Not Only, But Also: On Ari Banias' "A Symmetry"

Ari Banias | A Symmetry | W.W. Norton | 2021 | 112 Pages

The title of Ari Banias’ second collection of poetry is pliable, suggesting opposing meanings if you squint: “a symmetry,” or “asymmetry.” The difference between the two—a single space—is miniscule, easily elided. This is the same short and slippery distance that separates self and other, word and world, art and atrocity. A Symmetry, in four sections that traverse the bright, burning landscapes of California and Greece, explores questions of selfhood, embodiment, language, and nation through vivid descriptions of the everyday that wrestle with a world that is “sour and real.”

The opening poem of the collection, “Oracle,” sets a theoretical precedent, instructing the reader to “refuse the difference between sameness and difference.” The poem troubles notions of categorization and comparison: what appear on the surface as opposites might actually be revealed as contiguous or nested. This guiding ethos serves as a thread throughout the book, emerging in instances of recognition between the speaker and various strangers. For example, the poem “Contingency” ends:

you saw your neighbor keeping her head down

and wondered if you should keep your head down

you heard your neighbor screaming in the street

and knew you should also scream 

It is the proximity of “neighbor” that triggers this irresistible impulse to mirror their unarticulated suffering. There are opportunities around every corner for identification, such as looking through “the tempered car window between me and / not-me selling lollipops on the bridge.” Such moments bring into focus how “me” and “not-me” are always near-symmetrical, if one allows the boundaries of the self to become porous enough. This coherence, incoherence, or non-coherence of the self is explored further in the aptly titled “The Care of the Self,” wherein words and phrases containing “self” are arranged in pairs across the page. The English language is rich with selfhood—self-love, self-obsession, self-discipline, self-defense—and this three-page spread triggers semantic saturation; the word “self” loses meaning and transforms into an unsignifying glyph. Earlier in the book, the speaker asks, “How far away from yourself would you say you get?” This question could be one of empathy, or dissociation, or both.

The title poem, which closes the first section of the book, is an exercise in shapeshifting. A magnolia tree, “before it blooms,” is compared to “a statue from antiquity or / a shaved puss.” It begins like a nature poem, where an image in the natural world provides an anchor for reflection and catharsis from the perspective of a cohesive “I.” However, the “I” of this poem, as well as the book in general, rejects cohesive subjectivity, identifying by turns with the tree, “a pissed off dyke,” “a short bald man,” and “neither / a big-bosomed wide-hipped pretty / nor a short bald man.” The landscape shifts dizzyingly, zooming into a patterned rug on the floor with its abstracted depictions of flora, fauna, and human figures, then zooming out from the artificial “green center” to “a woods, a pasture, [...] a median of grass,” finally settling on a dark residential street. The poem concludes with an echoing and fragmented not-question: “How it feels to stand / outside a house at night whose lights are on. / Whose lights are on.” The “I” disappears altogether, inviting the reader to fill in the blank and imagine “how it feels.”

Banias frequently uses images of the natural world, like the magnolia tree, while simultaneously expressing skepticism about how these images tend to be deployed as poetic symbols. He writes, “I slept late, now I’m watching the clouds, like clouds / in an eighteenth-century painting. Overly articulate. / Except these clouds are not trying to symbolize anything.” Just as the magnolia tree resembles “a statue from antiquity,” the clouds resemble “an eighteenth-century painting.” The tradition of the nature poem is similar to that of the landscape painting—both position a person at the center, looking out, uncritical of their own vantage point. In order for something to become “landscape,” a certain distance is necessary so that the individual components of the scene can cohere into a beautiful view. Banias calls attention to the constructed nature of such representations: “A light in the distance. The idea of ‘the distance.’”

Oscillating between scales, A Symmetry brims with specificity, cataloging minute details of the beloved such as “birthmark on your right inner thigh,” and “mole below your left eye,” but also “microplastics buried imperceptibly in the face I can’t completely / hold.” The sky contains not only clouds, but also “police helicopters, pilotless aircraft, satellites, / warplanes.” The land is made up of not only grassy fields, but also parking lots, construction sites, condos, paper mills, cement plants, waste processing facilities. The ocean sparkles, but it is also slicked with oil and on fire, contaminated with “shattered particles of plastic lacing the surface,” and “22,000 metric tons of trash.” Description is a fraught business, the limits of language always straining at the seams. As Banias writes, “I don’t know the word for because. / So each act is disconnected from another. / I can almost imagine there are no consequences.” A simple conjunction is the hinge that makes cause and effect legible.

What does it mean to write poetry during these so-called precarious times—which is to say any time? “Almanac,” the final poem of the collection, wonders, “Will I have acted recklessly when asked / ‘where were you during that time?’ / I was writing a poem / that had no body.” In these closing pages, pronouns move fluidly from “I” to “one” to “we,” making room for the reader to place themselves within the text, amongst this accumulation of minor and major pains and pleasures. Each poem is a thin sliver of a quivering, vexed world, offering the paradox that “it can be some other way / and is.”