From Side to Side

To think critically—to reason thoroughly—is to consider both sides of a matter. Dianoia, the Greek title of Michael Heller’s latest collection of poems, means just that: dialectical thinking that moves from one side of an idea to the other before reaching a balanced conclusion. Heller lays bare the process of diánoia through precise language and careful engagement with both the external and internal worlds. Yet rather than examine both sides in an ethical exploration that would be expected from a poet with strong Objectivist roots, Heller confounds sides. Sides require a boundary, a line of separation, and Heller’s poems, using Socratic questioning and the integration of art, music, history, spirituality, and literature, efface the line. And what readers are left with is an open space where we can find “…the decipherable made indecipherable, / not to muddle, but to create something new and readable.”

Heller establishes this grey area early in the first poem, “Mappah.” Speaking of the holy tapestry, he writes that the cloth is

…neither real nor unreal, wovenwith an edge that is no edge.

No one can safely say where the sacred leavesoff, where the profanebegins.

Again and again, Heller deconstructs paradox to create a new field of meaning, one where an object or an idea can contain polarities that are not at odds with each other, but rather are parts of a whole.

In the process of blurring the line between sides, Heller also blurs the line between self and other. The writer/artist is a creator, but he is also a perceiver, dependent on engagement and permeable to influence. Heller’s influences aren’t just politely acknowledged; they form the basis of his work. Throughout the collection, he invokes, responds to, or pays homage to several writers and artists, including Allen Grossman, Zbigniew Herbert, Paula Rego, Martinů, Vasily Grossman, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Michael Martone, Victor Segalen, George Oppen, Bashō, Renée Alpert, Douglas Kahn, and Max Beckmann, among others.

In many cases, Heller uses allusions to others’ work to inform both the poem and the subjectivity from which the poem was written. Other times, as in the case with photographer Michael Martone and the artist collaborative alpert+kahn, the artists’ work is part of the poem. In the long sequence “DDA,” alpert+kahn’s visual art is part of a poem in which Heller’s response to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is juxtaposed with the artists’ visual response (called Dda and Dda+20) to the same painting. At the same time, Heller also dialogues with alpert+kahn’s art. Authorship becomes murky, subjectivity is revealed to be complex, and the relationship between the past and present artists is complicated. What is homage, after all?

In the prelude to “DDA,” Heller writes, “Artists cast shadows, and those who come after / pour light into the darkness of their opacity.” In a sense, “those who come after” illuminate and impact the artist’s work that came before. And yet, later on in the sequence, Heller writes, “It is the future something / that justifies the lineage, / not the past something.” In that sense, the homage is the beneficiary of the relationship between past and present. Heller asks, “Can a painter be shriven?” Shriven has a dual meaning: having heard someone’s confession and offered absolution, or having made a confession and seeking absolution. The contradictions and dualities of these lines aren’t meant to confuse but to illuminate; the three separate works (Picasso’s painting, alpert+kahn’s visual art, and Heller’s poems) all need the others to mean.

This isn’t to say that Heller negates subjectivity or finds the personal “I” invalid. Rather, he investigates how the “I” is constructed, even as he uses it himself. Of the poem sequence “Deities,” Heller reveals that he aimed to explore “…the armature of such conceits of the mind as identity and being.” Yet in every poem throughout the sequence, the subjective “I” is an agent of deciphering meaning. For Heller, the...