In the Vicinity of Riches
Chris Hutchinson
icehouse poetry, 2020
Review by Mark Grenon
The title of Chris Hutchinson’s fourth book of poetry, In the Vicinity of Riches, suggests that, though the riches of late capitalism may seem to be within reach, we are irrevocably distanced from them.
To be alive during the Anthropocene is to suffer like Tantalus, the Greek mythological figure for whom food and drink were placed just beyond grasp––except as a species, our dilemma isn’t so much lacking access to abundance, but rather how to manage our riches in a way that would ensure we can survive in the face of calamitous climate change.
Hutchinson’s ninety-three-page book is arranged in three parts: “An Egg-Shaped Hole in the Universe,” “American Freeway Exit Ramp: An Allegorical Travelogue,” and “The Aging Futurist.” One could argue that the egg-shaped hole is the self, the allegory is the search for the self, and the aging futurist is the road-weary time-travelling aesthete aware of the contradictions of being a cognizant self in a world doomed to fail interminably.
Though Hutchinson writes in conversation with the tradition, his work is robustly postmodern. “Portrait of the Artist as Notes for a Movie Based on a Poem” refers to Joyce, the great modernist, while poking fun at poetry’s cultural subservience to the novel and cinema. Hutchinson interrogates the self of the pronoun “I” through the book, and although the work has lyric strains––such as the existential suffering and loneliness of consciousness and poem-making––these concerns are too embedded in postmodern tricks for us to assume that the “I” is Hutchinson’s voice. Rather, we’re met with the multiplying polyvocality of an “I”:
Still, I refuse to go crazy—
except for the pure products of American
hysteria, the Anthropocene’s late-style
aesthetic.
That’s a pretty loaded em dash—as the speaker claims they won’t go crazy, revealing that this is a concern, they point to an exception: how they’re drawn into the apparently collective insanity of the America-saturated cultural sphere, the capitalist-dominated age in which our species has become so mad that we can’t discern between the screen-mediated spectacle and the thing-in-itself:
Imagine
sitting alone in the dark, sensing not
the plot or shadows strutting on screen
but the screen itself, like the embryonic glow
of a blank page.
The poet was once that producer who searched for an escape from the Platonic cave through the communal lucidity of musical language, but now is alone, a post-self merged with the screen, having become the screen, with the screen having taken on the fecund possibilities of the blank page.
“City of Pages,” which is after Joanna Klink’s “Auroras,” recognizes that all work which comes to be, comes after that which came before. An obvious point to labour––already a heavy task––yet in the Anthropocene, the weight of tradition––so loaded with colonial injustice and environmental disaster––is even heavier. Riffing on Klink’s “The way we speak to each other has changed,” he responds with “The ways in which we know ourselves / have multiplied.” On the one hand, these epistemological multiplicities are part of our contemporary cultural wealth; on the other hand, we are only in the vicinity of that wealth in the sense that, though we’ve never known more than we do now, we’re distanced from enjoying it due to the terrible burden that this wealth of knowledge can’t seem to stop the destruction we’re collectively causing.
In “North American Figures of the Capitalocene,” the speaker muses “Unmoved, I hesitate— / in the vicinity of riches, fail again to act.” Why unmoved? Perhaps because aesthetic mastery requires intellectual distance, and let it be said here that if Hutchinson is evolving a covert Ars Poetica—and he must be, as that’s what all strong poets do—it’s in the deep doubt espoused through his distancing techniques.
Hutchinson’s futuristic poet figure lurking throughout these poems is beset by the aporia of knowing that meaning is always deferred, that the failure to act in a seemingly doomed world plagues the lure of musical thinking. We encounter this puzzling doubt in “Sentences, Sentences”:
Fine sticky strands becoming sentences,
sentences, opalescent webs
of hagiography, etc
Yet too often your ecclesiastical jokes puzzle
the gods, and so they give you back
yourself to unravel.
Then death!
This poem describes the compositional weaver, the writer (and the poet, too) as a composer of sentences, loops of sentences attached to other sentences, a beautiful spider web of language. Language is webbed in our suspect desire to make saints of ourselves, and to intersperse these sentences with profanely sacred ironies, so the self that ravels itself into a lifetime of woven sentences is never done, as the gods return the content of the self for the poet to keep grappling with the mysteries of form. And what riches, what prize awaits the litterateur? What awaits everyone else, the terminal sentence, and, quite the caesura here: death!
In the Vicinity of Riches updates modernism’s stream-of-consciousness with an Anthropocenic squall of non-sequiturs. What follows does not necessarily follow: the poet can neither relinquish the search for order and form nor fix it in a point that would be satisfyingly linear to a stable “I.” So Hutchinson says his piece, but unsays it, too—ravelling and unravelling concerns with consciousness, poetics, politics, power, media, and aesthetics—as in these lines from “Inside the Air”:
Amelia Earhart’s heart, all alone,
content’s flying dream, form’s hidden half-
truth, avant-gardist’s secret lyric
obsession, news that isn’t fake and fake news
that is, police report on police
brutality …
Evidently following Robert Creeley’s “Form is never more than an expression of content,” Hutchinson’s poetic patchwork renders content as a flying dream—that is, freedom unhindered by gravity and the weight of being awake—while form is hidden, and only half-true. But given there are no copulas in the entire poem, the enjambment leaves multiplicities dangling: Is it form’s “hidden half” or “half-truth”? The hyphen would have us expect that, grammatically, it must be half-truth. However, the word truth is cunningly separated from its hyphenic partner, as if truth could still exist, somewhere, somehow, even if unknowable.
People can no longer tell the difference between what’s true and what isn’t, between news that at least attempts to adhere to the truth, and propaganda, which intentionally obfuscates the truth. And where does the poet—represented here by the solo aviator Amelia Earhart, whose auditory heart, like the poet’s, is “all alone,”—go in such times? To pursue avant-garde language is to put oneself self-consciously at the forefront of radical shifts in consciousness and language, to be a risk-taker and explorer, like Earhart. Can the avant-gardist ever really escape their “secret lyric obsession”? Doubtful, Hutchinson’s lines suggest. But who’s Hutchinson, and who’s the speaker? And if there is a spectrum of Hutchinsons torquing an unending multiplicity of pre-cracked sentences marked by fractured voices, sticky fragments, and haunted pronouns, could we ever say?
Although Hutchinson’s aporetic Ars Poetica can be almost horrifyingly relentless, In the Vicinity of Riches playfully yet seriously grapples with the history of poetics and the English language, bringing the rage and wealth of its spirit to bear against the avoidable tyranny of where our species appears to be going. Fittingly, the last word retreats into the sonic recursion of onomatopoeia—in “What the Bees Say,” the collection closes with language imitating the music of nature, with the source of all poetry, sound, the honeyed buzzing of being and questioning and saying and producing:
I guess I’d rather be lost and turning somewhere inside
my own utterances, like a river dreaming its way
through the Pyrenees, or like a cognitive breeze
contemplating itself in the grass? This is the life
for now, at least. Or, is it? –is it? is it? is it?
is is? is is? is is? is is? go the bees …
Mark Grenon‘s poetry and reviews have appeared in Arc, The Antigonish Review, filling Station, the Hamilton Review of Books, PRISM international, The Puritan, and Vallum. He’s taught ESL in the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and Chile, and lives in Montréal.