Rückenfigur and a Five-Pound Bag of M&Ms: On Andrew Zawacki's "Unsun"

Andrew Zawacki | Unsun | Coach House Books | 2019 | 112 Pages

There are many things a poem is not: a photograph, a radio, a 3D printer. A poem is not tuned to FM or AM; the poem written on a page cannot be manually refocused. Yet there are sensory objects whose affects a poem might approximate through the way it’s been made: the visual quality of language, a rhythmic current, a sentence arranged in lines. There are options: how a poem makes for its reader an experience of perception in real time—how a poem makes legible qualities of that experience, how that process of meeting legibility becomes memorable—does not quite depend on information, data to be interpreted, blunted through its language. Andrew Zawacki’s fifth collection of poetry Unsun (2019) is a book which challenges this process of legibility and so-called “meaning” in the face of ongoing ecological disaster. What do we do with all this knowledge?—the fact that humankind has irreparably raised our temperature. There are, of course, functional, policy-driven answers to this question, answers one will not find in a poem; Zawacki’s poems resent even the suggestion that they somehow become merely functional. Here, in these moments of reading, this poetry asks its readers to slow their pace a bit, sit down on the bed or at the table, and look at each other: “Talking until the lights go off / You with your future / Unfolded as yet…” 

The material of these poems is language. The convection which happens between sentences and their lines makes for us, those who encounter the poems, a particular impression of time happening. Zawacki’s poetry anticipates the future—eventually, but now—being liquidated into the poem’s present: “To conjugate in a future imperfect : will have been ongoing once…” What future is there to anticipate, what verb to be conjugated for the sake of our anticipation? The motivating conversation of Unsun, one that underlies almost every moment of the book: how best to explain this sensation to—to protect and, importantly, to guide—the poet’s daughter. As above, what good is all our wisdom if it’s been used to explain away our destructions? The conversation and our listening, as these lines from “Dixie Pixie Sonnet” recommend, should begin with a sugary treat and a slightly-too-charming linguistic game: “Five-pound bag of M&Ms and we could 3-D print a clone of you // Pell-mell all hell and ill will will unfurl…” One might find it easier to recognize the urgency, the gravity of this conversation, with a mouth full of M&Ms; what is insidious about technology, about the unfurling of ill will, will nonetheless be felt. 

We listen to a father caring for his daughter from behind a closed door. From behind a closed door, we only hear beginnings without their ending, as if in the process of speaking this father realizes a group of strangers have been listening the entire time:  

If you don’t wear your cheap synthetic, frilly fuchsia princess dress
Fake glass high heel sequin slippers clacking on the tile

In your lifetime, the Arctic will have been

You’re a frog no you’re a frog (after eating ice cream, a fire hose
for your face)

The causal couplet, that first sentence, has lost its final clause: what will happen if you don’t wear your princess dress? Likewise: imagining what one thinks of as now and here and immediate—changes incurred by ongoing climate disaster—but doing so in the future, the details cannot yet be articulated. While we wait for answers, for the sentence to finish, while we wring our wisdom for rationalization, a father plays a game of make-believe with his daughter. They eat ice cream together. “Dixie Pixie Sonnet” does not try to give answers (nor is it a sonnet), but that is because poetry does not give its comparably small audience the kind of answers which could even begin to functionally address global disaster. The poet seems to ask himself: for what reason would a poem need to be “functional” in the first place? What matters for Unsun is the way these conversations, a father speaking to his daughter about her princess dress and the future of the Arcrtic, have been arranged—the way a poem engages its own process of being made—with clarity, with confusion, with a distinctly blurred focus. 

Clarity, then, is the guts of Zawacki’s machine. The poet changes his aperture setting depending on the time of day, the place where one finds appropriate light. The book’s longest poem titled “Waterfall Plot” begins with—as the poem mounts itself—a large aperture, a smaller depth of field, not much in focus: 

Morning opens at f/2.8 – a fast sun, the forest
tight, oil rigs out of focus, the pasture a gesture

of fissure and blur. Ice epoxies the zaffre lake : 
as if a sky had skidded, or the breech earth turned. 

This visual technology has been turned inside-out, as if the oil rigs control their focus, as if the sun does not want to be caught. “Waterfall Plot” is a series of twenty two-couplet poems paired with photographs taken at a compound of now defunct chicken coops in Athens, Georgia. The series of poems and adjacent photographs approximates a sequence of short lyrics titled “Wheel-Rim River” by eight-century Chinese poet Wang Wei, or s according to Zawacki: “the accompanying large-format photographs—shot with 4x5 film, to replicate the aspect ratio of Wang’s poems: four verses containing five characters each…” A poem is not a photograph; 4x5 film replicates language only in the most marginal sense of interpolation. Really, the point is not replication. The intermedial pairings of image—of types of image, photographic and linguistic—neither clarify nor obfuscate what is being read and what is being seen. It would be wrong to suggest that one medium merely stages the other, the fallacy that form is inherently an extension of content. Instead, the combination of text and image makes Zawacki’s readers experience their own process of perceiving: “The affect of flatness : in a woods without branches, or / needles or bark, late sunlight bleaches the shadows to silver –“ There is no wood without branches; there are different representations of woods without branches which affect flatness. The small poems end when the fourth line stops, the photographs end when we can no longer look at them.

When the last photograph has been captured and printed, what figure steps away from the camera? When the book ends, what have we experienced while listening to a father speak tenderly to his daughter about the changing earth? The presence which arranges these words in this specific order, these representations of image and these printed photographs, keeps his back turned to us, facing the desk where he writes: 

Rückenfigur
transmitting at intervals – 23:40
11:05 – alive inside
The binary light, as a phase

in the flight of a bullet. 

The slight phrasing from the book’s first poem “Optic Audio” prepares readers—in ways they cannot, at this moment in the book, articulate—for the categories of image Zawacki works within and simultaneously resists. Can our Rückenfigur, a motif in which the figure is portrayed from behind, be transmitted?  Just as the person depicted is turned away, just as we cannot see his face, the poet asks us to pay attention to what surrounds him: the earth, the chicken coops, the daughter with her ice cream and M&Ms. Just as the figure is turned away, Zawacki seems to suggest in the notion of “transmission,” we’re still able to identify what he’s facing, a depiction made through sound waves: 

I can hear 
not hearing,
the sound of
the losing of sound