Review: David Greenspan
On One Person Holds So Much Silence by David Greenspan
by Tyler Truman Julian
With a title like One Person Holds So Much Silence, it’s easy to default to a state of questioning with David Greenspan’s new chapbook. Some questions that arise from this short collection are What is the speaker withholding? and What is he inviting the reader into? Greenspan is not without answers, however. The chapbook’s answers to these questions rest in familial and generational trauma and pain, addiction and sickness, and not to mention, hope. But when it comes to silence, potentially the most nuanced and compelling aspect of Greenspan’s work, it is contained into the white and blank spaces of the collection. These moments of caesura force the reader into a poem’s overt and material silences, asking them to sit and reflect and to feel a necessary discomfort.
One Person Holds So Much Silence is a challenging read, parked at the intersection of many roads. It tugs between humanism and naturalism, narrative and erasure, and active participation and passive acceptance to cultivate a bold communal vision of poetry. The collection pulls the reader to that busy intersection with the speaker and asks, What silences do we hold? And can we hold them together?
In Greenspan’s collection, the figure of the body acts as a conduit for spiritual experience. I do not mean to suggest a kind of divinity at work, but rather a pure and transcendent significance of experience. In the long Q&A style poem, “Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the speaker espouses his life’s philosophy: “There is no blood without blood.” In the biological sense, there is no life without blood; abstractly, there is no living without a little bloodshed. Nonetheless, there rests a deep desire for living in these poems, but also flirtatious descriptions of death and decay. Both descriptions of life and death seem tied to this idea that there is no living without bloodshed. both connect to the reality of bodily experience making us human. The speaker further explores this idea of experience as life-giving, saying, “What do we think when we hear sensual. A feeling of hands along other hands, water along filament. How much more can we syllogism. All ash is tactile. Lungs are ash” (“We the Dead Balk”). This prose poem uses the page, breaking at paragraphs, jumping to the next page, asking you to sit with the images of body parts and flashes of earth. The reading itself becomes a physical act as the reader is propelled to the next page, repeatedly, to finish the poem. Several pages later, “We the Dead Balk” continues, exploring experience and humanity, but taking them further and inviting the reader to make their own conclusion: “Our body has not found a destination & will be declared stateless unless claimed before [ ]” What makes us human? What connects us to the body that is our planet? What happens when we die and individual physical pain subsides, but others remain behind? We fill in the blank.
The connection of spirit to body to earth is concrete in these pages in a complicated way that the reader is forced to come back to again and again. If they can’t fill in the blank in “We the Dead Balk,” they get more opportunities later. For example, the speaker becomes more explicit in “A Poem to Pass the Time.” He asks,
what use is a landscape
without hair a landscape meatless
pitied
…
I guess my entire body
wants to scream say please
say one person holds so much
silence
This poem provides another glimpse into a childhood connected to nature and Vicodin and anxiety and ends the chapbook. The words jump across the page in alternating short and long lines, with an abundance of white space. The reader has ample room to feel the silence, ask and answer the speaker’s questions, and participate in the poem itself. Rounding out a dynamic, communal collection, the poem is cathartic for speaker and reader, clarifying nuanced moments of the chapbook and inviting further reflection
David Greenspan’s One Person Holds So Much Silence is a haunting work, where the ghosts are not only the speaker’s but also our own as readers. Readers of this work participate in Greenspan’s project as much as the speaker himself and we may not come out unscathed, but we certainly come out better for having done so. We are asked to leap from word to word, page to page, and poem to poem, hoping to avoid the frequent white space for fear of the possibilities that might lay within it. But of course, we will fail, as intended.