Redemptive Heresy

The title of Jacque Vaught Brogan's second collection, ta(l)king eyes, signals the coordinate ambitions in this unquiet tour de force: a book-length poem that incorporates traditional forms (sestina, sonnet, villanelle) while replying to the idiolect of modernist experiment. In a virtuoso rendering of these modalities, Brogan enlivens a Derridian congress of selves to query the politics of vision (as in talking eyes/I's) as well as the petty thefts and appropriations of identity (as in taking eyes/I's) germane to the strategic games of discourse. While linguistic anthropologists point out the structural violence in popular idioms and verbal caricatures, Brogan poetically enlivens the paradoxes ("in the manner of women") and parapraxes ("'She really is so well preserved'") in which such subtle violence, often perpetrated along gender lines, becomes strikingly clear.

Brogan juxtaposes passages of her epic poem with images that generate their own sidelong colloquy: paintings by Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, and John Singer Sargent; postcards by Gertrude Stein, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Maxfield Parrish; clips from an Indiana newspaper; a haunting portrait by Vivienne Padilla; and a recurring photograph of a hooded, draped Moroccan woman taken by Irving Penn in 1966 (Man in White, Woman in Black— Morocco). This bricolage counterpoints the visual tropes in the poem, implicating Brogan's play on the subject's eye/I as the poetic text calls into focus the ways and means, the detours and divagations of our perception.

Indeed, it is in a dense "contexture" of philosophical, interpersonal, and literary-historical dimensions that the poet investigates the rhetorical ground of the "I" and the current status of the "eye" as an agent of witness, reflection, and objectification. Consider the opening passage in which Brogan conjures the poem's governing energies, invoking the muse of an untold history:

Me talking to me talking to you making eyesbut I confirm it could be about gravelwoman in black which is why I was able to        leave (when)the earth moves tooquestioning the history of the objective        case—daughters—two brief lyrics shy and yet another daughter        caught it was like...................................................grit your teeth and take it like atie pin like a flower apologizedear peter in the waiting roomwhy we can't speak/why we're never heard

The failure of communication between Brogan's interlocutors is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's Prufrock, who similarly resents those "eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase." Alicia Ostriker, noting the frequent allusions to Prufrock in feminist poetry, conjectures that he represents the minotaur experience of being "a mere object in the eyes of the other sex...unable to participate in its mode of discourse—which all the while one half-envies, half-despises." Yet the circumstantial setting that Brogan delineates is at once more basic and more profound than the angst of Eliot's anti-hero, who is troubled by the soulless economies of polity, a prehensile sensitivity to others' judgment, and the faltering of verbal/sexual verve within the narrow limits of his social persona. Unlike Prufrock, Brogan's narrator does not fail to speak: on the contrary, she is a "me talking to me talking," an object whose words are given no subjective ground by a hostile interlocutor "making eyes" at her remarks. If, as the psychoanalytic theorist Jessica Benjamin has argued, identity is a concert of assertion and recognition, of embodying a self and having that self duly recognized, Brogan's narrator has the unnerving experience of being presumptively dismissed. She portrays her interlocutor's strategic misrecognition, moreover, as symbolic of intellectual women's chronic condition, a telling example of "why we're never heard."

In this gendered grammatology, the poem's narrator finds her words are literally forced back upon herself, creating the punitive echo chamber of the "objective case." "[D]aughters" are forced to reckon their status within a discourse in which there are no ungendered positions, no "I" unjudged by "eyes." Thus, Brogan's speaker finds that her remarks, however neutral and sexless ("it could...