On the Poetry of Chloe Honum

By AUSTIN SEGREST    |    JUNE 10, 2017     |     BOOK REVIEWS

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O ne of the most interesting things about Chloe Honum’s new chapbook, Then Winter, is its correspondence with her debut collection, The Tulip-Flame. The works enrich each other. Largely, this is testament to the power of that first book, which narrates with brutal sparseness a woman’s psychically embattled coming of age; the speaker copes with her single mother’s severe mental illness by subjecting herself to the equally severe disciplines of ballet and anorexia. Displaying a fierce talent and focus (to borrow from the poem “Group Therapy” from Then Winter), The Tulip-Flame enacts a delicate and finely balanced need for control.

     Then Winter’s speaker is in a psychiatric ward. Although the consistent, first-person speaker sounds similar to the speaker in The Tulip-Flame, there is no mention of ballet or a suicidal mother. Honum’s reticence on this account is a measure of the pull of that first work—its eclipsing subjects and methods. With little backstory or context on its own, this chapbook is not simply an epilogue or next chapter of that life. Continuity has been compromised.

     Then Winter helps us see that continuity is already at stake in The Tulip-Flame. In “Ballerina, Released,” from The Tulip-Flame, the speaker’s adolescent ballerina self describes the aftermath of a performance:

On stage each night I shape a single story.
It’s later, driving home, that vertigo
sets in. I lose all focus, see the roads
tangling in the wind. Rain sings on stones
that lead to my front door; its music holds
no cues for me.

As soon as the ballet is over, things fall apart. Offstage, she loses “focus,” misses her “cues,” faints. The “single story” she shapes each night is Stravinsky’s The Firebird: “I dance the murders of / the Firebird, my red tutu a flame / in a cave.” The discernible “shape” of the dance and the coherent “story” are stays against the confusion of living with a delusional-depressive and suicidal mother. Also a stay is the rehearsal of the experience in verse. Fourteen dynamic lines of iambic pentameter about, appropriately enough, the limits of control, the poem does its own shaping and storytelling. Into these enclosed, controllable spaces (the studio, her body, the poem) the speaker escapes. From “Ballerina at Dawn”:

By then I’d learned
to triple pirouette,
which felt like disappearing.

She does not, like Bob Dylan, desire to be “released.” The constraints of form and narrative—even the contained flame metaphor—keep her intact. But the stay against confusion is only ever momentary. From “Danse des Petits Cygnes”:

Rehearsals ran late.
Night swayed on its green stem

and I couldn’t comprehend
we’d ever be clipped from it.
Even seeing us together
in our white tutus--

like roses standing naked
on a coffin—I was soothed . . .

Looking back with retrospective irony, The Tulip-Flame’s speaker can see what her younger self couldn’t: that even her closest-knit moments as a ballerina spelled out separation, disintegration, the end. Rather than congratulatory bouquets, the dancers resemble coffin roses. Though momentarily fended off, the threat steadily encroaches, erodes, undermines.

     With dance, like her mother, having released this speaker into the void, the subsequent discipline of poetry catches her in its net, “colored / with all the illnesses of beauty” (“Snow White”). But there’s always a next “aftermath” coming for her. From “Spring”:

All that falls is caught. Unless

it doesn’t stop, like moonlight,
which has no pace to speak of,
falling through the cedar limbs,
falling through the rock.

Like Dickinson’s famous speaker, she hits a world at every plunge. Read alongside The Tulip-Flame, Then Winter opens on the question of which next plunge and world will hold her together. It’s a question of sanity as well as poetry, of style as well as subject.

     Then Winter cuts (or troubles, anyway) ties with the past—with the subjects and, to a large degree, with the modes of The Tulip-Flame. There’s no backstory or received forms. There’s less polish, flare, and congruence; more prose poems, more dwelling in the present. Looking eastward off the porch of experience, the speaker endeavors to face the edge of what’s to come (or come apart). This takes gumption, and proves terribly trying (and terrifying).

     What “shape” does the present take? Standing at the edge to embrace shapelessness, the fact that there’s no “single story”? To be alive to the process? These questions concern this chapbook as much as—and, indeed, are indistinguishable from—the speaker’s experiences as a patient in a psychiatric ward.

     In the short history of American poetry, the mental breakdown is famously accompanied by a desperate, self-immolating search for a new form or mode—a breakthrough. Then Winter’s nervous breakdown concurs with a break from The Tulip-Flame’s use of “shape” and “story.” The imposed structures of the ward—containment in rooms, group therapy—lend some support. But the heart of the drama is no longer framed at a distance; rather, it lies in the act of recognition itself. From “April in the Berkshires”:

. . . once, in a supermarket,
you slid up behind me,
covered my eyes, and said, guess who?

