by Tommy Jacobi

Heather Christle, The Difficult Farm, Octopus Books, 2009.

ISBN: 978-0980193831

A little over a week ago, the second edition of Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm came out, from Octopus Books, with a revised bunny and some dropped poems. I want to mark the occasion by remembering my old, outdated copy of the book, released September 2009, and how Christle’s poetry started acting like a part of my nervous system.

I’ll be as objective as possible. Here’s what my copy of The Difficult Farm looked about a week ago: bright, bee-yellow cover with a sketch of a one-eared rabbit; “THE DIFFICULT FARM” above Christle’s name written in a shaky, watery font; two blurbs on the back from James Tate and Dara Wier; and about 77 pages of book with a few little gaps from dog-ears. Certainly, it looks like it’s as “joyfully imaginative” and “surreal” as the SPD website has said, and as “fun” as Blake Butler and Chris Hosea have said. Slowly, I’ve made my marks. I drew a fat pen line between “DIFFICULT” and “FARM,” put a small, dense spot in the bunny’s leg. The corners are rough and upturned. I underlined parts of the back, like Dara Wier writing “urgent” and “careful” and “a little scary, very scary, and awfully generous to us all,” circled James Tate’s “This is serious.” Inside, I can’t even count the number of brackets, stars, and “holy shits” I’ve penned in, writing mantras, creeds, and a few knock-off theses on poetry in general. Yet for all this digging, I still feel like I’m not taking Christle’s poems—marvelous, immense, beautiful, literally wonderful—seriously enough. It’s like trying to hold a farm in the hand, easier to imagine as a cartoon than as the actual dirt, blood, and crops it is. The Difficult Farm offers us all the full, raw communication that we’d never expect from an animated bunny, and all the honesty and giving we don’t expect from poetry.

There’s no doubt, though, that this poetry has sheen and surprises, and is intensely pretty. From “It’s Not a Good Shortcut If Everyone Dies,” here are the book’s glamorous opening lines:

Yesterday, looking at a cinderblock’s
reflection—lightest grey on golden floor—
I finally understood painting. I was irate!

Just following the lines, moving immediately with the narrative, we get a nice familiar cinderblock, some dazzling flashes, a golden floor, a painting, and a crazy shift in tone. It’s a bright montage, a film—it could be enough. But there’s companionship, darling animals, and romance too—it could be a movie:

I went
door to door, to my neighbors, trying to explain
the system we actually inhabit, and they became
absorbed, so we all flapped our arms together
and though we did not fly away I finally
understood how geese make decisions. I was
crushed. I wandered the earth for eighteen years,
honking at anyone who’d listen and there were
a few who even fell in love with me, but because
they did not understand I was under a powerful
spell they could not help me…

The turns are heartbreaking in the cutest, most teen-movie way. They leave you wanting to take the speaker out to some local diner that plays Joy Division at three in the morning. This brand of cuteness certainly abounds in The Difficult Farm, whose very title, very cover suggests a poetic catalogue of MTV movie originals and fuzzy little animals. I—and the poems too, I think—want to get past this, way past this, but these warm bits are worth looking at. Poem number two, “What Is the Croup” (a title I’ll never stop guessing at), reads almost like a cento or collage of these Polaroid moments. “Monday evening I took out/the garbage. Nobody/saw me but I looked beautiful.” Like something from the Xanga archives, the lines don’t seem to do anything but document a life we pretty much already know. “Like you/I live in the area. I live/on the second floor. Even/though our altitudes mismatch/I hope you will think of me.” It’s darling enough to make me stop breathing, and then it goes on. “A good time to think of me/is now.” All this has a kind of deadpan, Wes Anderson quality to it—the quick, slightly predictable line breaks—that any twenty-something could grin at. “Like you/I live in the area” is charming because it’s flat, like forced conversation, like weather-talk, which Christle cites constantly (“and listen, the weather is good”). It’s charted territory. It’s like poetry written on bright red 8^th grade valentines. This reading is, sad to say, especially easy and automatic for me, having half-met her and seen how beautiful she is. However, it hardly gets at the poem’s careful, careful work. Note the strange, unmapped space this seemingly sweet and familiar poem enters, without flinching. The flat, dumb enjambment gets even flatter, and the cuteness dies hard: “In my brain I use the town hall/as a landmark and then I make/my way. In my way I am/keeping an order. I killed/the insect after I was born.” These lines aren’t tricky. They aren’t magic. They aren’t charming. The pictures fragment and collide and stack up in jangly piles. “Make my way” is treated like it’s supposed to have some surprising turn, and then, boring as hell, the “way” continues straight into a Foucaultian keeping of order through death, taxonomy, and birth. This weirdness is beyond personality. It’s beyond my theorizing. This is straight-up brain country, and it’s very, very scary.

Christle alerts us constantly to this issue of personality, in a book full of trees, suitors, and animals. The book’s third poem, “Variations on an Animal Kingdom,” starts out goofy, but swinging:

People love to come up to me and say

Hello, you enormous, vibrating bird,

but they are just confusing me

with my invention, an invention

I regret.

