Chaos Reigns: A Poetry Antichrist Finds Their Way Home
There’s a scene towards the middle of Lars Von Trier’s 2009 film Antichrist where the not-really central character played by Willem Defoe happens upon a fox in a small clearing in the woods, said in the film to be “Satan’s church.” The fox is curled in upon itself, and, when it detaches its mouth from its belly, a decaying corpse is revealed as well as the fox’s action: it’s eating itself. The fox unfurls and slowly lets out the words, “Chaos reigns.”
Luis Neer’s first full-length poetry collection honors those words as the author sets up a “Satan’s church” service, complete with hymns to human consciousness, a fittingly sylvan West Virginia setting, extended meditations on deer, and a stand-in for Satan (pan in a wonderful extended section of the book, getting at its pagan roots and hinting at the connections to mythology and even fairy tales).
The mythic grandeur on display in this full-length marks a bit of a sea change in Neer’s writings (but, like, more Beckett than Beck). In their first two chaps (in the order they were written), Become Death (Maudlin House, 2016) and This Is a Room Where You Wait for New Language (Ghost City, 2015), it was hard not to separate the poet from the poems and to see flashes of genius amidst filler (none of the other poems in those two chaps match the masterpieces “Saturn” from Become Death and “the poet approaches light speed” and “New Waltz for the Old World” from This Is a Room).
Extinction became a turning point in their writing. (Luis wrote all their next projects after writingExtinction.) By my count, it’s where they learn how to make a collection fully and totally, not letting it become the sum of its parts and not letting any part outshine the other. After Don DeLillo’s masterpiece Underworld came out, one critic wrote that “the larger the canvas, the better DeLillo paints.” I mention this because those words about DeLillo’s novel ring true for Luis in every collection they’ve put out, but it is only during and after Extinction that the conceptual frameworks Luis uses begin to show no signs of strain.
Part of this is because of the haunting beauty of Von Trier’s film, but another, potentially greater part is because of Anne Carson’s masterwork Autobiography of Red (1998). For me, this verse novel is what leads to Luis’ greatest revelation, a revelation that will hold for all their next projects, from Autobiography (Bottlecap, 2016) to Life after ppl (gloworm, 2016): the mastery of silence and silent spaces.
So it’s fitting that their next project carries the title Extinction: Luis goes back to ritual (This Is a Roomis about ritual too but those rituals feel less embodied and more youthful), learns how to use silence effectively, and incorporates themes from fairy tales and ancient sources/mythology to create a haunting negative space they can fill with truly meaningful words.
The second quote I want to point out is the epigraph of Extinction: “the choices were given, and now we must live them or just not live... but do you want that?” – Conor Oberst. I’m bringing this quote up because it announces two central themes in the work: the choices one is given and works with (reminding me of fairy tales and the inscription at the top of the entrance to the labyrinth in Pan’s Labyrinth, “in consiliis nostris fatum nostrum est,” or, in our choices lies our fate), and the importance of the combination of cognition and will in how we ultimately make meaning.
To go back to the fox’s words in Antichrist, Neer’s injection of carefully measured chaos into their poetry reinforces its enigmatic quality without making it too forced. By allowing chaos to reign, Luis shores poetic fragments against poetry’s ruin and, to quote Jay-Z, “instead we rise from the ash like a phoenix.”
The opening poem of the full-length “lazarus days” says as much, calling Luis to consciousness, calling them to wake up resurrected and anew, all the while railing against their futurity being cut off prematurely. There’s an immediacy that is frantic yet measured, and this carries through the rest of the book.
The poems in Extinction initially switch registers between birthday poems, which are more relatable yet still as incisive, and grand experimental poems, until the two registers converge in the title poem and the rest of the poems bear the mark of both, with mythic lines sharing space and trading off batons to lines that hit close to home like “when i wear this shirt i look like an outpatient” (35), “listening to obscure sad indie girl dirges made to be heard while dying on the floor” (“portrait of a nation without any people” 44), and “i don’t want to cry in public” (“gyre” 50). The Autobiography of Red lineage becomes clear.
There are also callbacks and anticipatory nods to the rest of the Luis canon, and because these easter eggs are within the context of a larger work considering themes such as heartbreak, empathy, self- examination, calling out to god(s), depression, mythos and the poetic figure, and friendship, it never comes across as self-important or aggrandizing. Humanism is always at the core.
This is the farthest Luis Neer has gone in reaching their vision for poetry. Two of the biggest influences on their poetry has full reign in this book (Whitman and Ginsberg), and all their other influences (Carson and indie poetry) begin to take shape, less like a fox eating itself and more like a baby phoenix hatching out of its ashen egg. Luis has made a home out of chaos, and the most surprising thing may be how inviting it all is.
Blake Wallin is the author of the chapbooks Otherwise Jesus (Ghost City Press, 2015) and No Sign on the Island (Bottlecap Press, 2016) as well as the microchap The Lucidity of Giving Up (Ghost City Press, 2016). He is the Reviews/Interviews Editor for Ghost City Review.