Did I recognize your touch or your voice?

While there is a return of Honum’s understated archetypal imagery, it quickly becomes apparent that something’s off:

Alone in my bedroom, I sob,
and the wardrobe steps forward,
like a coffin-mother, to embrace me.

Later, standing at the back door,
a coyote crosses my vision
on a wave of snow. . . .

Straight from the annals of the school of quietude, ink-brushed mothers, coffins, waves, and snow can all be found in The Tulip-Flame. Yet here they’ve been disquieted, and prove disquieting. Overshooting Symbol, they light on the threshold of the hallucinogenic, of madness.

     The Tulip-Flame’s tenuously controlled “twirl” and burn become, in Then Winter, a “fire that has lost its way”—even among poems that continue to scrupulously account for place, “such emphasis on setting” (“Note Home”). From “At America’s Best Value Inn in Crossett, Arkansas”:

     . . . Maybe sense is not a place
I want to linger, like the cement hallway that leads to the ice machine,
     the ground studded with old chewing gum. By my feet, two butterflies twirl
like fire that has lost its way. . . .

A twist on the deceptive phenomenon of ignis fatuus, here the fire itself is “lost.” In “The Motel,” even though she holds the map “on which the clerk / had circled [her] home for the night,” her room number, “among a series of doors,” is blurred “inside a drop of rain.” Sense is an “arithmetic” that she and her fellow patients long to “solve.” From “On the Stairs Outside the Psychiatric Ward”:

All around us autumn is throwing
gold and crimson leaves into the street
while starlings are holding tight on a telephone wire,
heads tucked in the cold. And the boy

and the Vietnam vet, who has just joined us,
and I are looking up with yearning, as though
we could solve that string of bird and sky arithmetic
and know the ages of our souls.

Shape and story aside, her allegiance to description itself, to forging connections (hence, that “telephone wire”), comes into question. To sit with herself like Whitman’s spider-poet and try to keep it together by “[launching] forth filament, filament, filament out of [herself]” is “important,” but by no means a given. From “Note Home”: “The light is fluorescent. Everything hums. It is so important to go on naming, even if all I said to you this winter was snow, snow, snow.” Her senses are on overdrive, yet her sense of recognition is off. Faces are doing funny things. She thinks she’s seen a fellow patient’s face before “in heavy, browning blossoms, ancient and disorganized” (“Blossoms in the Psychiatric Ward”). Her psychiatrist has a face “like an old dictionary” (“The Ward Above”). Verbs of throwing (oneself) and of jumping accrue the savor of suicide. A kind of hooded female Grim Reaper is shadowing her around town. Eerily, the woman carries a gladiola “like a spine in bloom” (“We’re Supposed to Get Snow Tonight”).

     As T. S. Eliot and many after him attest, poetically forged correspondence is at risk of breaking down when the speaker (or culture) is having a breakdown: “On Margate sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” Even tenderly rendered, there’s the suggestion that Then Winter’s gestures are but a “pantomime,” “about as convincing as the child playing the sun in the school recital” (“Offerings”). Or that the gestures are as staged as the play her fellow patient thinks they’re actors in (“Blossoms in the Psychiatric Ward”). Or that her images are “props,” better left for “The Master of Dreams” to secret away. This is bitterly ironic when connected with the stage-lit, nature-emulating speaker of The Tulip-Flame. From “At America’s Best Value Inn in Crossett, Arkansas”:

     In the distance: white clots of smoke rising from the Georgia-Pacific paper plant.
All those hot blank pages—who needs them? My phone could ring
     at any moment. You could say, _________. Mother Silence
could appear behind me, waving from any one of these dark windows.

As Seamus Heaney describes in The Government of the Tongue, destruction is always part of the creative process. From Honum’s “Late Afternoon in the Psychiatric Ward”:

Now a fly throws itself

down on the formica table
and buzzes and spins
on its back, quickening

the poison. It resembles
a word scribbled out.
Won’t do, won’t do.

Dickinson’s fly buzzes and death hovers. Rumors of shock therapy and miracle drugs—such poisons—circulate. The destructive impulse rises like a tide, flooding through otherwise “quickening” acts. Flight is grounded, writing erased, her group therapy only endurable when viewed as a family that she can “tear down” (“Group Therapy”).

