Drive Me Out of My Mind: 24 Houses in 10 Years

In his 1958 book, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “if we want to go beyond history, or even, while remaining in history, detain from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realize that the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery.” The Poetics of Space describes a philosophy of poetic Imagism (precision of imagination) coupled with, in part, a phenomenology of the home as (not just) mortar, 2×4, and stone. In my reading of Bachelard, our histories are only as real as the Images that embody them.

I was reminded of The Poetics of Space when I read Chad Faries’ memoir, Drive Me Out of My Mind: 24 Houses in 10 Years. The book is separated into a chapter-per-house-lived-in, each chapter begins with a street-and-town, a year, and some song lyrics—a soundtrack to the book that almost acts as white noise on which we can focus when the screaming and partying in the foreground get too depressing. Each chapter ends with “and then we moved.” The book begins at Faries’ birth in 1971 and moves its readers through a difficult–sometimes funny, sometimes grotesque–landscape of pick-up-and-go with his drug-booze-and-sex addicted mother, her family of women, and a wild cast of male characters, to 1981. Drive Me is not only scaffolded by the houses the author lived in before he hit puberty, but Faries’ houses exist in a space created by the coupling of memory and imagination in order to forge the memoired homestead. “Our whole house,” Faries writes early on, “was made of the shadows of others, and we sucked that gray light into our guts to push the total darkness away and claim everything as our own.”

To Bachelard, the shelter—in whatever form it takes—is the place through which we’re allowed to experience the world. The daydreamer (reminiscer?), Bachelard writes, “experiences the house[s] in its reality and its virtuality, by means of thoughts and dreams.” Faries’ recollections are many times dreamlike sequences—like the ascension of a Ford Falcon into a Florida sky—fostered by both reality and the speaker’s desire to escape it. The memoir takes its reader on a journey from house to house, sure, but these houses are many times just faulty shelters for the fucked up events that happen inside and outside of them.

To be sure, Drive Me is a book made up of memory-images and their underbellies like the car he rides in to Florida that flies up to heaven to meet its erstwhile owner or the chapter in the voice of a lost hamster circling a house backwards in order to rewind time and save Chad and his mother. In another scene, parked on a roadside in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (where Chad spent most of his early years) in a Ford Galaxy, Chad’s mom and her boyfriend screw in the front seat, while Chad, in the back seat, imagines another scene altogether—instead of being forced to watch, he gets a choice:

And off they go into the woods arm in arm, leaving Jensen a cardboard cutout in the old Ford Galaxy. Scenes like this imbue Drive Me with a specialness that’s only born through the coupling of memory and imagination. A revision, so to speak, of experience-as-fact. The fact is that no story exists without both, and Faries’ story can’t exist without imagining a way out of it. But Faries’ narrative takes an interesting turn toward the back half of the book. What once was magic in the eyes of a child (as sordid as the accumulation of lots of drugs, lots of sex, and lots of fucked up grown-ups may have been) grows less and less glittering. Chad becomes more worried about being abandoned by his mother. He locks away the invisible Green Lantern ring that has gotten him through many a rotten moment. As he gets older, though still a small child, his world starts looking just a little more bleak.

One of the most affecting scenes in the book exists in that back half when, on a walk through a cemetery with his friend/older sister figure, Suzanne, they happen upon two of Chad’s neighborhood buddies, one of whom, LittleMan, has recently taught Chad to use the word cunt with abandon. The two other boys wrestle Suzanne to the ground—the scene is graphic and awful, and the shock of it freezes Chad in a sea of contemplation until he summons his old superhero courage just long enough to yell, “Stop,” which does nothing except alert a neighbor who shoos them all away. No fanfare, no punishment. In this moment, Faries writes, “I realized I didn’t know what world I belonged to.” As Suzanne is fondled and humiliated—raped—the boy Chad speaks (squeaks?) out against the cards he’s been dealt. For my money, here’s the crux of the narrative, a crisis of faith.

I don’t actually have much sympathy for Mother as Faries portrays her—though I’m reminded occasionally that she loves her kid and that her kid loves her—but I do know the stronghold grip of Mother, how she tugs at your heartstrings, how she amazes then betrays you. And you, her. And I’m not sure this is a perfect memoir (what is that?); sometimes the houses themselves seem to buffet the book from its own greatness—but there are enough tatters and missteps painting Faries’ early years that maybe the circle can’t be closed gently, neatly. The strands won’t weave together into that perfect childhood home Bachelard imbues with “all the positive values of protection.” At one point, Faries recalls, “I was convinced I could live without Mother and didn’t need shit from adults anymore. Staring at the other house across the street, I remembered that the adults weren’t any different than boys and girls,” highlighting the messiness of discovery and assimilation of memory into adulthood.

