The Information Becomes Beautiful

By Eric Foley

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. —Andre Breton, Nadja

At the opening of Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye reminds us that in its original sense the word “essay” refers to “a trial or incomplete attempt.” This definition is useful to retain while reading The Laundromat Essay, an extended poem by Kyle Buckley that asks us, among other things, to “consider incompleteness as a founding concept of the technology of theory” (Buckley, 44).

Buckley’s book, not itself a failure, enacts it in various forms, exploring memory, thought, and their “failure” in forgetfulness. A precedent for this exploration is Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which Buckley cites as an influence. What Freud calls the “failure of a psychic function” (5), is in turn bound up with “The disappointment of poetry” (The Laundromat Essay’s epigraph, from Steve McCaffery). “We have to quite carefully imagine ourselves,” Buckley writes (65). This imagining, however, is fraught with difficulty, and Buckley responds by developing an aesthetic that might accurately be termed a poetics of disappointment (which must be distinguished, of course, from “disappointing poetry”).

In addition to the epigraph, McCaffery is present in the chiastic structure with which Buckley’s long poem unfolds. On the right-hand pages of the book we encounter bolded words (e.g. broken), with dotted lines leading to the left hand page, where we read corresponding passages that are often related in tangential or unexpected ways, e.g., “An essay composed of scenes of delay, and the narrative of fracturing memory” (34). This disrupts our normative reading practices, and is also reminiscent of reading on the Internet, where hyperlinks embedded in blocks of text are clicked to travel to related text. What could have been a messy concept in book form is here presented with an elegance and simplicity of design.

Jack Spicer wrote of the serial poem (a form related, but not identical, to the long poem), “It has to be some path that you’ve never seen on a map before. I think all of my books as far as they’re successful have just followed the bloody path to see where it goes, and sometimes it doesn’t go anywhere.” Narrative drive and its frustration go back to the beginnings of the long poem, where we find Odysseus’s arcing voyage home continually interrupted. Buckley is writing in the 21^st century, and so, like Don Dellilo’s Cosmopolis, a book whose 224 pages track a man’s journey across town to get a haircut, the external narrative of The Laundromat Essay is the speaker’s attempt to get his clothes from the laundromat before it closes.

As is often the case with long poems, delay and postponement are crucial. The speaker is repeatedly foiled in his attempts to retrieve his clean clothes, not so much by the figure of the laundromat owner, but by the shifting nature of the poem itself, which keeps wandering off with the speaker’s thoughts. The book is addressed to a “you”, presumably a lover, who remains as elusive as the clean clothes. The quest to retrieve the laundry and the drive to reach the beloved are linked: “The conversation with the laundromat owner starts the same way that my last conversation with you did… It’s the conversation that I’m always trying to get back to, that I’m always trying to find you in” (9).  Again, it is the action of the poem itself that frustrates the narrator’s desires: “What seems to be keeping me off track is that architecturally, at this moment, the poem dramatizes a confrontation with the laundromat owner across the street from my apartment” (9). Part of the “disappointment” of memory, thought, poetry, is how these things keep getting away from us, how they cannot be controlled. This is also, of course, an essential aspect of their wonder.

Of the strategies Buckley uses to disrupt narrative “sense,” perhaps the most effectively wondrous is the introduction of surrealism through specific images that appear and then reappear in different combinations (wolves, diamonds, stars, glass). With each of these words there is an entire lineage of their use as surrealist images that can be traced through earlier art and writing:

Andre Breton: “I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.”

Anne Carson: “When advised not to speak by doctors in the sanatorium, he left glass sentences all over the floor” (32).

Kyle Buckley: “The removal of syntax causes the sound of breaking glass in four walls around us” (24).

The diversity of art forms and traditions Buckley draws on is impressive:

Just like in the grammar of film, there are interspersed scenes of us trying to get home. We’re followed by little birds made of vaudevillian origami that are like folded paper learning to chirp. We disguise ourselves as wheat inspectors and keep to the side streets, resorting to escalators down the outsides of office buildings. Everyone keeps words under their hats. (36)

At several places in The Laundromat Essay I found myself thinking of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (the title of which comes from a poem by the uncrowned king of chiasmus, Alexander Pope) and The Science of Sleep, films where character, visuals and narrative are in constant danger of being destabilized by the shifting nature of the internal processes of memory and dreams (respectively).

I am always grateful when a book leaves me with questions. In this case, the questions were: What does it mean to fail? If failure is unavoidable, is it always a bad thing? How are poetry and thought linked? What distinctions and connections can be made between thought and poetry, memory and imagination? “Concept is a pliable concept,” Buckley writes (48). Like Frye’s definition of “essay,” The Laundromat Essay charts a course of conceptual trial and error, becoming a beautiful dream that builds and unbuilds itself as it winds through mental frustration and inadequacy. Poetry, Buckley tells us, “is a negation or succession of negations over a field. It’s machinery in which stars grind to a halt” (28).