Today, when the word “hourglass” is used, it’s more likely
to modify “figure” or “economy.” Yet, when I was a kid, we used to make fun of
a soap opera that claimed, “like sands through the hourglass, so are the days
of our lives.” But what does that mean exactly? I think they meant it like
“funny how time slips away,” as if turning it over means death? But, as a
time-measurer, the hourglass and the (electric, non-digital) clock both figure
time more as a circle than a line (even if you can’t turn back the hands of
time). The clock may be self-contained, but the hourglass needs something to
turn it over if the sands are to return to the other side, and while a clock is
thought of as measuring a day, in Krysia Jopek’s Hourglass Studies (Crisis Chronicles, 2017), the hourglass measures
the year (and maybe even “our lives”).
Many poets and writers have considered the analogy between
the day and the year (noon is like the summer solstice, midnight the winter
solstice, and evening an equinox), but viewing the seasonal cycles as the
primary scope rather than the diurnal cycle gives Jopek’s poetic sequence more
gravitas (it’s one thing to say “the darkest hour is just before the dawn” and
quite another to plead, “if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” or dream
of “second innocence” or “next time is the best time” as if it wouldn’t be
winter had you not made some dreadful error in summer):
“A clock points the exit
of bliss balanced with the least
severe
bitterness. To want so much and
turn over pliant grains
of sand without
meaning. (1)
The clock is active; the hourglass passive; time itself
seems absent. Is it the clock that wants to turn over the hourglass’s sands? Is
pointing out the exit the same as wanting so much? Is the hourglass more like
time itself than a clock is? What is time if not measured? What is time if
measured? Does the clock really start it? Like the unmoved mover, or the logos
that allegedly comes before the flesh (time)? Can measuring devices evoke the
unmeasurable?
For those who are looking for ‘speaker and situation’ to
ground this poem from these potentially infinite questions, one could this say
it takes place “in the month of winter solstice/ when the change is due to
come” (as Syd Barrett put it, setting the I-Ching to music), and, in this
sense, they provide an alternative ritual to navigate the month in which
American suicide rates are highest than the ready made pseudo-religious rituals
of secular Xmas. Of course, the winter solstice can be “a metaphor for” a
personal psychological journey, (“the illusion of starting over” 13), as if
this point of the darkest sand grain second is one with the indivisible void,
or the illusion of transcendental timelessness, where the center becomes the
conference, but I feel this book gains power if you read it in December (or in
June for Australian readers).
To “brace” for winter, to be forced to breathe in cold air
and see your breath…..It’s an “uphill” struggle, a descent into darkness, a
crisis poem, trying not to merely wait, trying not to cling so tight as to
strangle the gift. As the winter solstice approaches, one may be more likely to
feel “time’s defiant passing.” Scared of the dark and the cold, the
Anglo-Americans debate is it better to hope for spring, have a “mind of winter”
(they say NYC’s tough, well, I’m tough!), give in and embrace the darkness
(even if you have to hibernate, turn yourself off---as opposed to over—to do
so)….and let desperation have its day, aware of the dangers of pure poetry,
while “skipping backwards through the hurricane” (15). Krysia Jopek fiercely
flirts with many of these survival strategies, and finds a few to be immortal
and free (though not without a wry gallows humor; perhaps that’s what she means
by [melanc]holy). For instance, I
could call Section IX an ode to the strength of fragility (pg. 17-18), and a
no-nonsense account of the terror of being abandoned like a clock by time (or
time by a clock), and the trauma of isolation (or is it the isolation of trauma?):
“Magnetized to the floor, the character cannot arise from
the death scene, forgotten by everyone else on stage. The audience already went
home and dig cathartic holes.” (18)
But such a thematic reading of Hourglass Studies can run the risk of reducing it to “those story
facts, dust of the empirical, collage spun into pastiche by emphatic critics
stripping the coda. Everything reified; go
home.” (2), and, more intimately, Jopek’s brilliantly condensed almost
aphoristic short numbered sections become like the sands in the hourglass, the
grains of sand Blake could see worlds in (like snowflakes, no two alike); many
of these poems use the language of measurement to evoke an unmeasurable world,
even as the contemporary socio-political world makes occasional appearances
(section III, pg. 5-6).
