What are the poet’s options when their language reaches a stalemate, a stoppage in articulation? Virginia Konchan demands an answer in order for her work to emerge through an battle between creation and silence, chaos and order, and the self and the other, in her new collection of poems, Bel Canto. Konchan asserts that language is created in a war zone between silence and speech, but this hyperbolic statement will not save her from the outside world of the free market, as she writes in “Terra Nova”: “Hyperbole will not protect you / against diminishing returns.” Her self-addressed critique conveys an awareness of poetry’s limitations — and necessity. She commits herself to challenging the “meaninglessness” of poetry, while also figuring out new ways to reclaim its sacredness. Konchan’s introspection serves as a reinterpretation of a world ridden with apocalypse, catastrophe, and the impending demands of a capitalist economy on the body.
From the start, she doubts technological, religious, and linguistic systems, when she proposes that the digital cloud of information resembles the inaccessible moon:
There is infinite space in the digital cloud,
yet no one can inhabit it, without oxygen.
It is cold and vacuous, like the moon.
If you disobey the higher laws,
You must obey the lower laws.
Pick your poison, as they say.
The comparison of the cloud to the moon creates a critical view of technology’s cold grasp on human agency. It’s an umbrella, looming over and enveloping our agency to create. But why do we still choose to place our valuables within it? Konchan poses this question as a way to foreground technologies’ discrete hindrance to beauty’s creation. Then she goes on to satirically mock the higher and lower laws of Christianity, leaving us with disbelief in the foundations of religion and the bird song as a means to communicate: “What is a bird, but a handful / of sinew and song?”. What are we supposed to believe in if Christianity and the moon are no longer symbols of worship? How about the bird song — is that just mere flesh (“sinew”) and song?
These questions seem to suggest an aesthetic void, where language and religion have not found their ground in the modern world, and we are left with no answers to these questions, no place for the imagination to exist. However, for Konchan the answers to these questions begin to emerge through her voice, the way she reimagines how the lyric casts itself on the page. Her self-theorizing speaker reinterprets the purpose of language through a jazzy ensemble of calling and responding to her doubts, and sculpting a voice that will not settle the score with the end of language, writing further in “Terra Nova,” “What do you mean, this is better than that? / Is language a boa constrictor or a valve,” then responding:
Why can’t it all be opera, heroine
dragging her voluminous dress
across the floor? Captive me.
Croon explicit lyrics in my ear.
Inundated by doubt and disbelief, Konchan’s speaker is captivated by operatic music to evade a reality she cannot explain. She is fed up with justifying herself to her audience, an ironic gesture when one considers that this is the opening poem of the collection. But Konchan doesn’t need to be validated, because what matters is to move past morality, religion, and language and have faith in the human voice. She concludes “Terra Nova” with a symbolic gesture of salvation: “I don’t need proof of anything. / The only trial is by fire: / the only fear is fear.” The only thing restraining Konchan from writing is the fear that she cannot produce a poem that has a human voice. This fear, however, extinguishes itself when we read the poems that follow “Terra Nova.” In that respect, Konchan creates a penumbra of voices where the possibility to enter into new lands of language lies in the sound of a poetic voice, crooning explicit lyrics in our ears.
Konchan wants to ascend to a place where she cannot be constrained by a style of writing or the tug of rhetoric. Aspiring to do so, she pushes us to consider a space where we must confront how she wrestles to discern the purpose of her own attempts. She does so in multiple poems, especially “Joyride” and “Eclogue,” where the function of Art (capital A) and Poetry (capital P) offers a cacophony of meanings that serve Konchan with a plate of frustration and liberation:
Poem as hormone. Poem as nostalgic aftertaste of affect.
Poem as necessity, vice … Poem as traumatic wound …
Poem as horror, libretto of organized crime.
…
Art: something just beyond articulation
Art: a besmirched, dog eared hymnal,
cup of bitterness that tastes divine.
Stop arguing with beauty already.
For Konchan the subjects of Poem and Art become indefinable ciphers that need constant reassessment, sharpening, and contention. To wrestle with these concepts requires making sense of the purpose of her work and to understand that the responsibility of the poet is to discover new ways of saying things beyond the materiality of language, or as she writes in “Kir Royale”:
I want something so potent I can only
take a sip: something someone stingy
with praise would be unable to describe.
Again, Konchan refers to a desire to create something that cannot be explained by the critic or listener. She wants to equate her poetry with something akin to singing that the audience may hear for the sake of hearing, a voice that they can delight in without description — even while both Konchan and the reader know that this is an impossible task for a poem to achieve. Therefore, she bears the responsibility for convincing the reader that her desire is a valid one, worthy of consideration.
She writes in “Fortuna Redux”: “Generous, charitable reader, if we do not go about / interpreting chaos, what would become of us?” Her playful intimacy leads the reader to wrestle with her aesthetic shifts in language and skepticism toward traditional systems of power. She then implicates the reader in buying her words with currency and faith so that her poetry can ascend to the heavens in “Psalm”: “Be thou my anchor, harbor, refuge, rock: / monetize me, on the way to higher ground.” Within these invitations exists Konchan’s fear that she cannot attain what she set out to accomplish. Because as much as Konchan doubts the idea of religious salvation and bristles at the constraints of having a body, she fears that her methods are inadequate to be “ensouled,” as she writes in “Memoir”:
But I have never inhabited a form:
never had enough vowels
to buy an item, nor an I
How then am I to be ensouled
To be ensouled would entail taking on a body in the current life, though Konchan’s speaker hesitates to state that she has a body because it has long been objectified, commodified, and lost in the world, as she writes in “Kir Royale”:
You try being the looked at, lacking gender.
What is femininity, a variation on a theme?
From commodity to investment opportunity:
the time capsule of my life, salt, on a wound.
It’s a man’s world, but it would be nothing
without the self-theorizing that is required
to decolonize one’s body and mind.
In the lines above, Konchan reverses capitalism’s desire to turn her into material flesh and interrogates how certain systems of power force us into gender norms that inhibit creation. Verging on the autobiographical, Konchan tells us that creating poetry eventually becomes production, a means to an end that one cannot escape. However, the only way out of this cycle is for her to speak past the plights of living in a body bound by historical time, technological stimulation, and excessive consumerism. When she does so, Virginia Konchan is a poet willing to resurrect the sacred and celebrate the imperfections of having a body, no matter the investment costs or diminishing returns.
[Published by Carnegie Mellon University Press on December 20, 2022, 80 pages, $15.95]