Ouroborian Hermeneutic: On Mark Leidner's "Returning the Sword to the Stone"

Mark Leidner | Returning the Sword to the Stone | Fonograf, Portland | Feb 23. 2021 | 85 pages

You run up an escalator so forcefully, your feet throw the metal tread in reverse, and the whole mall goes back in time

I interpret the potential of the lyric to be bigger than any object on a shelf, a poem, or even a word can be a talisman to bring magic forward—living and functional. A poem can follow us into our days as a sort of spell. Leidner knows this miracle—magic and generously retrieves objects from the curio shelf in his mind of essential observation. Like well-loved (kitsch) items sketch a memento mori of a life investigated, we can, through these poems, look into this era of our disaffected partisan nation with pathos and humour. In a time of fear and love, these poems re-collect parts of ourselves we may not have picked up to look at for some time.

This poet’s second full-length collection from Fonograf, Portland, opens with Prism Jugglers. Firstly it is brilliant to introduce a prism as a tool for viewing these poems. This metaphor can stretch further as a lens with which to view the current global crisis of inequity. Its first line, Handcuffed skeletons washed ashore. I can read as a prison abolitionist statement hinged together with comment toward precarity concerns that are faced by far too many in the G7 conglomerate:

We binge watched sitcoms set in sweatshops/ we finger painted our own Rorschach ink blot.

I love Rorschach as a device to analyze the nation’s shaky stake-hold as a democracy. The poem takes turns between hopeless and hopeful.

There is an array of voices to exhibit tones altruistic to searing political wit. The well-timed poem titled “I’m running for President” uses the titular phrase as a recurring refrain, showing that sometimes absurdity is the only way to get through the unfathomable:

I put peanut butter on both sides of one slice/ and jelly on both sides of the other/ and then eat the sandwich with gloves/ and I’m running for President…

Out of old calendar pages, I fold/ paper airplanes… less to say anything profound about time/ than because calendars tend to pile up/ and the paper they’re made of is usually substantial enough/to cut through the wind, and to repel falling water/ and I’m running for President…

Did you know that since primordial times / certain columns of open air / were predestined to become elevator shafts?

I’ll shoulder a golden boulder the size of the moon/ through the same needle eye in the Bible/ rich people aren’t supposed to be able to ride camels through— and I’m running for President

There is between quips and drolleries, a gravitas, within lines of Midwest realism (Leidner attended The Writers’ Workshop) and envisaged through a lens of fables and fabulism. The warm, weirdness fondly calls to mind the magic of James Tate. 

For fans of Leidner’s work, the titular poem Returning The Sword To The Stone (RTSTTS) is an epic effort similar to the simile-based Blackouts (2011, Beauty Was the Case They Gave Me).

It’s like using tweezers to pull diamonds out of your girlfriend’s tear ducts.

But it’s like Oreo’s at dawn,” and,

It’s like Catullus proffering a handshake to an unsuspecting Archimedes.

Now an almost elegant restraint is applied; the poem is kept to three stanzas per page; lines reach plateaus of stillness that arc out into edge-of-your-seat metaphysics. This allows a masterful sleight of mind in the logic of lines unfolding. Like an Ouroboros meeting its own tail, we spiral into and away from presuppositions along the line: 

It’s like God gluing pictures of fish to pictures of water and

pictures of animals to pictures of land and balling it up and throwing it at a star. 

You close your eyes as the shadow you, whose eyes are on the backs of your eyelids, opens theirs on you. 

It’s like a different episode of your favorite TV show on in every room of a mansion with as many rooms as the show has episodes. 

It’s like a haunted lake in which the wind can spell whatever words                       

it wants in the ripples, but it never really wants to. 

RTSTTS is comic, concrete, and saddening—as our times are. Built with muscular movements that call to mind cinematic action scenes. Quick cuts, poetic leaps and rhetorical turnarounds recall that Leidner is a critically acclaimed screenwriter. Here a similar overlay of ideas to the VR-themed Empathy Inc. 2017:

You wake from a dream but the dream just jumps into somebody                                         

else’s head and continues.

It’s like humiliating yourself in a way that neither advances plot nor reveals character.

 It’s like a magic mirror that only shows you how you’re imagined by those who miss you. 

At fifteen pages—some lines I arrive at, hoping the poem has come to an end. Not because the words lack stamina, but because the line is so achingly good. I wish to pause in an extended freeze-frame, yet I have been tricked and lulled by the narrative rhythm such that I cannot stop from entering the next line. I finish, I then wish to return to the poems beginning again, Ouroboros like, hermeneutic.

Voice seems to achieve animism and autonomy beyond the page; one might be in a line-up or on the train. A gesture from the poem follows to show an aura around the everyday known objects glimmer anew through anaphora, and skillful mediation between disparate situations and things. There are SPOONERISMS, perceptional paradox—wordplays I worry can be gimmick-like. So I initially felt resistance seeing the title. The lines, however, lean toward playful logic and places of aphoristic brilliance.             

There is a quietly courageous approach to our collective grief in Plague Blessing. So reassuring to be with these words, which are beautifully and sparely spaced onto the page:

Panicked disorientation in the predawn gray. We steep the tea three times before throwing it away.

It is certain that every landscape vanishes into uncertainty. It is impertinent how therapeutic sunlight feels on the face. 

The last generation to remember meeting people before the internet birthing the last one to remember when strangers could touch. 

Grief doesn’t break your heart; it expands it. It breaks your brain; nature’s whispered gibberish is suddenly intimate. 

I read through the collection in various orderings. It’s like both a series of medieval morality paintings and comic strip windows that read successfully in multiple arrangements. I anticipate this copy of Returning The Sword to The Stone shall soon be dog-eared and denim soft. 

In a world of magic, spells don’t always make syntactic sense, but most importantly, they work. Leidner seems able to turn pathos into a quirky process of phenomenological inquiry; these poems pique moral inquiry yet never veer toward a didactic tone. This wizard’s way of seeing is hilarious and hopeful, and restored my pandemic weary sensibilities. Mark Leidner shows generously that mirth can potentially save us from falling down into despair. The closing poem Humility offers:

It’s like a beautiful vase/ of an epoch and place/ too ancient to name / resting on a pedestal in your foyer.  

The narrative carries you along with the mythic tale of this vessel (are you the vessel?) to close with: 

But it’s okay— it feels awesome. 

It’s like a cave full of diamonds

nobody knows about 

because there’s a waterfall in front of it

and a jungle around the waterfall 

and a desert around the jungle

           and an ocean around the desert

           and a shitload of nations 

still stuck in a time before the invention of boats

on the other side of the ocean.