“What poets have you been reading?” David Starkey asked the poet-teachers at the Writing Intensive at this year’s CPITS Symposium.
What poet-teachers read and how they might bring it into the classroom is one of the things that adds value to residencies. By bringing contemporary poems into the classroom, poet-teachers in a residency prepare students not for the canon they will study in their literature courses–although we do that, too–but to practice poetry in the world community they have been born into.
For a chapbook, The Solipsist fills a great expanse: the inner cosmos.
This week we’ll consider the poems in Troy Jollimore’s The Solipsist (Bear Star Press).
In Tom Thomson in Purgatory, Jollimore introduced the title character who for the most part bound the book together. Tom Thomson makes several appearances in The Solipsist, but he has grown somewhat in the two years between the books. Gone is some of the Yoda-syntax.
The character Tom Thomson returns in Troy Jollimore's The Solipsist.
But the big news in this marvelous chapbook (36 pages) is where Tom Thomson and Jollimore are: in the center of the universe, otherwise known as the mind.
For poet-teachers looking for models of contemporary poems, The Solipsist has plenty. Jollimore’s Tom Thomson’s sonnets are loose and liberating. The poem “On Changing Horses Midstream” is a fine reanimation of a dead metaphor. “Regret” is a good example of negative images.
But the aspect of The Solipsist that struck me the most was the interiorism,
Interiorism is based on Collins' assertion that how people arrange inner space is deeply revealing.
which I defined in the essay “Indoors with Billy Collins” as the poet ushering the reader into the architecture of consciousness. Much contemporary poetry seems to assume that a poem encases the reader from the first word. Collins, however, preferred to get “the reader in the sidecar” or “set out a welcome mat” before proceeding into the poem. These gestures to the reader were introductions to a unique inner world.
Once the inner world is posited, how the poet constructs that place can be reveal more about voice than many other techniques.
“It’s all in your head,” Jollimore writes in the title poem (11). Unlike Collins who often uses architecture to shape inner space, Jollimore uses the body. Instead of doors, Jollimore uses the ear, eye or nostril to enter (12, 36).
Once inside, “everything that the eye/can take in…lives inside your skull” (11). Ultimately, Jollimore is being ironic. Everything on the inside came in from the outside. In “Tom Thomson Indoors,” Jollimore’s character has a doorbell on “the inside” (Jollimore’s emphasis, 25). Of course the world doesn’t answer.
Tom, however, “pretty much/implodes” (again, Jollimore’s emphasis, 36). Once inside the self, Tom finds himself accelerating “toward the inner wall/–the universe’s limit–of his skull.” The consonance of “skull” and “wall” seems to underline the limits of our projections.
Nevertheless, poetry can be the expansion of our inner imagined space. Nowhere does a poet do that more so than in the world of the suppositional voice. Often using the conditional perfect tense, a writer brings the reader into their hopes or fears: “The passionate spark/that would have flared up in your eye as you said this–/if you had said this…” (34) . A poem such as “Regret” speaks about a life wished for but not lived outside the mind. The spark flares in the most intimate space, a place only the poet can bring you.
The Solipsist moves Tom Thomason and readers from Purgatory to the cosmos of Tom’s mind. The purgatory of regret might exist in that cosmos. So might we. The interior of this chapbook is so big, it seems to account for all that comes before. What an expansive little book.
Works Cited
Cesmat, Brandon. “Indoors with Billy Collins.” BaronaFest. Barona, 12 January 2003.
