Customer Reviews

The Face: A Novella in Verse

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

David St. John's "The Face" is a grab-bag of voices and sunlit scenes, sprinkled with some gorgeous lyric and incantatory permutations; its purported narrative (it's described as a "novella in verse") about a man coming apart while his life is being filmed is attentuated enough not to hold all the movements and ideas of the poems together, but coherent enough to function as its own entertaining thread, and as a gloss on the less narrative poems.

St. John at his best-the lyrical, musical St. John-puts in more than an occasional appearance in this book: "Where had the river swung against / Its passage from one life into another?" (10); "Blood funnel, passion leaf, hollow pane, darkening / Nude high in the ripped moon. Here, hold the slender globe of / Your lantern in the mute, pulsing night." (53); "Where were you all that light ago, busy as a scarab in the dust, / Hard by the bed? Winters passed, forecasting new bad memories." (17) Acute longing and a subtle violence go hand in hand in the most intensified of these gems (for example, poems XXXVIII and XL). Wit is in season as well, in multiple plays on "assembling" and "dissembling" wind throughout the work-reference to semblance/mask/face/mirror and the complicated tango of identity -and in deceptively glib transformations which open onto knotty philosophical reserves: "The pane of circumstance / Broken always by one's own reflections." (4)

Tonally, the poems don't stray much from each other, in spite of widely differing formal strategies. This is one area in which the book suffers, as the neutral point of its register wobbles between jokey, self-deprecating intimacy and prosaic wistfulness. Many poems (especially the directly narrative) seem slack by comparison with the transcendent lyrics. At worst, the merely sentimental seizes center stage, as when the speaker describes the birth of his daughter: "toting along with her such innocence / As falls in whispers from the towers of cathedrals." (47) The tough-guy language and the anger, all the hotter, baser, darker emotions, somehow fail to convince as effectively as the regret, sorrow, and yearning.

With such a title and multiply-announced project, a book like this dwells unapologetically in the postmodern, and that is largely where it stays: looking at the face of surface from angle upon angle while feinting underneath. As such, "The Face" is suitable for a very broad audience; it's likely that anyone can find a praiseworthy poem in it, from film-lovers to fiction-readers to language poets to unreconstructed Romantics, but as a whole the book hangs heavy with overdone verse.

David St. John's newest work, The Face, a Novella in Verse, chronicles the fallout of a love affair in a loosely narrative manner, addressing issues of time, identity and longing in the process, and employing self-reflexivity as a tool to ward off the pitfall of preciousness. Written in the voice of an LA denizen who feels, he "had come, it seemed, to the end of my life," and whose life is in the process of being made into a movie, the 45 numbered poems take us through a wide range of styles, from the unabashedly romantic and sensual to the sardonic and angry.

The refractory and elusive nature of time and self are considered from many different angles in the course of the book, as in the 3rd poem which states "When it's over/It's already been over, everybody knows, long before it's finally over." This is a comment on relationships, but it contains the shifting, unsteady sense of temporal consciousness that marks a number of poems in the book. The poem goes on to echo Bob Dylan's "Don't think twice" toward the end, with the line "I don't mind any of it, not even those years I've wasted like silence." Time is addressed in a subtler way in the harrowing poem number 11 which begins "Shattered, shattered, shattered. There are so many ways/ To break the vessel, sometimes no single way will do," And goes on to shatter our notion of what is entailed by a vessel: "The vessel is only the shape to be recalled as what once one was..." The book contains many instances of such "assembling and dissembling," in the narrator's effort to pick up the pieces of self after the proverbial "break up."

Each poem is filled with questions that the narrator directs at himself, a friend or a lover, in the relentless interrogation of reality and facades that occupy the book. The pronouns are blurred and the "you" comes to stand for either a beloved or the divided self. Yet, even as the narrator braves visits to a hilarious and hair-raising "Edge World" where his "self pity/..sets even the dingoes howling" and continues to "push the day up the hill" in Sisyphean ardor, readers are whisked through European landscapes, introduced to Sharon Stone and are given the chance to ponder the significance of Dennis Hopper's trench coat. Set against the Hollywood backdrop, the Face puzzles the notions of self as mask and performance, reaching for, and attaining, a "sweet delight" in the process.

