Review: Angela Hume’s middle time
In “melos,” the first section of middle time (Omnidawn), poet Angela Hume prepares the reader for what is to come: “you clutched parts of//me darkly/inside and I//didn’t stop no for once/followed your body to the center of/mine.” Hume continues, after a bit of white space, with “said: why do we break the social/body?//said: our bodies have been broken/into and so we break the social//body.” In a collection that revolves around ideas of absorption and permeability, and, by the way, has very little ‘you’ or ‘I’ in it at all (none outside “melos” that I noticed), the ‘you’ in this poetry can represent not only a moderately separate person or entity, in as much as any of us are separate from each other, but also the part of the ‘you’ that contains the ‘I’s’ perception of it. This perception, in turn, evokes our environment, both in the more general sense of what we talk about when we talk about our surroundings, and in a more specific sense, our ecological environment, which takes central place in middle time. All of this, in turn, might beg the question, what does the ‘I’ itself contain? As we read the collection, we learn that at least one possible answer is: a lot that’s not supposed to be there. This is where permeability and absorption come in.
Just as we have polluted our surroundings, our environment now pollutes us. Hume demonstrates this act of absorption in a section of the poem where toxic chemistry permeates and becomes part of the poetry itself.
Absorption is certainly at play in “second story of your body,” which was originally published as a chapbook by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. This long poem juxtaposes genuinely beautiful and (perhaps more importantly) conventionally poetic sequences like “we say water’s/wax-white//like human eyes/after long illness//we say water’s/a gorgeous thing” with the technical, maybe even ‘ugly’ language of toxic chemistry (“bisphenal/A,” “(bis/[2-ethylhexyl]//phthalates, found in//plastic,” “chlorine”) as well as with language associated with illness, injury, and disease (“a sclerosis,” “(sickness,” “contusion,” “is there a history of mental/illness in the family,” “(shrill sero/tonin low,” “invasive/procedures,” “genetic/sympto/matic,” “affecting//kidneys/the nervous system”). The presence of toxic chemicals reminds us of the source of some illnesses and the way the names of the chemicals interrupt the text, sometimes appearing in their own columns, reminds the reader that they are interlopers in our bodies. Their presence jars us, just as the difficulty of pronouncing these often multisyllabic words, the very stumbling-ness of our tongues during this act, takes us out of the poetry. We may find ourselves asking how this is ‘poetic,’ whatever that might mean. But in rewriting and reframing more conventional notions of what constitutes poetry, Hume reminds the reader that the nonfictional world she presents in “second story of your body” (and throughout middle time) has always been and will always be the site of our fluctuating relationship with our surrounding environment. Just as we have polluted our surroundings, our environment now pollutes us. Hume demonstrates this act of absorption in a section of the poem where toxic chemistry permeates and becomes part of the poetry itself:
body occurs at….a limit
a tissue
limit
a blood
limit….(2-
a broken-cell….(butoxy/(ethanol
limit
what kind of limit….are you
(Note: ‘….’ indicated white space in original text. Text appears in two columns in original.)
Here, Hume uses careful line breaks and space to create an aesthetically pleasurable, rhythmic reading experience out of a subject matter that is not even slightly so. What purpose does this serve? Certainly, the absorption of the 2-butoxyethanol (an organic compound used as an industrial cleaner that has caused adrenal tumors in animals) into this poetry mimics the absorption of toxic chemicals into our bodies. We don’t expect them there, we don’t want them there, but they are there. When it comes to our bodies, we may not even know that toxins are there, despite adverse health effects. Thus, borders become porous, and may not exist at all. in “second story of your body,” with its insistence on showing toxins even as it absorbs them, Hume simultaneously re-asserts the concepts of boundaries that many of us believe should exist even as she considers that these boundaries may no longer apply.
Sadly, [Hume’s work] is especially pertinent now, when Americans (and therefore the world) face an incoming administration that includes climate change deniers at the highest level.
Permeability also plays a role in “the middle,” which, along with other fragments published in middle time, was awarded the 2012 Omnidawn Chapbook Prize, although it expresses itself in a slightly different way. Here, permeability becomes an expression of existence and continuance. The poem (and, perhaps, the book as a whole), presumably takes its title from the epigraph that precedes it. After describing the constitution of a whole, a beginning, and an ending, Artistotle describes a middle as “that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it.” Hume’s middle, on the other hand, might be said not only to have a precursor and a successor, but also to contain bits and pieces of what has come before and what comes after. In other words, the present moment contains both the past and the future. Or, more specifically, the present contains both the actions of the past and the ramifications of those actions for our collective future. In this way, Hume addresses both “the temporality of the middle,” which she defines as “the temporality of waste,” and “an aesthetics of the middle.” But what comes next? Hume writes:
dreams in skin….for years
I wasted my body
tight….coil round a hook
without
consequence….the planet
dimming like any
one
encysted, time
spent in such a way
(Note: ‘….’ indicated white space in original text. Text appears in two columns in original.)
Time certainly plays a role in this section. We get the past tense (“wasted” “spent”), the present tense (“coil”), but we also get the future out of Hume’s grammar. As a gerund, “dimming” contains continuous, and, therefore, future action. In other words, “dimming” (along with other gerunds in this section) contain what has been happening, what is happening, and what will continue to happen, as long as we decline to alter our behaviours and patterns. There is, after all, a lot at stake. Later in “the middle” Hume writes, “one might say: hottest on record//one might say: faster than models can/capture//one might say: persistence of desire//one might say:” That there is no second part to the latter “one might say” may simply indicate a desire for open-endedness or the possibility for change, but on the other hand, the abrupt stop may also signal an interruption or even herald a warning. As Hume tells us, “when the water/runs out the middle//runs out.” We should all be mindful, this poet is telling us, about the possibility of ending. We may not be able to keep the ending out. Sadly, this is especially pertinent now, when Americans (and therefore the world) face an incoming administration that includes climate change deniers at the highest level.
Hume has set out to show us where we are and of what we are made.
Throughout middle time, Hume confronts, and sometimes astounds, the reader with what we cannot keep out. This applies not only to the toxins present in our environment that our bodies may absorb and to the possible ecological disaster of a poisoned planet, but also to knowledge. The way Hume’s source material — Hume intersperses her poetry with language from published health and environmental research, for example, but also from poetry and philosophy — informs this text mirrors, in many ways, the act of absorption itself. In the end, the reader leaves middle time reminded not only of the membraneous nature of permeability, but also of the porous nature of language and thought, which also make up our environment. All the same, middle time is not what I would call a hopeful book. And why should it be? In this contribution to the field of ecopoetics, Hume, the poet, serves also as note-taker, one concerned with the facts (see, again, her use of source material such as reports) and a re-framing of those same facts in such a way that highlights what almost might rightly be called their absurdity. Or, put another way, their wrong-ness. Or, a third way, the unsuitability of their existence in a living, breathing world. But her judgment is not heavy-handed, however dire the situation may be. Rather, Hume has set out to show us where we are and of what we are made.
