Leah Flax Barber’s debut collection of poetry, The Mirror of Simple Souls, takes its title from Marguerite Porete’s 14th century mystical tract on love’s supremacy over reason. Porete’s text ends by recognizing its own limits as a book–pointing out the facade of claiming to be above reason while still speaking in language. Mortal language is, Porete realizes (in Babinsky’s translation), “more like lying than speaking the truth.” Writing has shown her how writing could never bring her to truth.
Flax Barber takes this revelation, in which the book becomes the means of showing its own falsehood, as a model for poetry. Mirror of Simple Souls craft a costume flimsy enough to reveal how costumed we all are. Her language is assured and referential—confident enough to let us see right through the farce to ourselves.
The book moves through three sections: from the archetypical Commedia dell’arte figure Columbina, to the memory forging condition Cryptomnesia, to the origin-seeking ritualistic Saturnalia. As a whole, The Mirror of Simple Souls forms an erotics of drama that seeks out the self’s origin—each poem constructing a new site actively caught in the fraught space between actress and character, projection and self, I and the origin of I. Where does the character begin? Where do I begin? Where do we begin?
“Origin is the goal,” she writes in “What the Mind Wants.” Rather than a psychologically stable center, an interior ego, these poems discover origin in action: “The shape of my character starts / Not in my mind / But in my experience.” As in a pantomime, we only know through happening.
Linking character, origin, and experience, Flax Barber dramatizes the ethical act of making one’s self “from water” and “passion nights.” Like Keats’s desired tombstone, the self made from water must be constantly re-made as it quickly washes away; where do the passionate nights go during the day?
So the dramatist lies bare the “possibility of liberation” in the “melancholy memory-image” of comedy, of Saturnalia, by revealing our mercuriality. In this identity free-fall, however, forever being another leaves one no longer free to touch, to be touched. Interaction is coated with itself—a metaphysical patina that shines as the “I” says “I” for another. She writes, in “Columbina and Pedrolino”: “Being an actress I touch your hand / Without touching it.” The metonymic space following “actress” keeps player and part separate, while the stress of the line leaves “I” and “you” subdued, keeping attention on the gesture that happens without happening. The specific “hand” becomes the general “it.”
With her contorted syntax and deceptive transparency, Flax Barber holds the reader in in this metonymic space: touched and untouched, actress and costume. She is ruthlessly attentive to the ways in which language—spoken and heard/written and read—arises from our self-dramatization—lets us disguise dissociation as self-augmentation—lets us lie and say we are someone certain at all.
The trouble with language is that, by enabling our inconsistencies, it also reveals them:
A book like a mirror
Is held to the face
Complication lies
On the surface
In the face
The prepositional slip—“on the surface” becoming “in the face”—turns interiority into a surface, a book bringing all the strata of the face to lie bare. We lose our simplicity in our “Complication lies,” struggling “to do just one thing / To sing exactly / What you are.”
Origin in experience, from water, in the mirror revelations of text. By constantly turning into, onto others, we are constantly making new origins. Origin here is a verb. The place where “I… made myself what I am.”
Formally, Flax Barber’s medium is the brief phrase. Her art is to sustain possibilities at this intermediate level between word and line. With a pared diction, she brings phrases to an elemental singularity without completely isolating them—emphasizing an omnidirectional almost-entropy. The poem “Infidelity” ends:
It is work to be
Thought of is to stay alive
I have already been living
At the heart I know
I have sinned not how
It would be overwhelming to exhaust all possible syntaxes—the work to be, to be thought of, staying alive to have been living, the known heart, the known sin… The caesura, made visually explicit, has become another way of creating distance and, through that distance, creating variables—keeping the poem in the conditional: it could be this, or it could be that.
At a larger level, these conditional possibilities shift across the book’s three sections. The idea of form, for example, appears in the poem “Columbina in the Afternoon,” as protection:
Form protects me
From extinction
Form repeats
Through the sustenance of repetition, form keeps me in play, ongoing. Then later in “Notes on Antony and Cleopatra”:
Form a lengthy suicide
Effacing the whole
Dream
An actress gives a character form, effacing their actress self; the actress washes off the makeup, effacing the character. The act of performing one effaces the other.
Form could be protection or suicide; these lyrics resist dialectical synthesis, instead seeking out conditions to support each possibility independently; in this case, the voice has changed from Columbina in the first to a Cryptomnesic voice in the second. Voice to voice, opposite claims might each be honest. Columbina, a stock character, is kept safe by being performed, by being “repeated” play by play. The Cryptomnesic voice constructs new memories out of what has been “forgotten” performing newness as an effacement.
At the climactic moment—where fanfare and transcendence ought to be, “at the end of an orgasm”—Flax Barber finds “a sweet little pillbox” and “a gorgeous day” We find ourselves in the world, which is “the place / Where you hurt / Where you are.” It is the place that “thinks of us.” The stresses of these lines fall so heavily on the verbs—thinks, hurt, are. A character is what the actress does.
Reading Leah Flax Barber, I learn that having a simple soul is an awfully complicated affair. A fraught affair. A dramatic affair. But then, having undergone the chaotic ordeal of being no one and someone, there remains a gorgeous day. Flax Barber passes from voice to voice, from mask to mask, from line to line, not so much to emerge, as to stay alive to change—which may also be to stay safe from it. I play act someone else to be safe from being someone else; “I want to be in the world / To protect myself from it.”
Adam Ray Wagner
Adam Ray Wagner is a poet, translator, & musician from rural Nebraska. He holds degrees from Colorado State University, University of Maine at Orono, and Boise State University. He is currently pursuing his PhD in English at University at Buffalo. His work has appeared in, among other places, Firmament, Colorado Review, and Missouri Review.