On the Cave You Live In, poems by Philip Jenks.
Flood Editions (ISBN# 0-9710059-2-3);50 pages. $10.00.

    Seizures, the body’s aberrant inflection of physiological distress, might be construed as a type of extenuating reflex, parroting the mechanism of response in a negative realization. They are a serious, frequently debilitating depth-charge—autonomous in that they incur involuntary performance, a curious staccato interference of the biorhythmic norm. The disjunctiveness they factor into normal function fragments the body into separate but connected compartments of breath, gesticulation, and tension: a reflex of revulsion, a barometer of the strange. The poems of Philip Jenks incorporates this seizure pattern strikingly, a discursive reflex towards brokenness which frames his lines and saturates the stanzas with an unmistakable cadence. Instead of being a pathological occurrence, however, it enters the poems with a salutary and profound effect.

    Jenks’s debut collection, On the Cave You Live In, seizes upon strands of discontinuous meditation — performing, rather than coercing, a range of moods and insights. Whereas much American poetry contrives a strict organization of ideas, coherent like all typical and not terribly satisfying verse that abolishes the inner confidences between form and content, Jenks coalesces his themes around language which is often peripheral in its presumed scope and oblique in its descriptions. Among the artifacts that compose the Jenks universe: the depredations and dignity of Appalachian life, Biblical glosses and vatic tunings, playfully obscure confessions and catastrophic revelations. Both the apoplectic and the apocalyptic are invoked; the seizures of the singular body and its complementary body-at- large — the universe — are textualized; that is to say in kind, given texture. This becomes a complex gesture on his part, for the refracted semblance constructed out of the perceptual world is distorted further by the multiple viewings that render and hide known quantities.

    Everything is out of joint, lacking stable centers and sturdy edges. From “Twilight”: “Put your eyes in the photo room,/And get back up on the shelf./This much always fits the frame —/It’s not that you yourself/Don’t matter—you’re in the same/Shape on either side of the mirror.” Insofar that the designation dens’t put undue pressure on the achievements of a first book or the reputation of its author, this is characteristic of Jenks: nebulous, difficult, oracular. The jarred lines and broken syntax imbue unsettled, often magnificently various sequences, less blur than blend—a proliferating organism of presence, “Recombinant molecule inertia,”—not contradictory, but shifting in interest, in value, in evolving purpose. Alive and swarming, kinetic and violent: these four adjectives alone describe the impulse well.

    One’s archival imperatives might find the need to consign this kind of verse to roving and unhelpful epithets like ‘postmodern,’ ‘L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E,’ or experimental poetry. However, such official record-keeping merely demarcates the freshness of the work within a ghetto of references, prearranged agendas, and conceptual tropes which don’t express the abundance and proliferating forms found in the pages. This isn’t sufficient: the combustible energy of this collection and its arsenal of well-pitched gimmicks evades such categorization. That an unflagging concern for rural life emerges in a half-dozen poems also alienates it from the politically uncommitted or the obsessively contingent aesthetic enterprises that typify the above ascribed behavioral zones of poetry (this phrase, I realize, is an encumbrance; so are the countless camps, schools and movements of modern poetry).

    Jenks evidently concerts his movements with particular nods to or pastiches of Heidegger, Derrida, and Blanchot, among others, while subsuming their intellects to his own. Whatever his reference, Jenks usually constructs a satisfying mythos in the poetic spaces he inhabits. Spaces, and, to quote Dr. Johnson, “the interstices between the intersections,” are what occupy him and what he occupies. And assuredly, these eminently performative poems move rapturously through their sifting, shifting materials to uncover a space with which to breathe essences or excrescences or appearances in deeply.

    There are few unsuccessful poems in this volume. In the otherwise astonishing trio of poems beginning with the inaugural “Hypothetical Antipodes,” Jenks inserts a stanza about the lack of shoes in Appalachia and its appearance is perplexing. Why? Because an otherwise exquisite riff about the evanescence of personal identity becomes, unwittingly, a cri de coeur for mistreated mountain workers. In doing so, it becomes mired down in topical, politically sensitive issues head-on without the usual, resourceful rebuff of easy sums or discoveries perfected elsewhere. In Jenks such solidity becomes, ironically, gibberish. This is one of the only inauspicious detours that comes to mind. He might sometimes be tempted to load an otherwise supple poem with rhetorical bingeing. However, these minor defects are in the cause of invention, not inflated purpose, and the synergy to which Jenks aspires to in his lines comes through even in a weaker vehicle.

    Jenks adopts, with a shamanic propensity and the brio of a snakehandler (one of his many subjects), numerous eccentric guises with suitably stunning vocations. Within the spaces of these thirty-nine poems, the poet pantomimes, ventriloquizes, and summons voices and shapes impatiently with what I can only call an ecstatic clairvoyance. Whether he encounters a shred of scripture, a disheartening statistic about rural poverty, or the impreciseness of life when making its claim for wholeness, he preserves the luster of mystery and mystification, while probing all the while the justness of observation and the objects it engulfs. Jenks astutely addresses the duality of content—its knowable and inscrutable signatures, its calamitous or salvific remedies, its transparent and opaque properties. The poet dispatches himself to apprehend or disavow, emerge or vanish from the jostling, spastic world which he reflects and recreates: “like some epileptic thunderstorm/waiting for the eye.” Like an epileptic thunderstorm, Philip Jenks’s exemplary work will continue to evolve in happily unfathomable directions. Flood Editions is to be commended for publishing this fine first book.