While I try as much as I can to approach each book with an open reading, I also know there there are certain methods that consistently draws me into poems. The one in Daniela Naomi Molnar’s book, CHORUS, is familiar to me, but I’m not sure what to call it. “Breathless”? “Relentless”? “Insisitent”? It’s like a torrent of impressions, but beneath the chaos there is this intention steadying the poem amidst all this activity. Meaning I don’t feel confused reading it. I feel this intentional guide firmly pointing me in directions. Like the poem is full of this assured energy; it guides the poet and reader forward. It’s a poetry of the forceful lyric.
And that’s what Molnar has in this poem. It’s what she has with most of the poems in her collection, CHORUS. Forcefulness. Perspicacity. A world of impressions that she ties together. And in the poem, “CHORUS 9 / OJITO CANYON,” she introduces the reader to a location that serves as a kind of catalyst for her thinking. Or I consider this middle section a catalyst, because I see the first section of the book as a control, like the control portion of an experiment. Where the second section might be about how the landscape of Ojito Canyon helped the poet understand a transitional point in her life, the first section establishes the poet’s perspective on her own subjectivity amidst the world. She considers that paradox where looking too closely at the self, the self reveals how it can be intimately felt but also invisibly present (”this moment / between a deadness performing born-ness / & the knowledge of being prey / between being prey / & praying”). What exists between unconscious awareness and extreme self-consciousness? What are contradictions like this but further evidence of a self’s inherent complexity? What I appreciate in the book’s opening poems are moments where this fixed-point “self” is viewed so closely, then suddenly the poem realizes there is a world adjacent to that fixed point. In “CHORUS 4 / ELSEWISE,” the poet looks at her eyes, so “the rest” of her body can sense the “metronome beat of rain in drainpipe / creamy dogwood bracts pointing all four directions.” “Chorus” is an operative trope of the book, where each succeeding “CHORUS” poem assembles a chorus of self and adjacencies to self. What is the music of this chorus? The book leaves that an open question.
However, when the setting for the book moves to Ojito Canyon, I sense the poet taking me with her on a personal journey into the wilderness, so to speak. Accompanied by a chorus of the senses. A reading I would say the book encourages as many of the titles in this section are “CHORUS / OJITO CANYON / [some further title here],” as though the canyon itself had become a lens for the poet to understand where she is in her life.
Though maybe “understanding” is too strong a word. Because these poems register a lot of bewilderment. And uncertainty. Granted, the poems have a capacity to observe the fullness of the world even as the poet registers a humitility in the face of that world. These are spiritual poems in awe of and in obeisance to nature or circumstance. The poems still understand there’s so much they’ve yet to understand. In my goodreads review, I talk about how similar Molnar’s work is to Jorie Graham and James McCorkle. I would add Karla Kelsey. All three poets’ work makes me feel the momentum of their thinking. It feels like they think in a similarly torrential style. A downpour of thinking. And the poetic language like actual rain, immerses me in its thinking. And however varied the impressions that populate the poem might be, the poem’s thinking language makes it feel like all those impressions have been pointed in the same direction. Like in “CHORUS 9 / OJITO CANYON,” I feel the body evacuating this sense of self. “Slow conversion of self at zero and in that conversion advance.” As the poem states it in the opening line. But the gesture is more the poet diminishing herself so she can be enveloped even deeper into the natural world, the natural order. She would favor being the world over her body. And yet it’s her body making the poem. And the poem acknowledges this underlying contradiction, “Keep / the body Thinking is a truceless act.”
And I know what I crave in this poem is what I crave in those other poets’ work. It’s that culture of critical discourse Kimberly Quiogue Andrews uses to frame Wallace Stevens’s work. It marks a faith in the language to just be language, but also language as the most intimately familiar tool people have for relating with other people. There are many ways to use language. To create chaos or confusion. To summarize. The bring an argument to a fine point. Andrews sees Stevens’s language arguing how valuable the imaginative world is, and how it feels to Stevens to pursue that world in his life. It wouldn’t be so far a stretch to connect Jorie Graham to Wallace Stevens, and then to acknowledge the explicit connection Daniela Noami Molnar makes to Jorie Graham via epigraph in CHORUS. All these poets establish the utility of precision. Language with the capacity to be the right words in the right order, but maybe not. And it’s how the language might gesture to the possibility of precision, and the ensuing consolation in Molnar that maybe the best laid plans to be precise keep falling victim to the larger contradiction of a self among all these other members of the chorus.