Destruction MythBy Mathias Svalina |
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Reviewed by Charles Jensen
The burden of myth is plausibility. In the religious traditions that have sought to explain both our purpose for being and the way the world came about, the same questions must be answered, but each spun tale must, at its core, have a plausible shred—a common-sense starting point.
So it is with Mathias Svalina’s exceptional collection of poems Destruction Myth. Of the forty-five pieces that make up the book, forty-four carry the title “Creation Myth,” and forty-four of them set out to explain, in their own ways, using their own discrete logic, how the world came about and what meaning our origin brings to our lives.
While the poems often begin in absurdity, they locate their rational shreds fairly quickly. The first contends, “In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird,” then quickly rights itself by continuing, “but everyone did not have the name Larry Bird / & this was confusing.” Or, take this example, equally logical: “In the beginning there was nothing. But the nothing smelled like bacon. No one could figure out how nothing could: a) have a smell & b) smell like bacon.” The poem continues to describe how the occupants of the nothingness provided theories to explain the bacony smell of themselves. That they discover, in the end of the tale, that they are all made of bacon as they are made in God’s image is both a satirical reading of religious tradition and, at the same time, an oddly touching tribute to the power of faith.
Such contradictions—in narrative, in tone, in language—are the hallmarks of this exciting and talented poet. Svalina is the master of the poetic turn, inverting his pieces so that what was serious is mocked and what was humorous becomes sad. Take, for example, the piece that begins, “In the beginning there were only streets.” The streets, unwieldy, take over the world, become the world. Svalina builds and builds the absurdity of the piece with each line, taking it beyond the realm of the rational and into the preposterous. And then, the poem closes:
Your car does not love you. Your car knows
what it is to be a car & that cars belong
to the streets. Just as every bird
belongs to the bird feeder. Just as lead
belongs to the pencil. That’s how I felt
when I was eight years old
& my home broke apart.
The book goes on and on this way, creating and recreating the world with myth after myth, each one more interesting, more compelling, more curious than the last:
“In the beginning everyone wanted to fight to the death. This made shopping difficult & also lovemaking and almost everything else.”
“In the beginning everything I said exploded. I’d say I am holding a glass of ice water and the glass of ice water would explode.”
“God created the world over a span of four years.
He would get all excited about it & work really hard for a few days
& then he would watch some movies & get out of the mood”
“In the beginning there was a book
but every time a villager read the book
it meant something different to her
than it did to her friend or mother.”
“At the beginning of everything the suicide rate increased dramatically.”
Svalina employs a consistent use of irony in these pieces, perhaps as a way to demonstrate that the world’s inherent contradictions resist any formula that may describe it. If the myths are as cunning and impassioned as Wile E. Coyote, the world they try to encompass is the Roadrunner, who merely moves two inches to the left and manages to avoid every restriction that could contain it. Svalina masterfully uses the kind of ambient language that clogs our culture today—ad words, brand names, TV news sound bytes, scientific jargon, and other bits of ephemera that, while seemingly empty, bring credibility and a kind of real-world color to these myths. These are myths of our culture, reflective of our culture, that tell us as much about who we are today as about who we were.
The final piece in the book—the frenetic, schizophrenic poem that lends its title to the book—skillfully, and perhaps gleefully, deconstructs the contents of the creation myths that precede it. All of the memorable presences from the earlier works—Larry Bird, pig’s blood, a sledgehammer, a fight to the death—reappear and are destroyed or subtracted. After such hard work to create the book—and, ostensibly, the world—it’s interesting to note it takes Svalina only thirteen sections to work it backward to oblivion. While many of the creation myths rely on prose and prose conventions of narrative to weave their worlds, “Destruction Myth” is built from rapid-fire lines whose pace, comparatively speaking, feels like poetry on the autobahn, generating more speed from its own speed. Like a furnace devouring its own house, the poem consumes the book, the myths, until it notes, “Most people didn’t want it to end. / But then it was the end.”
What makes this book such a compelling read isn’t Svalina’s deft use of imagery or the pervading sense of play at work in these poems, although those are enjoyable elements. While Svalina treads in the absurd, he stays close to the central truth of our humanity, that we are, fundamentally, miraculous errors, blessed with being and cursed with the need to explain why.