When the Mouth Opened

A Review of Phoebe Giannisi’s Cicada

“Space is not the setting, real or logical, in which things are arranged,” wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. “It is the means whereby the positing of things becomes possible.” I thought a lot about this quote reading Phoebe Giannisi’s Cicada – the second of her seven books of poetry to appear in English translation – and even more about Merleau-Ponty’s work in general. For he and other early phenomenological thinkers, nothing preceded the lived, embodied moment, which was always and inevitably located. While we often forget it, it’s in space that we exist. It’s in the body in space that all meaning, all relation, becomes possible. Reading Cicada, space might be thought of less as a container for the things of reality than as a kind of event – something the poet is both always inside of and continually re-entering, the world and her place in it made strange, made possible, each time. 

Most of Cicada seems to take place in Volos, Greece, where Giannisi has taught architecture and cultural studies at the University of Thessaly for over twenty years (not entirely to my surprise after reading Cicada, her departmental profile lists one of her research interests as embodied subjectivity). But what’s interesting about these poems is that they give few indications of where in the world the poet is actually speaking from, at least not in the ultra-localised, thickly descriptive sense we have seen in much Anglophone writing of place of the last century. There’s an alien feeling to many of the poems in this book. Sounds, visuals, and tactile impressions of an environment accumulate; certain settings – the seaside, a house, a back garden – seem to recur: “from the backyard facing the mountain,” she writes in ‘Backyard,’ “the engine of a boat conveys the sea into the room” (75). Yet a clear sense of scene eludes us. “Existence is a thing of places” (62), Giannisi writes, but place, in her poetry, seems to be something known from the inside. Giannisi is less interested in reflecting on or even describing the worlds her speaker inhabits than in voicing the very experience of being in a body inside them. And with that voicing comes an alertness that I can only describe as ethical, a deep sense of how intimately the experiencing subject is involved with the other agencies – the lives, objects, or bodies – with whom space is shared:

Houses by the sea 
light air of September
distant noise of the saw
garden shadows
a woman in black sweeping the road
pomegranates, plane tree, cypress
a man with a dog 
underneath the olive trees
sofas cast-iron chairs
from the 60s or 70s   (71)

One of Cicada’s consistent themes is our capacity to be changed by the spaces we exist in, to be moved, even reconstituted, by things originating outside the private, bounded self of liberal individualism. It’s a dualist model of subjectivity Giannisi is resisting in these poems, that old but persistent Cartesian fantasy of a human consciousness that floats free of nature and the physical world. I sense this resistance even in the above lines, relatively quiet, almost domestic, as they are. The gorgeous simultaneity Giannisi achieves here (sounds and movements follow but do not displace one another, time as well as space is distributed, is shared) crops up in the book often: “apples redden on the branches/ and then fall,” she writes elsewhere, “cicadas/ blend with the noise of the cement mixer/ and the ants/ that walk along the wall” (9). If the speaker seems to disappear in lines like these, it’s only because it’s the world itself – the “light air of September” at this precise moment in the garden, the “distant noise of the saw” – that reveals her. There’s an experiencing subjectivity at work behind all these lines, and it is awake, affectable. Translator Brian Sneeden should be credited for carrying Giannisi’s strange voice and often puzzling syntax into English. Again and again his sensitive translation accesses the immediacy of “the absolute present” (17) to render the porous distinctions between subject and object, self and world:

I walk along the shore
among the scent 
of bitter mud
mud of the field mud of the seabed
scent of evening primrose 
soaked yard
yelping dog
a waiter with a tray
a solitary woman
a cricket (81)

Probably my favourite thing about Cicada is the sheer democracy of its ecological vision. Giannisi is not sentimental about what is included in these poems, nor what is included in the category of ‘nature’ altogether. The grease of modernity is all over Cicada, from the trawlers in ‘Phaleron’ whose nets “bring to light/ fish mollusks seaweed junk” (28) to “the distant/ murmur of the mechanical crane” heard over “the vast flower of the sea” in ‘Zeno’s Paradox’ (78). One poem is devoted to the poet’s car, which “for so long bore [her] in its viscera/ like an animal” and now makes for “scrap/ at the ports” with the other “old cars made in China” (“we inhale the motes/ of our own rust,” Giannisi writes, a brilliant image of capitalism’s waste and excess coming back in from the away) (74). I suspect the nature/culture divide we still see in so much Anglophone (particularly Anglo-American) ecopoetry – the wilderness environmentalism that has seen nature writers setting the corruptions of modernity against the ‘purity’ of the natural world since at least Thoreau – is simply not something Giannisi would recognise in her own cultural antecedents. The human world is included in the natural. The garden is cut by the sound of the buzz saw, the sea by the clamour of human labour and industry. Why pretend otherwise? 

In place of Edenic nostalgia for a wilderness lost to history, Cicada offers a simpler fact of ecology: everything that exists in time and space involves– wounds– something outside of it. And, in turn, is involved and wounded back. This is at least one of the meanings of Giannisi’s titular cicada – ancient symbol of change and rebirth, of course, but just as often in the poems a strange physical being that signifies nothing beyond the fact of its own presence. In one of the most memorable images in the book, Giannisi’s cicada literally invades the body, “flutter[ing] and screech[ing]” from inside the human mouth; “When the mouth opened,” Giannisi writes, “the cicada took off flying” (32). Is there almost a kind of eros here, in the broadest sense of the word – a merging, a being inhabited? The speaker’s wonder at witnessing this moment is the same wonder behind all the poems. It’s the wonder at being a body in the world, at being involved with that which exists outside of it:

the summer my brother
ate a cicada
it fluttered 
and screeched
alien voice from the fence
of the teeth
when the mouth opened
the cicada 
took off flying (32)