John Paul Davis: Review by Michael Collins
John Paul Davis, Climbing a Burning Rope (University of Pittsburgh Press)
“though it is smaller than me, I am inside it”: Climbing a Burning Rope by John Paul Davis
Drawing inspiration from the apparently workaday world, John Paul Davis’s second collection, Climbing a Burning Rope, delights with flexible webs of thought, feeling, and imaginative perspective that continually return to the essential and miraculous interconnectedness of life itself.
“Smaller on the Outside” gathers many central thoughts of the collection’s heart: “From outside the universe it must not look infinite / which means its infinity goes inwards, like yours, / like mine, like everything ever” (49). This shared interior movement of infinities connects the universe with each psyche—and psyche per se. Depending on perspective, each is contained within the other. This insight opens from a thought experiment any reader may begin by confirming that any object in front of them has external boundaries. When we then imagine the universe in a similar way, our perspective shifts by applying the same external view to something we usually assume transcends us. From this perspective, the universe’s interior expansion mirrors our own psychic interior, which has been conducting the experiment. Within this strange loop of interiors, the exploration continues:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxRocks rock
from the inside for instance, their quantum bits coy
& shimmering as much as yours. Time-lapse
a billion years per second & rocks ripple
& flow like liquid. Solids are just very slow
motion.
Thought and imagination continue to partner in playful uncertainty, moving through time to create the imaginal experience of solids becoming liquescent. The “rock” pun, the idiom it employs, and the personification of “quantum bits” effervescently underline the poetic basis of this meditative journey. In doing so, they also point toward the poem’s own universe of interdependent features, an emanation of the speaker’s psyche that readers also perceive from the outside. This opens to the speaker’s corollary vision of the psyche:
My infinity curves inward too, all my parts
made of parts which have parts made of parts.
I’m less than the sum of them, because they’re infinite
& I’m not, because they move without being moved,
all my particles & their particles. I am made of dancing,
made entirely of dead things, yet I am alive.
Applying the same external perspective to himself, the speaker confronts his own ultimate unreality—or his reality as a universe of interconnected realities. This imaginative self-perception evokes the miracle by which interconnections of “dead things” can also be “dancing”: consciousness. This perspective presents consciousness’s experience of transcending itself: “I am a story / that doesn’t end. Even when what you think of as me / is dead as everything I’m made of, I’ll exist / still.”
The impersonal aspect of consciousness counterintuitively opens a view of love as a form of connection that is possible because of all of the shared, “dead” elements of the universe that consciousness itself is not:
xxxxxxxxxxHow else could those who survive me go on loving
me? I’m not a soul in a body, I’m a shell
wrapped around a ghost, a brief wink
before the eye opens, the hammer that strikes the bell.
before the long now ringing.
Limited human consciousness briefly glimpses itself in metaphor as a reflection of consciousness per se. The profound oneness is also a profound emptiness.
Various poems, such as “Working Overtime,” explore shadows of this paradox, in which versions of “connection” and “emptiness” may also work to cultivate such views, albeit in the manner that satire cultivates truth-telling:
xxxxxxxxxxxMy soul
will be made of dust
collected & piled
in a heap in the center
of an empty concrete room,
where the accountants
remove one fleck
at a time, trying to figure
out how many they can take
before I’m no longer
who I am. (31-2)
This poem captures the same smallness and ephemerality as the previous; however, it retains the ego’s perspective. It fears the incremental loss of an identity constructed—like many of ours—from its own worldly suffering, another phenomenon that appears very differently from the outside. “Ouroboros” shows a related view of the things we put into our bodies, unwittingly altering them in attempts to transform our perceptions. Beginning with the “cartel” that “sells food / that isn’t food, spends a half century / getting everyone hooked on refined sugar,” a wry romp follows from “pills / to protect the body from sugar, / pills to lose the weight gained” to companies that “help us pretend / we still have friends / by making a fake world” (54) to compensate for the one where we
xxxxxxxxstay just healthy enough to go to work
so we can take the pittance we’re paid
to reward ourselves
with a little treat,
something sweet. (55)
Sometimes ironically, the things we make unintentionally reconstruct interconnectedness of consciousness—here with both the literally interiorized creations and the unconscious needs for control, connection, and pleasure beneath the very cleverness that invents them. The poem presents levers we use to make ourselves feel allegedly positive illusions in order to recreate the very transcendent negativity they obscure.
“White Noise Hour” also exemplifies seeing through such illusions into their shared depths. It is set in a generic “town hall” (italics original) meeting addressing a reorganization that follows when “[s]ometimes the company swallows a smaller company / & sometimes it’s absorbed by one much larger / & it’s changed names more times than a triple agent” (12). The presenter’s affect presents as a microcosm of the ongoing flux:
His voice cracks when he mentions
the third restructuring since last winter. He toggles
back and forth between two bar graphs,
before & after, like he’s stabbing a doll
expecting a reaction from the actual man.
