Aufgabe 6 Pontius Silas

It’s Raining Axolotls and Vinegarroons: Simone Muench’s Lampblack & Ash *

Pontius Silas

The opening lines of Simone Muench’s Lampblack & Ash are its velvet rope and curtain. “I’m like you, my dear,/ a leafleteer of belle-lettres./ A fan of lentissimo,// doloroso.” The implied confidence between speaker and reader in these lines—that you too are a logophile, not simply a fan of the humanities but of literæ humaniores—will either resonate with a reader or bode warning: ‘Abandon all abridged dictionaries, ye who enter here.’ Unquestionably, Muench has a more than friendly relationship with words (read the pretty white dress of her poem “Pretty White Dress” as a sheet of paper for proof). With titles like “The OED Defines Red Hot” or “The Disease of Pronouns,” language is more than Muench’s medium, it is often her muse. Yet while the Muse and Muench could easily be the ‘you and I’ relationship that permeates this collection, it is certaintly not the only reading. The presence of Language as such, from the explicit mention of vowels, asterisks, “the elegance of the letter f,” literary terms, and other linguistic hardware (“you/ perched like a comma in the middle/ of a sentence, circumscribed but alive”) to the mention of poets, literary theorists, and the outright apostrophe of Language (“Poem marry me.”), leaves no doubt that Muench intends a layered reading of her work. As such, I would not deny, as the collection’s anomynous book-flap blurb purports, that these poems “explore the layered dangers of sexual love, and/or lust,” even though that particular exploration covers a lot of well-charted ground and misrepresents, for the sake of sex appeal, far more interesting aspects of Muench’s work. Nor would I discount the influence of the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos (‒), whose poetry Muench employes to partition Lampblack & Ash and after whom one of her poems is titled. Desnos may very well be Muench’s other, her ‘you,’ the muse that inspired this collection. However, seeing how widely the poems of Lampblack & Ash vary in style and subject, and as all twenty-eight of these poems have been previously published in this or that literary journal, the Desnos epigraphs read with an air of afterthought. Are the epigraphs beautiful? Yes. Thematically relevant to Muench’s poems? Somewhat. Essential framework? Questionable. As for the poems themselves, Lampblack & Ash reads as a collection of curiosities, for as with any Wunderkammer worth its cabinet, Muench’s showcase draws on the intricacy of nature (naturalia), human oddity (arteficialia), and the mysterious relationship therein (scienticifa). In the vitrines of her pages, one discovers “an architect of petals,” “a man who…barks at his car,” “a witch 251

disguised as a stem of snapdragons,” “cicadas that decay into lace,” and such an abundance of flora that I’m convinced the poet moonlights as an amateur botanist. While the diction in these poems can be outright esoteric (i.e. loup-garous, schizocarp, axolotl, satinspar, vermeil), it is appropriate to Muench’s curio-program and worlds away from the indecipherable hyperlexic wordscapes you might expect from someone employing such vocabulary. Her genera choices are similarly arcane: bestiary, fairy tale, herbarium, dictionary entry, malediction…Like the curiosity cabinets of the seventeenth century, Muench’s collection is as much a testament to her fascination as it is her humanist education. Thankfully though, her curios are rarely opulent, drawing instead on the magic desuetude of garage sales, prosody, regionalism, second-hand dresses by the rackful, and a diaries-ofstrangers aesthetic.

BOOK INFO

Lampblack & Ash, Simone Muench Sarabande Books,  Paperback,  pages $ . I S B N : ---

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