Indeed, it’s weirdly easy to read these poems in terms of traits, quirks, and habits—to put (at least in my case) an attractive human face behind it. That could be the bird here. But even without this context, the images here are stunning—poet as huge, probably multicolored bird, confused, surrounded with the test tubes, light bulbs, and beakers called up by “invention.” Then there is the gendered reading. The speaker/poet is reduced to a sexy parrot (or even just bird/dame/crone/chick/girl)—one we nonetheless meet and experience, despite the fact that it’s her own regrettable creation, her own part-deliberate performance. How much of the author’s plumage—real or mistaken—do we put between us and the poem itself? Christle’s bird could just as well be a literal invention, mechanical and creepy. Either way it’s confrontational.

Miraculously, Christle’s poetry is generous enough to let all this go on without stopping the poem. Even when I feel like a patriarchal shithead, there are countless nicer paths to take through the language. Christle seems to sacrifice the personal—her image, her mythology—in the name of the poems. “This is a televised/attempt to bring myself to justice,” she writes. “A way of reaching up to touch again/the harmless, feral sky. I won’t stoop/to demonstrate the birds’ small and frantic/black eyes, but you can probably/imagine and then probably stop.” And we can.

The Difficult Farm almost always reaches out and up, even when its peculiar language—forests, geese, historial fact, line break jokes—is most limited or limiting. Like Jack Spicer said in his 1965 Vancouver Lectures:

Now, if you have a cleft palate and are trying to speak with the tongues of men and angels, you’re going to still speak through a cleft palate. And the poem comes distorted through the things which are in you. Your tongue is exactly the kind of tongue that you’re born with, and the source of energy, whatever it is, can take advantage of your tongue, can make it do things that you didn’t think it could, but your tongue will want to return to the same normal position of the ordinary cleft-palate speech of your own dialect.

Since the Farm’s major cripple would probably be too many adorable bees or too many trees, this might sound a bit harsh. But Spicer’s examples get a little kinder and more to the point. “It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a message,” he says. “This is the way the source of energy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resisting it.”

The unique virtuosity of The Difficult Farm is in how it works beauty into this very resistance of language. Take “Acorn Duly Crushed”:

Dear stupid forest.

Dear totally brain-dead forest.

Dear beautiful ugly stupid forest

full of nightingales

why won’t you shut up.

What do you want from me.

Even as Christle crushes her lovely, idiotic trees—through address, the same way she was converted to a vibrating bird—the nightingales emerge. They punctuate her total, justified rage, making it glimmer a glimmer she then, too, snuffs.

Dear rapid bloodless forest

you are talking all the time.

You are not pithy.

You are like 8,000 swans.

With every thrash comes a new, insanely gorgeous sensation. “Dear rapid bloodless forest” is really a poem in itself. The trees sprout 8,000 otherwise graceful heads, which we feel in the chest. It goes on: “Blunt international forest./Forest of bees and of hair.” Every iteration of forest rebirths a forest. Despite the anger, the letter blocks remain. However, through combination and rearrangement, the forest’s genetic makeup seems to change with the poem. Sure enough, it becomes something active and dark, something not fully a forest:

You should come back to my house.

We can bag drugs all night.

You can tell me

about your new windows.

How they are just now

beginning to sprout.

Christle wrote recently on her blog, “Trees happen to be the furniture in my room, but they’re not real trees. They’re figures. They’re the nouns that I need to do the real work, which is all the stuff between the nouns.” The Difficult Farm isn’t here to trick you. It’s here to literally work the old tricks into real magic, to fix poetry’s lame old tools by using them again.

Given this, it’s strange that Christle would frame the book with a title like The Difficult Farm, which suggests exactly the kind of easy, domestic surrealism her poems shake off. It’s also strange that she’d wrap it in bright, cleaning-product yellow (though it’s now available in Robin’s Egg Blue). For an answer—or really, a working solution—we’re offered a poem uncannily titled “Stroking My Head with My Deception Stick.” After a weird arrangement of hair, police, and conversations with the elastic-lipped dead, it comes.

And then you hear the screaming, not to be found

within the dead, but rather in the tiny
black pot which holds the greater part

of our mass and the difficult
farm where all the hens are black

and black are the wheatfields through which
runs a black and silent wind. Thin teachers

explain to our children: if the farm is a burgeoning
snowglobe, then the screaming’s a legend, like glass.

In the difficult farm—“the difficult/farm”—the screaming half-emerges, its other half in a pot, and everything is black, and the farm is propositionally explained as a snowglobe, maybe bounded by its own legendary terror. This happens. The darling snowglobe on the darling bureau gets blown up into something that contains screaming and ash, yet somehow still burgeons. Growth becomes possible in the most charred and cold of places, even a troped-out, boring farm.

Under this new construction, which comes three-quarters of the way through the book, Christle gives us some avalanching moments as sublime as anything from Harmonium or Some Trees, and with their same emphasis on processing and simultaneity. Here’s the ineffable last third of “Pale Lemon Square.”

I feel like I’ve been studying
to become a doctor forever and now, faced
with a real-world pandemic, I’m full
of unmitigated lust for business—as though
I were sitting in a high school classroom
watching the morning’s snow foster impending
cancellations and all the attendant policies. Soon,
if not at once, the library and gymnasium will be
redubbed infirmaries, and you and I will drift
among the cots like swans in ever-wider grids.

