“Drivel is what drives the lever of each cell:/it matches you for every footwork you can lay it,” Mischa Foster Poole writes in his 2018 UK poetry collection unboxing, teardown.
If that sounds like drivel about drivel, it’s not an accident. Poole wrote the 51 poems in the book while in hypnagogia—or what he describes as “that loosened state between sleeping and waking when you can sometimes hear your mind speaking to your ears.” The term “unboxing” refers to opening some much-expected gift; “teardown” is the dismantling of a piece of equipment to see if you can rebuild it or fix it. The unboxing and teardown here involve Poole’s own consciousness, which he explores half-asleep to see which words he can pull out and which ideas he can tear apart.
Poole did some editing in interpreting his own handwriting and to expand on “conceptual, aural or visual parallelisms,” but for the most part the book consists of half-coherent words and thoughts sliding around and/or bumping into each other. As he insists in the final poem, “indulge/the magic state surrealism brought to this work.”
The surrealists believed that dreams could be mined for revelatory truths and pleasingly disturbing images. Poole’s sort-of dreams are indebted to that tradition. But in their semi-conscious lubricity, they’re less committed to meaning and meaninglessness than Bretons and Dalis past, slipping across the line between Joycean wordplay and Edward Lear’s dong with the luminous nose.
Here’s one of Poole’s almost sonnets:
unboxing, teardown: Armstrong
What is the codeword aardvark or the tall say?
Many times I was struck by the arrogance of my own poetry.
He’s a comely warehouse, space behind the tough ears;
gleam as your only sum, sequestered with the afternoon
or have mistakenly? The length of his gum!
Trail out patterns like a category monsoon.
It is a postal stamp or a jiggy notary’s reach
and you’re off to the balanced whim of what we call
a city clerk or…Armstrong—fanciful erasure there.
A comes back warhorse, arm hooked into the hellomychildren such
(takes up the strip of the yellow yoghurt spoon)
takes up his stance remembering the long-haul (amen!) plant.
The poem opens, or seems to open, by asking what it’s about or what it says—“What is the codeword aardvark…?” It then (jokingly?) excoriates itself for its own arrogance, which might mean the arrogance of not providing the codeword, or of using codewords without knowing what they mean. From there the language sprawls out, sometimes examining its own meanderings towards meanings (“or have mistakenly?”) sometimes getting distracted by rhyme (afternoon/monsoon/spoon; sum/gum) or alliteration (sum, sequestered) and sometimes just warbling off into garble. The title, “Armstrong,” pops up in the middle, but what it means is anyone’s guess. Is the Armstrong here Louis? Neil? Lance? Stretch? Or is “Armstrong” just a random word starting with “a” (“A comes back warhorse”) that follows aardvark?
There isn’t an answer; part of the point of the poem, and of Poole’s approach, is that he doesn’t know what the answer is. You can follow the connections (“Trail out patterns”) and disconnections (“fanciful erasure there”) without making them add up (“gleam as your only sum”). To read the poem is to be “off to the balanced whim,” bobbing around in word slurry that sounds sometimes like a concussed Dylan Thomas reading ad copy, sometimes like dictionary definitions in a dream.
Poole uses a quote from Mallarme as an epigraph: “The poet should shut up, and let the words get on with it.” It’s not just the words, though, but the organization of the book itself which seems to have self-generated without clear method or even consciousness. One “poem” is just the word “INTERVAL.” Most poems are titled “unboxing, teardown:” followed by the first line or words of the poem. But then some (like “unboxing, teardown: Armstrong”) use a different word or theme from the poem. There’s a single footnote in the book—a footnote which is as irrelevant and random as anything else in the poems. Patterns are established and then dispensed with, just as the poems seem to adhere to the norms of syntax and logic before taking odd turns, or stumbling into dead ends, or lopping off their own heads.
Of all the books I’m reviewing in this series, Poole’s is probably the least well-known. It was released by a small press; as far as I can find it hasn’t been reviewed in any prominent venue, and maybe not in any venue at all. The obscurity is appropriate for a book that’s deliberately designed as an exploration of the writer’s idle and rapidly crumbling thoughts.
Perhaps the best part of the book, though, is that those thoughts don’t go quietly. This isn’t the exhausted, nonsense collage of Ashbery, where the gibberish exhales in controlled, cosmopolitan gusts. The words here scrabble and argue and fulminate, declaim and exhort and narrate with weird, misplaced energy. As in “unboxing, teardown: but the whale hung back,” Poole’s vacillating between land and sea, going to parties and doing coke or just hanging out on the telephone.
—oh whale, do not let them say I too do not.
Back to the water library, and underall;
wisdom of whale to take back up your quiet nook.
Poole’s water library is overflowing and all his whales are confusing wisdom. Part of the joy of unboxing, teardown is that you’re never sure, while reading it, whether you are opening some new truth or it’s simply falling apart.