Sandra Simonds’s Orlando (Wave Books, 2018) thinks through problems of living in relation to fantasy. With “the frenzied lushness of plants and water,” a language wracked and snapping, the two long poems that compose the book represent and enact an electrified sensory intensity peculiarly anchored in the unreality aesthetics of late-night Berlin clubtronica, the fringes of the American theme park, teenage sensibility, metal hotel walls, the high false sweetness of an artificial sugar, and, simultaneously, the everyday details of life as a mother, and the stormy ecology of Florida itself. The book is as “pink and furious” as Orlando, Florida—“City Beautiful,” “Theme Park Capital of the World”— where a storefront tourist order of “chlorinated / water pouring and pouring from the corpselike molten spaces, the crystalline and mechanical turns / of what is no longer human” abuts a dominant logic of fury and turbulence (weather, relationships, interpenetrating fantasy and reality). At other times, the book’s Orlando seems to be an ex-lover—one who has chased the poems’ central persona’ s children good-humoredly around an apartment, who sits on the sofa, who is married to another woman, whose wife buys a house. And then suddenly Orlando has a diner in it, has cloud cover, cannot be snowed in.
A quiet and irregular musical line of literary reference and convention also emerges around “Orlando”: Orlando Furioso, Woolf’s Orlando, Orlando of As You Like It. “Orlando” in Western literature tends to colocalize with love: unhappy love, strange and fluid kinds of love, love thwarted, rearranged, persistent. Other unhappy literary lovers appear for brief cameos as well: Desdemona drifts across a line, “Ophelia season” comes again. The grand “O” of the love lyric, apostrophe, and theatrical address makes itself felt—we “O greenest / branch hail!” We “O” a lot, actually: we also call the city/lover “O.” Names, forms of language convention, personae, and places are in a network of free-floating, emergent relation, without ever settling into an enduring pattern. It is not really clear what any of these devices and references do, other than to help establish Romantic Love as a constitutive part of the book’ s ecosystem. The ontological orders of Simonds’ s figures are inconstant, shifting, as unstable as the text’s relationship to lived experience, to material conditions, to temporality, and to adolescence, which seems to work as a “narrative doubling back on itself” in the book—a way of experiencing whose return, in modified form, guides both the affective and formal intuitions of the poems.
Ordered around a thematics of fantasy, Orlando explores a personal archive as its opening gambit—the “I” returns to their teenage diaries, excerpts of which often appear as italicized and dated quotes within the text. Significantly, a poem called “Fantasy” is offered piecemeal—the “I” first hesitates because the poem seems juvenile. And, indeed, the language of the excerpts is juvenile, hyperbolic, grandiose; the teenage self exclaims, “Oh my god, poetic inspiration!!!” declares that it does not want to be meat, gushingly admires Sylvia Plath, whose influence on both the adolescent and adult poet is palpable. The amped-up snarl-and-flail of teenage emotional extremes pervades the logic of the poems at all levels, and rules as an unrelenting steamy climate over the space that the text generates. Orlando, the city, as Simonds’s book portrays it, induces such extremes of feeling. Simonds’s wild and gorgeous, striding, comma-riddled, multiclausal lines—are they lines?—in the title poem often also represent, via teenage formulations, such extremes of feeling in the adult “I” ’s life, as do the shorter lines of “Demon Spring,” the second long poem in the book (“Police brutality makes me want to starve / myself to death and loneliness / sucks”). The adolescent voice is often cut with tonally drier references to “conceptual poetry” or “theory and long / hours of study,” or “eruption[s] of data,” but these countervailing registers feel mostly gestural, and never quite resignify the tonalities they modulate. The formal intelligence in Simonds’ s lineation, however, does sometimes allow these conflicting elements to cohere, and there are also a few choice moments where a juxtaposition of disparate registers does produce real sparks. For example:
you decided you didn’t want what you wanted, but then the effusive apology, the guilt
streaming down your mouth like grease, having eaten many chickens, having stuffed one’s
core with bold meats, black wines, and lust, what crime did you read, did I kill a rat
Here the overdetermined, familiar excess of “the effusive apology the guilt / streaming down your mouth” is cut and, somehow, magically balanced by the sheer awkward strangeness of “having eaten many chickens,” then by the odd, goth, High-Literary quality of “bold meats, black wines, and lust.” The book’s poise, when it achieves poise—always momentary, just a wavering between kinds of frenetic overdoing-it—arrives when either a formal attention to the line or a carefully calibrated balancing of gestures harnesses the sometimes too-cheap pyrotechnics of the book’s generic and modal collisions. Simonds’s ear and intuition for multiple energetic ways of folding a sense unit are the true strength of the collection.