Drive Me’s last chapter is in the form of a transcription of an adult conversation between Chad, his mother, some aunts, and a family friend. While one aunt tattoos the name of a woman—a lover whose ghost haunts the entire book—on Chad’s back, the women recount their versions of history, and his mother points out, “Well, I have memories too that are wrong.” In the end, calling all memory into question, the group waits frozen in time for a nonexistent phone to ring in the tattoo parlor. No tidy conclusions here.

Back at a rooftop birthday party circa 1974, toddler Chad—stoned because someone gave him a hit of a joint—watches his mother from a roof rail-cum-cloud vantage, “An omnipotent mother was puffing a cigarette, her breath a braid of smoke,” perhaps an allusion to the infinite poetics of space, that great amalgamation of memory and imagination, certainly recalling Charles Simic:

For Simic the world doesn’t end, even after his flight over destruction. For Faries, beyond the music and mayhem, “after our bellies were full we all reveled in being lost, mistaking it for peace.” There’s some freedom in that, huh. Getting lost in the sky and making that your jungle gym.

Dean Young had this to say about Orgera’s poems:

Alexis Orgera’s poems perpetually, vitally involve the reconceiving and reenacting of the means of intimacy even as they say again and again, I can no longer be myself.  These are love poems between strangers who may for a moment celebrate and endure recognition; their voice is arch, angelic and at odds with itself, mercurial in its metaphoric riches, captivating in improvisational zeal, beautiful, and impossible not to love.

If you’d like to purchase the book, you can do so from H_NGM_N for $14.95. Click on the donate/PayPal button once you get to the HLFO page.

One of our regular & distinguished commenters, Michael James Martin, has some work in the new issue of New CollAge magazine, the magazine of–wait for it–New College, in Florida. Over at his site, MJM peruses the issue, which contains work by such luminaries as Dean Young, Matt Hart, Peter Jay Shippy, Emily Kendal Frey, and many more. It also contains a poem by yours truly. I’ve also got a copy of the issue sitting on my desk, and had been planning to write about it when I had a free minute to do more than just browse the thing (est’d occurrence of free minute: Nov. 7th, 5:42 PM) but since MJM nailed it, I’m just going to go ahead and direct you over his way. You can also view some excerpts from the issue (though not mine or his) over at the New CollAge website. Cheers, Michael! And a hearty cheers as well to Alexis Orgera (ed.) and the staff at New CollAge.

I was reading Alexis Orgera’s blog last night, and she had posted something about something Tony Hoagland wrote about “the cult of Dean Young” in American Poetry Review, and some subsequent vituperative blogging induced thereby. But what caught my attention was something Alexis mentioned in passing, while talking about something John Gallaher said about Hoagland’s piece. “I do like that Gallaher calls Hoagland out for defining the new American poetry by young, white men. I think two of the most interesting and fearless young poets right now are women: Darcie Dennigan and Dorothea Lasky.” This, to me, is infinitely more interesting than whether Tony Hoagland thinks Dean Young is being trampled to death by geese or not. What’s especially infinitely interesting is the fact that I’ve never even heard of Darcie Dennigan. (Pretty sure I’m on-record as a fan of Dottie L’s, but if not, let this be that record.) Or I thought I’d never heard of her. It actually turns out that DD is the author of Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse, a book I most definitely remember hearing about. It came out from Fordham University Press last year, after winning their Poets Out Loud prize. So let’s all get to know Darcie Dennigan.

- Matt Hart reviews Corinna at Coldfront

- “Orienteering in the Land of New Pirates” is a poem by DD in H_NGM_N #6.

- “The Canon Come Again: Same Themes, Different Centuries” is an essay by DD at the Poetry Foundation.

- Raymond McDaniel at Boston Review also digs Corinna.

- Paul Vermeersch had the same idea as I did about DD, and already did more legwork than I’m going to. So for more, go over to his blog and see what he’s rounded up.

