Lifting Our Skin Up, Looking for Patterns: A Correspondence with Angelo Maneage re: "THE IMPROPER USE OF PLATES"

Angelo Maneage | THE IMPROPER USE OF PLATES | Ghost City Press | 2021 | 36 Pages

On the cover of Angelo Maneage’s THE IMPROPER USE OF PLATES are five dark circles—appropriately, very plate-like—set against an off-white background for contrast. The top and bottom circles are partial, half of their being somewhere off the page, but assumed. In order from top to bottom the circles appear as follows: intact (partial), intact, fragmented, intact, intact (partial). The question is whether or not this is meant to be viewed as representing a portion of a pattern. Beyond the confines of the book’s cover, if there is a next circle, will it be fragmented—confirming a pattern—or will it be intact?

If we allow ourselves to indulge one step further in this ekphrastic exegesis, it might be said that the circles resemble stepping stones. Coming across a broken stone—a fragmentation of the path—the traveler is forced to adjust their expectations of the path’s reality accordingly. The traveler becomes cautious, prepares themselves for future fragmentations. The arrangement of the cover’s circles in this context makes clear the power of this fragmentation in the way we conceive our own realities. 

Maneage’s project is a consideration of his mother’s near-death. It is a textual representation of the manner in which trauma affects our perception of reality, the ways in which we construct an understanding of difficult memory, and give primacy to that construction as we understand reality moving forward. 

In the book’s opening poem, “That Sugar Cube You Feed to a Horse,” Maneage writes: “I forgot how newscasters lived / with no shock like that I could be that simple I thought” (11). Already we are given to understand that shock is front of mind for Maneage’s speaker by his envy of the newscaster, so blank; that he could be that simple, that he could soon claim calm in the face of shock suggests the potential for acclimation. 

Returning to the cover briefly, the idea of patterns beckons. There are three suggested possibilities: there is only one broken circle, one fragmentation in the path, and it is anomalous; one in every three is broken, and fragmentation becomes predictable; or, there is no pattern at all. 

If it is the first, then central as it may become to one’s worldview for the trauma it presents, it is manageable. One might spend time piecing it back together before getting on their merry way down the path.

If it is the second, then the fragmentation is factored into one’s sense of reality as an integral component. What does living in this state do to a person? How does the expectation of new trauma dictate our engagement with that trauma, with a reality in which trauma is an integral ingredient? In this scenario, we come to make sense of our world and our place in it by the shape of our fragmentation. 

This is what trauma does, what grief does: it blurs reality both as it is and as it is able to be communicated. Maneage’s work is populated by fragmentation in both form and content. Centered as it is around his mother’s treatment and hospitalization, the lived experience of trauma is communicated through the disrupted context of its memory in literal grammatical fragments, in hollow spaces between parts of a sentence, in long strings of punctuation presented in such a way that the reader almost feels the words might inhabit their walls, but is left only with the ghost of their contours. What is so special about THE IMPROPER USE OF PLATES is neither the trauma itself, nor trauma’s resolution. Rather, it is the process of ripping apart and piecing together that accompanies trauma. The two are interdependent; without feeling Maneage’s world ripped apart, there would be no context for the reader to understand its being pieced back together. Without seeing that there are intact stepping stones along a path, there is no way to understand the significance of a broken one, and vice versa. 

The blurring of reality as it is communicated hinges on a clarified understanding of reality as it was; the communication of traumatic reality need not be crystal clear, so long as it is clearer than the experience of it. This act of clarification is the path to the newscaster’s simplicity. Having seen the potential for calm, for simplicity, Maneage’s writes: “and then I started to lift up my skin… and did not die. it hurt me like hell but it was okay compared to the news.” The speaker’s former pain is an improvement on his latter pain, and that is the point of its infliction. What follows in THE IMPROPER USE OF PLATES, then, may be read as the repetitive infliction of some form of pain toward a decrease in its sharpness. Maneage wants to become like the newscaster, to live with no shock, not because he wishes to avoid feeling, but because it is a goal which necessitates feeling the totality of everything to a point of numbness so complete it borders on forgetfulness. It is an effort to peer so closely at the shattering of one’s life that it once again seems whole. 

The third interpretation of the cover’s pattern is that there is no pattern. The question then becomes how to navigate trauma without any expectation of what lies ahead, without applying what we do know to make the terrifying unknown approachable. “BUT I DON’T KNOW ANY / OTHER WORDS,” exclaims Maneage’s speaker in the book’s closing pages. This comes amidst his making language of the machinery keeping his mother alive—”BOP / beep beep beep   boop   bee  op    bop bop beoep    oop / boop” (22). Maneage is subsumed by the language of his own fragmented world. He speaks through and with the pieces he finds. He holds them close and he learns their meanings. 

There is a mother. There is a son. There is a breath. There is the moment of silence before the next. There is a newscaster somewhere, calmer than calm should be. There is a broken stone in the path. There are no patterns. There are no plans. There is an assortment of things. And there is us, lifting our skin up to feel a smaller pain. 

