type of abandonment we hear and see and read. And the people are victims of this physiological hijacking. Maybe this is what causes the guilt. Maybe, therefore, the farms are bought out. Maybe this destruction happens internally but projected in the landscape. Cut, scissor, jig-sawed, but restlessly expected to give, both land and people give.

This passage appears in his review of Abraham Smith’s collection Destruction of Man, and on page twenty-foour in Thickets. The type of abandonment refers, in the review, to the “neoliberal logic” in which rurality is stereotyped and caricatured as a land of ignorant hicks by political candidates. In Thickets, it is alternatives to news headlines following a pantomime of the same performance, and in doing so upending it.

“Alternative Headline 1: Bare Branches were Torched in the Evening Wind by Venture Capitalists”

These headlines bring this review to the first figure which is a metabolite of Gray’s poiesis: monologue. The folklorist Mary Hufford understands the monologic as a kind of reduction, or elimination: “monologic genres assume a silent addressee, sustaining a single consciousness and a fixed irreversible perspective,” she writes. The monologic, as it manifests in Gray’s home, is destructive, atomizing the social into its component parts and sloughing off everything extraneous to the economic.

“Alternative Headline 4: Ways to Survive Extraction, Take Too Much Sinus Medication and Watch Documentaries” (24)

A monologue, an oeuvre of expertise, a politician’s web is a precipitate of and precipitates Appalachia: a zone eligible for the ravages of extractive capitalism, for cultural and ecological exploitation. “Faces become personified invitations of investment opportunity” Gray writes. “We were all pale empty symbols then” (42). People, spun by the monologue, lose their substance in favor of what they mediate, how they can be woven into the semiotic webs of fossil capital. In Gray’s compost journals, he takes up the reductions of his home, of a web of social relations, into a trope: Appalachia. A useful icon for nonprofit fundraising, a resource-cursed hinterland, a backwards folk cultural treasure, but never a collection of living beings (except insofar as that collection can be frozen into the trope of community). As Gray’s uptake of something composted into monologue suggests, though, monologization is not just something that happens to people from way on high, perhaps unbeknownst to them, but which they feel and live through and make do with. Appalachia’s stereotypes and their cascading effects are facets of everyday life, a mundane feature of dealing with shit.

The monologue lives with, within, lives encompassing ruin. “At the BBQ restaurant, we imagine we are in a romantic and rural place, with antlered deer mounted on the wall. In the woods, the tectonic plates eek” (26). Or, “Antlered deer beside definitions of words like family and Sunday. / In the woods the hills just wither tectonically” (14). Withering orogeny indicates an atmosphere of ongoing ruination, a pervading feeling. The anthropologist Gaston Gordillo writes, following and pushing on Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, that ruin is a trope of destruction and disintegration, but also “evokes a unified object that elite sensibilities often treat as a fetish that ought not be disturbed.” He contrasts ruin with rubble, the debris surrounding ruin that gets ignored, the “void” which the figuration of ruin attempts to disappear. If for Benjamin and Adorno, ruin is negativity, for Gordillo, ruin is a refiguration of negativity into a kind of remaindered positivity, richly textured by its survival of the passage of time. Rubble, he contends, is the “void that haunts modernity,” the remains of “the places that were negated to create the geographies of the present.” The destruction entailed by the enrollment of space into the inside and outside of capital, the productive and sacrificed, is a negativity whose precipitate is rubble.

Arruination makes rubble and ruin—twin facets of an Appalachia that is monologue. Cultural heritage and mountaintop removal. Gray uptakes both, into the decaying or upended Appalachia of Thickets, which is the transit of Appalachia through his body: “Words, lay sad behind my tongue. Words, form the abandoned racetrack: a distorted and disfigured mile-marker of me” (1). The world, recursively, moves through its figuration, a prior figuration digested into more figuration: Thickets.

Ruination begets loss. Loss pervades Gray’s text. “I was I was I was I was I was” Gray repeats in eight couplets alternating with single lines of a more questioning and doubtful “was I was I was I was I was” (16). “I was the riverbank before it eroded” (17). Work dries up, people fall ill, the very geology goes to shit. The imperative to live runs up against the senselessness of doing so in the bounds of abstracted, sacrificed space. For Gordillo, ruin can generate collective solidarity; rubble “can become” he writes, “the possibility of building something better.” Whereas Gray asks, “Why do we try to live sometimes inside a broken machine that is both animal and human, that is both man-made and organic” (35). Transformation versus stagnation. Hope versus bafflement. Where commentators may see the ongoingness of life as potentiality, bodily encounter by the looks of things finds in that ongoingness and even the potentiality it brings forth as resources for the re-cycling of the very forces which initiated the ruination in which life has to go on in the first place. Collective solidarity might just be as much the potential grounds for the reproduction of the destruction of space as it is the potential grounds for something better.

How to respond to the figures or forces (or figures which are forces) of monologue and ruin? The poetry (I guess) of living renders itself subjunctive in these kinds of situations. Or curtailed. “I would settle to just be a laurel bush” Gray writes (36). For the anthropologist Chloe Ahmann, subjunctivity in the everyday practice of politics is a matter of the “speculative winnowing of options,” an imposition of “an economy of choices by foreclosing certain futures.” The atmospherics of destruction can engender a subjectivity which doesn’t hope, not so much. The subjunctive psyche Gray composts is often his own. Quoting Frank Stanford: “There are so many revolutions light years away” (40). “I can feel how temporary this has become” (44). “[n]owhere can I place myself, no / other axis or ancestors” (46). “You ache like this and no river can help fix it, no natural thing. I’m afraid we have fucked it away” (55). This litany I wend out of Gray’s text is an atmosphere of loss—of the past (sometimes literally through a fucked orogeny) and of some kind of future where life doesn’t have to be ongoing but just is.

Genres of living suggest themselves. Like, life is not lived singularly but is a multiplicity lying along some kind of gradient or within a field. Sacrifice could precipitate a genre of living in which transformation is possible, depending. Or it could precipitate one which is, cribbing from Ahmann, a “terrain where hope is hamstrung by an everyday ethics of the probable.” Revolution may come, but it is far away, and nowhere to be found in the pervasive temporariness of destroyed space. Or anyways, that’s the precipitate of a feeling decomposed and cast into the shape of a text.

There’s something subjunctive in the very composition of the text. Gray writes, “What is there to do other than to write more of this, more like this, steeped vein of myself and to others, for the destruction of man may be the self-destruction of all” (36). If it is impossible to envision a future that is a rupture from the past, let alone produce it, what is left but bearing the present. If the world cannot be decomposed materially, it can be decomposed discursively, which is its own materiality, which is its own kind of possibilizing, its own kind of performance, maybe its own kind of getting at a different genre of life. The world, I’m thinking, cannot precede its doing. Though how important is this, really—I don’t know, I don’t know if I care to know, I don’t know if I care—is it material? Asked about the role of poetry in today’s world, Gray writes: “Maybe it offers an alternative way of experiencing language. Maybe it is just a fun little game to play.”