Review: Daniel Biegelson
On Of Being Neighbors by Daniel Biegelson
by Tyler Truman Julian
Daniel Biegelson’s Of Being Neighbors is a complex inquiry into what makes us human and what makes us artists. From dense prose poems to winding narratives, Biegelson adeptly moves a speaker around and through all sides of the varied realities of childrearing and writing in our postmodern moment. This collection, reminiscent of Grace Paley in its deeply human, often wry and humorous explorations, leaps to strange and disquieting heights in search of answers to unsettling questions that plague the contemporary poet: What role does poetry have in a world so troubled? Are my troubles as large as those of the world’s? Circling these answers takes time, takes a frequency of word and image that Biegelson handles well, utilizing imagery, repetition, and metaphor to beautiful effect, forcing his reader to slow and reflect and question in their own experience: What makes living worthwhile?
From the outset, Biegelson’s speaker’s foot is on the gas, his hand is heavy on the pen. The repeated and revised poem “Neighbors” opens the collection, pulls us in, and never lets us go:
Do you believe in eternity. Infinity. Affinity. For once. Can we pray without ropes around
the prayer. Exchange branches for wires. Extinguish the clouds. We are the murmuration
turning over the earth with our predatory eyes. We are the field turned over and under.
We want to preserve our singularity. We can no longer look at each other.
(“Neighbors (I)”)
The small tragedy of neighbors failing to look at each other is compared and equated to questions of eternity. The microcosms of a cul-de-sac, a family, and a writer with their pen mirror the drama of the larger world and require special attention. With the skillful blending of his own words with those of others, Biegelson’s work addresses both extremes as equal, though such a stance is complicated:
We don’t really speak anymore
of what it means to be human. As if we were dying.
We speak of clothes and their cast. Of cars and rigs
mangling people. Of grievance and violence. Shuttering
or drifting toward a mass extinction. Can we convince
ourselves that we are real.
(“The New Light”)
Again, what is poetry’s role in responding to our present moment seems to be the question at the heart of these complex lines. Can art reveal our humanity in the face of dehumanization and isolation on the global level? Slowly, the poems in Of Being Neighbors build into a clear yes. “Even you are responsible,” Biegelson’s speaker warns us, “to more than you. / What is light. What is rain. Now a metaphor” (“Notes on the Winter Holidays”). Life and art blend in almost Gertrude Stein fashion here to emphasize this yes. Biegelson challenges us to see the world and respond:
We are witnesses to our own evolution…We are the genderless sea heaving upon the
breathless shore. The tired. The poor. The masses. ‘Yearning to breathe.’ But what we
need is (not) also. What we need is. Is. No adherents. And oxygen.
(“Neighbors (I-X) Revisited”)
The mosaic that is crafted by Biegelson’s blending of his words with the words of global as well as distinctly American poets, artists, pop culture icons, and philosophers is sprawling, a complicated image of the present moment, of what it means to be good neighbors. How can artists add their piece to this puzzle? The speaker says it best in “Henny Penny Blues,” “We cannot / be quiet even in our most intimate whisper.” This is deeply human writing elevated by appeals to a muse that the author can’t seem to shake, even if he wanted to. Writing is vocational, and poetry is vital. The personal is truly political. Evocatively four-square, Of Being Neighbors raises questions of responsibility and impotence that cloud both the parental role and task of the writer in the modern age. “We’ve been thrown back onto the shards / of questions we thought we had answered,” the speaker further posits in “Henny Penny Blues.” In the face of questions, Biegelson writes, Biegelson raises his children to be good neighbors. Bearing witness is art, and art is something greater than survival; in fact, it is how we find our “footing in depthlessness” (“Only the Borrowed Light”).