The Book of Jon/The California Poem

Eleni Sikelianos. The Book of Jon. San Francisco: City Lights, 2004. 116 pp. $11.95 Eleni Sikelianos. The California Poem. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004. 195 pp. $16 Eleni Sikelianoss most recent books-The California Poem, a wide-ranging book-length poem about her home state, and The Book of Jon, a poetic memoir about her father-are peripatetic and fragmentary investigations into the poet's origins. They shift from short lyrics about the horizon to exhaustive accounts of a road trip; from candid photographs of childhood to found notes and collages of torn-up landscapes; and from careful, insistent prose about bowling to delightfully disjointed haiku-like lines about porch light. The experience of reading the poems is like moving through the curves of a huge, unpolished steel sculpture by Richard Serra. Lacking a clear trajectory, the poems unabashedly return to source, lineage, and home. In The California Poem, Sikelianoss goal is to Invent a language, 'the tongue / of the mirror,' into which / anything, everything can be / perfectly translated, but in which / nothing can be said. Sikelianoss California is mysterious, abundant, pure, wild, unpredictable, and pleasurable. And while things are stolen, lost, dug up, sold, and kicked around, there is an underlying regard for and affinity with nature and its creatures. Everybody's halfcracked with halfteeth missing and ideas of almost-functioning // shipping & receiving depts. near the train tracks collide, hillsides / scrubbed in wild brighting mustard. High and low culture are in cahoots; nature is tricked by and tricked out with modern man's festivities. The California Poem samples early explorers' diaries, bird guides, Chumash oral histories, state timetables, and logs of extinct and endangered animals. It blends the poet's pop heritage with her bibliomancy and private longings. It is not enough for Sikelianos's readers to accept California as a glistening chapel or a hedon edenj because Memory can be anyone's shimmering / Albion bathyspheric hellhole hideout trop severe. She exposes the destruction the land has endured and the awe its beauty continues to demand. She resists representations of her home state as shiny simulacrum by defamiliarizing and demythologizing it. Attempting to make her California real, she comes closer to realizing how she was formed there: Sikelianos appropriates Bishop's One Art as a means to uncover loss's real subject, which initially looks like emptiness but in the end is a kind of generative force. Elsewhere Fanny Howe is a clear guide. The poem opens with a fragment from Howe's Introduction to the World sequence: .. .concentrate on the consciousness / the sea comes out of. The California Poem is not a book tied to the modernist belief in the primacy of things (from which ideas must necessarily stem); instead, this poet looks to ideas as the origin of things. Sikelianos wants to uncover memory, dream, and experience alongside documented history in order to reveal something fundamental about her territory and ultimately herself. When Sikelianos speaks, her own words interfere with, and complicate, perception: you / read that wingy language? Can you / typeset that sky? And yet she insists on locating an originating idea that could reveal a deeper source, a pure and creative foundation: all that entered into the composition of the bone or the stone that smashed it / was more perfect than me. This source occasionally appears in family lore as floating or lit in the distance, as when the poet describes family members going on shore at night and looking at the oil rigs out in the water like lighted bird-palace places. But more often dreams give California its fundamental form, as when dreams of tumbleweeds sweep across Death Valley stirring cakey layers of land, gloss of gloss / Angeles & Inyo County is just / dusty in the bus station at the cold night shifting. …