Simple Machines
Barbara Duffey
The Word Works, 2016
ISBN 9780915380992
Paperback, 90 pp.
$17
From time to time, after I read the last line of the last poem in a book, the whole project clicks. The boundaries between poems dissolve and the work itself becomes Art. It’s as if the poems are gears turning toward this final realization. At first I have no reasons—for those I must ponder and re-read. But usually the click happens when it appears the poet has cut all unnecessary words, lines, and poems and arranged the rest into a whirring “machine made of words.” This happened when I finished Barbara Duffey’s second book of poems, Simple Machines, which aptly won the 2015 Washington Prize (The Word Works). It’s a must-read book for all lovers of poetry as well as readers with affection for physics.
The book’s epigraphs bring readers quickly up to speed with Duffey’s philosophical thinking: Isaac Asimov’s definition of machine, William Carlos Williams’ definition of a poem as a machine, and a quote from Donna Haraway’s “The Cyborg Manifesto,” which yokes machines and human bodies. And the second poem in the book, “Diagnosis: Diminished Ovarian Reserve,” gives us the physical context for her exploration. Simple Machines is about the limitations and possibilities of biology and technology, using properties of material and theoretical physics as tools to plumb the emotional depth of infertility.
Highly distilled, often short poems using one simple machine as a metaphor comprise the first section. Duffey’s subtle and superb didacticism, which illuminates ways of reading, is shown in “How Simple Machines Work.” The poem opens with “Rain on a neighbor’s shutters, the sound of / learning someone else is pregnant” –such a wrenching and memorable beginning—yet turns to its real subject, the power the beloved has to “winch me back” despite infertility’s emotional toll: “even though you / lose heat to friction every time the rope / rubs against the spool as it’s wound and wound (11-13). Duffey articulates a complex emotional state via the metaphor of the machine, which gives, as all good metaphors do, a path toward understanding.
Each poem in this section does the work of metaphor, just as each word of “Mason Jar” vibrates with intensity, gaps and white spaces sharp with meaning. She grabs us in the first three lines, “Fetch me an air baby, / the kind who can live without // soil,” and pulls us closer when the speaker becomes “a trap sealed with a / screw” (9-10). When she juxtaposes the implied heat in the lines “embryos can induct / electricity in // growing cells” (16-18) and ends with “I’m like ice; my calling / is preserving” (19-20) any danger of overstated emotion evaporates, leaving us with stark emptiness.
A quote from How Your Body Works: A Trip Inside the Body Machine (Hindley 1975) frames the second section by listing activities a body can do that a machine cannot: have new ideas, make jokes, change its mind, have a baby. The poems that follow critique these assertions and complicate the body-as-machine metaphor in, at the very least, two ways: form and research. Formally, Duffey uses “mechanical” moves in her own compositions: the erasure poem and the cento. To create a cento, a poet borrows lines from other writers and collages them together to form her own poem. An erasure poem, by contrast, deletes words, phrases, and sentences from an already existing text to create a poem. These constraints enable Duffey to mirror the constraints of the body—create with a limited pool or use the material of others—to create her own arc of meaning. Research-wise, the bodies of work she chose to collage or erase—scientific papers, computer science lecture, technological treatises, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—allow her to argue with Hindley’s assertions and explore conception and failures to conceive “naturally.”
Duffey enacts, on a textual level, the technology of insemination, adding, deleting, and moving words. She uses Vernor Vinge’s article “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive the Post-Human Era” to compose the erasure poem, “Or Change Its Mind,” one of the best examples of the how erasure creates both fluidity and fragmentation of idea and syntax. This poem opens with these lines:
Wake up, intimate. Let me
make inventions, “what ifs” in our heads.We are the lower
animals. Our models must
be discarded as we move
beyond control, runaway
humankind, the tools of
rabbits—
The speaker philosophizes about the process of conceiving with such distance from physicality that new life is reimagined to be “pieces of ego / can be copied and merged.” The results of her process are beauty and poignant insight, yoking the weight of association to her subject matter. “Cento: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley” does this amazingly with the open two lines: “It was with these feelings that I began / the creation of a human being.” Readers know how this happens in the novel—a piecing together of other bodies in a lab—and what becomes of this endeavor; this knowledge both complicates and tugs emotionally since we already know, by virtue of other poems, the speaker’s yearning to have a baby.
The number of different emotions that flash through this slim collection is voluminous yet never overdone. “Inclined Plane,” which closes the second section, is a great example. The speaker begins pissed off at others’ words of advice concerning infertility—namely, that it indicates a baby is “not in God’s plan,” but midway yields to the sense that she felt her child, whom “the doctor and his art, / that acceleration // of my milk and family” brings into being. This poignant shift belies its meaning; it’s science that answers her desire.
In the third section, Duffey pushes the body-machine metaphor toward phenomenological ends. She opens with an invitation: “I want you to be a cyborg too, Reader” and lists the supplies (paper and bone folder) we’ll need for our Poem Machines. For each way to create a poem machine—there are three—Duffey gives readers the visual framework, composes lyrical directions, and writes an example.
The didactic poems enumerate ways to copy, cut, and fold paper to shift words and compose poems. Co-creating readers are free to manipulate the works and interpret at a much more intimate level than other books of poetry ask us to do. Duffey also pens other poems in this section, some unhinged from the margins and punctuation, others that mirror the forms of earlier poems (and speak to them directly). By the end of the book, we as readers are a bit unhinged, too, our perceptions of what can happen in a contemporary book of poetry challenged. Duffey brings us—and her narrative arc—back to a middle ground of form (distilled yet open with strategic use of white space) and emotion, a hedged hope. “I, Eternally Opening,” addresses “You, // baby,” (6-7) ending with the final image of “a corner of a lip / tipped up, /this time.” With that sense of closure, I think you, too, will feel this book click into Art. May its whirring poem machines keep you coming back to reread; the poems yield more richness each time.
Poet and memoirist Christine Stewart-Nuñez is the author of Untrussed (University of New Mexico Press 2016), Bluewords Greening (Terrapin Books 2016), Keeping Them Alive (WordTech Editions 2010), and Postcard on Parchment (ABZ Press 2008). Her piece “An Archeology of Secrets” was a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2012. She is an Associate Professor in the English Department at South Dakota State University. Find her work at christinestewartnunez.com.