June 2, 2002, Review of Jackie Sheeler’s “The Memory Factor”
TITLE: The Memory Factory
AUTHOR: Jackie Sheeler
PUBLISHER: Buttonwood Press, POB 206, Champaign, Illinois 61824-0206
ISNB: 0-9658045-3-4
Awards: The 2001 Magellan Prize
Word count: 1375
In 1965, poet and law clerk Charles Reznikoff published the first of a quartet of books entitled Testimony. The poems in these four volumes were collected from law reports from the United States civil courts between 1885 and 1915. In them he was able to preserve the actual voices of people who ended up in court, suing someone or being sued. Reznikoff also walked to work through several boroughs from his apartment in New York City until his retirement (in the late Sixties Allen Ginsberg encountered him on one of these walks on an autumn evening in Central Park) and his other poems are filled with overheard conversations, unexpected street dramas, and the families he saw, night after night, escaping the summer heat on their front porches or in the streets. And with these poems, he has preserved a particular place and a specific time and filled it with actual people.
Likewise, in the future, if history is written by poets, it might look something like Jackie Sheeler’s The Memory Factory. Sheeler has lived inside of New York City all of her life (unlike Reznikoff) but, like Reznikoff, she is in the process of documenting her time and neighborhood. The social strata she’s preserving beneath the immigrant shopkeepers and aging salesmen Reznikoff chronicled, but those who know the more furtive boroughs of Brooklyn will recognize the blighted landscapes and everydayness of its despair. And Sheeler refuses to let go of our hands, even when we feel that we have seen enough—she wants us to see it all, everything she’s seen, before it turns into ash.
But what separates Sheeler from most of the poets who have written noirish first person narratives in nightmare landscapes is that she is as sensitive to language as she is to narrative, and she doesn’t believe that telling a story is the same thing as writing a poem. Likewise, though she is interested in language and sound (there’s both an appearance in the Def Poetry anthology and a successful gig the Nuyorican café on her resume), she also demands that her stories not only be stylish and well-told but also worth telling. This is appropriate for a poet who considers the sky in “Astronomology” to be the mother who put her to sleep with stories of constellations and myths as a child.
What holds these poems together is that each one is a probe into the process of memory. In her poems—no matter what is actually happening—Sheeler is trying desperately to recall the past in order to hold it up in the light and understand it. Even poems written more or less in the present tense share the same dissociation as she begins to question perception itself. Ultimately, she is less interested in how these stories are stored than how they were created in the place.
She begins her book with an image of sharpening a hypodermic needle against a matchbook. And it is with this motion that we a quick series of vignettes, something like a photo album from Dante’s “Inferno.” Her guides and companions on this journey are disappearing husbands, accident victims, suicides, winos, drug addicts, the presumed dead and the nearly dead. The narrator of most of these poems, presumably Sheeler herself, is the daughter of an abusive policeman, who becomes pregnant at 13, and is subsequently beaten by her father into the hospital. Her father is arrested and then released. When the poet is released from the hospital, her mother signs her off as a Child in Need of Supervision and she is sent to juvenile prison. Sometime subsequent to this she becomes addicted to drugs (apparently heroin and crack) and ends up in shooting galleries and crackhouses, living for a time in an abandoned building with her junkie husband. “To beg is to drag your tenderest spot across the teeth of strangers.” Imagine a sensibility like this in situations like that.
But there are realms of hell that even Jackie hasn’t entered. She observes the prostitution and physical violence and criminal behavior that surround her from afar with a disconcerting level of dissociation, which serves to remind us that a homeless drug addict is not much different from us except in circumstances. She still needs food, a safe place to sleep, and companionship, as well as having to be attentive to the difficulties of negotiating the uncertainty of illegal drug commerce. Luckily for us she never descends to the level of chronic wastage as do the winos and ODs that she encounters, but we get the feeling that she considers these to be snapshots of her possible future. And she comes perilously close to them when in her poem “Red Tape” she revives an OD for the sole purpose of determining how much of the unexpectedly pure heroin he’s injected so that she can more expertly calculate her own dose.
But although notable for their content and the desperate landscape she so eloquently surveys and records, there is much more to these poems than their narratives. And for a poet so accustomed to the performance arena, there is all sorts of rewarding information for the reader in terms of how these poems work on the page. With such dire contents, the poems are created as almost delicate—there is usually a highly developed and pleasant rhythmic structure, and a lightness in the language, and a rapid movement through the poem, as well as a sharp visual sense of how to use and balance her chosen couplets and triads. Her lines are usually so crammed with information that sometimes we can only bear three lines at a time:
The blood is clean: no dreams pollute its red thunder, the veins
are thickened with sieves and catheters, but
dreams are kept out. The blood is clean.
Ice, Applied Directly
I would also guess that she is a dedicated reader of Flaubert—for she too shares his delight in packing a line with at least three shifts of tone or levels of information, such as when she writes of “hope twisting like an alien tongue in my mouth.” At other times her descriptions are both exact and surreal, or surreally exact: “limp, / like the innards of an exhausted balloon” or “the tentative / fist of a dream.” And there are other witty pleasures, such as how the unripened apples of “Apples” become the heavy, overripe apples that open “Natural Bodies” on the following page.
Although all of these poems are in the first person, there are several in the voices of others, such as one in the voice of JonBenet Ramsey and, perhaps my favorite poem in the book, a monologue from the Egypt Air pilot who sent his airliner into the Atlantic, which begins: “God is bloodthirsty and blind. Blessed / be the name of God…” The facility with which she assumes these diverse voices makes one curious how many of her other poems may be written in the voice of an assumed persona as well. Some of these narrators have girlfriends, and we desperately want to know if the voice is male or female. That this ambiguity still exists after a close reading (and works in the poem’s favor) is an indication of how convincing these poems are and also how complex Sheeler’s worldview can be.
Congratulations goes out to Buttonwood Press of Champaign, Illinois, for putting together such a nice-looking book and for sending it out into the world. But, most of all, I’m thankful that Sheeler survived to record these poems for all the people—many now undoubtedly dead—she met when they were all ghosts on a road to oblivion. On the back of the book we find that she is currently a computer technology manager, so the part of her story that has yet to be told is the journey from a squatter’s tenement to a position at HotJobs. But as she admits in “One Uncivilized Soul,” there is a part of her that will always feel more alien sitting in a rented apartment than she did twelve years ago, sleeping in abandoned buildings and the park benches in Brooklyn. My fondest hope is that she’s been documenting her “Purgatorio” as thoroughly as she has her “Inferno.”
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