MP Review:
Sandy McKinney, Body Grief
Reviewed by Stephanie Pope
Body Grief: Poetry by Sandy McKinney
The Bromley Bookstore: Stanford, CT
ISBN 0-9743157-0-2   $12.00

”Body Grief”: When A Poem Wants A Poem

Myth is many things to many people. To Jung, myth addresses Mind or Psyche and this is its big contribution to ‘Knowing.’ Mythic thinking works by reworking images, 'no-ing' them. In this way mythic thinking attempts to address how Psyche speaks reality and this logos is as libation spilling from the mouth/muthos/myth of Memory (Mnemosyne), dream (Hypnos) and reflection (Kastalia-Hippocrene). ‘Muthos’ is Greek and means both 'myth' and 'mouth' linking these notions together in belonging...making them 'a little phrase' in that sense Merleau-Ponty suggests. [i]   My hope is to try to review Body Grief: Poetry by Sandy McKinney from such a mythic perspective.

Body Grief re-imagines a poetic, sensate and incarnate body-mind through the ways in which an outer life hungers for an inner one; through a ‘give and grieve’, an eros demanding recognition of “an hour, a breath, a word” made flesh in words. When a poem wants a poem, poetic body will come to knowledge of what it knows it knows and wants to say a certain way, precisely because its outer sense hungers for that inner one… because the outer world once upon a time grew stiff and cold…grew dry…because love (Eros) happened and so did death (Thanatos). Because both took place a certain way, a certain way wants told.

The primordial space we each live in is a space of great silence in which a wave of vitality clamors for expression gathering to itself fragments of preenacted, ‘lived’ essences even as our mind aches in meaning bent toward the named experience prior to knowing it. We rend here. We give, and grieve. McKinney’s poetic voice shows us how to accept such profound losing graciously while refusing to give it up completely. The poetic voice of her poetry gives it up without giving up on its ability to remake.

The realm of cold and arid sensation in one poem suggests cthonic dimensions at work and these constellate for me a persephonic thoughtfulness: the soul (psyche) of this poetry is led to expression in knowings of itself through love, seemingly like Orpheus is led to Eurydice; to the losing of her again and again and bit by bit but, ‘a little out of time’ or…right where soul-existences come home! The poet, Orpheus is led into what is below and comes after the actions of life. Deeper than these, orphic mind/soul/psyche is led to touch its true ideas around a felt-sense for images. These remake in no-ings that garner and hold here the retellings that will exactly embody their losses…

I know the colors of the desert sky
Are made of dust, Aridity…

…Give me a day,
an hour, a breath, a word.
Give me one word.      - Logos

The Little Phrase shares with us a soul-making’s poetic image (PI). It allows us to experience how Psyche/Mind sees reality and it puts us in a realm of thinking that streams this seer and its ideal while producing the sense for the sensible infrastructure that makes these ideas so (and just so) before they break into consciousness. The Little Phrase makes images over in original language and into speech and idea. Of this sensible infrastructure, the poetic voice in Body Grief reveals

All my life long, I’ve only managed to save
out of the hundred houses, the thousand
moons, the staircase that leads
from one moment to the next,
a rusty skeleton key
that promises to unlock another breath.     -Hoarding

The Little Phrase cannot be extracted from the visible, sensate world directly. It requires an/other breath. Because this is so, the sensible invites a double, an 'as-form.' The image double is the visible, sensate incarnation, an in-visible of the visible.

Keep in mind the 'incarnation' or double is not itself, strictly speaking, sensible. It resembles Plato's idea, an ideality not alien to the flesh. This ground of be-ing is neither inside nor outside. It is a no-where space whose significance is grounded in silence and whose yield is the ‘little phrase' whose purpose it is to give libation. The Little Phrase is a fluid reality. It gives us release from mental tensions bound to our mode of thinking in matter that matters in energetic oppositionalisms of thought. The Little Phrase gives to the ideas of Plato their axis, their depth and their dimensions in being-so.

Body Grief’s poetic voice tells us of the promise inherent in no-ing images by allowing them to fall a-part, decay into their own essences and vanish into depths where what re-presents itself to us tells us what it is like; this give and grieve in Body Grief is like a rusty skeleton key that promises to unlock another breath… if we let what Psyche speaks assume here poetic re(com)pose.
 
Psychic existences belonging to the poems in this poetry volume express losings. Mostly they seem to tell stories about losses in flesh and blood. By taking life and the actions of life to death—past and through death—this poetry reveals truths of psyche-making. Psyche-making, by way of its as-forms of poetic existence, lead us to experience the superlative form of what things must mean to us in Mind’s body and what matters to our lives in ultimate meanings throughout our own life’s soul-making. [ii] The sickness in the metal, the rust in the skeleton, is both incurable and cure. Both.

Ex

That Conte crayon drawing
Charlie did of you—you know,
the one I used to turn face down
so I could bear the weeks
you’d be away. Well, it’s still
art, the first thing I hang up
in every new apartment.         –Four Little Scenes of Love From Myth And Life

What cannot be faced, faces us every day. More deeply— under stand-ingly— it re-mains what matters in psychic life, re-maining an unknown yet knowable psychic content, an “X”, like the “Ex” we married ourselves to long ago and then divorced. We know this (e)X is still our hang-up, our rust, our sickness of metal that is also our cure. Yet, what is this cure?

There are four scenes presented in this little poem found on p74 of Body Grief. The title of the poem tells us these are scenes of eros (love). Further, the poem presents us with a pair of mythic (imaginal) lovers, a pair of historical lovers, and an image of the animal form (the depth love seeded in the Mind’s body) this eros assumes. Somehow, the mythopoetic expression has X-pressed the image of the cure, the little phrase, what it is like, and retraced upon this page in poetic form, its as-form in language.

What this poem reveals to me re-tells the story of the power of hospitality in the presence of hostility.  It expresses a way of dealing with the strangeness of life in the presence of the stranger life becomes. Strangers are guests of a certain deity, Zeus Xenius. “Xenos” is Greek for both “stranger” and “guest.” Our word for “hospitality” (xenia) comes from here. Fear of this strangeness is xenophobia. Love for it, and strangers, is xenophilia. The cure for the incurable body’s grief, the poetic voice of Body Grief explicitly foretells, will happen through a persistent practice of hospitality!

Zeus Xenius, Zeus of the Stranger, is the protector of all who seek shelter in a strange life. Consequently, the strange life harbors sanctuary. Sanctuaries are primarily both temples and places of hospitality. The likeness in the strange life of an estrangement can be like a hospice or inn, or inner temple. If hospice, the poetry in Body Grief reveals a place of care. If inn, the in(n)-scape here offers us its place of sustenance. If a temple, this space is sacred and houses divinity. But, it is always through what ails us that we come to know this.

The poetic life sensated throughout Body Grief reaffirms the stranger that life becomes is guest and guide and host with healing powers. The PI voices a language used to cultivate a psyche of welcome that both gives and grieves in how to live with the losses it knows, has loved, still loves, and must go on to live without. Without this love, what could endure? The profound poetic statement in this collection of poems dwells where the holy and the unholy cannot be torn apart yet must be, and will be, told a-part again. So that finally, I rest my picturing and this review back upon Body Grief’s own expression of likeness for what such poetic and beautiful, hospitable soul-making is really like…

Sparrow

They call her Fur Pie
You can tell the way
she stands there with her legs

Apart that she’s no good
and dumb to boot, but she
can find crumbs in the snow

Where there’s been no sign
of human charity for years.       –Four Little Scenes of Love From Myth And Life