The lines pile up like sophisticated, readable snow. There is both immense clutter and immense organization. Narrative works alongside the total change in frequency happening with every enjambment. When one thing happens, another will happen “soon, if not at once.” In the space of one written poem, snow can become policies, become swans, get dropped into a high school campus, then a storm shelter, get seen from the window, then from the sky, then get forgotten among the sweet, familiar cots. We are endlessly propelled toward the bottom, yet resisting propulsion.

And indeed, Christle’s poetry is smart enough to recognize our ability to experience all this, and generous enough to give it all to us. The brain is miraculous and immense, even sacred. On her blog, Christle writes,

If anyone would like to dress my poems in some kind of outfit, it should be a cognitive blouse. When I sit down to write, that is where I am facing, toward the brain. The brain is linked to the earth and to the past, but I can’t head straight toward them. I’d miss too much on the way. Everything is there for me in the brain. It gives me everything I need. And you have one too. And it seems likely to me they have much in common. So that, I think, is where I start.

If there’s an ethical or political project behind the book, then, it’s less capital-F Feminist or capital-S Surrealist or capital-E Environmentalist than it is an Ashberian project of being pleasant with whatever masks, voices, animals, and ceilings strike the mind. Whatever can be thought of is fair game, whether it’s schematic or moral or boring or black and white. Christle also shares with Ashbery (and Stevens) a masterful awareness of poetic momentum, her final lines often turning with the weight of everything that came before. Tough, irritating poems become worth the struggle in their last moments, exploding beautifully. “Now stand and shake that butt as though/some god were shaking it for you.”

Where Christle and Ashbery differ, though, is their framing. The Difficult Farm’s first line, “Yesterday, looking at a cinderblock’s/reflection,” doesn’t toy with the same hard, unbending, patriarchal authority that Some Trees does, opening “We see us as we truly behave.” The potential power of the cinderblock gets undercut as a reflection. Presence is lost, the glossy mirror takes over. Farm, with its big white bunny, seems to accept classic feminine associations the way Some Trees accepts the masculine—that is, it performs them, bends them, lets them energize the poems, then forgets about them and writes. Still, Christle’s poems, with their frequently TV-like pace, tend to hurry us along through their deepest, murkiest territory, in moments when we need most time. The book seems acutely aware of this, and its response is the poem “Television.” It begins, “People like surprises./Surprise! I am your uncle./And that kind of thing.” The joke is on us, I guess. But the poem goes further than mere acknowledgement. Its arbitrary surprises wind up at an overdetermined end: “Car alarms surprise/nobody. Nobody, you surprise me,/how you are always sneaking in./Ladies & gentlemen, Uncle Nobody./Nobody, this is your life.” Somehow, the speaker seems to be suddenly telling the hard, hurting truth.

These last lines, along with many other closing lines throughout the book, work to put some faith back in the line as a unit, as whole. In poems that undoubtedly reward close attention, this is an important reminder. Difficulty takes time. We need to process the poem. Like difficult Stevens, Christle’s poetry looks both backwards and forwards, communicating without warning across the page, in the faith that you’ll try to keep up. Once we make the effort, big things happen. Here’s a second look at that particularly paisley-dress-shirt-esque passage from “It’s Not a Good Shortcut If Everyone Dies,” the book’s first poem:

I went
door to door, to my neighbors, trying to explain
the system we actually inhabit, and they became
absorbed, so we all flapped our arms together
and though we did not fly away I finally
understood how geese make decisions. I was
crushed. I wandered the earth for eighteen years,
honking at anyone who’d listen and there were
a few who even fell in love with me, but because
they did not understand I was under a powerful
spell they could not help me…

The density of the action is incredible. With its near-uniform line length (a feature we see throughout the book), the poem becomes this space where door opening, wing flapping, total absorption, and physical witchcraft can happen at once—not one after the other, but at once. That The Difficult Farm can offer us this explosive mania alongside a softer, more mediated narrative, is remarkable. This, I think, is what Dara Wier meant by “awfully generous”. There is so much joy in jumping the bright, beaming hurdles Christle throws at us. Maybe that’s the poor rabbit’s secret message. When we accept our compulsion to hop, Christle’s landscape goes past itself, past its pleasant sunlight, and almost touches some harmless, feral sky.

But the compulsion is still primarily to think, and to feel oneself thinking. These are poems that read themselves as they move. Whatever strength it takes to process a word or phrase ultimately gets absorbed, recycled, becoming a part of the poem’s language. The book adds up and expands and implodes and reconstructs, while somehow containing itself. Christle seems to have opened her brain to us in the straightest, most honest ways possible. She’s even lit up and wallpapered the tunnels to get there.

The Difficult Farm is just as difficult as it is a farm, but in it, things happen in spite of the world, and in spite of the poet, and in spite of the reader, and they happen quickly, “and it is the Fourth of July/and it has been for months.”

(Spicer quotes come from The House That Jack Built, ed. Peter Gizzi, Wesleyan University Press, 1998)