On My New Job by Catherine Wagner (Fence Books, 2009)
Catherine Wagner's My New Job is
as body-conscious as an American Apparel garment: it is a relentless,
playful, uncomfortable look at the shape of the beast. The book
hosts a great deal of variety because it comprises elements from six
chapbooks, and it is amusing, experimental, cringe-worthy and
aggressive at once.
The first section, Exercises, meets the
body in pain. That said, though, it is by no means a played-out,
emotionally tiring “illness narrative” (after Miss America
and Macular Hole, no-one would expect pathos). Rather, the
Exercises are about an obligation to an exhausting body that you both
want and do not want to challenge:
“I politely rise to meet
“I politely rise to meet
my knee
As I get sorer in the belly
I hate the knee
am however diligent and strict”
(Exercise 28)
The poems here aren't numbered in
order, so when I refer to the order, I mean the order in which they
appear. In the first Exercises, the harder the physical act, the
more distracted the narrator is, and the scarier the feeling that
follows it. The more observation of the outside world there is
during the exercise, the greater the panic reaction that follows. In
Exercise 31, the narrator spends the poem (tidy, in visual stanzas)
looking around. The looking outward is punctuated with minor motions
of the body (lifting the hips, moving the head), until the end when
the narrator quite literally projects herself with force into the
room, both as image and act of violence:
“Facing the room I could walk in
there
the girl thrown from the lamp”
(Exercise 31)
By the end of the Exercises section,
with all its fight and flight, panic and re-panic, the body is
distinctly and disturbingly alive: “Breathed & ovulated,
breathed & blood fanned out / Tough new cord so I get stronger”
(Exercise 42).
Exercises is also an obligation to
poetics. According to the notes, each line of each poem (and if the
numbers are trustworthy, there are at least 45 poems) was composed
between sets of physical therapy. The writer's frustration sublimates
in darkly comic bubbles (“Why don't you work? Is it because you are
lazy or do you / think you can't?” Exercise 33) but it's
pervasive, especially in the fact that the setting seems to never
change; the imagery of this section is almost exclusively window,
light, television, computer, the boundaries of the bedroom. “My
heart vibrates the ceiling” she writes in Exercise 42. The room is,
by the end of the section, an indifferent antagonist.
There is a lot of fucking in My New
Job. It takes many forms –
silly, scary, tawdry, inefficient – with the sexy
conspicuously missing. There is the idea of the body stripped of
other symbolism, as in the poem “Among the Orders” where an
irritating narrator sees two homeless people fucking. There is sex
as a measure of the body's worth, like in “For the Boys,” where
Wagner writes “Now there was / in a transparent skybox / someone
watching my body and giving it / a score”. Body parts become
punchlines, like in “Song” which rhymes penis and vagina
repeatedly. But the punchline is the point of the joke, and so the
body stubbornly asserts its importance: it's brightly lit, albeit
unflatteringly (as when the narrator sits on a copy machine to make a
facsimile of her ass in “Coming But I Did Not Run Away”). I
found myself drawn most to two simple lines in “For The Boys”:
“the problem lies / with you.” Something about this word “lies”
and its threefold meaning is extremely effective – “lies” as a
locating verb, as an untruth, and as a sex act. These last two
interpretation are my favorites: the problem is the body and the body
is both traitor and accomplice. But it is not a person's entire
measure of character.
Each of the sections has its
strangeness, vulgarity and charm: the rapid-fire sections of “Roaring
Spring,” the mondegreens and outlandishness of “A Hole in the
Ground.” As a body of work, My
New Job gives a lot to a reader, but it is harder to read as a
single unit. On my readings, I repeatedly the book down and picked it
back up, usually at the end of each section. But what makes a book
cohesive? The presence of a cover and a title? When I asked my
non-poet boyfriend what he thought of the muted-orange, plain-font
cover that Fence Books gave My New Job, he answered that it
looked like an instructional manual. If this is the interpretation
we go with, then the book is one of the most coherent I have ever
encountered: each section is equipped with its own set of parameters,
its own pace and vocabulary, and a reader can quickly internalize
these elements because Wagner pulls them off so stylishly. The
sections teach themselves to the reader, and though the teaching
methods are wildly varied, they each fortify.
