Rita Mae Reese’s The Book of Hulga

AUSTIN SEGREST    SEPTEMBER 2, 2016



R ita Mae Reese’s new book of poems, The Book of Hulga, is so good it’ll make you wanna slap your mama. Here’s a taste:

THE MISFIT’S SONNET

What Pavlov’s dogs & other martyrs know
is all some people’s ever fit to learn.
Obedience never was my cup of tea, or coffee.
Listen, nobody ever came along
to raise my daddy after he passed.
I sat up and watched & he ain’t never moved
all that night. I put my hands on him & said rise!
Rise rise rise, you sonafabitch.
Nothing, just Mama crying in the corner,
begging me to stop. So I left & kept leaving.
That’s me there on the side of the road.
You think you’ve done gone past, don’t you?

When I’m done with you, you’re gonna know
how to give like you’re begging.

Winner of University of Wisconsin Press’s Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, Reese’s second collection is a compassionate and imaginative homage to Flannery O’Connor. Given how large O’Connor looms over our nation’s literary history, such a project puts the powers of lyric poetry to the test. And the spot-on dialect and Faulknerian closet drama of “The Misfit’s Sonnet” show us that Reese understands what she’s up against. Mining the reserves of poetic invention, The Book of Hulga brings to the mat graphic illustrations, various stanzaic shapes, pop culture references, intertextuality, fairy tales, metanarrative, ampersands, anaphora, self-portraits-as, a poem with footnotes, a rejection slip poem, and of course, the empathetic reflection of an interior, lyric self. I’d like to talk about the twin engines I see powering this lyric tour de force. One is dramatic irony, a poetic mode as ancient as it is contemporary, and, as I see it, central to Southern literature in general. The other is the inherently Christian practice of reinterpretation and revision.

     But before I explain how this irony works, let me back off the anxiety-of-influence rhetoric. Reese’s candid and expressly feminist project aims for more of a sense of collaboration than of heroic originality. And though the book’s mode isn’t, for the most part, interrogative, its open process shows us how it proceeds from questions rather than from assertions or convictions: Why was Hulga so special to O’Connor? Why was Simone Weil? How is Weil’s “nothingness from which we flee” related to the “nothingness” that undoes Hulga in the hayloft? Caliban’s “wood enough within” to O’Connor’s ubiquitous, foreboding Georgia woods? Why should Weil associate Pavlov’s dogs with martyrs?

     A number of these questions Reese submits to the crucible of form. Three interspersed sonnet cycles—loosely metered and mostly unrhymed—are braced, head to tail, by the same seven lines from the writings of Simone Weil. Formal constraint “opens the door” to an intertextual map bold in its metaphysics and cut with an apophatic mysticism. From the first sonnet, “The Given Lines”:

& the nothingness toward which we go.
Hell is nothing, God is nothing          & we
are nothing lost between. Out of our pain

we make countries, maps, direction.
. . .
All of the empty spaces have the outline
of someone missing . . .

The question Why Hulga? seems to have served as a starting point for Reese. Reading O’Connor’s letters, she came to understand that O’Connor had high hopes for the character of Hulga—beyond the famous short story “Good Country People.” Alas. As if Hulga isn’t tragic enough! A bookworm stuck with her mother in the sticks, no father to speak of, mortally ill: Hulga is already a dark reflection of O’Connor. Now we see that Hulga’s career, like her creator’s, was cut tragically short. This is one reason Reese immaculately impregnates Hulga in the loft. Like a New Testament author retroactively planting the seed, Reese ensures O’Connor’s heroine an afterlife. From “Mrs. Freeman Knows the Signs”:

Birds and bees
all buzzing
around Hulga’s head,
which is quiet
and empty now,
as if her brain sank
down into her stomach
where it is growing
into a child.
Sweet Jesus.

     Looking back on a past, or a past self that doesn’t know what we know now, is fuel to the poet seeking dramatic irony—especially one with a Southern bent for fatalism and nostalgia. Dramatic irony powers many a poem. Philip Larkin, in his classic “MCMXIV,” for example, meditates, fifty years out, on a photograph of an eager queue of British WWI volunteers:

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Such irony is often tragic. In Greek tragedy, the audience watches mythological characters, who don’t know what the audience knows, accomplish their awful fates. In contemporary poetry this bitter play between knowledge and ignorance can take on a kind of belated prophetic quality: all the signs were there. Or as Reese writes, “That was years ago is how now felt then.” Indeed, I don’t think I’d be the first to see a lineage from the fatalism of Greek tragedy to that of Southern literature.

