Ekpyrosis, according to the Internet, is an Ancient Greek term that means “conflagration.” And, according to Google’s number one search result, Plato and the Christian Bible claimed the world would burn during a great apocalypse. It’s important to know this for Joe Hall’s poem, “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” (from Oversound 9), because it’s not entirely clear how to read Apocalypse or conflagration into the poem. In one of my readings, I see Hall in anticipation of the apocalypse. Living in Buffalo, going through the motions of living in a previously industrial city, the poet is waiting for what feels like the inevitability of catastrophe. In another of my readings, I see the poem’s paratactic structure building a conflagration on the page. Like think of the structure of fire, the concatenation of flame on flame, the consistency, the YouTube white-noise video crackling in one of your browser tabs. Or perhaps there’s another reading, where the fire in Hall’s poem has already happened. The ash that appears in the second section, the recurring references to water.
In fact, I’m perfectly happy with these multiple readings, because I don’t think the poem needs to be read for plot. There is a foreboding affect, given the poem’s overt reference to “ekpyrosis” in the title and the final line (sorry if that’s a spoiler). And I would argue the poem toys with plot when in the poem’s second section the “I” remarks on the water streaming from him joining to the waters streaming from “you”, but I don’t find the presence of “I” and “you” as guides towards a series of structured events.
Instead, I find an increasingly dense parataxis dictating the moment. How I should experience the poem’s language in the moment. An experience that feels unrelenting. Here is one of my favorite moments:
if the hospital is the university is the prison is the train
over the Buffalo River running where it is entombed and running
to meet other waters in a gathering
with everything it has been made to take
Or in later sections, where the poem slips into a steady recurrence of phrases initiated by a word like, “as” or “in”:
in the foam exploding
over what it makes the shore, in hit that vocal smooth
over the top of the tablet to say everything is going
good in this transaction, in the colorless candle of dawn,
in the glycerin taking and refracting, in soft rolling away
the peeling apart of color from color in array, in the time
already severed into now, in the way the
task app’s ding presses the sweaty hand into the hypnotic
wheel of the blender
It’s like a gathering and a disassembling at once. Where the actions all are equivalent. But also there is nothing explicit making it cohere. Just the pressures of syntax and rhythm. All these parts of the city or living in the city or being aware of your experience in a city, not that this kind of life can only be lived in a city, but these types of details are what you will likely find in an urban environment. Perhaps I should base Hall’s poetics on awareness and how parataxis gives the poet access to this way of being cognizant of the world.
And maybe that’s why I don’t want to nail down the poem’s occasion. Meaning, I don’t want to assign this poem to “anticipating Apocalypse” or “the mundane as Apocalypse” or “the parataxis of conflagrating fires!!!!” because my primary sensation reading it is a delightful claustrophobia. A crowd of language. A sedimentary rock formation of language pressing me into my reader position. The final section’s recurrent phrase is “clock in/out,” which truly breaks me for its read on work, it’s indeterminate value assigned to time when you’re “on the clock.” Yes, I can see how the poem increasingly edges towards catastrophic imagery, especially the conflated image of a van being built on an assembly line, and in the heated atmosphere of the factory it can anticipate the “sweating sex and children / and laughter in the rivets.” What an ongoingness of style and pace Hall maintains! I can only hope the Apocalypse will be as persistent!