Another example of the book’s energetic loveliness, this time from the very beginning of the first poem, also usefully condenses some of the most important ways the poem thinks about fantasy:
Don’ t make the morning come, Orlando, place of “how did thishappen?” and to what extent, your body, heaved inside the abacus moon, I begged the gods, the upward whatever, “don’ t make it happen this way,” already
too late, a dented taxi rushes off
into the palm tree afternoon, dented sun, dented hotels, shiny and sad, remote as money, the future you told was incredible and made me feel like a real poet, more than my favorites even: Frank O’Hara, John
Wieners, Alice Notley, pulled at my throat,
until I was above my own circumstance, until I could float above my life
like a moth
whose lifespan is so short but still she tries to extract some horrible
beauty from this world as she
hovers over the tender waters of sleep and I hovered there too with the
flourishing language
you offered: Oh, I was the great moth, great Suwannee River, and when
you said of yourself,
“I’ m a really bad person,” I didn’ t believe you, couldn’ t believe this
would devolve
into failure, ink of the adolescent’ s diary that comes off so easily, powder
off wings
The “flourishing” language—both in the green sense of Florida’ s enthusiastic overgrowth, and in the “purple gel / pen” sense of the extra, the supplementary, the excess, the swirl—is simultaneously an issue of semantic content, but also of drawing, of living, and of ways of being in space. Here, as elsewhere, Simonds works to multiply charge her recurrent forms. These lines also make apparent how much Simonds is able to generate a propulsive movement within the long line, even with nested clauses and repeated simple conjunctions, without resorting to a fully realized anaphoric rhythm. One of the most important contributions of the book is the way that “Orlando” marries structurally complex sense units spread over long lines to the Laura Warman–style internet affect vortex, managing to preserve the speed of the latter and some of the elegance of the former.
One other feature this moment prefigures nicely is the way a concern with “beauty” and with floating above life or circumstances (i.e., fantasy) relate to one another. It is helpful to read Orlando as an exploration of this relationship: Can one extract “beauty” by a practice of hovering with “flourishing language”? What are the limits of fantasy? To what extent is a kind of emotional reality or intensity possible without true purchase on material circumstances? The “I,” sometimes figured as a singer, is “in the dream city, the energy radiating, / and I stand here, alone, / Orlando, singing inside the song of it.” They sing in the fantastical key of the theme parks’ city, of the teenage diary archive, of the poem and vaporwave and humid salmon clouds of a Florida sunset. And this is perhaps the difficulty of the book, or the point at which the exploration of its questions discovers and develops an emergent problem. Despite the brief and familiar head nods to the evils of capitalism, calls for solidarity among women, received thoughts about the difficulties of care in a consumer society, and so on, the lyric “I” ’s persistent interest in fantasy, beauty, the unreal, the simulated, and the personal archive can often have the effect of making the poems seem narcissistic, adolescent, and unexamined. The emotions expressed often register as both inflated and flat, offering little in the way of insight or relatable reformulation, even (and perhaps especially when) the poems seem to want to redeem these gestures by ironizing them. While the overt framing of these teenage and fantasy-oriented formations as the text’s central concern does work to stabilize the disagreeable tonal effects, they nonetheless become a persistent and unpleasant note running through the book. Aesthetically, they mar the work, and yet in many ways they feel like the most real and true thing in the text, aside from the frequent pleasure that the “flourishing” language offers. But maybe that’ s the point: yes, one can live inside a fantasy, but only if one accepts the emotional logic, the relational capacities, and the relentless sensory intensity of adolescence.
Ultimately, despite the sometimes jarring way Orlando thinks through its questions, the book is a pleasure to read—its language is wild, innovative, lush, joyous. These are fast, exciting poems—they inject complex sinuous sentences with something approximating the hectic teenage aesthetic of the internet, where everything is immediate, brightly colored, unbearably intense, referentially-inclined (but with an ever-diminishing attachment to a referent), maybe a joke, deadly serious. The book’s tonal extremity and tilt towards a kind of solipsism is—almost!—saved by the fact that it makes these aspects elements of a problematics, enacts and asks them as a question, offers them as a trouble and an answer in a wet crystal forest of Florida greenery, “body sack[s],” storms, formal intelligence, simulacra.
August 2018
This review appears in Chicago Review 61.3/4.