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kallistoi 's review for:
Nightingale
by Paisley Rekdal
challenging
dark
reflective
cw for discussions of sexual violence and its gendered dynamics
i stalled quite a bit in the middle of this one because i found the eponymous centerpiece poem so frustrating for its halting approach to ovidian violence. rekdal gets there quite convincingly in some other poems in this book, especially "horn of plenty" and "marsyas." i loved the ambiguities and excesses of these two poems and how they entangled myth and art and violence and desire in a self-consciously ambivalent way that strikes me as very typically ovidian. but, as is my standard and probably unpopular complaint about a lot of feminist reckonings with myths from the metamorphoses, i found that when rekdal stopped to most explicitly connect the dots of ovid, gender, poetry, and sexual violence in "nightingale: a gloss," she was too ready to settle at the conclusion that ovid's philomela narrative must have been ultimately misogynist because of some ineluctable male perspective (arising both from poet and roman readership) that taints any otherwise potentially compelling representation of womanhood. "to make his (literate, male) audience understand [her] powerlessness," she writes, "ovid frames the rape from philomela's point of view. he centers male agency within a silent female consciousness." even if the story is told from a woman's point of view, for rekdal, the patriarchal context in which it was written occludes the possibility that ovid, a man, could offer any worthwhile insight into a woman's experience of violence -- or, "positioning an implicitly male audience in the consciousness of a raving, raped woman tilts the myth from one of identification to one of rejection." set aside for now the historical question of whether women were not part of the literary audience at rome -- we know many women were literate, at least elite women, and ovid is one of multiple roman poets who textually figure women to be among their readership. mostly, i find this tautology of gender and representation infuriating for the ways it arises from a flattened, heterosexually enmeshed binary way of thinking about gender. this collection does have a quite few poems in which rekdal thinks about gender, myth, and trauma outside of heterosexual and cisnormative matrices ("io," "tiresias," "the olive tree at vouves"), but they're lacking in their treatment of queerness as an experience, rather than a literary thought experiment -- particularly the first two in that list. i'm still chewing on the portrait in "gokstadt/ganymede" of a man who is a survivor of childhood sexual violence, but i'm not entirely convinced either. that said, it's all so particularly enraging because elsewhere rekdal really does get it. as i said, some of these poems take a fascinating angle on the ethics and aesthetics of artistic representation of violence, and i think i prefer the pieces that eschew straightforward answers. even the title poem that i've given such grief has its moments in this regard, asking "what if it is the form, not the content, of the metamorphoses that is the terror? each story unfolding into another, perpetually disrupting, thus delaying the ending? what if, because we came to listen, we are the reason the story keeps not ending?" and this question builds as rekdal theorizes the power of silence with regards to her own experiences of sexual violence, what she is able to accomplish by strategically not naming, by refusing to disclose. her address to the reader (not, i think, implicitly male) toward the end of the poem takes aim at the idea that an audience for one's trauma is necessarily desirable, with a piercing accusation, "this act [of reading] is done for yourself. it is not, though you may believe it is, at all useful to me."
i stalled quite a bit in the middle of this one because i found the eponymous centerpiece poem so frustrating for its halting approach to ovidian violence. rekdal gets there quite convincingly in some other poems in this book, especially "horn of plenty" and "marsyas." i loved the ambiguities and excesses of these two poems and how they entangled myth and art and violence and desire in a self-consciously ambivalent way that strikes me as very typically ovidian. but, as is my standard and probably unpopular complaint about a lot of feminist reckonings with myths from the metamorphoses, i found that when rekdal stopped to most explicitly connect the dots of ovid, gender, poetry, and sexual violence in "nightingale: a gloss," she was too ready to settle at the conclusion that ovid's philomela narrative must have been ultimately misogynist because of some ineluctable male perspective (arising both from poet and roman readership) that taints any otherwise potentially compelling representation of womanhood. "to make his (literate, male) audience understand [her] powerlessness," she writes, "ovid frames the rape from philomela's point of view. he centers male agency within a silent female consciousness." even if the story is told from a woman's point of view, for rekdal, the patriarchal context in which it was written occludes the possibility that ovid, a man, could offer any worthwhile insight into a woman's experience of violence -- or, "positioning an implicitly male audience in the consciousness of a raving, raped woman tilts the myth from one of identification to one of rejection." set aside for now the historical question of whether women were not part of the literary audience at rome -- we know many women were literate, at least elite women, and ovid is one of multiple roman poets who textually figure women to be among their readership. mostly, i find this tautology of gender and representation infuriating for the ways it arises from a flattened, heterosexually enmeshed binary way of thinking about gender. this collection does have a quite few poems in which rekdal thinks about gender, myth, and trauma outside of heterosexual and cisnormative matrices ("io," "tiresias," "the olive tree at vouves"), but they're lacking in their treatment of queerness as an experience, rather than a literary thought experiment -- particularly the first two in that list. i'm still chewing on the portrait in "gokstadt/ganymede" of a man who is a survivor of childhood sexual violence, but i'm not entirely convinced either. that said, it's all so particularly enraging because elsewhere rekdal really does get it. as i said, some of these poems take a fascinating angle on the ethics and aesthetics of artistic representation of violence, and i think i prefer the pieces that eschew straightforward answers. even the title poem that i've given such grief has its moments in this regard, asking "what if it is the form, not the content, of the metamorphoses that is the terror? each story unfolding into another, perpetually disrupting, thus delaying the ending? what if, because we came to listen, we are the reason the story keeps not ending?" and this question builds as rekdal theorizes the power of silence with regards to her own experiences of sexual violence, what she is able to accomplish by strategically not naming, by refusing to disclose. her address to the reader (not, i think, implicitly male) toward the end of the poem takes aim at the idea that an audience for one's trauma is necessarily desirable, with a piercing accusation, "this act [of reading] is done for yourself. it is not, though you may believe it is, at all useful to me."