Lewis Lapham, of Harper’s fame, started a new quarterly focusing in depth on ‘timeless’ humanist qualms such as war, love, nature, etc., and I’m happy to see this on her shelf. The thinness of that Moby Dick spine looks like some abridged version, but I’m hoping knot (get it? fuck). Joyce and Beckett sit well next to each other like Exile and Absence out for a date. I can only imagine the library late fees out on Paradise Lost — the Fall of man at 20 cents a day. Alexis is onto something with all this irrevocable mor(t)al stuff. (And who needs The Iowa Review when I got a review of Iowa right here: corn blows.) If you think I’m grasping for material here, I’ll just repeat what I said to Marco Polo, ‘get lost.’

Rating: Haut.

I am afraid, dear illuminator,

to tell you the truth. – “Book of Hours (Two)”

Of all the sweet, sweet things I saw/met/read/drank at AWP, one of the sweeter ones was a little chapbook called Illuminatrix, by a poet named Alexis Orgera. Illuminatrix is published by Forklift, Ink, the book arm of Matt Hart & Eric Appleby’s immeasurably badass magazine Forklift, Ohio. Anyway, my magazine was sharing a booth with Forklift, and so I was able to acquire Alexis’s book and spend a bit of time with her, without having to even leave the confines of our little patch of carpeting. It was very Dorothy Gale. (I was wearing beautiful red shoes.)

Illuminatrix is a skinny, fascinating book. Light is not exactly a novel theme for poetry, but this is surely a take on it that you’ve never encountered before. Orgera isn’t interested in light which dapples birch branches or reminds the poet of his childhood home–this is anything but SoQ country, is my point–her light issues forth from the place where physics meets metaphysics; it hearkens back to a time when mathematics was a branch of philosophy, then suitably distorts that mindset so it can live in a world of electric vacuums and lamps. Orgera’s “illuminators” are characters, all sharing the same name/title and therefore distinguished only by their actions–or else the poet’s frame of mind when, as above, she addresses one of them directly. In fact they are not distinguishable from one another. It is as if they have obtained a fluidity of identity and being, or perhaps are all part of the same secret order of shining ninja monks. After the jump, I Q&A with Alexis about her book, Florida, Dean Young and Courtney Love. But first! A poem from Illuminatrix:

“Falling”

There was some wabi-sabi between them

and like cherry blossoms they fell

into bed. There’s nothing in me that’s light, she said.

He buried his head between her legs

to make her sing. But there was no song

in her. She was thinking

about the impermanence of motion.

He was thinking about the inescapable

nothingness he felt on Sunday afternoons.

How life is a series of lightbulbs nobody uses.

A series of odd delinquencies called weekends

in which the ancient wabi-sabi drools between them.

Do you know what "wabi-sabi" means? Why didn't you look it up? You'll like the poem better if you look it up. Take a minute. We'll wait here.

THE Q&A BEGINS WITH US TRYING TO MAKE TIME TO DO THE Q&A. WE DESCRIBE OUR OFFICES TO EACH OTHER:

JUSTIN: Yes, Monday–and now Wednesday. I’m here in my little windowless office in the basement of the English hall at Rutgers. Too bad too, since it’s warmer than it’s been in weeks and the sun through the tall bare trees makes the whole quad look like it’s overlaid with some sort of endless, indecipherable schematic. Which, I guess, in a sense it has.

I’ll try and send you some questions this weekend.

ALEXIS: It’s so beautiful in Florida right now. My office is windowless, too, but our campus is on Sarasota Bay, so I can take off my shoes and meander in the shallows when I get claustrophobic. Or just sit. Talk about schematics–the way the sun shatters the bay into a zillion particles. My dog shakes with excitement every time she sees it.
Weekend, yes.

[ALEXIS WINS. - ED.]

ON THE WEEKEND, THE Q&A ACTUALLY HAPPENS.

JT: So correct me if I’m mistaken, but I thought I remember hearing that this book was a sort of commissioned project. Is that true?

AO: Yes! Matt Hart got in touch one day—he and Eric Appleby had published two of my poems in Forklift, Ohio a few months before—and said something like, Hey, do you want to write a chapbook just for us? I’d been thinking about these characters called Illuminators, and Matt’s challenge gave me an arena in which to wrestle with these buggers.

Related question—how did that impact your writing process?

I love a challenge. I love assignments. So this worked really well for me. I also felt honored that an editor called me up and asked me to do this, especially one whose own poems I really admire, so I guess I felt a sense of urgency that I may not have felt otherwise. To any other editors or collaborators out there: I’m game!

