Review: Kimberly Grey
On Systems for the Future of Feeling by Kimberly Grey
by Tyler Truman Julian
Recently, a friend in the middle of studying for her Creative Writing Doctorate’s comprehensive exams sent me a picture of sentence diagrams, a linear breakdown of a sentence with offshoots that label each part of speech in the sentence. They look a little like a tree blown over in a storm. The longer the sentence, the more complicated they get. The tree trunk (the subject-verb base) may fork with conjunctions, and the number of branches only increases, expanding as the sentence is broken down into prepositions, adjectives, objects of prepositions, and adverbs. I’d seen sentence diagrams before and even filled some in (in Spanish classes though, not English), but looking at them in relation to my friend’s doctoral program, they seemed heavy and interesting. Words carry a lot of weight, so much so, these diagrams seem to say, that sentences can collapse under it into their various pieces. Interestingly, it’s somewhere around this idea and the study of semantics that Systems for the Future of Feeling by Kimberly Grey takes off and finds its genius.
The poems of Systems for the Future of Feeling seek new ways to make meaning of age-old questions in a postmodern world. Grey approaches love, lost love, and catastrophe in this collection, working through various imaginative and philosophical diagrams all her own, looking for the right words to give voice to emotion that is much older than the perceived apathy of our present moment. The first section of the collection, aptly titled, “Rhetoric,” is a long poem that builds to the question: “can we be happy still?” This question, in isolation, is tired, over-asked, but from the first line on, Grey’s speaker offers new questions and images to lead the reader to it, with new meaning:
If language formed a center.
If the center were true and tugging.
If the tugging kinged us and we were fully assembled.
If we were translated into compasses and the wind spun us around.
If the ground imagined us raveled.
The poem continues on the next page, after sufficient white space to sit with these images. Grey’s speaker builds,
If we string milkweed around our shoulders and walked north.
If we found a little house and labeled it covet.
If it were contemptible to be personal and diamondly lit.
After several pages:
If we are unkinged.
If we suffer for language and a little house.
If truth is contemptible and wonder is a symposium of god.
If we build god with a compass and bath.
If the neighbors watch and wonder.
After a page break:
If language equals failure and failure is the end.
If we disassemble the center.
If we wander back to where we arrived.
After one last page break:
If the ground is a gallery of horse tails.
If we bury our failures in the ground.
If we wait for them to bloom.
If a horse comes and pisses on them.
can we be happy still?
This long poem sprawls across pages, a complex breakdown of semantics, and comes full circle in a winding, probing way, asking questions of the language used in the poem, asking with each rhetorical situation, can we be happy still? Knowing the postmodern, postindustrial reader is not interested in the romantic, Grey’s speaker builds and builds before dropping the question. This is effective. This adds meaning. And this poem sets the stage for the rest of the collection, allowing the poetry to climb to romantic heights, while the rhetorical and semantical play keep it grounded and frequently academic.
By way of moving forward, the speaker admonishes and invites in the poem immediately following “Rhetoric.” Grey writes, “For too long / now I’ve been spoiled by what I don’t know…it’s never enough, to be astonished” (“System of Knowing”). Why can’t we be astonished—by beauty, love, romance? Grey’s speaker seems to be asking. And the inability seems to lie in the inability to find modern words to capture the emotion created by these themes. The speaker looks back to find the language, interviewing various Bigs of linguistic history: Gertrude Stein, Sina Queyras, Anne Carson, Jack Gilbert, and Ludwig Wittgenstien, at the same time, she recognizes that “Time deserves to be studied, as I study you and me and how we are linked. See we’ve become almost like holy things, while the reverse is also true and every time I see you, while I’m looking…I’m thinking of a long river, something with no end” (“Simultaneously”). The speaker learns, as the readers learn, that time always moves forward, and we with it; therefore, language always changes and capturing the large emotions of life is always going to be a challenge, just as it has been from the dawn of time. Still, the speaker tells us, “It’s valuable to know language / will not make us beautiful;” it’s our working through the big emotions that makes humanity beautiful (“System with Some Truth”).
Once the speaker draws this conclusion, she looks for ways to better articulate the impact, both for the speaker and the larger world. She explains,
We need a form to form us, we need a form to teach
us the facts. How, actually, it is form that un-renders us
now: my back against your back.
…
Is love really a mountain
that just stops? When I say, why aren’t you weeping
I mean, weep with me. We need an affectionate form,
we need a home various
with love. This is experimental. Everything is sad
but I cannot describe the sad. I can only describe
the outside of sadness
(“Love in the Time of Formlessness (or Form in the Time of Lovelessness)”)
This poem points to the need for poetry, even as language fails, in an almost ars poetica kind of way. Humanity craves forms to categorize and define their feelings, but nothing quite captures them. Grey’s speaker knows this. After all, language will not make us beautiful—but art and poetry can move us and describe experience, making the personal universal and vice versa.
Why does this matter, especially if language equals failure and failure is the end? Grey has an answer. Her speaker bookends the collection in another long poem, this time titled “Reason,” and stretches various responses from page to page. Ultimately, language matters, poetry matters, this collection matters because there is so much pleasure and pain in life, and we need to describe it, we need to see the romance of the present moment to emphasize its existence, even at the risk of failure. Why does this matter?
Because in German world is Welt.
…
Because the law says everything is in conflict.
…
Because objects were empty and infinity, robust.
…
Because we couldn’t leave.
Because we whispered Welt, Welt.
Because arranging the future is violence.