Jean Day LATE HUMAN

 

The poetry in Jean Day’s latest is funny and biting, and also disorienting in a useful way. The reader will recognize the clusterfuck of signifiers at reference in LATE HUMAN as the same ones they daily navigate and, as we are dealing with Day’s particular kind of subtly acid wit, a sharp but empathic mind organizes and sounds out the contradictions.

It’s a book that is altogether of the world the author lives in, but also more than that. Life feels altogether atomized, and can poetry do anything against it? It can be poetry,  a welter of possibilities, or a litany of sensations, truth told slant, or taking off the top of our heads, leaving us with a sense of new ways for living on this planet. But it can’t singlehandedly topple regimes, feed striking workers, or empower the oppressed. One thing we know poetry can do is help us draw together something like a representation of our material and spiritual existence. Jean Day here uses a fine-toothed presentiment to suss out the particulars of our bound agency: all at once social, political, and existential. 

        It has come to this and quickly

        The bear wants to return as wandering disarticulated ears

        Tingling in high cirrus on a handsome hundredscore

        Family plans and no night

        Cooks in their perpetual dusk kitchens

        –But would that be so great?

        And the yawning of the books that cannot include us like Crime

        And Punishment, Thirst For Love, and Daddy.

        When the rose of the sun goes away color dips

        To the gates of any city having divised a device against rising tides

        And our indiscretions. Let the humming-fly and the musk-mouse

        Scamper to their corners. Don’t forget

        Strange heat and clouds in the arena.

The script flips itself several times. Animals become omnipresent. Technology usurps all processes.  And unlike in earlier times, there is a distinct tardiness to our current predicament here. We are facing climate catastrophe and it feels like there isn’t much time, things are reaching a frothy state, nearing completion or exhaustion. We might begin to feel we are Late Humans.

The Late Human however remains an inquisitive animal, so it’s no surprise that stringing together an array of facts to look for a pattern is a popular compulsion. I think this is because we are looking for a picture of the world that makes sense, off bleary-eyed down wormholes, link-thru-link, searching for the next moment of clarity.

Commonly, the Late Human is trying to assemble a logic that lends at least coherence to the seemingly random events that we are supposed to be so invested in. Coherence, however, is not to be found. The senses are deranged for profit, and signs invite the consumer to participate in the manufacture of virtue. Remixing and matching disparate reference points to form a locus of curated desire, Capitalism is the ultimate bad mashup DJ.

Likewise, poetry invites us to engage in a kind of play between disparate phenomena, but it can also show glimpses of how things might be other than they currently are, how a break, or an opening created by some logical leap can remind us of the possibilities of existence. The Modernists showed that poetry can be a kind of intrepid world-building, but there will remain unrefined elements in the text, linguistic feelings that rhyme with sensations, a play of music and ideas that convenes a larger range of harmonic convergences. What Jean Day’s LATE HUMAN invites the reader to engage is something closer to the latter sentence than to Modernism’s nascent world-building. And yet it does not shirk big questions. The text has a voice which is searching for both meaningful fissures and meaningful connections, interrogating the riddles of late post-modernity in the process. 

Jean Day has been at it, and presumably, really good at it, for a long while now, and LATE HUMAN displays a practiced adroitness with words and signifiers, animated by a witty speaker who sustains pathos as well as a keen sense for the music of verse. Jean Day can be very funny, at times copping the voice of a movie character, a wisenheimer, cribbing song titles, steered by an ear, and mercurial. As ever, the reader finds themself transported from and back to the world. 

What LATE HUMAN has to say about sociality, about both pre-and post-COVID life is disturbing. A number of random and off-putting questions appear throughout the book’s five long-ish sequences, troubling our balance in useful ways. The first questions that appear, in WHERE THE BOYS ARE, are bracketed and then double-bracketed, and set a tone that is searching and beguiling at the same time:  “[Who am I?]/ [[And for what?]]” This is preceded by two declarative lines: “Masked I go forward/ Naked I withdraw”.  Elusive moments of momentum are succeeded by startled vulnerability. You lose your way, you find your way again. Much later on, its suggested that one can always “inhabit memory’s/ stupid loops”. I find this couple of lines especially resonating. In Simon Reynolds’ RETROMANIA, he writes of a chronic nostalgia that has gripped culture, seemingly rendering it unable to produce anything truly new. In Adam Curtis’ recent documentary CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD, Curtis traces the development of the individual as kind solitary, Super Mario-like actor installed in a long attenuation of history and politics, events nonetheless mutating at breakneck speed, always some new boss level waiting to be discovered, with no real reward beyond.

As in the work of the late Mark Fisher, the reader may detect a lament at the cancelation of the future. The future is, after all, a way forward as much as it is a concept of time. But in a hyper-individualized matrix of plausibilities, political agency is randomized, and there are only lateral moves. 

What we get from LATE HUMAN then, among other pleasures, is pure possibility, sonic language and found speech, the quick transfer of meanings and context, a deft weaving of our stories never fully coming into sharp focus, rather given meaning by their unfolding, guided by a just-reliable-enough narrator. Day writes mostly in the lyric mode, the narrow lines and occasional structural discombobulation of contemporary verse which the reader may define as “post-avant”, but the scattershot is like our world’s scattershot, and in the reader’s hands it might become a tapestry of echoes and rendezvous. We’re not given the full story or the meaning, but in our minds we can grasp their palpable imminence, something like the prophetic potentials that haunt contemporary poetry. Toward the end of the book, we encounter an indented, at times italicized, at times exasperated series of questions where finally, the speaker asks in suggestive italics: “Do I hear free verse?” It’s a strange thing for a poet to ask maybe, but also a marvelous moment of self-consciousness. Is the speaker wanting to know whether the free verse in question is audible? Whether it is already there but hidden? Whether it is somewhere near in the offing, and tantalizingly soon-to-be available? Day has managed to string together illuminate associative chains that subtle in their deviance from syntax.

I wonder if a long period of experimentation in poetry, as well as other art forms, has not prepared us to approach things in a fresher, more meaningful way, where meaning as such can be gleaned in a much wider variety of forms than we had known before.

Late Human is available here from Ugly Duckling Presse.