Book Review

Whale Box
by Lauren Bender
Publishing Genius Press, 2007, $4.00
http://www.publishinggenius.com/wbdetails.html

When the reader opens Whale Box, the first page of the book has a picture of a cardboard box of the bar Dionysus in Baltimore—apparently with the poet, Lauren Bender, inside. It was from inside this box she read her poems at a reading at said bar. She knew that some poets after her were going to be reading poems about Heraclitus, which got her thinking. "Thus I imagined a story about Heraclitus inside Dionysus, who, naturally, became a whale," she writes. Alhough this is exactly the kind of leap one should make as a poet, and although it's an interesting premise with some beautiful moments, Whale Box as a whole is slightly uneven.

The opening poem is an exchange between D and H, with H inside D, with many obligatory mentions of wine for D and weeping for H (he was known as the "weeping poet") and then an "I" voice enters, presumably the poet's, and goes on what seems to be a stream-of-consciousness journey, which appears to have little or nothing to do with H or D, although the word "whale" is used a few times, in places such as "I don't know if you know this,/But Rush did a song about the Whale." This journey comprises the bulk of the book, spanning subjects such as Stephen Sondheim, thermoplastics, patriotism, friendship, animal husbandry, and pies.

The poet returns to H and D at the end, but there's no real indication of what took place between them. The whale/D is dying; H is drunk. Despite the gap in their narrative, and the lack of cohesion, Bender handles this part well. There is a good sense of the formal, epic tone required when or relating a myth—established or constructed for the purpose of the poem:

"And The Obscure was intoxicated, going mad from wine, and The Liberator still around him buoyed toward lifelessness. And with the force from the heavens a great gust rose the sea, and Heraclitus was afraid."

It's clear that Bender has an understanding of her subject—the people and the history—but she has not adequately translated it through the poetic medium. The result is more riddle than poem, which is, oddly enough, exactly the problem Heraclitus was seen to have had. He was known as "the riddler," oftentimes writing unclearly and obscurely. As a result, the information contained in Whale Box is a mixed bag, where one despairs of finding meaning. This is becoming, more and more, the norm in poetry: meaning is kicked to the curb, considered "relative," or to be made up entirely by the reader from the pieces provided by the poet. It is certainly not a new idea, actually one that hearkens back to language poetry from the 60s and 70s, and often it is full of paratactic syntax (the juxtaposition of very dissimilar images and fragments). If the point, however, really is to write as Heraclitus—obscurely—then this technique would seem to be is a poor use of the reader's time and this poet's gift.

The best moments are when the poet follows and develops an idea:

I am so afraid of being afraid
That event the richest coffee in the world,
Handcrafted by Colombian artisans,
Can't bring me back.
Scientists call this,
"writing poems on the day of the reading."

Or the following:

Is this your fish?
I found it choked to death in my hands.

That's really headed somewhere, a true, marvelous image/line. The next line, however, leaps as far away from the sea and the story of H and D as one can get:

"here are five words to do with the Wild West: Calamity/ Expanse/I can't remember the other three."

Another lovely, lyrical image is

Bridged the gap with the body;
Bridged the bridges with more bridges.

The next line, however, is about the bar (where the reading is taking place) being a bathtub in which the audience and the poet are sitting, so we are again ripped away from what might have lifted us from the poet in a box in a bar.

In the end, the book can't move past that premise/metaphor. Bender continually returns to discuss being inside a box, being in a bar reading poetry, writing poetry. A case could be made for weaving the two stories together—that of H and D, and the poet in the box, but that line is never fully drawn, the dots never fully connected. In such a case, the poet would need to play the role, however self-consciously, of H, which does not happen. H and the "I" are very much separate.

One feels that the story of H and D should have been the privileged subject of the poems; the leap into that narrative is what should have been made from the original, lyrical premise, but it remains one that is never fully addressed or developed. This is unfortunate, because Bender seems very capable of doing it justice. This is borne out by a stand-out stanza of power and force near the end of the book, a promise of what might have been:

Whale, God, Liberator.
Greek, Turk, Obscure.
Struck down at the zenith
Of their affair.
What to do with all of this plurality?
Their steady weather to part the seas apart,
To parse the chaff and the grain.

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