During, Karen Houle
In Karen Houle’s During, the poem “During the Eighth” diagnoses, “We’re living on a layercake/ of unmatched socks of waste,/ every solid place a part of three busted others.” Houle’s second collection of poems fixates on borders and brokenness, categories and cohesion. The collection is itself split into four sections that share a linguistic root: “During,” “Duration,” “Endure,” and “Durable.” Houle’s poetry inspects the fractures and pauses within relationships, the body, and language.
The fact that Houle is a philosophy professor is certainly evident in her cool, analytical tone. Whether examining Mother’s Day, the local overpopulation of deer, or sex, Houle looks through the same lens of abstraction. In “My Various Daughters,” Houle comments on motherhood and creation, “Making stuff out of other stuff:/ What else could a body do?” In “More Advice from Sokrates” (one of the best in the collection), Houle describes vacuuming to Mahler: “Halfway through the Second Movement/ the pig-shaped sucking unit from Sears/ refuses to suck; to kiss the shag’s plush mouth/ plugged full of all of us.”
During’s finest poems identify the strangeness of human existence and have a special attention to rich sounds and rhythm, as in “If You Are Not on Good Terms with Your Own History,” in which Houle declares, “You are an unblinking neck slit of demoted thereness:/ Your own history the blankety blank nothing new.” The poems that don’t work as well are the ones with almost impenetrable syntax, like the following lines from “The Zipper”: “Cage wires the jaws shut/ inaudible, tetanus wings fuse/ the waving of arms.” During is not straightforward and is frequently inaccessible; nevertheless, Houle’s collection is stimulating in its analysis of the divided, detached, and developing. |