     In the ultimate disorientation, cause is dissevered from effect. The speaker never explains the reason she’s in the ward. This, in contrast to The Tulip-Flame, which begins unequivocally (and metrically) with context: “My mother tried to take her life” (“Spring”). Still, at the heart of Then Winter’s volatility is a hint of patriarchal violation. The brutal New England snow is a conqueror. Why would she want to emulate a conqueror? The fellow patient she grows closest to, close enough to eventually “name” (Dan), is terrorized by the knowledge that his father molested his sisters. The father got away with it because he was a bigwig, the fire chief. The ramifications of the fire chief’s actions, unlike those of Stravinsky’s Firebird, are not controlled or contained—not even to a single generation. Truly, the fire “has lost its way.” (This sexual damage recalls the grandfather in The Tulip-Flame.) What can ground her? What can keep her from floating up to the ward above, “for those in the most danger” (from “Stay Beside Me”), and asking “to be admitted” (from the very next poem, “The Ward Above”)? Like her fellow patient’s suggestion that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” be played whenever someone dies (“First Day of Partial Hospitalization”), asking for admittance to the ward above sounds cheesily religious. But there’s crippling irony and ambivalence at work. In The Tulip-Flame, the mother suffers from religious delusions, writing “Cum Deo in permanent marker all around the house” before attempting suicide a year later (“Visiting Hours”). Going to God or sublimating into spirit are not exactly consoling notions. Likewise, the hope and glory of the ballerina’s transcendent “sudden / ascension” warps in Then Winter into something more closely resembling a “terrible migration.” From “Kiwi”:

The fluorescent light in the group therapy room is vetting me for some terrible migration. I ask the counselor to turn it off. My native bird is flightless. It’s a cousin to the moa: a brown hut of a bird. […] My native bird is nocturnal. Though it has lived fifty million years, it and the sky have reached no agreement.

Having encountered a hooded woman in the parking lot in “Phoebe,” she abruptly declares:

You want to know what I believe? I believe my dog would come between my death and me, that she would come huffing and shaking all over, as her dreams allow.

The old god/dog salvation sendup is deliciously bathetic. The speaker’s dog anchors her to earth. Subtly morbid though it is, she can hold her “warm, happy skull through the night” (“The Ward Above”).

     That love will save Then Winter’s speaker is, with more wilting irony, reduced to a saccharine, if off-kilter, memory. From “Group Therapy”: “Some say love, it is a river, I sang as a girl in school assembly. We sang standing up. I was ready to faint all that year. For five days each month, my blood came bright as plum juice.” But interpersonal connection is her best shot. As phrasing from various poems reinforces, she elects to “stand with,” “side with,” and “stay beside” those whom she loves and with whom she empathizes: the absent lover’s “river- / wet lips” in “Late Afternoon”; Dan, his sentences “clean as autumn,” in “Before Group Meditation”; her poetry students at the Juvenile Detention Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas, their

. . . get-away poems
and tree-house poems.

Sack of weed and siren poems.
A flea appears on my arm and
quivers, like a fleck of onyx.
I watch it bite and gleam and the boys

sitting across from me
watch it, too. In a cement
tomb, hope is anything
that travels in big leaps.

     In a few poems from The Tulip-Flame, the speaker dwells in the present without disappearing (at least not totally) into the past, or into dance. These latter (and chronologically later) poems in the collection find her “fond of silence,” “slow to remember,” weeping, and sleeping all day. It is out of these poems that the speaker of Then Winter most directly steps. The tulip-flame as an image already gestures toward the unruly present and its proximity to the void. Like the subject of the suicidal mother, this painted flower organizes the scenery, even as it is, at its heart, a disturbance (like an inversion of Wallace Steven’s jar in Tennessee). From “The Tulip-Flame”:

My sister’s painting this: a hill, a lane

of cobblestones, a watery terrain
of dripping flowers. Her strokes, elsewhere controlled,
flare out and fray around the tulip-flame
as if it were an accident, a stain,
a blaze in the midpoint of a wet field.

More than the mother’s illness or death, this unruly burning represents the broken compact of safety and sanity. By dent of the ingenious structure surrounding it and keeping it at bay, we can feel the tug toward disintegration and destruction. Throughout The Tulip-Flame, such decentering, central burning is kept “slight and low” through “practice” (“Dress Rehearsal”). But what happens when the dance is over? After the first book is out? How, or for how long, can the flame be kept at a distance, contained in the past, described in form? Neither entirely chosen nor entirely given by circumstance, this is the task of Then Winter: to look into the eye of The Tulip-Flame, into the abyss.

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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.

Then Winter, by Chloe Honum. Bull City Press, 2017

The Tulip-Flame, by Chloe Honum. Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014

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