The historical reenactor is a familiar American stereotype: men who don archaic garments, take up fake weapons, and stage bygone battles. At times, their dramatization can appear to be as much a game as an educational performance, founded on levels of historical accuracy that vary from faithful recreation to retrospective fantasy. Reenactment has even spawned an internal system of classification with its own neologisms, such as the less-than-authentic “farbs” (allegedly derived from “far be it from authentic,”) and “period rush,” a kind of euphoria associated with total immersion in reenactment. While reenactment undoubtedly can carry real educational value—like making history more interesting to new audiences—its costuming can sometimes teeter into a more problematic kind of imitation, or even fetishization, and has caused controversies, like when World War II reenactors dined in a Massachusetts restaurant while still dressed in Nazi uniforms.
All historical reenactors deal in anachronisms, and this is where their strange power lies: staging a Civil War battle in a field five minutes from a Long John Silver’s might seem farcical, but it forges a temporal disjunction, a glitch, emphasizing the significance of the event through the ill fit between its participants and their world. Another way of saying this is that reenactment is its own kind of defamiliarization. The distance between content and setting makes us see both anew. And so, in both apparent and subtle ways, reenacted scenes work to preserve significance that otherwise might have been lost. But what if this could be done for the present itself? Could there be a reenactor of the present?
Cyrus Console’s newest book, The Wayfarer, imagines this figure as the poet and the parent. Though the book’s speakers wear no anachronistic costumes and bear no dulled weapons, they defamiliarize the contemporary world. This reenactment is a performance staged entirely in language, finding new terms for familiar things, and one of its most charged instantiations is that of the parent. Parenting, many poems in The Wayfarer seem to argue, is a role of both narrating and being narrated to, explaining the world to one’s child while also reinterpreting it through the child’s eyes, much like a reenactor both performing and becoming immersed in a historical scene. As these poems witness the children of a new generation encountering what will become early associations and memories, the roles of poet and parent converge, and the reader is invited to view their own familiar world from a new distance, revealing how it can be both beautiful and terrifying.
Defamiliarization is a strong tool to combat the way everyday reality desensitizes us—with its onslaught of dire news, the majestic stupidity of our technologized surroundings—and it makes the world real again. Take, for example, the lines that begin the poem “Old Yeller.”
Once the virus reached
The shore I felt
No better time would come
For you to have one
Despite being unequipped
To care for it long-term
These lines ring of epic, apocalyptic parlance, denoting time with the incommensurable physical scale between “virus” and “shore,” but readers may soon recognize that these stanzas are really about purchasing a pet for a child during the COVID-19 pandemic. Setting a modern global catastrophe against mythicizing language is an attempt to forge meaning, and possibly even hope, for the speaker’s child in a world undergoing political and ecological collapse. Across the collection, what might have served as old refuges, such as nostalgic narratives from the speaker’s childhood (the titles of the poems include characters like Old Yeller, Curious George, Pippi Longstocking, and Charlie Brown), are troubled as Console interpolates them with modern realities like climate change, nuclear disaster, and the encroachment of the algorithm. Console’s speakers, often addressing a nebulous child figure, stage this world in strange, unexpected language, invoking the glow of beauty—and fear—that one might have lost in childhood. This is reenactment.
Console’s prior work uses similar linguistic tactics, playing subject matter against lexicon to create a discordant, striking effect. His first book, Brief Under Water, consists of prose poems that weigh elements of 1980s Topeka against highly academic, almost Victorian sentences, an effect that approaches irony as it forces surprising lexical collisions. One poem, for instance, describes Peanuts bedsheets like this: “Many years later these bedclothes would retain the power to cheer me, both by the inimitable distress of their fabric and by the illustrations they bore.” There’s poignance in this mismatch. It’s as if by returning to childhood in language acquired later, the speaker can no longer make sense of it in other terms. Console’s following book, which was largely written as his doctoral dissertation at the University of Kansas, is The Odicy, a masterful pentaptych that engages both the lyric and the epic, the vernacular speech of 21st-century Topeka and the prosody of Paradise Lost. Largely in pentameter, the book chronicles the plight of the modern man-child, questions the possibility of religious experience in a nation dominated by fundamentalist rhetoric, and, through a standout series of acrostics spelling RAINBOW (an allusion to a suite of Vietnam-era defoliants), investigates how the chemicals made to wreak ecological genocide in Vietnam were connected to the advent of artificial sweeteners.
Brief Under Water and The Odicy are both interested in their own kinds of reenactment: the former plumbs Console’s childhood for nostalgic images it can defamiliarize and therefore reanimate, and the latter replays the religious and political context of the United States that Console has grown up in, turning the ruinous path of a nation into an inverted epic. Both seek to enliven, through art, a present whose meaning has been deadened through familiarity and repetition, through mass culture and corporatization. In an interview conducted by Ben Lerner for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Console says an objective of The Odicy was “to find out if available subject matter (the Twinkie, as opposed to the daffodil) can be beautiful.” Console’s particular example, the lowly Twinkie, echoes the concerns of the New York School poets, such as John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, who brought elements of consumer culture and commercialized language into their poems. But perhaps the subtle allusion to Wordsworth’s daffodils is more telling, since such an attempt to inspirit the ordinary follows a Romantic impulse. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote:
To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar … this is the character and privilege of genius.
