~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 Fennellyâs 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
poetâs
alter ego, Mr. Daylater in the bookâs central poem, "From
LâHotel Terminus
Notebooks."
In "From LâHotel Terminus Notebooks,"
Fennellyâs
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 wonât work, you know. / Weâre /
enthralled by the
linear. Itâs our destiny." Yet itâs Fennellyâs
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 Fennellyâs
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
Iâve known Katerina sheâs 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, ÎWhy arenât you
alive? Speak!â";
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 couldnât 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
Poundâs
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
