Joe Bonomo

Hyphen
Sketching the Bridge With Invisible Ink

The lyric moment has always held the power of narrative and the heft of
a story. My long-held admiration and love for raconteurs, for friends or
stumbled-on strangers who can command the energy and attention of
a crowd with a detail-spiked story, casts my own limitations as a story-
teller into clear relief. The ebb and flow, the conscious climb up Freitag’s
Triangle, the deforesting of the brambly tale up ahead—whatever meta-
phor works for you, it never worked for me. Your stories are great! I’d say,
but never while looking in the mirror. I was too self-conscious, too ego-
driven (too ungenerous?) to lose myself in a story while leading others to
a satisfying end. This may be why I felt compelled to write lyric poems:
I couldn’t soar over the hilly expanse of a good story, so I’d land here or
there, wing-tired, and explore the moment, the detail. I was content to
explore the side streets.
A decade ago I began to acknowledge a growing dissatisfaction with
my poems. They looked smaller somehow, the ink on the page narrower.
I repeated the word spindly over and over in my head while considering
recent poems. Stick legs was another phrase that virtually announced
itself as poems seemed to heroically rise from my page and…then quickly
sit down again, winded, their skinny limbs barely up to the task of sup-
porting their bodies. My poems began to resemble Giacometti’s figures
as stooped senior citizens, and as the work became physically under-

Joe Bonomo is the author of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series, 2010), Jerry Lee Lewis:
Lost and Found (Continuum, 2009), Installations (National Poetry Series, 2008), Sweat: The
Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band (Continuum, 2007), and numerous personal
essays and prose poems. He teaches at Northern Illinois University.

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122 Hyphen

nourished, so did the subject matter. I was trying to translate the den-
sity of the moment—the side-glance of human mass that we’re blessed
with in ordinary domestic time—as a kind of prism through which many
beams shine, but my poems were failing in their lean and dull ways. And
what they had to say was becoming thin, mean, and, worse, esoteric, a
kind of sterile cipher. Around this time my wife suggested that I write
some prose.
I’d been mulling over a memory from school, an awful day when
a bunch of my classmates threw stones at a girl named Mina because
she was Iranian and Iran at that time held American hostages. In a brief
prose piece I tried to write about the incident and whether or not I was
implicated, worrying less about a beginning-middle-end then in circling
the story though the indelible images I possessed of the day and era. I
trusted that the common thread among them would be strong enough
to bind together several pages, and it did. I began writing more essays,
aligning myself with Montaigne’s exercise of “essay” in attempting to
make sense of the tones, sensations, and imagery my imagination clung
to about occasions, trivial and large. I often had no idea where I’d land.
More jagged than arced, these prose pieces began to coalesce into some-
thing more substantial, visually and thematically, than my poems. The
magnetic right margin, with which I no longer danced self-consciously,
tugged and lengthened my lines, layering them. And the discursive ele-
ment and conversational voice relieved me (mostly) of the lyric, abstract
tone with which my more recent poems had whispered, affectedly, to
my ear.
My prose natively took shape as block text, but arranged musically,
the sentences growing or shrinking as Denise Levertov observed the
phenomenon in organic poetry. I approached the page with the same
impulse I did when writing poetry: less with a subject then with a note
struck inside of myself. And so my essays naturally hyphenate, sitting
astride music and discourse, cadence and idea(s). I’ll always lean toward
the poetic with my feet firmly planted in the prosaic.

When I became interested in exploring nonautobiographical writing, I

stuck with prose. I began to work on a biography of a cult rock & roll band,
Joe Bonomo 123

living and working in New York City for month-long stretches, poring
over Village Voice microfilm in the New York Public Library, researching
fabled neighborhoods and bars. As a (very) poor-man’s Joe Mitchell, I was
satisfying the urge to document an interesting era and world, but I felt
the pull toward a more imaginative engagement. I’d become especially
enamored with art installations, those lively, dimensional, arranged-
teasing of our environment. One of the last poems I’d written had de-
scribed an early-1980s installation on the abandoned Lansburgh Build-
ing in old-downtown Washington D.C., where black cut-out figures had
been mounted along the exterior ledges and windows, appearing to be
scaling the building in a creepy-crawly manner. It had been an arresting
and unnerving urban image.
When my attention turned to writing prose some years later, I revis-
ited a poem that I’d written that had described a wholly-fictional instal-
lation visited by a first-person persona; I relined the poem as prose, and
was immediately struck. I created each installation fictionally, though
many exhibited details borrowed from actual installations I’d visited
or read about. Whatever “story” or “discourse” there might be in my
description of any given installation was suggested and evoked by the
arrangement of items. In essence, I was describing a poem with prose,
was reporting on a visually poetic array, and the energy ignited between
the lyrical and the reportage felt new, and very interesting—a compound
of sorts. The prosody was pulling at the poetic to get into the game, to
tell, to list, to name, to document, to report, to offer history, an artist’s
bio or manifesto; meanwhile the poetic was demurring, hoping that the
prosiness would shut up for a second, be content to linger in the evoking
of idea and concept by a still and quiet display of items and figures.
These Installation prose poems began to tell a story. I imagined the
same visitor at each installation, a curious museumgoer both eager and
tentative, as each exhibit became weirder and stranger, luring him into
a magic realist afternoon that accumulates as a story or a novel does.
Encounters with other nameless visitors underscore the humane center
of the installations, the pooling together in the wake of great art. Aban-
doning a conventional narrative arc, I simply dropped this guy into each
room and watched the top of his head lift off. He’ll leave that museum
124 Hyphen

at the end of the day a very different man, the world having been re-pre-
sented to him in refreshing, startling ways.

