The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics

An Aesthetics of Accumulation: On the Contemporary Litany

43 An Aesthetics of Accumulation: On the Contemporary Litany Michael Dumanis consider, preferably through reading it out loud, Lisa Jarnot’s poem “Song of the Chinchilla,” from her collection Ring of Fire: You chinchilla in the marketplace in france you international chinchilla, chinchilla of the plains and mountains all in fur you fur of the chinchilla of the pont de neuf, selling wrist watches, on the oldest bridge of evolution that you are, you, chinchilla, going roadside towards the cars, the dark arabian chinchilla of the neutral zone with pears, you still life of chinchilla, abstractions of chinchilla, aperitif chinchilla, lowing in the headlands in my mind, dark, the cliffs of dover, dark chinchilla, tractor of chinchilla, chili of chinchilla, chill of the chinchilla, crosswalk of chinchilla of the dawn, facilitator you, chinchilla, foodstuffs for the food chain dressed in light. Each time I enter this poem, I am overcome with both a childlike fancy and the kind of mild rapture that I, despite a lack of religious conviction, can’t help but feel in the presence of stained glass, Baroque 44 An Aesthetics of Accumulation / Michael Dumanis The Monkey and the Wrench cupolas, and high church windows. Various religious traditions utilize the repetition of words or phrases to enact spiritual transformation, and I feel as though the language has cast on me a spell, or, more precisely , since the poem employs a second person address from the start, I feel as though the language has cast me into a spell, that something mystical is taking place—the incantation of a shaman—and I am fully implicated in it. The word “chinchilla” recurs fifteen times in the space of fifteen lines until it no longer references an absurdly-named small furry mammal and transforms into a kind of mantra, a catalyst for the phrases it calls into being, a firm organizing principle that serves to rein in somewhat the disjunctive cacophony around it. Each successive iteration of the word “chinchilla” intensifies the power of the repeated word over the surrounding language; while one can make literal meaning fairly easily at the poem’s outset (the addressee is in a marketplace, is all in fur, is moving toward traffic, etc.), by the tenth line of the poem, the list of chinchilla-related remarks begins to shed its final shreds of sense, succumbing to the chant of the catalytic mantra: “chili of chinchilla, chill of the / chinchilla.” Likewise, the manic repetition of “chinchilla” as organizing principle seems to trigger other repetitions in the poem, creating a cat’s cradle of sonic patterns and associations: four different lines end identically with “of the”; the word “you” recurs seven times; “arabian” assonantially triggers “abstractions” and “aperitif”; “all in fur” folds into “you fur of the / chinchilla,” and “pont de neuf” (the oldest standing bridge over the Seine in Paris) morphs and translates itself into “bridge of evolution.” What if you were to replace the word “chinchilla” with your given name? Picking a name at random: “You alicia in the marketplace in france / you international alicia, alicia of the / plains and mountains all in fur...you still life of / alicia, abstractions of alicia, aperitif / alicia, lowing in the headlands in my mind...” If your name is Alicia, until we get to the chinchilla-generated “chili” and “chill,” the poem begins to make a peculiar kind of sense. It functions as a travelogue listing both literal and metaphysical locales in which the self is being located or dislocated, a delineation of the boundaries of the self, a conjurer’s spell calling the self—whether Alicia or you or something called a chinchilla—into being. An Aesthetics of Accumulation / Michael Dumanis 45 Essays into Contemporary Poetics In a way, “Song of the Chinchilla” seems extremely self-generative and dislocating, an engine fueled by the word “chinchilla” that will continue chugging however long the writer chooses to inject more fuel into its lines, a perpetual motion machine that can transport us into any direction the word “chinchilla” triggers. On the other hand, the poem also paradoxically feels remarkably static and focused, yoked to the word “chinchilla,” obsessively yoyo-ing back to its starting place, not capable of straying from the object of its concentration. This is the paradox of a poem advanced on the fuel of repetition: on the one hand, this is the most open of forms, a resistance of any kind of closure, a kind of immortality for the poem if...