Parenting, as far as it allows one to see the world as new and (sometimes) wondrous, draws on poetic skills—perhaps its own kind of “genius”—but The Wayfarer isn’t only interested in articulating the latent beauty in the contemporary world. It also explores the disquieting effects that can be achieved by reenacting the present in different terms, what Viktor Shklovsky calls ostranenie, often translated as “defamiliarization,” “estrangement,” or “enstrangement.” In the same way that seeing a live historical battle staged in front of you recalibrates your sense of the subject and its significance in its anachronistic strangeness, the poems in The Wayfarer replay the present so that it may be noticed again, beautiful or disturbing as it may be. As Shklovsky writes, “The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things.”
Where Romanticism sought refuge from the industrialized degradation of the natural world through recourse to beauty and emotion, Console seeks to examine that damaged world itself, rendering in new terms the man-made environmental change that we might have become numb to. The poem “Pippi Longstocking” conflates the voices of the titular character and the speaker’s child:
A little radiation is unavoidable she says
Thankfully the disaster meant everyone
Was already under orders to stay home
These lines are reminiscent of pandemic-era public language, mimicking regulatory bodies who downplay genuine risks, and such language becomes absurd when rendered through the voice of a child. Notably, these lines contain no punctuation (nor do any in the collection), and so the line break becomes the primary metric of grammar and rhythm, which sometimes gives the language itself a breathless, almost childlike feel.
Here “Pippi Longstocking” takes on a historical charge as the poem, which invokes a “Zone of Alienation” and the “State Radioecological Reserve,” makes the Chernobyl disaster the clear referent. The several valences of “orders to stay home”—nuclear accident, pandemic lockdown, a sick child staying home from school—stratify the language into a phraseology of crises across time. This leads the speaker toward a more direct attempt at consolation, perhaps for both themself and the child:
I believe everything happens for a reason
I do it principally to teach you to do it
But in Japan there is a vault of ice they need
To keep cool for three thousand centuries
The speaker feels tension between their responsibility to model hope for their child and their responsibility to be an honest parent. Their disclosure of the “vault of ice” is a reference to the “Land-side Impermeable Wall,” a system of frozen soil installed at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to prevent the site’s radioactive contamination from entering the groundwater. Instead of directly invoking Fukushima—a name whose meaning has been sapped by repetition in the news—Console approaches the 2011 disaster through a mythological register, illustrating how man-made catastrophe has warranted a chamber extending “three thousand centuries” into the future to protect not its contents, but its surroundings. The effect is jolting.
There are other moments when anthropogenic environmental change appears, as in the final lines of the poem “Catchment// Catchment,” when the speaker says “it was going/ To be sunny with a high of 114°.” Though this may already be a normal forecast in some parts of the world, the oddness of the high temperature in the poem shows how, in a world of perpetual warming, the metric of temperature becomes calendrical.
The preceding line indexes a different brand of violence, reading, “War was other people.” The play on Sartre’s phrase “hell is other people”—now in the past tense, as if the present is now history—syllogizes William Tecumseh Sherman’s phrase “war is hell,” and satirizes the detached hawkishness of the American public and political establishment during the wars of Console’s lifetime. The Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan—these are someone else’s problems. The line is costumed in language from the contemporary canon of adages, familiar and trite, though reconfigured to highlight how the collectivity established by Console’s coded references is troubled by its dependence on an American perspective. It is as much an admission as it is an indictment, implicating both speaker and reader.
The poems in The Wayfarer also contrast the abstraction of global violence with an American palette, estranging the domestic front. Dogs appear and reappear throughout the collection, often like ghosts. The poem “Old Yeller” examines the animal’s freighted status as both steadfast companion and mortal measure, a friend to grow alongside, and then, tragically, outgrow: “By the time you become/ A man every dog that’s/ Seen you cry is dead.” There is the stunning poem “Laxness,” which contains the ruminations of a speaker theorizing how they might explain the decision to euthanize the family dog to their child: “Blankness was the better place/ I promised you the vet would find for her.” This oddly matter-of-fact statement is strange consolation, and bleeds tonally into the realm of reenactment as it displaces a traditional euphemism like the “farm upstate,” exposing its hollowness. Maybe this lack of spiritual surety is because the speaker themself is haunted. The poem concludes:
And then I thought of likeness
And the dog bursting into flames
And the flames licking my hand
Other poems scour the quotidian and local for darker patterns, showing us that once we step back, we can find the minutiae of our own lives disturbing. For example, “The Denim Jacket” depicts canine shock collars alongside iPad kids:
Twice-named dogs miming
Enclosures that were just
Correlation between property
Line and pain right here
[…]
Given crayons now
Children draw screens
And you among them
Hands held out dumbly
Beneath a senseless tap
Ubiquitous technology reprograms us. Even our unconscious movements have been calibrated to expect “smart” surroundings, which sometimes leaves us waving our hands underneath analog faucets. We are then no better than the children we’ve conditioned to grow up with “screens”—a word that itself serves as a frequent metonym for all manner of devices, and could mean any combination of surface, world, and barrier. The incursion of tech into our daily lives also has implications for our privacy, which concerns Console’s speaker in “Catchment// Catchment”:
From my pocket personal devices
Had begun communicating
Parts of what they overheard
To something with ontological status
That modified their content
What might have sounded paranoid pre-Snowden or Lopez v. Apple—that someone, or something, is listening—has now become an overlooked fact of life. Console gives the algorithm a disturbingly animate, almost biological standing in the poem, depicting a lifeform bred on maximizing engagement, replicating less any particular ideology than ideology in general. The poem asks whether it’s crazy or clichéd to acknowledge that each of us carries a device that tracks our movement, watches us through its cluster of cameras, and spies on our speech. These are the very “screens” that the children “draw” and have spent virtually none of their conscious lives without.