Meanwhile I read, and reread: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, and

Robert Bly, and I rediscovered Russell Edson. Edson’s work has held up
well since the 60s; his prose poems are smart and imaginative, the sur-
realism and humor always finding firm footing in a recognizable world.
Contemporary writers such as Tony Tost, Sarah Manguso, John D’Agata,
and Joel Brouwer are producing vigorous, elastic prose poems as inter-
esting intellectually as they are formally. Loitering happily at the prose/
poetry intersection in journals such as Quarter After Eight and Sentence,
I see that there are many writers who are naturally drawn there.
I’m attracted to writers extending the size and shape of the prose
poem, often to book-length; if a prose poem extends to several pages
or more, it can be read as a lyric essay: D’Agata in many of the Halls of
Fame pieces, Brian Lennon throughout City. In this vein, D.J. Waldie and
Robert Vivian are two writers who remain underappreciated. Waldie, in
his brilliant Holy Land, creates a lyric map—if such a thing can be said
to exist. Waldie’s worked in a civic position in L.A. for decades, and his
sometimes-fragmentary memories of growing up in mid-century subur-
ban Los Angeles dovetail with accurate and clinical reportage of the area’s
tract history in 316 poetically arranged segments that suggest nothing
less than an aerial-view of a suburban neighborhood captured in rev-
erie. A characteristic Vivian essay in Cold Snap as Yearning expounds
upon a single image or a simple narrative moment, indulging in medita-
tive vertical time as the rest of the world rushes forward, absorbed with
itself. He seems nearly obsessed with Walter Pater’s observation that all
art “constantly aspires toward the condition of music,” and with Mal-
larmé’s notion that “the dream” of art is to suggest rather than to name.
Vivian’s lyric essays are less about anything solid, really, than about lan-
guage and the imagination, and memory’s stubborn insistence that both
must give shape and substance to the world as perceived. These qualities
give Vivian’s best work a tenderness and subtlety, a prose-poem marriage
of declaration and hush.
Joe Bonomo 125

Although the prose poem has been with us for centuries, it feels new.
There’s something about our loud world, the daily collision of thought
and noise, that’s hospitable to the form. Postmodernism recognized cul-
tural hybridization decades ago, and the further we are away from the
formally tumultuous 70s and 80s, the era of collapsing definitions and
crowded boundaries, the more clearly we see the inevitable ascension
of a form that natively blends the lyric and the declarative. The line be-
tween the poetic and the statemental blurred as a consequence of the
speed with which we live and perceive, inside of an era that welcomes
and encourages The Hyphen. It’s an obvious conclusion that this form
will emerge as a major genre in this century.

Poems
On the floor in front of you...
A large, well-lit, white-walled room. You walk to a red line painted
on the floor.

On the floor in front of you is a white-chalk outline of a body. You

feel, This is very much like a crime scene and yet you don’t shiver or
look away.

There are several spectators with you. One walks to a low wood table
near the red line and picks up a book. She leafs through. Over her
shoulder you notice that the pages are empty.

She reads instructions printed on a placard nailed to the floor. She

steps toward the chalk outline and kneels next to it. She opens the
book she’s holding to a random page of milk-white.

To your astonishment she stretches her body out and fits herself
into the chalk outline. The outline matches her body perfectly, top-
to-bottom, side-to-side.

She stands, walks over to you, and hands you the book. You confirm,
leafing through the title, that the pages are blank. The cover is blank.
126 Hyphen

You step toward the chalk outline and, clutching the book awkward-
ly in one hand, sink to your knees, and then stretch your body inside
the outline. To your astonishment the outline fits you perfectly. You
feel transported, held, refreshed.

You stand up and hand the book to another spectator, who kneels at
the outline, stretches his body, and lies in a flawless match.

You pick another book up from the low table. You wish that the book
had words, you wish that you could read and understand. You wish
that the book were titled Empathy in a language that you knew.

After Serving
I stuff my cassock in a closet. I dream of the Washington Redskins. I
dream of Jenny and Wendy in pink underwear. I dream of an Italian
sub. I dream of launching myself into the woods. I dream of bleed-
ing sunlight. I dream of incense drifting into neglected corners. I
dream of incense in haze. I dream loudly, as after silence. I dream
of stink. I dream of counting sleepless heads in vapor. I dream of
the change beneath my bed, and of transubstantiation. I dream of
magic tricks evaporating, offered up into a noon sky. I dream of driv-
ing someday. I dream of the smell of ash wood, of the muddy field.
I dream that the sun will continue its slow demise, someday giving
up the far, pinched cry of the smothered baby. I dream of offering, of
prayer, of social studies. I dream of the large, chapped fingers of the
man whose hands I wash. I dream of the evacuated body. I dream of
the altar. A sacristy is a room in a church. A cassock gropes emptily
in a dark closet.