Book Review: Some Habits

Some Habits. By C. Violet Eaton. Richmond, C.A.: Omnidawn. 2015. $17.95 (pa.)

In the Winter 2016 Issue of Fence—always a trove of challenging new poetry—I came across a bizarre, almost intoxicating poem by C. Violet Eaton. The language careened between the esoteric and the colloquial, the rhythms swerved and chugged across the page like nothing I’d encountered before. My thirst for more brought me to Omnidawn Press, where Eaton won a first/second book contest in 2015. In Some Habits, the resulting book, Eaton examines the minutiae of daily life in the Ozarks in a mode that reaffirms the etymological relationship—or as Eaton puts it, the “guts of a tongue” —between textile, texture, and text. Largely composed of prose poems addressed to an ambiguous entity by the name of “David,” Some Habits renders habit into ritual, road signs become portents, correspondence becomes poetics. Like much experimental/innovative work (more on this binary in future posts) it’s an acquired taste. It demands an oblique approach, and obliging readers will uncover enormous depth.

An object that engenders itself by probing its own purpose, the book describes its content here as a “soupcan full of nails where the old tune once was”, there as “fiddlemusic issued from an organ.” On the spectrum of sense to sound-texture, Eaton lists hard into sound. Take a passage like the following, in which the material qualities of utterance take precedence over straightforward communication: “instead of.  throughout.  was also then.  it didn’t one with.  at no about but still were.  as to that, it would play.  for them his it.  on by.  can against the along there…”

Theorists of the prose poem emphasize how the form should make up for its lack of line-energy by funneling it into syntax. One strategy, parataxis, has become a mainstay of discursive work; not subordinating clauses frees the writer to collage sentences and maximize startling juxtapositions. But here, Eaton pushes parataxis and fragmentation to the extreme. As the speaker puts it, “‘most of my work is certainly interested in the collage’ : yes : I’m sure I said this once : I was an educate once : no more : I hiss now like wet turf.”  The effect is more akin to frottage, a Surrealist technique in which the artist makes a rubbing of a surface with pencil or charcoal and then interprets and refines the resulting artwork, or leaves it as is. Here, the syntax is all rhythm and texture: a linguistic surface, almost without content. Double spaces between sentence fragments, and spaces on either side of the colons, exaggerate the silence between utterances. These gaps must be bridged—interpreted and refined—by the imaginative reader. Neither the sentence, the page itself, nor the paragraph, but the page itself, is Eaton’s primary organizing unit. The lack of titles reinforces this effect, as a reader can never be certain where one poem ends and the next begins.

Much has been said of the poet-as-persona, but what do we make of the addresses (“& Dear fulgor you sort of implied spirit called david”) which punctuate the work and figure the addressee as a persona? With this intimate address to some imagined reader, a ghostly or ideal reader perhaps, even the book’s more hermetic passages feel less so, because we sense that “David,” or some part of the “you” in all of us, will get it. Look close enough at anything, the poems seem to say, and a pattern inevitably emerges. That pattern may be a product, a sort of counterpoint text, of the reader’s own reading-habits. “The reader is always ready to become a writer,” writes Walter Benjamin. I would add that the letter-reader is always ready to become a letter-writer, and the letter-writer, a poet. Sometimes it takes a book like Some Habits fold on the dotted line.