The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun
Matthew Moore
“When we grow up, we’ll bomb Paris,” is the opening refrain of the two stanzas that comprise the poem “Raw Sienna,” which appears late in The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (Ecco Press, 1988). This refrain indicates what drives the Šalamunian imperative is neither reactionary nor revolutionary thought, but is in fact nothing short of a dream of insurgency. I take Šalamun at his word, here, that to bomb Paris means to destroy a capital of oligarchical finance, wherein art is a commodity and culture is roughly shaped by U.S. influence and consumerism. Šalamun, a truly free radical, a poet who often prefers the sensuous vulnerability of the first person pronoun “I,” chooses the plural “we” in this poem to suggest a community as the actors behind such a clear-sighted participation in aesthetically and politically freeing violence. The dream to bomb Paris belongs to the multiple, and Šalamun, always multiple in his meaning, goes on to embody this dream by ending “Raw Sienna” with an image that belongs to Mediterranea writ large: “a beam of oblique sunlight will spread in the samovar.” The samovar is an aesthetic object used to boil water for tea that, through its usage, unites a genealogy of several otherwise discernably disparate regions through space and time—including Byzantine, Western, Central, and South Asian, and Eastern European backgrounds. Šalamun’s extraordinary “beam of oblique sunlight” suggests an insurgent fire, set against the space-time genealogy of the samovar, that will “spread” until the samovar can no longer hope to contain it, nor the future “Raw Sienna” envisions.
In these Selected Poems, Šalamun proves himself to be one of the leading figures of poetry’s Cult of the Proper Noun, whose High Priestess is Emily Dickinson. Across seventy-one poems, over ninety-three pages, there are at least two-hundred and thirty-three proper nouns dispersed through Šalamun’s Selected, each as unyielding in its high collar of signification as the one before. Names, places, and dates riddle the Selected with repositories of meaning whose roots extend beneath the immediate horizon of the poems and admit deeper wounds. Even from the start, the first words of the first poem (“History”) test the strength and weakness of the authority over all the proper nouns to come, Tomaž Šalamun himself: “Tomaž Šalamun is a monster. | Tomaž Šalamun is a sphere rushing through the air.” The whole sublime measure of Šalamun’s enduring poetics is spelled out in the silence between the first and second lines that the reader encounters. There is the first line’s Grand Guignol expression of material histories as struck by the Šalamunian demotic of terror. There is the second line’s undying high spirit as deemed by the insurgency into which poets are enlisted for their capacity to invent. Šalamun’s proper nouns incite a parade in the Šalamunian city of muses, lovers, saints, enemies, acquaintances, holy sites, vistas, and states of exception. Two of the very best poems in the Selected, “Homage to Hat & Uncle Guido & Eliot,” and “Jonah,” depend entirely upon the deployment of their proper nouns that bristle with a torsion of meanings which simultaneously include and exclude the reader in their observations. This daisy-chain of inclusion and exclusion, this signifying yes and no, this simultaneous bomb-site and bread-line, at once destroyed by meaning and verdant with it, can turn Šalamun’s proper nouns from words into “prayers | song of songs of the Pan-Šalamunian religion” into bullets. The reader of the poem that quotation appears in, “Homage to Hat & Uncle Guido & Eliot,” may know “Christmas,” “Parmesan,” “Spinoza,” “magnolia Brandenburg & America,” and the titular “Eliot”; may need to look up “Ventimiglia,” “Tzilka,” and “Horak,”; and may likely be entirely at the mercy of “Clay,” “Frank’s blue cap,” “the Pan-Šalamunian religion,” and the titular “Uncle Guido”; on the other hand, this matrix of knowledge could arrange itself in a completely different manner, depending on the reader’s proximity to the poem’s several ideas of order beyond Key West. The poem aims oxymoronically along the points of allusion to reach beyond them via the deployment of its proper nouns. As for another significant poem, “Jonah,” it is less wounding in its exercise of proper nouns than “Homage to Hat & Uncle Guido & Eliot;” its muscular proper noun, “Jonah,” is quite more derived from a symbol of Lacanian radical alterity, the poem glints with the otherness of the reader’s exhalations when it is read aloud:
JONAH
how does the sun set?
like snow
what color is the sea?
large
Jonah are you salty?
I’m salty
Jonah are you a flag?
I’m a flag
the fireflies rest now
what are stones like?
green
how do little dogs play
like flowers
Jonah are you a fish?
I’m a fish
Jonah are you a sea urchin?
I’m a sea urchin
listen to the flow
Jonah is the roe running through the woods
Jonah is the mountain breathing
Jonah is all the houses
have you ever heard such a rainbow?
what is the dew like?
are you asleep?
Brian Henry has said “Jonah” follows an “interview format” (https://poems.com/features/what-sparks-poetry/brian-henry/) that explodes the idea of what it is a question can do in a poem, and I really like that idea. But what I really think is that “Jonah” hews even closer to the call and response format of the divine, again returning to that “song of songs of the Pan-Šalamunian religion,” or as in the three questions asked of the newly dead by the angels منكر ونكير, or any other catechism of the living and the dead, this contexture of religiosity cannot be overlooked in this poem, which stands at the cross-roads of the secular-divine oxymoron to which Šalamun so often returns. In another poem from the Selected, “Red Flowers,” Šalamun writes: “I know I had bullets in my body, they crumble away now. | How beautifully I breathe. | I feel I am being ironed, it doesn’t burn at all.” This contains all the violent upheaval and voicing of conviction that Jeanne d’Arc had in her court records, vexed with heavenly delight and relief, although whose bullets and what heaven remain unknown. In “Bitches Angels,” “sin” is “a tattooed stupidity,” and this serves at once as an exposition of and criticism against the idea of sin as aesthetically secular and divine, indelible, and to do with flesh. In “Proverbs,” a poem that comes a couple dozen of pages after the first poem “History,” “Tomaž Šalamun” returns again, as the great reformer, to a time in flux, where he “made the Party blink, tamed it, dismantled it, and reconstituted it.” The “Tomaž Šalamun” of “Proverbs” also “said, ‘Russians Get Out!’ and they did.” And in the present tense, “sleeps in a forest” just as the Partisans must have. Thus, the Party-monger possesses a creaturely fidelity in relation to the earth, and the body politic of “Tomaž Šalamun” melts, into a field of sacred questions. As in another late poem, “Sky Above Querétaro,” which ends:
And again an orange appears in heaven
which piously and quickly I make spin
to stretch and pluck at its petal,
and—
does the earth continue to breathe then?