“How Do I Know I Still Exist?”: TFT Review of Fog Gorgeous Stag by Sean Lovelace

Fog Gorgeous Stag, the latest tumultuous effort from Sean Lovelace (June, Publishing Genius), is first and foremost a book obsessed with its own existence as a linguistic deity or idol: a literary tower of Babel, striving towards the sky. Much like the arrogant architects of the days of yore, Lovelace seems to have lost control of his own personal poetic structure, and much like the occurrence of a proliferation of different tongues served as a punishment then, so too does Fog seem to suffer from a malignant form of malformed and confusing verbiage—but with one caveat: it is a delightful disease.

Lovelace has crafted a long series of poetic moments that excite even as they confuse: fat and heavy paragraphs rife with metaphor and little time to breath, acerbic and terse parenthetical remarks appearing from no where, long lists and random catalogues of everything finite, as well as things unaccounted for. He has done so with an authority that truly does affirm the awesome Olympic power of a group of well crafted sentences. An entry entitled simply “God” begins with the line “Gorgeous are the chemists,” noting the beauty of synthesis in the world (specifically writing) and Lovelace has accomplished his alchemical feat with a steady hand, creating literary AU out of pulp and ink. Though at times Fog and Lovelace (it seems only right to speak of this book as its own entity separate from the author) ask a great deal of the reader, or demand, rather, as the meaning behind the more eccentric moments can be sometimes rather hard to cull from the white noise of the ink on the page, but they certainly do not ask for forgiveness, and if the reader is game to follow the book up its pillared steps towards the heavens, there will not be any disappointment when that destination, wherever it is, is reached.

Consider six lines from “Six Lies” at the onset of Fog:

Someone better, better do something soon, but no one does a thing. THE PLAN IS TO LOVE YOUR LONELINESS…There is something sheen/sweet/hard about flesh, you whisper. Listen to me: There is no plan. We should be ashamed… [This is not dress rehearsal/Check]

The lines spread throughout a paragraph jumbled with reference to Josephine Baker and a fractured heel, exhibit a desperation of thought, of contemplation, and yet a stark realization of the moment at hand. No matter how hard we try to connect with the world, our brains are just lonely cells, and if that’s not scary enough, there is another secret: No plan. Despite this dire idea Lovelace makes certain to check the box at the end, admitting that there is only one rehearsal, which we should relish, because as it turns out, this dry run through is actually the opening night. There is an engagement here between the page and the reader that is obfuscating and honest, muddled and crystal clear. Fog passes before the eyes like a murky creek, the water swirling and every once in a long while clearing up, quickening the flow to reveal a shimmering, smooth pebbly bottom, just for a second, until this faltering image is again obscured by the muddy water.

In “Several Useful Prayers,” the beginning piece of a series of “prayers” that include “The Prayer of Gun Ownership” and “Additional Prayer (with List Of Potential Summer Employment,” Lovelace fights with the language he seeks to master and loses, drawing the reader into the death: “Now my heart falls gun-shot, all crabbed, snarly, and stupid. Prayer for 7 ½ seconds. Prayer for words to revisit the throat, the hole filled, the silver hearse without any wheel at all.” These moments in the book, when Lovelace admits defeat, and concedes that perhaps the language is too powerful and can’t be controlled in any conventional sense, that Fog reaches a depth of feeling and raw potential that send a pulse of electric fulfillment up the spine of the reader, reasserting that unnerving feeling that we haven’t mastered anything at all and there are still paths that lead to discovery. But these moments are in equal proportion to the instances where Lovelace exhibits complete control of his faculties and puts the language through its paces without regret for the wear and tear.

To wit, the opening lines of “After Doing Smiles”:

I jump now at the slap of light. At the kick and silences of glistening (as in words). At my name. She gave up too. Pause. I will not talk paper.

Lovelace begins to build his vague argument, calling into being the physical memory of waking, of being called out by name, of a woman- the things that bring us to the surface of our lives. Then he takes its further, to the depths of language, the hidden corners of the spoken word that have no counterpart in the tangible universe:

If I talk paper I will mumble limbs crack/crumble/fall into a thousand breaths—there is bound (bind, binding, binder full of albino wolves) to be swaying. I said pause. Her skin was leathery.

The rhythm here is unmistakably wrought and tight, the words twist against each other and engulf one another, feeding their syllables into the sentence like raw meat to a lion. The words call into existence the power behind Fog: that last area of uncovered map, of untouched forest, the sign that reads: Here There Be Monsters- the way that though it seems language has done all it can, there is still so much left to do. Fog takes the reader there. But this is not to say Lovelace is our guide to this new territory, but rather a scientific and faithful observer, wondering at his own place in the vast expanse of the page. In the same piece he continues:

Why must someone wake me? Why not wake myself? … How do I know I still exist?

It is a question that seems, in light of all the other points of departure and digression within the text, to be the artery that supplies life to the rest; is any of this truly happening?

Despite the heavy overtones here, Fog never gets bogged down in over analyzing or weighty cerebral spelunking- Lovelace matches every single philosophical conundrum with a flippant instance of light heartedness, bordering on the absurd, though with a decidedly dark side to the humor. Nearly the entire text of “Firing Squad” reads as follows:

-Do you have any last wishes?

-Yes, I do. I would like a ceiling fan. I enjoy the white noise of a ceiling fan.

Or a few lines from “Free: Blue Hanging Folders”:

-Every problem can be traced to this: someone thinks.

And:

-I do regret the consumers

Or, more verbosely:

-I woke to coughing down the hallway. I crept through the bog, into the Living Room. There tottered an old man atop my television set- he had long legs and hot pants. He said, “My name is Robert Frost and I am wise in a simple way and depressed in a happy way and I am the first poet to be on your TV.

Fog Gorgeous Stag is a daring feat of language and a testament to the reciprocity of conviction and audacity. Lovelace has a sense for words and what they can and can’t do; it can’t be put more simply than that. The language works for him in ways that are astounding and at times exciting. The snag in this whole apparatus is that this type of reading takes time and energy- a willingness to give up the will to the author of the text, and accept that yes, he/she is god until one closes the book and whatever is said, goes. This type of authorial authority can become tedious at times, and especially with subject matter as heady as the material in Fog. But perhaps this is Lovelace’s gift to us, to show us that with a little effort there is still so much left for language to give us, so much left for us to discover within the acts of writing and reading, and that above all, the written word is not dead- though the reader may, as Lovelace puts it in “Transcript [2]”, be lost in acquiescence to the accepted ideas of literature- “[obedience: born into a grave]”. In one of the final pieces in the text, “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Obesity” Lovelace seems to reinforce this previous notion, and remind us that if indeed the text here is a deity, then like many myths and legends, on must believe in order for them to exist, or in other words, the text will only give up on the reader, if the reader gives up on the text:

I forgot abut the odor of rotting storytell-ers. Fallen words. Cockroaches fly very well. Darwin’s bathtub, for example. You should go home. You should witness unbelievable airborne activity. This is serious. But you’ll never {?} say so. What? I forgot to tell you that God has left us; She now huddles curled inside every poor play of chess {all}. Fallen leaflets. Look around. Shut up. We have people in the North. We sing fondly of hell. So. I said drink. Take a slow breath. Listen. To this God: I see, She whispered, and saw nothing.