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"IT / WAKES ME UP": MICHAEL O'BRIEN'S SLEEPING AND WAKING 
Of New York-based poet and translator Michael O'Brien's Sills, Eirik Steinhoff writes in the Chicago Review, "Rarely is a selected poems one's first introduction to a poet, but in the case of Michael O'Brien's Sills, I think we have to make a welcome exception." O'Brien's new book, Sleeping and Waking, is both welcome and exceptional. It immerses its reader in a world of slippage and double sight, where the artificial invades the natural, the natural invades the artificial, and there's a scary sense that our fast-paced, tech-saturated lives may be unsustainable. The beauty of Sleeping and Waking, however, is its offer, should we take it, of an alternative: the transformative power of perception and sensory experience. The possibilities of such transformation are evident in the collection's first poem, which reflects on writing praxis. O'Brien's take on that topic is similar to that of theorist Walter Benjamin, who writes in The Arcades Project, "Say something about the method of composition itself: how everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time must at all costs be incorporated into the project then at hand." In Sleeping and Waking, the first poem, a prose poem titled "Certain Evenings," echoes that sentiment: "This is the story of a man sitting in a room writing everything / down that comes into his head. Images and sentences. A kind of / parade. That ends at the cemetery." The speaker continues: "And then changing it. What he's written down. The man in the room. So that what happens is the changes. This is the story." Planted firmly in the book's inaugural poem is this declaration that "what happens" in the writing is "the changes." "The changes," furthermore, are intrinsically tied to the writing process, to what Benjamin calls "the method of composition." Because O'Brien's changes are to "what he's written down," they are, literally, what no longer exists on the page. By inscribing their presence into the poem, then, O'Brien draws our attention to what's unseen, to a kind of invisible cemetery that lines the poems' undersides. |
| "The grace of this book lies in the subtlety with which it moves and changes, and in its optimistic inclusion of possibility." |
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In Sleeping and Waking, the under-presence of "the changes" is shadowed and eventually expressed through the movement of the book: the poet's use of increasingly bold metaphors and his attention to the three states depicted in the book's title—sleeping, waking, and being awake. The doubleness of the word "waking" is significant here: The word depicts the act of waking (the state between sleeping and waking) and the waking hours themselves.
The poet's attention to multiple states of consciousness is bound to both "the changes" (simultaneously present in and gone from the poems) and to the diverse population of New York City. In "Certain Evenings," then, we meet the linguistic ghosts of the poems, alongside the real and imaginary people of the city: "the travelers" in Penn station are "practicing stillness" in front of "new arrivals [that] drift in numbers past the / watchers." A building bears "an advertisement the size of a six-story building.the model's / puzzled, blank defiance, life translated into some other lan- / guage, one it cannot support." The poem ends with a reflection on watching a homeless woman push two shopping carts down the street: "Like being hazed by one's needs. By human practice. Which can change." Not "which changes" or "which will change," but "which can change"—there are no guarantees, but through the verb's auxiliary we find that change is a distinct possibility The grace of this book lies in the subtlety with which it moves and changes, and in its optimistic inclusion of possibility. Here are two excepts (both poems, it's worth noting, have titles related to location): From "Upstate"—Both poems deal with a similar subject matter—dreams, external patterns applied to living—but the differences between them illustrate the book's development. While "Upstate" acknowledges the dream as dream ("In a broken / dream I have / just met Lord / Byron"), "Local" gives us the pleasure of finding out after the fact. The reader, along with the poem's "I" are made local to the dream: "At a / party my / father suddenly / appears." Only when the speaker wakes do we learn he's dreaming. This willingness to dwell in the dream world parallels the movement in the poems from numerical patterns integrated into our lives to outward reflections on these patterns. In "Certain Evenings," there are "the voices / their repeating decimals" and the arrivals at the train station that "drift in numbers" across the board. In "Upstate," life and numbers are similarly seamless, "I reach for my / watch to see / where we are / in night's program." Without "I reach for my," "watch" is a verb, not a noun, not the object we use to tell time. Regardless, the idea that night has a program—some agency and pattern of its own—remains even if we read "watch" as a verb. In "Local" the integration of numbers into life has built to a crescendo and subsequently unravels: "you get used to" the grid, but "[t]hen one / day it starts to feel like / a graph with your present / position & all its / projections plotted out. / Last Wash 7 pm." This is different from looking at a watch in the middle of the night. This is a reflection from outside of the numbered world on what it's like to live within the parameters of everyday, contemporary