New Shoes on a Dead Horse
Sierra DeMulder
Write Bloody Publishing
At the end of 2011, as if to round out the year, someone named @criticmichiko joined Twitter and began posting scathing, pretentious reviews of household objects, pizza crusts, and baby names: “It is with frustration that the reader tries to affix the new Swiffer pad to the Swiffer base. The user’s manual is self-indulgent blather.” A parody aimed at the scathing, pretentious New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, @criticmichiko now has nearly a thousand followers. After another account, @ActualNYTMK, joined Twitter and demanded that the parody take the account offline, and then proceeded to accuse @colsonwhitehead of masterminding the whole thing, the Twittersphere was too amused to care whether or not @ActualNYTMK was, indeed, the actual Michiko Kakutani or simply another parody account.
In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books published last weekend, novelist Matthew Specktor examined not only this specific phenomenon but its ramifications—the fruits of social networking itself. Our identities, with few exceptions, are filtered through this media: “On Twitter, or Facebook, we serve ourselves up in miscellaneous detail, presenting our epigrams and aphorisms and photographs, our urbane or intemperate responses to others… Consciously or otherwise, we stretch ourselves into flattering (even if, at times, deliberately ugly) postures: We spend time trying to curate, to use that buzzy term, ourselves. Or ‘selves.’” It’s this other “self” that interests Specktor, and he goes on to admit that, despite the extent to which we’ve taken it, it’s nothing new: “Je est un autre. Rimbaud’s notorious observation has become a prescription. Every last one of us has become someone else, at least one person, by now.” For an artist, there has always been un autre—the fragmentation of the person who calls herself an artist and the artist herself who creates the art. Art itself—even our most personal art—is filtered in a far more meticulous and intricate way than our 140-character epigrams. Art is the organization of the personal into the persona. The artist is as much our creation as the art itself.
Last year, MCB had the pleasure of reviewing Twin City treasure Sierra DeMulder’s first book of poetry, The Bones Below. As a multiple National Poetry Slam champion, The Bones Below was DeMulder’s first public foray into what for simplicity’s sake is called “page poetry,” and showed a startling understanding of the way the human heart fragments itself and negotiates its own internal distance. MCB implores MCB readers—if you haven’t done so—to order this book.
MCB would also like you to order DeMulder’s new book, New Shoes on a Dead Horse. While The Bones Below betrays a knowledge of quiet pain and desire, New Shoes is her exploration of Rimbaud’s autre, and, it should be said, is the work of a mature artist. Here we have the three levels of Sierra DeMulder: Sierra, “Sierra,” and—in the ancient muse sense of the word—The Genius. In the opening poem, “The Genius and the Soup Kitchen,” this muse offers the world to its followers: “Finally, he unplugged the Open sign. / He waited for it to cool before bending / the letters, forming new words / with electric yarn. // You Will Find Everything Here.” As the public invades, he’s burdened by questions. “Is there a God?” someone wonders. “Why doesn’t he return // my phone calls?” Readers familiar with DeMulder’s previous work will imagine the young artist herself extending an empty bowl toward the Genius, looking for answers before she starves to death.
As artists, we do everything we can to prevent that starving. In New Shoes, we see the juxtaposition of person and persona, and what it takes to negotiate survival. In “The Genius Performs Taxidermy,” we see this relationship at work: “He heaved // the Love onto the butcher’s block, / lifted its limp neck. He knew from the sloppy / twine stitches and the mismatched eyebrows that // this was not its first time dying.” In this sense, the poems that show the ache of relationships—“Your Son Has a Beautiful Voice,” “Love, Forgive Me,” “After We Break into My Apartment Because I Lost My Keys”—not only function as odes and elegies to love, but as the crumpled pages that feed the heart’s flame. Everything is here—a full understanding of a young life, or DeMulder’s own A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. Not only is New Shoes the work of a mature artist, but it’s the chronicle of that artist’s maturity, that artist’s awakening. It’s not simply a book of poems, but a narrative in verse, told in different voices from the same throat: “She’s got too many mouths to feed // on that head of hers. She’s got / too many heads on that vase of a neck.” It’s this starvation, however, that keeps every artist going back to her soup kitchen, as well as the Genius who waits behind the counter. Let’s hope we’re hungry forever.
New Shoes on a Dead Horse is forthcoming from Write Bloody Publishing (now taking pre-orders). You can meet the poet, as well as admire her intensely, at her release party on January 29th at Honey in NE Minneapolis (205 East Hennepin Ave), hosted by Spencer Retelle and featuring John Jodzio, Kerry Alexander, and A Loud Heart with Guante and Claire Taubenhaus. Party starts at 7:00. Visit DeMulder’s website for more information.