The “overhearing” that Console describes echoes John Stuart Mill’s quote that “eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard,” which raises the question: what would such a machine do if it encountered poetry? The poem “The Wire” suggests it might inflict damage:
Certain verses are lost
Because the phone understood
Them as search terms
While this might figure poetry as a sort of jamming mechanism that undermines the language of capitalistic utility—not unlike the ambitions of the Language poets—there is a distinct sadness in these lines. The machine has defanged poetic language and tossed it aside, where it cannot be recovered. Imagine Console, maybe in his car, trying to preserve a fleeting verse, only to be met with the anodyne accent of a virtual assistant who cannot help him, can never really help him. The compression of the aesthetic into the functional does not produce functionality in any sense; it only destroys language. Elsewhere in the poem, the line “Ok Google take note” pops up, perhaps more as an artifact than as an operative command—though one wonders if, reciting this poem, they may unwittingly awaken someone’s phone.
And production itself may also be at risk. In another poem, “Cursor Mundi,” the speaker talks of “Having destroyed the wise/ Sayings by writing them down,” a claim made ironic by the poem’s title, which it shares with an early fourteenth-century religious poem chronicling Christianity’s history from beginning to doomsday. This poem is the source of over 1,000 new English words such as “anywhere,” “brimstone,” and “wickedness.” The destruction of the “wise/ Sayings” suggests writing with technology has accelerated the commodification of language—verse turned to search strings, poems appearing in Super Bowl ads—and now, even just typing something out might entail feeding the datasets of large language models. It endangers the speaker’s futurity, handing down broken verse to a generation losing access to original language. The speaker of the poem “Lana Del Rey” theorizes about the clash between AI and human creativity, observing that “machines wrote lyrics more/ Perfect than we could.” While this claim is up for debate in certain circles, these lines—which could just as easily apply to Drake and his team of ghostwriters as to lyric poems—seem more sarcastic than defeatist, especially considering the aforementioned phone misunderstanding verses “as search terms.” And perhaps orality has advantages other than tripping up AI. In his interview for LARB, Console mentions that his second book is “also a fantasy about poetry’s relevance as an art form that could survive the darkening of the grid.” Such a theory is connected to the question of poetry as parental posterity, which appears in “Pippi Longstocking”:
My legacy to you in a bubble economy
Together with the poems I want
You to consider as most significant
Among three hobbies I pursued
In a kingdom whose only valuable sectors
Work diminished and degraded utterly
The modern role of the poet might be fraught, even sometimes “degraded,” but The Wayfarer suggests there is a responsibility to continue storytelling, as both poet and parent. Staged historical reenactment is occasional, but the sort of narration that parenting requires is constant. The process also moves in the other direction, as the child relays and reframes the world to the parent, allowing for reenchantment and wonder. Console puts that relationship into language, compiling a story for his time, a book that leaves space for its addressee to one day become its reader. There is a community across time implied by the hope that the book’s “liable fraction of enthusiasts”—as the speaker of “Curious George” puts it—might one day include the poet’s own children. Ultimately, across its estranged, coded reenactments, The Wayfarer is a message of radical clarity. It is a chronicle whose depictions of our terrifying reality also give way to moments of Romantic, epic beauty—natural images like the “windless night whose stars/ Hate the thought of quantity” or fragments that trace the lineage of the form itself: “My friend has said/ Song began when/ Voice decayed/ In cave or canyon.”
Reenactment, at its core, is storytelling. The Wayfarer argues that this is our most valuable site of connection. The end of “Pippi Longstocking” is an emblem of Console’s project; it describes “black shoes precisely/ Twice the length of her feet” purchased for someone who might be Pippi or might be the speaker’s child. While this final line refers to the shoes, its collective pronoun also imagines poetry as a public, a realm of both futurity and posterity, found in a book of poems written “So that you would have something to grow into.”
Evan McHenry
Evan McHenry is a writer from Kansas. He's a Features Contributor at The Onion. He currently lives in Brooklyn.