Brian Nicolet holds an MFA from the University of Houston. He has received scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and his poetry and reviews can be found in Colorado Review, New South and Gulf Coast. He currently teaches English in Seoul, South Korea. Expression versus the Thing Expressed           Akilah Oliver's A Toast in the House of Friends a review by Brian Nicolet              Akilah Oliver, A Toast in the House of Friends.                   Coffee House Press, 2009. Paperback, 97 pp, $16.00.        I’m just going to lay my cards on the table: I have a love/hate relationship with Akilah Oliver’s debut full-length collection, A Toast in the House of Friends, and everyone should read it. One poem, “The Visible Unseen,” which is something of a philosophical lynchpin to the collection, on its own makes this collection worth picking up. And the sectioned prose poem “Our Good Day” isn’t merely a good poem, it’s a great poem. The collection overall is elegiac in its periodic returns to the loss of a son, but Oliver wisely circumvents confessional solipsism and instead channels this grief into a meditation on larger social concerns. While the collection is often political in its approach, it maintains an ironic detachment from its heightened social awareness:              i am so intrinsically of the wor/ld              do you call that deceiver god except after ‘c’        But, problematically, the collection often values expression over the thing expressed, which is a distinction I will have to clarify, and which is probably itself political (at least within the realm of poetics), insofar as it is, in part, an aesthetic distinction. But at its worst this valuation of expression falls victim to a kind of lyric offhandedness that is destructive to the poet’s project. I hazard toward negativity here only because I see this as a pressing issue in the poetry of our moment. It is a discussion we should be having.                                              *  *  *        “Without contraries is no progression.” Blake’s famous claim had more to do with the forces at work in his elaborate psychodramas, but the dictum works equally well as a cautionary proverb regarding the formal energies of the poem. Put another way, for every wild, unbridled energy in the poem, there is (or ought to be) an equal and opposing force of restraint. Each line break (or line ending, as Longenbach maintains) is a tiny rebellion against syntax. Blake’s unrhymed “symmetry” in “The Tyger” only has meaning for the rhyme scheme it skewers. The periphrasis so indigenous to Ashbery’s lyric meanderings is—in a poem like “Soonest Mended”—reigned in (just barely) by his highly discursive deployment of information; it’s not a story, sure, but it certainly sounds like it has a narrative through-line.        The complication that lineation and syntax provide for each other is one of the most available and familiar means for producing tension; after all, the poem often lives in that liminal territory between the known and the unknown. This is why I occasionally find myself resisting the ever-present poetry of no punctuation. (Oliver’s punctuation, when present, is by turns radical and spare.) And yet, in the hands of masters like Oppen or Palmer, the best passages seem deftly chiseled, all the more deliberate for their minimalist punctuational scoring. In its strongest moments A Toast in the House of Friends achieves such deliberateness, the lines hard won and fraught with the tension that both created and sustains them, as in the final lines of “Disguise”:              Chinook winds are outside blowing, lying.              i allow this jungle.              under that tree, where the cat has tagged the bark,              that’s where i hunt In passages such as this, I fully trust—which is to say I don’t even think to question—that the poet has selected the only way the unifying emotion could be expressed. It is a strange paradox that the work of the poet (in practice) is to exhaust all extraneous modes of expression in favor of one and yet also to arrive, with that one, at an expressiveness that seems to have never existed any other way. And yet this is the artist’s task. By contrast, consider these lines from the gender-criticism-charged “Green Fibs”: “what does it mean to be a postcolonial subject / an i in a category that as of yet is i not idaho”. The tonal discrepancies (intellectual vs. boorish) in these lines rather pull me out of the poem.        The analogy of a musical score is an appropriate way to talk about a manuscript that so clearly values the performative aspects of poetry, but this returns us to my initial concern of expression over the thing expressed. Two poems in the book are titled as “chants” and rely heavily on repetition to perhaps induce a trancelike state or a kind of religiosity. Another relies on typographical stylization not unlike that pioneered by Mallarme. But the material inclusiveness of these chants, these scores, reduces their effectiveness. If there is no restraining force, that is, if all symbols are allowed, then each symbol loses currency. Gems retain value because they are rare and because one parts with them only out of necessity; it is the same with words. Consider the inclusiveness of “Meditations (Redemptive Chant)”:                   the space of morning redemption lives here                   sweet loved one              the space of mourning redemption lives here                   sweet loved one              the space of morning redemption lives here                   sweet loved one              the space of morning              the space of mourning              the space of morning              […]              looked out the window at the pure white snow              i was not rejoiceful              i looked out the window at the baby tearful snow                              i moored        i mourned                              i morned like a visiting rainbow Rainbow-induced groans aside, one might excuse this for its performative aspect, but the heavy reliance on homonyms undercuts that notion. More importantly, though, this is a lyrical freedom that defeats lyrical freedom. If the rebel is defined by that which s/he rebels against, there must be something to rebel against. The poem that eschews not one form of structure but all—syntax, rhythm, selection, punctuation, discursiveness, to name a few—finds itself with little left on which to construct meaning.        Consider then, by contrast, how the deployment of line and syntax supports meaning in this excerpt from “Go.”          often now when i imagine life i think of what should          be finite, the guise of limitability, the desire for stop          are there greeters there [are you one] when we former               ghosts arrive          is this sea deceptive, as if alive or an          actor, the               world masked          in my own way there was a time when i stumbled over               a tense: says/said          now, bereft […] What keeps this passage so surprising is the tension between syntax and the punctuation and lineation that subverts that syntax. Initially a comment on finiteness defeats the finiteness of the first line, simultaneously establishing an expectation for another enjambment at the end of the second line… which in turn rather “stops”… even though the lack of punctuation and capitalization says otherwise. The passage is suffused with the anxiety it discusses. This passage also provides a sample of how Oliver allows outwardly social concerns to be pierced by the intensely personal elegiac motivations of the book (i.e. the sudden bracketed address “are you one”). More importantly though, the final lines of this passage hint at the book’s central and ultimately most compelling concern: the interplay between time, memory, and impermanence.        It is this theme that is tackled so successfully in “The Visible Unseen,” a theoretical meditation on graffiti as an art that imitates script but which ultimately resists the observer, a “writing comparable to guerilla tactics.” And the incorporation into the text of actual images of graffiti, much to my surprise, in no way diminishes the poem’s project or pushes it into gimmickry. Instead it serves to remind the reader of the experience Oliver describes:              When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly              ecstatic, a dialects of violence, a distortion of limbs,              a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names              of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted              there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose              place in history has been fictionalized and rendered              unseen under the totalizing glare of history.        Of course, it would be tempting to read “The Visible Unseen” as a defense of the kind of poetry I have in this review discarded as offhanded, the poetry which values expression over the thing expressed. The poem itself provides keen insight into the politics of graffiti:              in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the                   public imagination              we are forced to see what we would rather not,              to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot                   read on the level of              meaning.              it irritates, forces its agency upon us speaks outside                   and beyond              semiotic reach.              that is, it is a glossary that shifts, mutates, has stable                   referents that are              constantly and seemingly arbitrarily defined,              codified, and discarded. This may be true of graffiti. Over the course of the poem I, for one, am convinced. But if the poet wishes to imply the same project should carry over into poetry, I can only say the following: Surely no one doubts there is a philosophical and/or political backing for such a poetics, but the suggestion, even if only implicit, that the poet’s task is to redistribute meaning via distortion of meaning is, I think, tantamount to surrender, insofar as poetic utterance remains a social act.