The presenter’s performance unwittingly characterizes his own fleeting role, and the allusion to voodoo evokes the shadowy aspects of interconnectedness he is trying to convince himself, via his audience, that he has marshaled. “Speaking in Tongues” relates a developmental version of this instinct to survive by belonging through a story of feigning glossolalia:
xxxxxxxxThat was the day
I started pretending, to him,
to myself, to the world,
that I believed what he believed
meaning I was also distanced
from myself, the chasm was inside me,
infinite as any god but deadlier, darker,
& I began then to try to fill it
with words. (25-6)
Both stories invoke human tendencies to conform in exchange for belonging. However, behind, the coerciveness and interior division, the speakers also present shadows of human adaptivity. “Learnings” foregrounds its role in honing our thinking and creativity to meet our practical challenges in the images of “skyscrapers […] purposefully constructed to sway / in the wind because otherwise they’d break” unlike “the snapped / top halves of trees & poles & lampposts” that broke off because “they couldn’t bend, / not even a little” (30). The poems, likewise, model such flexible resilience. Subtly, tacitly, the poems accrue synapses between the gentle recognition of our underlying non-existence—and our ability to meet material challenges through the same thought and imagination that allowed us to grasp that we don’t exist in the first place.
“The Zone” connects experientially with such complexities through bike riding, perhaps an organic ritual of such a worldview: “After biking so fast down the west side path / I could talk smack to light” (83). The inventive joy overflows the initial humor: “that’s when I feel the course of my life, / burning like everything burns.” “The zone’s” flexibility of perspective reorganizes our chronological conception of time with a litany beginning with “that’s when,” which gathers around the ride experiences of kindred ebullience from being “all charm & common / sense & mak[ing] colleagues laugh in meetings” to “when evening puts on his best pinks & purples” and “when I lie next to my wife in the heartbeat / of the darkness, breathing together without trying” (84). A web of connective behaviors and responses interconnect throughout the day, subordinating chronology to feeling as the measure of life. Connective happiness functions as a centering, self-replicating view of existence that guides the mind to go and do likewise.
Small emanations of this feeling peek out through various poems, as if calling the speaker to directly connect with the reader in witnessing them, whether the adorable interruption of a commute in “Baby on the Subway”: “I tell you, it healed each one of us / […] / just a little, just enough” (19)—or music overheard from a window in “There was Song”:
I’m just saying it happened, the chilly morning,
the wind & the colors, I’m saying
I was there, my body an industry of flesh & heartbeat,
first there was darkness, & then there was song. (48)
This is an apt description of many of these poems as well.
“Epigenetics” proceeds even further, opening as if taking literally the notion that “ancestors watch us from the afterlife,” comically digressing into “the Paleolithic // bewilderment at the fact I never even have to think / about warmth” (79). Another movement from the external trappings of life to the interior is more poignant:
xxxxxxxxMy own grandfather wouldn’t
know what to make of a smartphone or streaming
television or my strange faith, cobbled
together from so many sources
like soup made from what’s about to go bad
in the fridge, a cabinet of magic
to most of my distant family.
The humorous sketch of literalized belief opens a realization: The impulses toward “faith” bear similarities regardless of creative alterations that adapt them to the fluid spirit of the times:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI do pray, if talking
to an invisible possibility counts, I sing
to empty rooms. I make wishes, touching wood
& think rabbits are messengers from an otherworld,
not just the breathing ones, but also even sculptures
& pictures, & this carving from walnut
my grandfather whittled for my grandmother
& my sister stole to smuggle to me long after they died
& I whisper to it sometimes, because what else
would those big ears be for, if not for listening? (79-80)
The speaker perceives how the creative interactions of his “cobbled /together” faith reincorporate elements his forebears might recognize, a reincarnation of the need to imagine one’s own interiority as worthy of being heard by forces too transcendent to quantify. The main difference is the poem’s awareness of its role as a container in which such imagination perceives itself—as well as the limitation and grounding this awareness implies.
Speaking of containers, we conclude by taking in “Bring the Number of Styrofoam Cups Americans Throw Away Every Second to Work Day.” The poem and its inventive form emphasize the role of thought in such returns of imagination to itself. Each line’s multiple removals from “normal” text—enclosure within brackets, spaces, stanza breaks, and italics—evoke the separation between its insights and their material subject (as well as any assumptions about poetic form we smuggled into our reading). Each insight connects with the others only when seen through to its own depths:
[ the coffee cup I tossed out this morning will melt when the sun goes supernova ]
[ the cup is already ancient ]
[ though it is smaller than me, I am inside it ] (70, italics original)
Through imaginative temporal movement, our assumedly premeditated garbage evokes transcendent mystery in its dwarfing of our lifespans. Surprisingly, the speaker recognizes, through the archetype present in “the cup,” a sort of cup of life that blesses the present moment—which we also commonly treat like garbage—by invoking an impossible form of nostalgia: “[ do you remember where you were when the cup was thrown away? ]” Of course, we cannot remember “the cup” or its forsaking because it is a form or symbol. However, the frustrated attempt at such thought, once again, opens a feeling of being a small part of incomprehensible vastness. Like every poem in this fine collection—each in its own way—it leaves us with a mysterious awakening, a feeling of being within.
Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have appeared in many journals and magazines. He is also the author of several books and chapbooks, including Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. Collins teaches at New York University and various community outreach and children’s centers. He is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, New York.