Process and creation: A review of Dan Chiasson's THE MATH CAMPERS
the math campers by dan chiasson — knopf, 2020
poetry / 114 pages / $27
reviewed by Edward Sambrano III
With his characteristic entertaining wit and aptitude for crafting sophisticated poetic devices, Dan Chiasson’s technical precision and compelling depictions are showcased in his new metafictional book of poems, The Math Campers. Here we find Chiasson grappling with the profound question of understanding the self in the “enormity of time,” and with the impressive stylistic techniques at his disposal, he delves into these often poignant, sometimes humorous, frequently surreal, and beautiful poems.
The first poem of the book, “Bloom,” describing, in part, a mural in the poet’s house, immediately introduces one of the collection’s central concerns: the creative process. Here Chiasson contemplates the mural in imaginative language: day and night are personified cosmic actors, and a poignant mood is established as a “state-of-the-art screen” promises the reader, “Tomorrow will be worse.” Despite these morbid visions, the poem leads us finally and suddenly to the speaker’s (read as poet’s) son arriving at “the breakthrough moment” of discovering “the cover of your pizza book”: a reference to the cover of Chiasson’s previous collection of poems Bicentennial. In this way, Chiasson abruptly implies—by using the definite article the in the above quote—that the contemplation represented by the progression of events in the poem amounts to a sort of inspiration. By contextualizing in his personal history the serendipitous discovery of Bicentennial’s book cover, this outcome is rendered as an inevitable synthesis: a product of the seemingly unrelated, beautifully surreal, and disorienting lines of “Bloom.”
The long poem “Must We Mean What We Say?” further explores this type of inevitability by exploring the notion of time. In an seemingly fictional series of letters written by the poet at the time of the collection’s creation, and read by a version of his past self, Chiasson writes, portraying ages of his life as “buoys…in the tide,” “[T]he correspondences were hidden under the/ heavy cover of chronology.” A conventional temporal linearity is eschewed in favor of a meandering path toward the present, in which disparate points in time are interconnected. The “correspondences”—interactions between different moments of a life—are made explicit in the collection’s poems by its juxtaposing and drawing connections between these disparate points in time; as Chiasson writes, “ [the ages] nine and thirty-one were side by side.”
This tactic is most apparent when the poet utilizes echoes of language from elsewhere in the collection, employing instances of repetition within and between its sections. Rather than simply convey a sense of constant, unchanging similarity between different moments, repetition as Chiasson uses it integrates slight modulations of grammar, syntax, and surrounding context used to deftly present subtle emotional and thematic changes occurring underneath the surface meaning of a poem.
This type of modulated repetition appears often in the collection, with an exemplary instance in the first section of “Must We Mean What We Say?” Tracking the repeating fragments “I was eleven,” “this was before my father died,” and “not long before” offers a glimpse not only into the underlying importance—through emphasis—of the ideas conveyed by them, but also into the process by which the speaker connects them, piecemeal, into a refined, cohesive thought. These repeated fragments are partially connected with commas, separated by periods, and sometimes the content of whole stanzas comes between them. Eventually, the poem arrives, in a surprising moment of resolution, at: “I was eleven, this was before my father died, not long before.” This process reveals the emotional undercurrents of these pages: a contemplation on the propulsive “exposure to death” behind the moment in which “time sharpened,” driving the creation of the poem itself. Chiasson’s writing operates as if it is revising successive drafts into the final version, into an eventual utterance synthesized from its parts, and in the process lays bare for the reader the significant emotive underpinnings of his poetry.
But while the ability to craft the subtle details this approach entails is indicative of the poet’s attention to, and acute understanding of presenting, time and the mental processes that occur as he is contemplating it, to the speaker the “pressure of transformation” is “too much for him to bear.” A distinction becomes apparent here between poet-as-creator and the poet as an individual subject to the unyielding progression of time.
In the act of writing, the poet is keeping tabs on passing time, re-creating it and demonstrating its effects for the reader. This skill, however, can only operate with the benefit of hindsight; while the writer does his work, time refuses to pause. There is a dramatic, almost paradoxical, interplay between past and present, encapsulated by words that come later in the collection: “From the new dream, I looked back on the first dream and called that dream reality.” While the poet is adept at conveying nuance through technical decisions, it becomes evident, precisely through the revelatory technique of these poems, that the speaker is unable to register changes in his sons as they grow older, and only retrospectively is able to portray his failure to recognize minute changes. This first becomes apparent in the climax of the first section of “Must We Mean What We Say?,” its technical operations culminating in the poem-within-a-poem “Euphrasy & Rue.”
Repetition in this poem at first seems indicative of a lack of change. The phrases repeated and rearranged are often tautological: “Years ago, our sons were born;/ our sons were born years ago.” The use of redundancy establishes a sense that the speaker is ruminating on this information, as if attempting to stop time to examine the facts—to little effect. We don’t see the slight variations in meaning the poet makes use of elsewhere. This tactic is at odds with the poem’s content; the speaker plays “‘Over and Over’/ over and over while all the while upstairs/ they changed” and “[o]ne by one they replaced the days we’d made/ with days they made themselves.” The speaker knows change has happened but is unable to understand it as it happens in real time. The permutations of repeated phrases echo throughout the poem only for the unforeseen, transformative ending to arrive suddenly, as through an instantaneous realization.
Later, in a dream, the son is suddenly twenty-six. He had grown up; the speaker is asked “hadn’t I realized that’s why he had gone into Boston?” For all the speaker’s mental resources, time continues to stay one step ahead, as the suddenness of endings and tautological phrasing operate to convey, though these too are only made available through the expansive strategies of the poet. “You see how even change is changed,” Chiasson almost taunts. To explain why we might find changes in a draft of his poem he may have hid in the James Merrill Apartment, where he presumably worked on the collection, he writes, “because, you know why: because time.”
Edward Sambrano III is a poet and critic from San Antonio, Texas. An MFA candidate at the University of Florida, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spillway Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. He can be found on Twitter @SambranoPoet.