I wanted to know about the mother, the son, the breath. I wanted to talk about trauma as a distorting force in memory, and in writing about momentous horrors. I wanted to talk about how to be goofy, too, how to remix and rejoice in the BOP / beep beep beep   boop   bee  op    bop bop beoep    oop / boop that keeps us alive.

Angelo Maneage very kindly agreed to do all of this and more with me, and so the two of us sat down and talked over the space from Chicago to Cleveland. We had wine. He recommended several books, all of which I bought, some of which I’ve since read (Beverly by Nick Drnaso rocks). We wrote a poem together. Angelo told me about all of the genres he writes in and that sometimes he does stand up comedy. I wanted to ask him to arm wrestle, but that was hard to do through computers. I think one of us cried, but I don’t remember which of us it was. I think we’re friends now. 

I’ll show you the transcript, but first you should read our poem:

Hi Evan

I’m on a Macbook Pro

Please write back

Oh no, 

I’m on a Macbook Air

I’m not pro enough

Fly away

Ok, here’s my conversation with Angelo:

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Evan Williams: The first poem in your book, “THAT SUGER CUBE YOU FEED TO A HORSE,” is such a spectacular piece and one that I think back on often. Reading it initially, I kept thinking about Gertrude Stein’s work. It’s just so unpredictable in every way. The first line plays with the sort of linguistic/syntactical fragmentation I think you do so well throughout (“body on behind sweet dentist glass pressed on that guy with a red face peeking from it”). Then, later you have a line that reads, “I started to lift my skin up only like a magician with hooks above a desert of crocodiles and did not die.” The whole thing is very surreal and blurs reality both as it is and as it is communicated. 

I want to ask first about the blurring of syntax. It’s not just something you do on the sentence or word level, but something you toy with through punctuation too. I’m thinking particularly about “UPSIDE DOWN CHRISTMAS TREE” when you have a chunk of space devoted to a series of quotation marks holding nothing inside of them. How are you thinking about punctuation as a tool to tell this story, as a way to disrupt it? And how does disruption—either through the use of unorthodox punctuation, or through strange sentence structure, help (maybe paradoxically) to glue it all together?

Angelo Maneage: My God, thank you for that Stein parallel. She’s a big influence on my poetry brain and the way shapes of mouths say rich sentences. The reason I wear colorful hats. 

Punctuation lends itself to nuance really well, but it also holds solid rules that we know about already, that we use everyday, often in the same ways but in different settings. They’re tools we’re familiar with, I guess. And so taking that thing and twisting it, moving it, bopping it, repurposing it has an effect that disrupts a comfort. Fear of being misheard or ‘misunderstood’ is something that I think haunts my work generally. There’s a certain feel-good predictability knowing that a period will go at the end of this sentence! And when that’s subverted, like that dumb exclamation point, mystery and nuance and confusion all come into play, which is really what I’m interested in; a world of getting-through, a navigation that offers a question or new mystery or new mis-remembery as often as possible. 

Paradox is an interesting word to think about with this book. I like when things mean four hundred other things, and can be stretched in each direction. How semantics are created just by the movement of a mark, or a line break. The confused syntax, I think, pushes through a sort of circular thought while also trying to look at itself in a few different directions. There’s a physicality to the mouth when saying things allowed; it might be uncomfortable. The idea of some physical obstruction—a tumor, a punctuation mark—is always in the background, makes the brain look around every which way for some sort of “escape” but really can kind of only trudge forward through roundabout talking.

EW: I also want to ask about the surrealist approach. In a book that seems very much about trauma, is there a level of unreality that you needed to achieve in order to write this book? What does that do for you, how do you access it? 

AM: I think that unreality was kind of how I remembered it. I don’t know. I have to enact something and, like, really dive in to try and get something right, even if it’s subconsciously. You know, you just start thinking in the world of the what, but in everyday life. I thought I was Batman for a week after I saw the new Batman. 

All artists do this, but any time something happens, the only way I can compute it is if I can retell it in some sort of way someone will maybe listen? Overhear it? (How unhealthy is that?) Which is strange because this is a quietly-loud little book. Expression and re-expression, through plates or grandmas on scooters or flying dogs or mothers strapped to tops of cars are invented but the only way to convey the absolute absurdism of what was happening at that time in mine and my family’s life. Kind of like knock-knock jokes with no punchline. 

Reality in this book is bent and covered with a super thin sheet that has like, weird stains on it. These particular poems kind of just came out through some sort of processing spout, like, chronologically and in the order they appear. Wild. The language and world “rules” did kind of what they wanted to, in what appears to be an anarchy, but I just followed their lead. I didn’t actually clip my back with hooks and hang above a desert, though. 

