~ADRIANNE
KALFOPOULOU~
BETH
ANN
FENNELLY:
OPEN
HOUSE
. . . it is a rare and
happy blending which celebrates
a magnificent range of voices, time periods and themes . . .
Beth Ann Fennelly’s award winning first collection,
Open
House (winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry), is a polyvocal
exuberant embrace of a contemporary world as infused with such figures
of the past as Gauguin and Mandelstam as the names of lip gloss samplers
and poems on Post-Its. David Baker, who judged the contest and picked the
book, describes the collection as a "blending [of] the postmodern and the
ancient," and it is a rare and happy blending which celebrates a magnificent
range of voices, time periods and themes from the resilience of "Madame
L. who Describes the Siege of Paris" to the wry commentary of the poet’s
alter ego, Mr. Daylater in the book’s central poem, "From L’Hotel Terminus
Notebooks."
In "From L’Hotel Terminus Notebooks," Fennelly’s
song "of the four categories from which art is drawn: / ambition, love,
religion and death," she challenges us to experience the 
multi-faceted,
discordant and polyphonic perspectives that define her inclusive aesthetic.
"—Mr. Daylater: This won’t work, you know. / We’re / enthralled by the
linear. It’s our destiny." Yet it’s Fennelly’s achievement that she balances
and leaps between the minutiae of millennium angsts ("millennium, the most
misspelled word of the millennium") and the quoted influences of William
Mathews, Stephen Dunn and Michelangelo, to mention a few of the distinguished
personas who make an appearance in this poetic narrative of The Artist
as a Young Woman coming of age with unflagging energy and craft. Such inclusiveness
of the world in all its messy pain, banality and moments of brilliance
and transcendence amounts to a rare wisdom and courage refreshingly welcome
in a time when trimmed hopes and wary intimacies are the more frequent
subjects of contemporary writers. Not least of Fennelly’s strengths in
Open
House is her humor; just as history achieves an immediacy and relevance
to the present, so too is the seemingly inconsequential given the urgency
of necessity. Here is a section from "IV. Death":
Each region in
Ireland has a distinct pattern for its fishermen
sweaters.
The sweaters
are a great favorite with the tourists.
The patterns
originated as a way of telling, when a fisherman
washed up on
shore with his face nibbled off, where
to send the
body.
The five years
I’ve known Katerina she’s been grieving for Tim,
dead of AIDS. She used to wear his shirts—the shoulder seams
would fall to her tiny elbows. Then one day she shows up in a
size four yellow blouse. Grief is like that sometimes: after a long
while you can find it no longer fits.
The rooms of this open house are filled with
transformative feats. We learn Michelangelo attacked his statue of Moses,
"beating it with his fists and / screaming, ‘Why aren’t you alive? Speak!’";
in the desert "the spiky blue agave […] yields its heart / to tequila";
and "Zoologists […] trying to breed a rare female rhino that had / never
given birth" find even after they "tied her down, and sawed off her horn.
So / she couldn’t fight the male off anymore […] she never conceived."
Details from encyclopedic terminology to the anecdotal and informational
outside their conventional contexts are given the added dimension of unexpected
juxtapositions: "Moses never reached the promised land but led others close.
/ Michelangelo also never reached his promised land (sculp- / ture so real
it becomes human) but led others close. / Connect this." If one of
the founding tenets of modernism was a commitment to breaking away from
predictable responses to given traditions and forms and to follow Pound’s
dictum to "Make it New," Fennelly, in the revived spirit of her Mandelstam
"who loved words recklessly," invents a whole new architecture to house
the many voices of her rich imagination.
Fennelly, Beth Ann. Open House. Lincoln, Nebraska: Zoo
Press, 2002. ISBN: 0-9708177-5-4 $14.95
© by Adrianne Kalfopoulou