life. The italicized announcement enacts these parameters, while the second-person "you" creates a kind of double address—the speaker to him or herself and to the reader, thus implicating the reader in the system as well. Formally, the use of enjambment and short lines, particularly in "Upstate," grates against the poem's already paradoxical combination of casual tone and lyric intensity. The line breaks are almost violent, disrupting one's sense of the clause or sentence, sometimes even breaking on the article "a" that precedes the noun: "seen everything, a / spider's eyes, a / kind of banked / fury." These line breaks set up an expectation and delay the gratification of nouns-to-come. When considered as individual lines, however, "a" nearly becomes a character: the first letter of the alphabet, a starting point. But these isolated letters, hanging out at the edges of lines (a formal device that occurs throughout the book, not only in these poems), also create a kind of dialogue between poet and letter, an address to the alphabet-starter: "seen everything, a," "spider's eyes, a." "A," in these kinds of lines, might even echo its speech cousins: "eh" or "aye." "Local" appears late in Sleeping and Waking and, as its title indicates, the poem enacts a move from "the grid," with its "projections plotted out," directly to the uncharted world of perception and dream where we meet dead relatives, where we start "[a]t a." There is the notion, again, of the alphabet as an entrance to the world of perception and flux, where dreaming is just one state of consciousness and one thing seems often to be another. In "Once," we find ourselves in the presence of a half-bald, contradictory, and ironic statement on poetics: Work against correspondence, theFormal qualities work against the stanza's meaning as a unit; the lines build on each other as ironic commands-to-self that end with gentle mocking. We find the now familiar starting mark, "a," ironically denounced—"world is not a"—and then bumped against the central line in the stanza. This middle line undoes the previous one by appealing to the book, and thus language, as authority ("book, everything is"), even as we read according to the entire clause in question, "the / world is not a / book..." The last clause, "you / could look it up," pokes fun at the idea of the book as authority even while confirming that we often do go to books for information. We go to books wanting to find that everything is something else. The irony of this stanza works because everything in Sleeping and Waking proves it wrong. Consider the following excerpts: From "Upstate"—These excerpts all consider the metaphoric correspondences created by the senses, which—even as they sometimes deceive us—work here as a vehicle for seeing or hearing double, for experiencing the world according to possibility. As the book moves, these moments of doubleness become less tentative and more certain, spliced together by commas rather than conjunctions such as "but" and "or," in "Upstate" and "Ukulele Songs," respectively. The metaphors are confident. Sight is trusted. Everything is something else. And in the last two examples, we find the artificial compared to the natural and vice versa. A firecracker is a tadpole. A black cat is a car's shadow. This interpenetration of artificial and natural phenomena extends into all facets of Sleeping and Waking: its metaphoric life, the states of sleeping and waking, the formal device of juxtaposing the meaning of a given grammatical unit and the meaning of an individual line. It's unclear whether the word 'correspondence' in "Once" alludes to Baudelaire's famous poem, "Correspondences," but the last line of that poem feels apt here: "to praise the senses' raptures and the mind's." In Baudelaire's poem, the senses and the intellect are united; the same could be said of O'Brien's book, though to me the sense of correspondence feels even more expansive in Sleeping and Waking. It is not only the senses and the intellect that correspond, but also states of consciousness and images and perceptions of the urban and natural worlds. In the book's final poem—also a prose poem —"After Hippocrates," we find the speaker back in the city, this time on Ninth, rather than Seventh, Avenue: ...A huge crane places a dot at the
end of a sentence,
pigeons wheel, now black, now white, we paste the days
together with sleep,
draft horses huge as horses in dreams. Dawn has in reserve
so much light,
seeping into the streets, saturating them, turning up in a place
where no eye but would see.
A crane ends a sentence; pigeons are black and white, but so are the days, made of both dark and light. We use sleep to glue the days together, and the "real" horses of our waking hours, "draft horses," have to live up to the horses in our dreams, not vice versa. A draft horse is by definition a horse bred for heavy labor, but in the last poem of Sleeping and Waking, the draft horse overturns our use of sleep as mere glue: Waking is a draft for sleeping and not the other way around. Day is a draft for night and their hinge—the place where they correspond—is "dawn," where light will turn up in a place "no eye but would see." This odd grammatical construction is strangely optimistic. Even "no eye" could not help but see the light of dawn, or put differently, when the eye is absent, we can still represent it in the mind. Sleeping and Waking achieves this doubling with increasing clarity as it moves, until dreaming and waking, the real and the imagined, what we see and what we think we see, all gain our equal attention and trust. |