     Retrospection is opportunity for reinterpretation, for reading the signs of recorded history or myth. The art of hermeneutics recollects in tranquility, at a remove from the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which life or O’Connor (those primary sources), throw us in the midst of. It’s an apt method for creating poems with such literary and religious subjects as Reese’s. O’Connor’s work is rife with Christian signs to confound characters and readers alike. A glance at some of Reese’s poem titles gives us a sense of this vein: “Exegesis: The Tempest,” “Mrs. Freeman Knows the Signs.” The collection’s title, The Book of Hulga, itself suggests a kind of apocryphal book of scripture. From “The Life You Save”:

. . . Today give me a sign,
one that even I can read, telling me
how to get back to the before-dead, how to rise up
in still-sweet flesh, how to believe

there’s an unnumb heaven waiting for us
& that this pain is going to open the door.

The power of dramatic irony—and, playing off of it, the freedom of invention afforded the poet—is prominent in “How to Lose a Leg”:

First, you must enter the woods.  No, the woods must enter you.      So
            stand very still and think of something else.
This is easier if you are a girl, an only child, lonely.         If
your head is in books, in the clouds, in clouds of books.          If you
are, right now, thinking about King Midas.     Not the goldfinger of Midas
but the donkey ears.       And not King Midas really but his barber.    Not
the barber taking off the king’s hat         but the barber digging a hole
            and shouting into it              King Midas has donkey ears!
About the itch of those words in your throat.                       Inside the pockets
of your father’s field jacket       your hands cup two dead quails.
            Despite the birds         you must not think
about guns.         You are not sentimental about birds    or death
            —this is why he brings you.       Don’t think about birds
or him, think only about Midas, about donkey ears. Then
the loudest shot you’ve ever heard.          It is the sound
of the ground opening beneath you.         It is
the birds and the trees and the air
                                                            shouting you down into the hole.

     The ironic “how to” poem is now a standard in the field. And the gold standard, of course, is Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master… Lose something every day…” et cetera. There’s a joke at the heart of this kind of poem. Furnishing the easy steps to accomplishing something incredibly difficult and about which we have no choice anyway, such instructions are ridiculous. As Reese writes in “Revising History”:

. . . We
don’t get to choose which part of ourselves
we’ll lose, or even to know what it is we’ve lost.
We don’t get to know where we should go

or how to hold still or any of the other things
Pavlov’s dogs & other martyrs know.

The “how to” formula provides an alternative way, ironically distanced, to talk about if not bemoan suffering and tragedy. The tragedy in the case of “How to Lose a Leg” is Hulga’s: we know from a parenthetical passage in “Good Country People” that she lost her leg in a childhood hunting accident (if we don’t know this, or if we’ve forgotten, Julie Franki’s compellingly quirky section page illustrations in The Book of Hulga remind us). With a foreknowing audience, Reese finds herself in the realm of dramatic irony as well as saying-one-thing-but-meaning-another irony.

     Revisiting tragedy, one’s own or that of someone else, is, once again, opportunity for interpretation. As with any interpretation, the re-viewer has a semblance of control, a stab at revision within certain bounds: in how the materials are laid out, reviewed, questioned, and otherwise explored or expanded. Here, Reese not only wrenches her audience by evoking the tragedy’s incontrovertible circumstances but also surprises them by fleshing out the myth/text. Here we learn anew, see created before our very eyes, the backstory: that Hulga was hunting with her father, wearing his clothes (as the collection shows us she was wont to do), distracted. Such fictional touches pay due obeisance to O’Connor while also participating in an interpretive tradition as Greco-Roman as it is Judeo-Christian.

     As a tribute, The Book of Hulga’s manifest care affords remarkable insight into O’Connor’s metaphysics. In that “mirror that retains the reflection / of anyone who has ever looked into it,” we see Reese’s “reflection in search / of a mirror” in O’Connor, who’s seeking a mirror in Hulga, that “angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth.” We see a heroine whose downfall is antecedent to the real conversion she thought she’d already accomplished intellectually. We see an everywoman whose lameness and blindness reflect us all and which make her fit to inherit the earth. From “The Red Clay Virgin”:

The women say Hulga is an anathema
both in Greek         & in Hebrew:
Hulga is set aside for God      & Hulga
is banished, exiled, forbidden.

Hulga says Hulga believes in Hell. Her bed
a place to pray & a house of corrections.
One guard, one prisoner,
one cell    —all Hulga.