In a poem called “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” you write that “poems are paroxysms.” Are you describing your own experience of writing, here, or the experience you intend for a reader? Or both or neither?

I think I’m talking both about the experience of reading and of writing a poem. Dickinson, of course, said it best when she wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I like the violent expression of language, to feel it while writing and to catch glimpses of it in other poems. There’s a danger to paroxysm that I’m drawn to. That said, I like quiet things too. Ani DiFranco has this great line concerning how people talk about her image, “like what I happen to be wearing the day that someone takes a picture is my new statement for all of womankind.” So, no, I’m not making a life long thesis statement.

Illuminatrix has three epigraphs, one each from Lucretius, Dean Young, and Courtney Love. Do you have a favorite Dean Young poem, or book?

I do have some Dean Young faves. “Sunflower” knocks my socks off. I have students read it all the time. I like the self-invocation, the meandering-but-not, how it pays homage to Breton and Marvell while doing such a modern activity as vacuum cleaning. Plus I think there’s some gender stuff going on. But, I have to say, when Primitive Mentor came out last year, I was blown away. Talk about paroxysms. Especially Section 4, brilliant and heartfelt stuff.

There’s also some Empedocles in Illuminatrix. You’ve got a sort of Ancient Greeks thing happening, it seems. Is that specific to this book, or is it an ongoing interest of yours? What draws you to these guys / this era?

Here’s what happened. I was thinking about these Illuminator characters and, hence, light and theories of light. I read somewhere that Empedocles believed that Aphrodite placed a ball of fire in the human eye that enabled sight. His cosmogony is, I think, the first to delineate the four elements. He also believed that Love and Strife balanced everything out. But back to light. He wrote this On Nature (which we only have pieces of), and the later Roman philosopher Lucretius also wrote a book with a similar title, which is not uncommon for ancient thinkers, I’m told. But both guys have much to say about the way humans experience light, and I found that interesting to the project. I’m not generally sitting around reading the ancients, but after Illuminatrix I feel like I should be.

Related question, do you also think that maybe—just maybe—Courtney’s got one really amazing album in her? Like, if she either really gets her shit together or else totally finishes the job of losing it?

Ahhhh, I don’t know. It’s all been so downhill since Live Through This and one or two later songs. If she’d just strip it down again, maybe even sit in a room by herself with an acoustic guitar, maybe we’d hear some of that old spark.

Your bio says you’re the assistant director of the Writing Resource Center at New College of Florida. In a previous version of this question, which has since been revised and partially redacted, I made it glaringly obvious that I have no idea what the WRC is. But when I was in high school (in Miami) I used to dream about going to New College because I had read they didn’t have grades there. How long have you been at New College, and/or in Florida?

The Writing Resource Center is a peer tutoring center designed primarily, though not exclusively, to help students with their academic writing. New College doesn’t have an undergrad creative writing program, though we do have a visiting writer-in-residence every spring. This year it’s Sandy Florian. I graduated from New College about 10 years ago, went out into the world, and returned last September. Weird.

You are helping with the re-launch of New Collage—the venerable and soon-to-be-no-longer-defunct journal of New College. How’s that going? When can the world expect to see an issue?

I’m teaching it as a class! We’re reading all kinds of craft essays and random poems on top of planning the re-launch. And we’re blogging about it at joiningtheconversation.wordpress.com. I’m having fun. I hope my students are, too. I’m filling their heads with all sorts of grandiose ideas. The world can expect to see our first issue by the end of the semester if all goes relatively smoothly.

Speaking of things the world expects/hopes to see in the future, what are you working on now?

I’ve got a couple of manuscripts I’m shopping around. They’re called In the Great Tradition of Highway Angeles and The Trusting, The Stupid, The Dead. (Is it true that you’re not supposed to italicize titles that haven’t been published yet?) [I HOPE NOT. – JT] And I just went through my files and found 100 pages of poems NOT in manuscripts, about half of which there’s a chance I’ll want. I’m looking forward to messing around with those poems. I’ve also been trying to hammer out a series of poems about memory and loss-of-memory and fear-of-losing-memory, but that’s a hard one.

If we give you to the laughing witch,

she will keep you for a week, fly you,

on her broom, dropping stardust on the world.

If we give you to the black wolf he will keep you

for a year in a cave, no fire, no sunrise.

And you will grow hard.

If we keep you for ourselves, we’ll have you

forevermore under the blinding

light of the morning star.-

- from the title poem