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Flutter
by Alice Burdick
Toronto: Mansfield
Press, Inc., ISBN: 978-1-894469-41-8, 97 pp., $16.95 cloth.
There's a new mainstream in poetry, the hybrid poem. In the introduction to A Norton Anthology of New Poetry: American Hybrid, Cole Swenson, who teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop, states:Today's hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation. (ed., Cole Swenson and David St. John, xxi)
Alice Burdick's second poetry collection, Flutter, exemplifies Swenson's definition of the hybrid. Elliptical, it abounds in disconnected phrases and abrupt syntactical shifts that mimic fragmented thought: "People clap hands: / butterflies. // Love means you / can drop your hat anywhere" (24).
While the deliberate attempt to not follow conventional narrative sense can be irritating at times and difficult to read for any extended period, calling too much attention to the surfaces of language, overall the collection reads like an instruction manual on how to live in the 21st century. Danger lurks everywhere, and the poet's job is to jolt us out of our unawareness, as in the poem "We are the residents": "Conquer the crevice; the road / coils up and strikes the residents. / We live here and have nothing to say. / Our houses sit sly, and creep / us out when we sleep." Though stated obliquely, the message comes through loud and clear: "We take a class / to embrace the inner businessman. / The spiritual side of torture" (23). Everyone is implicated. Inanimate objects are as potentially threatening as humans.
Many poems contain exhortations: "Walk-on, trust. / Grey holds blue, the debit / of morning." Later in the same poem, the speaker (and there is a strong speaker in these poems) says, "Try to breathe what is exhaled. / But make no mistakes, please, no accidents. / Lungs must not be seen" (44). These lines set up a double bind, or unveil one that is already there. The reader may try to "breathe what is exhaled," but if she does, she needs to do it secretly as "lungs must not be seen."
In the second last poem in the collection, "Specific time of joy," Burdick provides an interpretation of the book title Flutter. At the beginning of the next to last stanza (there are five earlier stanzas of from four to five lines), the narrator states, "All these flutters are broken." Read linearly, this sentence seems to be referring not just to the sentences/lines/word clusters in this poem, but to the collection as a whole. Flutters can be read as thoughts, and they are broken. Rarely do we have two consecutive sentences/thoughts that are connected.
These associative leaps remind me of monkey mind, the Zen notion that our minds jump from thought to thought like a monkey jumps from tree to tree. These thoughts distract us from existing in the present. However, in Burdick's poems, monkey mind is what saves us from the facade that prevents us from seeing what lurks beneath the surfaces of everyday speech/life: "You won't glue the hopeful past back / onto the present. // It's a fairly long drop / into the belching sea. Those seals never stop / their gleaning / of sleek fat sleep" (45). These declarative sentences create a feeling of normalcy in the midst of this unpredictable world.
An odd oracular voice of someone standing apart and commenting on what she observes floods these utterances. Burdick's observations merit our attention.
Lily Iona MacKenzie lives and writes in Richmond, California.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.