We see a queering. As church patriarchs St. Jerome and Augustine advise her about love from her bookshelf, a drunk Hulga fantasizes about the girl “in the apartment downstairs.” From “At 36, Hulga Speaks of Love”:

   Love, and do what you like, he mutters. Hulga is
      multiplied by the dozens of women
she has never seduced. She is cast into a legion of swine
      sailing over a cliff.    And she is flying.

We see an anti-miracle (one of the Weil repetons is “The stories about miracles confuse everything”). We see a pseudo-Mary giving birth to her final humiliation in the straw: “Hulga is a block of hay beneath snow. / If an angel comes, she does not know.” And we see a creation given birth to, self- or God-generated—“Is Hulga divided by God / Hulga or God?”—, woman-generated: the creation of a woman, within the creation of a woman, among the creations of women.

     In “Hulga,” in addition to the stubborn “hull” of a battleship that Hulga’s mother thinks of, we hear the words “holy,” “hell,” and “hole.” In the hole we see the absence of a father, of a leg; the nothingness Hulga believes in and Manley’s nothingness beyond belief; Simone Weil’s “fullness of being” and “nothingness from which we flee.” We see hell, the hole the bible salesman disappears through in the hayloft, the absence of God.

     Finally, we see, in “Revising History,” for example, Reese’s speaker:

rooted in the absence of a definite place,
[belonging] to mountains that have been removed,
to valleys that have been filled—a world gone flat
. . .
[learning] geography as affliction.

We see her own past ironized, superimposed upon the material, meta-viewing Hulga. From “Casting Call for Temps Mort”:

Oh God, what we need is a faster time machine and deliberate death.
     We need 1986 & Warhol directing

& you and I sitting for hours, for days
     watching Hulga lie there all alone,
          us in our first apartment
             with Sinead O’Connor

& Virginia Woolf at 17 on the walls,
     & inside our little cable-less television
          Hulga played by Jane Fonda, by Candy Darling,
             by Joe Dallesandro with his headband on,
by Valerie Solanas with her bad aim. One after another of them,
     & you & I on the couch, in our bed, in the kitchen
          our bony hillbilly hips & lips transmuted by its glow,
             which is only the absence of anything blocking the light.

We see this speaker grappling with her past, with doctrine. From “Isn’t”:

. . . Everything has a use
or there is a landfill with a fire
always burning and this is Hell, or it isn’t.
(Always a bur in your shoe. Hundreds
of years, thousands, yes, but always?)

All of this, and more, The Book of Hulga shows us.

     The fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin recurs in the collection, derived from Hulga’s straw. It is the hope of the doomed—sinner, saint, and writer—that the mortal straw of their affliction be spun into gold. In this collection, Reese gathers and spins O’Connor’s felled grass, retelling and re-seeing, but also seeing and telling anew. And though the book’s negative theology makes clear that gold is never gold, or even the point (as in “How to Lose a Leg”), Hulga shines with new life. And O’Connor herself is more than merely gilded, as the usual bio-poem formula allows, with pity and awe. Rather, careful invention bordering on obsession forges a quasi-sexual intimacy not so unlike Berryman’s in his Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.

     What about the speaker? What about her straw? As any work to be countenanced by Flannery O’Connor must, Hulga refrains from those low-hanging poet fruits “grace” and “mercy.” Yet a transformation can be found. Again, retrospective irony is at work. As proems paradoxically always do, “Feast Day” looks back on the book as a whole, on the labor of it (Weil reminds us that “Nothing can have a destination which is not its origin”). With the book’s enormous emotion behind her, the speaker seems to finally let go of the reins, ending the anxiety of influence, the fast of affliction, forgiving the self, the past, the South, and accepting the invitation, like George Herbert in “Love III,” to sit down at O’Connor’s (if not God’s) table.

FEAST DAY

When we eat wheat      we devour the sun
     so in this room filled with permanent flowers,
let us celebrate not with fasting
     but with Red Sammy Butts barbeque.
Lord, let us sink to our knees under the weight
     of our Southern appetites. Let us devour
     cornbread & turnip greens, rum balls & goose eggs
     brined in the salt of resurrection.
Let us fill our hollow legs with pink chiffon pie
     & Cokes spiked with coffee.
Let us devour the landscape--
     every damn cotton field in Georgia
& beyond, every real & imagined plantation,
     every pig farm & waiting room.
May we eat & eat & eat Lord,
     & make no end of this, her hunger.

Originally from Alabama, AUSTIN SEGREST now lives and teaches in Wisconsin. His poems can be found in The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, Image, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Blackbird, and New England Review.

The Book of Hulga, by Rita Mae Reese. Wisconsin Poetry Series. University of Wisconsin Press, 2016