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ISBN: 09290220-04-1
TITLE: A’s Dream
AUTHOR: Aaron Schurin
$8.00
DESCRIPTION: 1989, Poetry, 96 pages.
In a recent article on contemporary music, Village Voice critic Kyle Gann discusses Bela Bartok’s use of the Fibonacci sequence – the series of two numbers in which each number is the sum of the two before it – as an aid to composition. Bartok’s aim, Gann says, was not to enslave his lyrical invention to mathematics, but to use the logic of sequence as a blade to cut his music free from the rhythmic conventions and melodic cliches of his time. Gann points out, however, that living audiences don’t listen to Bartok’s music to marvel at his ingenious use of the Fibonacci sequence. We listen, says Gann, "because Bartok dissolved the system in voluptuous waves of melody, a compelling fusion of intellect and emotion."The volutpuous lyricism of Aaron Schurin’s A’s Dream was, like Bartok’s, generated with the help of a system. Each text in A’s Dream takes another text as its lexicon; that is, the writer used only words found in, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets to produce "Artery." For "Material’s Daughter" the lexicon was Emma Goldman’s autobiography, for the title poem, Shurin’s own Barron notes for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Though Shurin’s procedure raises interesting questions about language as inheritance, originality, and so on, we don’t listen to Shurin’s poems to marvel at his ingenious use of a procedure. We listen because Shurin’s system is dissolved in language that shimmers with ‘unearthly majesty’ as it addresses essential questions about the nature of self, the nature of language, the discovery of one’s own true face in a courageous act of loving.
Shurin’s first collection, The Night Sun, published in 1976, was distinguished by the young poet’s conviction that love and sexuality between men was a doorway into a new, more compassionate social order. A poem about walking down Castro Street in drag for the first time glowed with primal fire: the transformation was recognized as not a change of appearance only but a transubstantiation of self, an initiation of shamanistic power.
Shurin’s mature work deepens the concerns of his early poems, maintaining the passion and sharpening the wit, his language aquiring new folds and subtleties to capture what Shurin’s teacher, the late Robert Duncan, called the "snake-like beauty in the living changes of syntax." Shurin writes with his ears open for the shimmy and whip-crack of contemporary idiom, revelling in producing memorable aphorisms, whether humorous ("animals, like Republicans/must first be given trainers"), fey ("a twinkle never chooses the simple route"), oracular and philosophical ("appearances, after all, may be only speculations; identities are of the real"), or self-referential ("I am a master making/deception without/ deceiving. This is / that thing.")
The adjectival slots into which I fit Shurin’s phrases give some sense of the poet’s range, but one of Shurin’s particular gifts is to allow several voices – sensual, intellectual, ‘dishy,’ coyly evasive – to speak in the same word or phrase, and to have the whole seem lit from behind by a gnostic apprehension of the essences of things. Shurin is, at heart, a Romantic: his ambition is less to dissect than to ravish, to worship more than instruct.
The best work in the book, for me, is "City of Men," which takes as its lexicon poems from Whitman’s "Calamus" and "Children of Adam" sequences. Shurin explained his intentions in a postscript to "City of Men" called "Full Circle," published in Temblor #9:
As most careful readers of Whiman know, Calamus is his collectio of homoerotic love poems, emotional, tender, idealistic, radically politcal, prophetic, obliquely erotic but– alas– not sexual. If you want sex, go to the grouping Children of Adam...filled with body and body parts, physical material catalogues, paeans to the sex act – but – alas – no love. The body is electric but it is not affectionate...
My historical period has permitted me to come full circle, to write my eros out of spirit and body, shamelessly, and perhaps for the first time in history, from a completely integrated viewpoint.
"City of Men" is the beautiful and singular child of the two poets’ ambitions, combining the virtues of Shurin’s work with the inclusive spirit, celebration of the revolutionary potency of fearless love, and consecration of the minutely physical that Whitman fathered in our song.
The poem begins, "I heard my name" – the self is disovered or revealed in an act of communication with another. The lover – "my friend of liquid, my most same" – is not a single, possessible "thing," but a presence nearly divine, instructing, eluding, terrifying, drawing nearer or away, a destination :
appearances, after all, may be only speculations; identities are of the real. hold me by the hand, that is subtle air, impalpable, curiously words hold untellable. reason confounf us, sense surround us, he travels to me and these are the shining things I perceive. I walk in the fable of a man, charged with points of view, skies of colors, densities, and something yet to be known...
Love between men was, for Whitman, more than loving one man, but a way or path into the world. By paying tribute to his lover’s body, or to his own, Whitman celebrated embodiment itself. Shurin takes up that tradition of love as a recognition of the sacred in body, using Whitman’s vocabulary to create a language that is completely personal and contemporary, of our time and beyond it. "I have lived orgies and will one day make pageants," brags Shurin, a proclamation made more necessary by AIDS and the current sexual clampdown.
"It seems essential to me in the age of AIDS," Shurin says in his postscript, "to keep the body forward, to keep the parts named, to not let ourselves get scared back into our various closets by those who would profit from sexual repression, from sublimation and fear of sex...I do of course propose safe sex – medically safe but not politically safe, not socially or even physically safe. And towards the day when the Human Immunodeficiency Viruses I and II are consigned to the dustbins of history, I’ll dream – with Whitman– ‘unscrew the locks from the doors!/ Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!’"
Shurin’s poetry is least affecting for me when its strategies and evasions seem too willed, mannered, obscuring the poet’s convictions. A couple of the pieces – "Agora," for instance – seem hampered by the enervated, emotionally neutral contents of their lexicons.
We may admire a body of work for its technical brilliance, but the writing that stays with us grants us new possibilities of knowledge – unscrewing the locks from the doors of the senses, giving us sharper eyes or ears, a mind more alert to the kingdom that is everywhere at hand. The final poem in A’s Dream closes on the phrase "Unfolded light had fallen when he woke" – that light that is where new feelings are beginning, light shinig in heroic acts of love, the primal light out of which A that is alpha dreamed beta and the rest of speech and sign into being: the light of intellect and emotion, invention and spirit, unfolded in a single flame.
–Steve Silberman
Poetry Flash, January 1990
Copyright © 2002 O Books