It's not hard to find the overriding theme of David St. John's The Face. Of course, one might say, obviously, the "novella in verse" is about faces, or more specifically the speaker's face, or even more specifically and metaphorically, the speaker's appearance and history/story. One might even continue on this thread and come to the conclusion that the work is about the masks we adopt (XXVII). But I believe the poems are more about the process of reflection, disintegration and understanding.
Throughout the work, there are references to mirrors and more importantly the broken shards of a mirror, as well as the ideas of shattering and disassembling. This is imperative to apprehend the mind set of the speaker. Here is a person who has suffered some trauma (does it really matter what?) and is merely trying to reassemble what has become undone ("assembling the disassembling"). Instances of this fracturing are also evident in the passages that speak about the movie being made out of the speaker's life. The creator (ironic), Infanta (telling) wishes to make the movie in reverse, that is show the speaker's life in an inverted sequence a la Merlin-esque.
Some of my favorite poems are XXV about the black rooms and even more XXX, the Edge World theme park idea. Overall, I think that David St. John has got something here, a cohesive and modern idea that translates well for the reader, as well as being a genuinely entertaining piece of literature (and I say literature because it is both poem and prose).

THE FACE by David St. John is an exciting and daring departure from his previous books of poetry. St. John is at an age and stage in his career as a poet where most poets begin to protect territory and write and the same poems and the same book over and over again under the theory that it?s what his/her public wants. St. John has always taken risks and deserves our admiration for continuing to do so. This book is a story of a spiritual quest but one that is exciting and never heavy-handed. Some of its 45 sections are terrifying, some riveting, some consoling, and some are fall-down-laughing hilarious. A stunning book, profound without ever being obscure. Read it!

Questions of identity constitute the foreground of David St. John's most recent book, The Face, in which a multivocal anonymous speaker is continually "assembling and dissembling" his sense of self. The loosely coherent plot of this "Novella in Verse" (a categorization which presents its own identity crisis at the level of genre) has to do with various performances and shatterings of the speaker's identity, ranging from grief over a recently lost love to the absurd making of a movie about his life, starring a 19-year-old androgynous girl. "Who am I?" he asks at the beginning of the second of the book's three parts; "(Who was I; who will I be?)... I held up my soul to the highest bidder & along came/ That devilman carrying his basket jangling with pieces of jagged mirror."

In his debut at the start of the book, the speaker appears costumed in a trench coat alleged to have been worn by Dennis Hopper. With faux sophistication, he repeatedly asserts that "Yesterday is so boring, don't you think?" In brilliant satiric moments throughout the book, St. John captures the flavor of Los Angeles' Hollywood culture in all its materialism, its loneliness, its vanity, and particularly in its conflation of reality and fiction, until the two seem interchangeable, equally violent and disorienting. At the heart of the poet's critique is an illustration of how Hollywood culture has bled so far into contemporary public life (particularly in Los Angeles) that as the movie about the speaker's life is on the verge of release, he asks himself, "Now when exactly was it that I ever could, in this world,/ Call this life my own...?"

Against the backdrop of this glitzy upscale urban self-consciousness, the book turns on the spit of the speaker's personal grief over the recent loss of a lover whose "face" we never get to see. Her absence is expressed appropriately through the sad, lyrical language of silence, leaving her nameless and featureless, discernable only by "the fever of her body, the white/ Ember in the long pillow of the bed."

Disconnected imagery combines with the speaker's radically shifting emotions to create an experience of displacement and confusion for the reader. Surfaces, shadows, costumes, reflections, drama, depression, sleeplessness, nightmares, the incessancy of nighttime (think film noire), spiritual vacancy, fragmented memories of Italy, flashes of recognition in the natural world, the touch of a familiar hand, theme parks, fast cars, drugs, Renaissance art, literary figures disguised as movie stars disguised as servants, cell phones and all their consequent mishearings humming and buzzing like "the insistence of a heartbeat long after the body has grown distant & cold." St. John wants us to feel as disoriented as his speaker. Accordingly, in some sections of the book, the plot dissolves completely, or more appropriately "dissembles" behind other valences of meaning. In addition, the speaker's modes of speech are so various and surprising that it's not entirely clear at first that we are dealing with a single speaker throughout the book. At times, he has us laughing out loud, and then we suddenly find ourselves sympathizing with his "pane of circumstance/ Broken always by [his] own reflections." To complicate matters further, St. John intermingles real people (Toni, for example, to whom the book is dedicated) as characters among the obviously fictional (Infanta, Antonioni, Cybèle).

For all its fragmentation, The Face triumphs in its presentation of some of the most pressing difficulties we face in our hi-tech, overpopulated, commercialized, and plot-obsessed culture. This is a book to be read several times and considered on many levels as a journey through the vibrant intricacies of human consciousness and its inexorable public and private struggles.