Book Review: A Slipknot into Somewhere Else

Poet Michael H. Brownstein’s “Journey to the Borderlands of Dementia”

By Moristotle

A lot of books are easier to read and review than Michael H. Brownstein’s A Slipknot into Somewhere Else. Maybe most books. Some of the poems in this collection, on their first reading, seem to be only just begun and not yet fully formed or developed, as though an early draft had made it to press by mistake. But read them again.
    For that first impression of “undeveloped” is when the work of reading begins, and – if you enjoy the intellectual and emotional challenge of reading difficult poems whose author you trust – the pleasure of discovery also begins, not only of meanings and associations in the poet’s words, but also of depths and meanings in yourself. This review may be more a report of some of my experiences reading the book than a critical appraisal of it (that, fortunately for me, is one definition of “review”). Other readers will have their own experiences.
    Each time I picked up the book again and read again a series of poems, or read them randomly, or in reverse order, they began to clarify, as my clutching for sense and coherence progressed. For sense and coherence are there, but they required revisitations of reading to emerge, to open my eyes, to allow me to catch (or construct?) a sense and coherence for me. These re-readings also brought fluttering smiles of recognition to my lips, and prompted arrays of similar language from myself – as though the only proper way to respond to this work was in kind. What a gift for a book to give….
    As another reviewer of this book, Lennie Cox, points out on his blog, “Our Day’s Encounter”:

The introduction [to Part One]...takes us on a journey into the head of an individual with dementia…[and] when we reach the conclusion of the first part, we find ourselves in the hands of someone who seemingly knows how the mind works, and wanders; how it can focus, and then go off to another plain; how it discovers, and then recovers.

    Poet Brownstein confirms Cox’s reading in the interview that appeared on Moristotle & Co. on September 10, in which he said of his intentions in the Slipknot collection that he wrote and divided [Part One]

in this way to assist you as you enter the borderlands of dementia...That’s why the intro and conclusion are the way they are. / I want readers to not fall past the border. Stay strong. Read and react. / ...writing, journaling, creativity keeps us sharp and mentally alive.

    It’s hard to say for sure, of course, but this implies that my own declining faculties benefitted from having encountered Slipknot. The encounter also discouraged me, however, from believing that I could become an aficionado of the difficult kind of verse that poet Brownstein writes.

“Part 2: Other Poems,” on p. 73, surprised me, there having been – and still being, when I looked – no “Part 1” (though there is a page titled “Part One Acknowledgments”). When you’re reading a book by an artist like Michael H. Brownstein, something like that triggers awareness; you start looking for other things carefully placed askew.

• The absence of the book’s subtitle (A Poet’s Journey to the Borderlands of Dementia) on the front cover.

• Its appearance at the top of the back cover, in a typeface three or four times the size of the book’s title on the front cover (which is at the bottom there, and also smaller than the poet’s name, which is at the top).
• The sentence at the bottom of the last page before the barcode sheet stating that he is the editor of “First Poems from Vietnam” and administers Project Agent Orange. And, of course, the shaky drawing of a clock face on the cover – which I hadn’t attended to much before this – with its hours compressedly arranged: 12, 3, 5, 7, 14, 10, 19 – mis-sortedly arranged as well, in the case of the 10.

    Such things aren’t (or shouldn’t be) accidents in a book by Michael H. Brownstein.

Víctor Jara

    More poetry journals are listed in the book’s two acknowledgments pages (54 by my casual count) than the number of poems in this book. Numbers play prominently in four of the poems (at least) – “…of Sky and Hell” has two stanzas, numbered VII & IX; “…Great Bear Yawns…” has three stanzas, numbered 2, 8, & 9; the stanzas of “29 Lines and 32 Days” are presented as days of a calendar month, but a month with 32 days and nothing recorded for the last three of them; “44 Bullets” counts every one the bullets fired into Chilean folk singer and left wing political activist Víctor Jara.

The intimate intimations of dementia – of forgetting, breathlessness, “oxygen-dysfunction,” pains of war – seemed too real to me not to have been experienced personally by this poet. Either that, I imagined, or he has known and cared deeply for a number of individuals who have experienced them – how many who were ravaged in war, some surely by Agent Orange, himself included? I suspected these things. An additional piece of evidence was that the poet’s inscription to me on the inside front cover of the book he sent me is so raggedly written as to suggest the poet can barely control a pen. And, when I compared the inscription’s hand with the clock face on the cover, I was inclined to think that he drew the image himself¹. And the “I” of the first-person poems is too natural to have been adopted.
    I thought, but I was wrong.
    I know that I was wrong because I asked him about this in the interview, and he told me:

Strangely enough, I never met or encountered anyone with Alzheimer’s or dementia. I’m getting older. Sometimes a word stretches away from my tongue and I can’t get ahold of it until minutes, hours, sometimes day or even months...Sometimes people speak about senior moments or a sudden pause into daydream land. I think I sometimes have these moments, but I have learned that if I have a problem or a concern, if I write about it – make a poem about it – oftentimes the negative issues go away. After putting my book together, I actually had less lapses in memory and I began to feel stronger.

    And he was a student at the time of the Vietnam War, not a soldier. He learned about Agent Orange from being in Vietnam with his son, who won a scholarship to study there. He learned about it from Vietnamese, for whom the war was the American War….
    That is, poet Brownstein’s powers of empathy and imagination are even greater than I imagined….

You might wonder, what is a “slipknot,” anyway? I did, and I even looked it up. One illustration looked like a hangman’s noose, which can tighten. So I mentioned this to the poet, who said:

I selected the word “slipknot” because that’s a knot that unties easily. I hope people who read my book will be able to untie their mental states and grow stronger.

But it also, appropriately, associates with a knot of thoughts’ slipping, letting go, getting tangled, forgetting, taking us somewhere else…to the borderlands of dementia? Or am I being overly “poetic” here?
    You might incline to skip Slipknot if you’re not a poet yourself. The book might be almost only for poets. But some potential readers are poets without knowing it, and reading Slipknot could help them discover it by revealing to them that they command enough language to glory in these poems, and even raise an awareness of their own and others’ sufferings and longings for exultation.
    Maybe we owe it to ourselves to read this book, for a taste of what awaits us if we’re not occasionally there already…in or near the borderlands of dementia.
    For additional guidance in reading A Slipknot into Somewhere Else, I recommend the review by Lennie Cox cited above. It includes a fair number of quotations, in helpful context.

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1. I checked with the poet before including the bit about his handwriting, and he acknowledged that his handwriting is poor, and explained why:
   

   Let me tell you a story. In college, we had an in-class essay test. I’d studied hard for it, but when the test came, it contained nothing of what the class prepared for. I wrote so poorly, the prof could not read my paper. Told me to type it over. Type it over means I can study for the question none of us was prepared for. Is this cheating? Probably. I typed the essay at home, handed it in, and got an A. After that, my handwriting skills degraded quickly – punishment, perhaps, for doing what I did. None the less, I never, ever felt guilty. If you’re going to test us on specific material – and you tell us that is all you are going to test us on – then make sure that is what is in the test.

Copyright © 2018 by Moristotle