Grotesque Tenderness
Daniel Cowper
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019
Review by Mark Grenon
Flannery O’Connor wrote “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” The paradoxical title of Daniel Cowper’s first full-length book of poetry, Grotesque Tenderness, daringly asks us to consider how our potential to be tender can be distorted to the point of such abject violence.
Julia Kristeva saw the poetic catharsis of experiencing the abject in literature as a way for authors to shield themselves from the abject by immersing themselves within it. Perhaps this is why the poems in Grotesque Tenderness are spiked with the at times almost apocalyptic energy of horror, arson, cruelty, suicide, pedophilia, murder, and genocide.
The first and potentially most controversial section of the book, “The Life and Times of Sextus Tarquinius,” explores a twentieth-century take on the brutality of the son of Rome’s last king, whose rape of the noblewoman Lucretia led to her suicide, and, consequently, to the fall of his father’s rule and to the first Roman republic. In a note regarding this section, Cowper writes: “I believe that acknowledging and understanding our innate potential for monstrosity is a crucial step towards preventing that potential from being realized.”
For the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. “The Life and Times of Sextus Tarquinius” is a sequence of narrative poems about twenty-five pages in length that blends myth and the historical events leading up to the Second World War, and almost seems a direct response to Adorno’s statement. The narrative moves quickly, telling the story of a Jewish family, the Tarquins, who are living in France in the 1930’s. They move to Krakow to escape anti-semitism, only to find themselves vacuumed into the murderous vortex of the holocaust in Poland. Sextus manages to escape internment in the concentration camps and ends up living at times like an almost feral child. During the war, he loses his mother, an event captured with great pathos in the lines “Mother’s ashes / cycle mutely through the troposphere.” The narrative leaps forward nearly fifteen years to create a picture of another sort of tyranny, life in communist Poland.
In the early sixties, Sextus, whose life is modelled in part on Roman Polanski’s, finds himself in Paris, where he has become a filmmaker, and by the late sixties he’s living in Beverly Hills, married to an actress, Eve. While in London, he receives a call that his wife and unborn child have been murdered in a ritualistic, and perhaps occult manner, a scene clearly based on the murder of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson Family. The scene depicted here is indeed grotesque: it is vile imagery, pure terror in the vein of Greek tragedy, or like so much of the fare we encounter in horror films and gritty crime shows. To greatly complicate matters, by the mid-70’s in Los Angeles, Sextus has become a pop sensation as a filmmaker at the same time that he is revealed as a sexual predator. There is no explicit argument here that he lost his tenderness, that is, that he has become predatory and violent, as a result of the traumas he has suffered, but at the same time, his having survived these traumas can’t be separated from the person he becomes. With distinct echoes of Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” the poem “Macbeth” closes with the poignant lines “What / did Sextus try to lose, hurtling through / this underbrush of flesh?”
“Notes for the Sentencing” makes for difficult reading, as Sextus recounts how he drugs and rapes a young woman named Lucretia, apparently confusing her with his dead wife, a scene that is made even more repulsive by what’s revealed in these lines: “Even then you hissed / no to yourself, and no again, / until we flinted off a third heartbeat between us.” A man whose youth was robbed by the calculated mob brutality of the holocaust, and whose wife and child were ritualistically murdered, becomes a sexual predator in a refractory cycle of trauma and violence. He is, of course, individually responsible for these crimes, but they are also wound within the vagaries of history. Spending time inside Sextus’ fictive mind is akin to the oppressive feeling of being immersed in the transgressive poetics produced through the characterization of Robert Musil’s Moosbrugger in The Man Without Qualities, Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, or Anakana Schofield’s Martin John in her novel of that name.
In “Regrets,” the second section of the book, the speaker of these lyric poems, as a kind of cross-country East meets West flâneur, vacillates between the idyllic setting of Cowper’s childhood home on Bowen Island to the less than idyllic urban setting of Toronto. At the same time, the quest for home, and the exile that helps define it, gives us a glimpse into what defines tenderness, a sense of being rooted in one’s place. When it departs from the macabre, as it often does, Grotesque Tenderness is in many ways a series of love songs to Bowen Island. The meditative music (so full of subtle attention to formal verse in its alliteration, assonance, and half rhymes) employed in its descriptions of the trees, birds, mountains, and bodies of water is both wonderful, and filled with wonder, as in this quatrain from “Secret Water”:
We spooked a late-season fawn
from his den: born
scrawny, born to starve, he
skittered away over the rot-soft duff.
Amidst the feeling that the natural wonders of Bowen Island possess a secular sacredness, however, there’s the implicit lament that this bounty is ephemeral, and that violence and death forever lurk within the pulse of life.
The idylls of home and the natural order of Bowen Island are further threatened by the presence of what we encounter on the book’s cover: a kind of kraken-type creature, an oceanic Cthulhu, which in later sections of the book is referred to as “Mindless Thing,” a force of unnatural evil, a potentially unstoppable force that not even the beauty of Bowen Island can quell. In Part V’s “Abiogenesis,” the speaker struggles with the “Mindless Thing,” which also takes on the character of a digital Leviathan:
So scared I read my iPhone on the train,
gratefully fugue out on ad screens in lifts
instead of looking at the other suits,
afraid of what I’d think of, if I thought.
More than anything I’m afraid of you.
I snail into whiskies after work,
the joint smoked alone on my backyard stoop.
Afraid of the stain of your silhouette
I bask in the laptop’s solace,
drink ego and eros from the twittering net.
Perhaps what may preserve tenderness is mindful consciousness, whereas the evil of an amoral world, what Cowper imagines as “Mindless Thing,” the violent cycle of life and death in indifferent nature, has its counterpart among humans in moral evil, the grotesque nature of what we do when not bound by morality, which threatens even those who aim to be aware of and fight the “Mindless Thing” within.
These lines from “Principles of Conduct” have a visual force worthy of David Lynch’s searingly surreal cinematography in the third season of Twin Peaks:
It plays on loop archival footage
of star entrails spilled on Nagasaki,
human puppets feeding furnaces
with copies of themselves.
The pronoun referent for “it” must be “Mindless Thing”. In the end, not even on Bowen Island can the thinking, ethical self completely retreat into the peaceful hermitage of nature, not when there are such horrors as holocausts and nuclear weapons.
Though Cowper hasn’t resolved the strains of horror and almost romantic idealism which feed Grotesque Tenderness’ unmistakable energy, he guides us into territory where sound and sense grapple with such irresolvable ethical conundrums, and maybe, as Julia Kristeva suggests, we may find a burdensome catharsis in imagining the evils of infernos, tsunamis, abject violence, and nuclear war. More than that, hopefully, to seek that catharsis in the mysteriously musical power of language may help us protect ourselves from that “Mindless Thing,” whatever form it takes, and find a home for tenderness in its source.
Mark Grenon‘s writing has appeared in The Antigonish Review, filling Station, the Hamilton Review of Books, Matrix, The Puritan, and Vallum. His video poetry’s been screened at the Visible Verse Festival, the Rendez-vous cinéma québécois, the anti-Matter Film Festival, and the SIMULTAN Festival in Romania. He’s taught ESL in the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and Chile, and lives in Montréal.