One of the greatest pleasures of this book is the severe (if
not necessarily stark) forms of intimate shape-shifting (“Impeccable” 23)
attention to turns of phrase that have the power to both slow down defiant time
as well as speed up the transitions (and become more like time than a statue),
while never losing its authority falling into “mere language play.” Reading it, I think of Tristan Tzara’s “the
wonder of the word; around its center the dream called ourselves,” relishing
Jopek’s ambivalence about whether “to be fully on-guard” (15) while still
letting the double-meaning exceed logic’s grasp and compel hours of timeless
wonder.
Perhaps I could do better justice to this book by just
quoting some of these sections that especially grabbed my attention (I wonder
if I posted them on Facebook—out of context---if it would turn more people on
then this attempt at review)…
“Someone convinces we were needed in that house where sorrow
slips in on a Saturday, accordions the stairs.” (9)
“Wrists ache for a paintbrush to supersede the photograph.
Neck falls to confound interval, whispers to the knees to straighten and heal,
forget the long winter up ahead.” (12)
“Names can be changed, change can be given, wind can push
light objects through the street.” (13)
“Push me! The boy
orders the swing tangling verdant
[lush] decrescendo[s] [of] the marshland arching
from the
definitive.”
One of her most [dis][ch]arming devices is the use of
brackets that push the envelope of language’s ability to harbor multiple
meanings, perspectives and moods, which tend to get more complex as the book
progresses:
…..the hand[le] slips out of focus, displaces the
current…(7)
…the last day of vacation around the [is]land, different
each time…(7)
…Torrential downpour and thunder [deco]rate sleep to tell of
the [s]hip, the [t]rain, the waiting to be carried [a book] under someone’s
arm” (14)
“pass out pain[t] for everyone”
“Furiously night after night [p]urging emotions.”
“The goodbye proven with [photo]graphs, waiting for the roof
to heal, undo the laces, finish the prop[hecy], so there could be surprise
again without the ego’s shallow
pit[fall].” (19)
“The notebook [of winter] fell from the wind[ow]. Everything
heavy when days are X-rayed by night, the chest falls back [in c]loud.” (20)
“Another comes to title the composition [Melanc]holy.”(20)
“The feet sting upon landing: memory [g]losses ambit[ion].
(20)
By the time we reach the final poem (section XII, as in
clocks have 12 hours, years have 12 months, etc), the eponymous word
“Hourglass” finally appears for the first time, even though there had been many
clocks: “The hourglass flipped the conversation over. How to end when one
doesn’t recognize the beginning?” The poem had begun with the desire (or is it
need?) to turn over hourglass, as if the hourglass is a passive device, but
here the hourglass is an active power, as if, like a clock, it has hands
afterall, though not rendering people—at least as characters-- superfluous. In the
process, many dualisms seem to resolve themselves (though not in a
once-and-for-all static way). “I wake and
remember I am [a] stranger.”…..Being what they seem,…..time again has
meaning” Or, even better:
The director’s arms rock the camera and eucalyptus
Drunkenly
And [time] becomes a [chara]acter”
(Is an “acter” a cross between an actor and an aster?) Being
and seeming, Jopek both is and isn’t saying time becomes a character, coming to
accept that time will always be defiant, but then again so will the hourglass.
The ending of this poem reminds me of the Rilkean sublime that mixes “beauty
and terror” (Duino Elegies) which in
a way enacts the hourglass turned back to the poem’s beginning (with a Rilke
quote), while at the same time evoking the green of spring, as if writing this
poem got her through the winter….if you’re looking for a kind of happy ending
in which worry is transformed into wonder……either way, this book helps quicken
the mind, and may help prevent the onslaught of Alzheimer’s and other conditions
they say we’re prone to in the winter of our lives…..
Chris Stroffolino
very nice review.. thank you.
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