EW: As I read it, the other element to your work that falls somewhere between surrealism and disruption of syntax is the fragmentation of statements. It’s as if, once you’ve taken the reader to this surreal plane of existence and blurred the way you’re articulating its edges and corners, you’ve decided to crumble it into a million pieces and re-compose it to further disorient the reader. Tell me about producing that disorientation. Was it conscious, was it disorienting to you as you wrote? 

AM: I love this thought of crumbling and recomposing. It’s kind of a plasmatic fluid-thing, the disruptions. Yes, it was definitely conscious in the way that I wanted to produce forms of disorientation. But I wasn’t really formally following rules of “surrealism,” if there are any. Syntax going all wild, starting and stopping in the middle and after a phrase, not a sentence, play a role in the creation of new semantics, at the expense of logic disruption. And that’s a big thing for me. Punctuation plays this role too (among others). Trying to see all the over and under dualities of a line, backwards and forwards. 

I think the way the world operates in this book is kind of like a super small planet in which some things are backwards in the mirror, and like, rabbits have three eyes sometimes. There’s a blur between truly insane joke-isms and real reality; blending those two together is really important for me too because I kind of live in that space in my real, actual life. 

EW: On to some more logistical questions. How did you go about writing these poems, especially those with a more fragmented edge to them, like “UPSIDE DOWN CHRISTMAS TREE” or “NIGHTMARE ABOUT ELEVATORS“ or “MOMENT RESERVATIONS”? Did it flow easily, or was it a sort of stitching-together project?

AM: The Christmas trees came in succession, like a two-part special. I remember upside down Christmas trees were a big thing in 2018 for a week, and it was so confusing and seemed purely symbolic. Like, what the fuck? 

There were countless hours of moving a period, a slash, a caesura, back and forth, of course. Trying to do whatever moment justice. “MOMENT RESERVATIONS” specifically is based around the moment when my mother and I got the call, while driving home from the specialist place, that she had a meningioma brain tumor. So trying to recall and figure out how that absolutely horrific moment was stitched in was an obsession of mine and it was emotionally difficult, but in the way that all memories are. Kind of plucking from a blackout. By the town I grew up in, ten minutes out, there’s a valley with commercial office buildings on a long stretch of road with a ton of food places on either side. The medical building was off that road. On the corner there’s this mansion. A gorgeous mansion; the mayor in 1898 had to have lived there. And now it’s a McDonald’s. With an elevator. Which is just so funny. 

EW: Do you have a favorite piece in the book? If so, which, and why?

AM: When I get to sign a copy, I draw a little guy with his head hinged open and a plate where his brain is. That’s my favorite piece. Also the last poem, my mom and I talking on the phone. 

I also really like the prose-ish poem chunks. Those are the first two I wrote. The deadpan and confused syntax and knock-knock joke. Actually, “EXPRESSION SUBTYPE” is after the “no more jumping on the bed” nursery rhyme. That absurdness of fragility. The robotics of a doctor saying this crazy thing that sounds smart to a patient. I don’t know. I think that’s kind of terrifying.

EW: How old is the oldest poem in the book, and how new is the newest poem?

AM: Like I said, I think the two prose-chunks are the first I wrote. I wrote a few more like that, that I think ultimately ended up somewhere on the ground. Generally though they’re all pretty much the same age, written in 2018—going on four years. But only in 2021 did I actually dig my fingers in the gray matter and revise after it not budging for that while. So I guess they’re all pretty new actually. But the “newest”, I think, is “ADMISSION OF CHART GUIDANCE”—that really kind of morphed around like a lava lamp. It was trying to be a sort of series of scenes before, I think, and I liked that; I think taking the stage and stage direction into account, kind of reformatting the white space helped the performative nature and the cinematography and the whatever else.

EW: What was it like not only writing such a personal book, but sharing it? 

AM: It feels good, honestly. It doesn’t even hurt my feelings when people don’t say nice things about it. 

EW: I know that you do a lot of book design work for other authors. Going back to the idea of fragmentation, what is it like to extend a portion of your artistic self into someone else’s work? Do you have a core artistic self that you can always come back to, that you refuse to give out?

AM: I think being able to respond to poems and prose and collections is amazing; it’s basically ekphrastic work. It’s collaborative. It’s interpretive. We’re sharing a vulnerability? I love it. It opens a ton of conversations too, about both the written work and the cover work. I think being in the “literary” space too gets me excited even more.

But yeah, I don’t really compartmentalize as much as I think I do. I really put all of my brain and eye water into every medium I work in. I explore until satisfaction and then a little more or I go into a swirling depression.

EW: One last question that I always ask when I interview cool folks: if you could speak with yourself twenty, thirty, forty years in the future, is there anything that you have in your creative or personal life right now that you hope your future self hangs onto?

AM: Dust every week. Remember that. Do not let piles of dust build up. They get thick and glue themselves down.

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Angelo Maneage is a poet and book designer from Northeast Ohio. He’s the author of THE IMPROPER USE OF PLATES. You can visit him at angelomaneagethewebsite.com.