This is strange. Saturday night in what purports to be an S&M club, with skinny boys in body suits and skinnier girls in sparkles and body paint and duct tape over their nipples, and I'm thinking about poetry.
Not in an abstract way, mind you, but specifically about Sandra Cisneros' newest collection Loose Woman. I'm thinking that Ms Cisneros might like this place, because for all of the gaudy posturing going on here, the darkness of the room also allows some pretty open expressions of personality to shine through the facades.
Loose Woman, Cisneros' second book of poetry and fourth book over-all, alternately strikes poses and lets down its guard in this way, searching for a particular identity by trying on many others. The sense is that of a chameleon trying her damnedest to say who she truly is. Although the ensuing swirl of masks is one of the most exhilarating aspects of this poetry, it can also give rise to its greatest weakness, as when the narrator tries too hard to convince us that a given voice is genuine. Cisneros seems self-conscious and bored when this happens, leading the way through the detritus of a love life like a Southwestern T. S. Eliot. Ennui is a strained voice for someone who creates so many verbs from nouns: pilgrimed, bellyed, lullabied. At her best, though, Cisneros almost forgets the reader, setting free her imagination while keeping a firm hand on the language. Then the many faces of la verdad pour out in a torrent.
Think of the last chapter of Ulysses in reverse. Instead of Joyce's extended paean to the female mind, the poems in Loose Woman are as sharply punctuated as gunshots, and the occasional rhyme and alliteration serves to propel the reader headlong though this sexual not-quite autobiography. These poems swing with a big-hipped earthiness and a startling surrealism, as in "I Am So in Love I Grow a New Hymen". In between is a dizzying menagerie of beds, bars, mentrual cyles, cigars, godchildren and a laughing knowledge of the power of her Chicana body. From all of these, and especially the last, Cisneros synthesises her identity.
The book is arranged in a three-part progression from "Little Clown, My Heart" to "Heart, My Lovely Hobo"; from a light-hearted innocent to the terrifying title character singing "Ping! Ping! Ping! / I break things." Yet if I read this correctly, the progression is not so much chronological as it is definitive, a gathering of many contradictory selves at once. Not every poet has the courage to define herself so powerfully and without asking permission, or to then embrace the parts of herself that are not negotiable. Sandra Cisneros takes many risks in this collection, and at a time when many poets are content to state the obvious, succeeds in creating a vision that is completely alive.
1994