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Book Review
Rachel Custer, Editor-at-Large
A Review:
What Does It Mean to Mean?
Percival Everett’s Sonnets in a Missing Key
Sonnets for a Missing Key and some others
ISBN-13: 9781636281667
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Pages: 64
These sonnets were inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum.
Percival Everett is an American writer and a Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of Southern California.
I am listening to virtuoso jazz pianist Art Tatum play Chopin’s “Valse in C# Minor.” Uptempo and swinging, it is an utterly different experience from listening to the classical Preludes, which move from minor to major keys like two dancers on the same stage. Divergent as they are, the influence of both musicians on Percival Everett’s Sonnets for a Missing Key (Red Hen) is evident.
In Sonnets, Everett has written a book that can sometimes feel a bit mercurial, as he navigates the moods of his various influences. In the almost mournful “G Minor” (19), Everett’s speaker wonders “At what age do we/trim our own nails, and how many/of us remember that first time?//Last words always sound like/last words always sound like last/words always sound like this.” By contrast, the reassurance of Ab Major (18) is that “Someone, a child for example, will pause/and ask you a question. You will not know the answer,/and that’s all right, that’s all right/that will forever, ever, be all right.” From dirgelike to joyful, these sonnets move.
The tension between two extremes is a recurring theme in Sonnets. In C# Major, “Storms develop yet always and yet never/surprise, innocent of some raging/philosophical divide…” (34), reminding us that opposite things can be true at once, or perhaps that the truth lies somewhere in between. Or maybe, Everett’s speaker seems to be saying, there is no Truth at all: “In this, the last universe of discourse,/the axioms fall like flies, if flies would/fall, if flies would fly away” (25). A gesture from God is conceived of as “a gang sign from a gang with no members,/a null set, a null gang, a naive set theory/set to accept and negate any contradiction/tosses, necessarily, his celestial way” (25).
Despite the contention that God is not there (yet can somehow be written about), Everett’s speaker does recognize “A sad and great evil is among us….A blank and gray history is between us,/folding like a map with countries that/no longer exist, that no longer have governments,/but only confused people once citizens” (23). Evil exists, so according to the rules of Everett’s work here, so must good, and even Good. It may be “a god that cares little” (60), but God exists. Despair can be found throughout these “Sonnets,” hunting the reader (and the speaker) like a predator, set to a song in a minor key, but it is dialectically paired with an almost stubborn hope: Relative, light/Water at sunset//The color is tender,/Ironic and new//The crying is real,/The crying is not real//The real is torn/Of light” (58).
What does any of this have to do with music? With a song playing in a poet’s ear? Sonnets addresses that question, too, almost obsessively scratching at the itch that is the role of the artist. For Everett’s speaker, hope and meaning are found in “the thing becom[ing] a thing” (13). It’s not a blind faith, however; there is plenty of ironic scorn (and even perhaps unironic scorn) for the writer, the reader, and exactly what is going on in this process: “These dancers transpose. There is no/other way to stay in step. The dancers/sign their names in time, with time. They/are dancers after all, after all…” (21).
The dancers, responding to the music, trade places with one another. This is a theme throughout the book, as the speaker, the “you,” and the reader engage in the dance that is meaning-making. For Everett, the song (and the poem) is the thing. The reader’s role is suspect (“consort with the airs I do not wear,/with endless stories I have not told…Befriend the wind” Eb Minor, 17). The author’s role is even more suspect: “The fountain in the village is like a/mouth. It opens wide to spread gossip that/no one will believe. Why should we?/The fountain is a liar….The fountain tells the truth while it/lies, that is its lie, its big scary lie, that/its lie is true about the truth of its lying” (26).
In this way, both dissembling, the speaker and the reader transpose in a dance, making the poem into something it never was and will refuse to be. They do find meaning along the way; if “what is received is scaffolding…we [climb] at the language” (32) along with Everett, making of it something worthwhile. However, language itself remains suspect: “…With a little practice, you/said, we could, if we wanted, fall up” (32). In these poems, there is no objective Truth, but rather the bones of a structure, without walls, giving “…nowhere to lean our backs” (32). This structure, however, will hold us, if we will climb it. This fountain will tell us a story, if we will listen.
Percival Everett can’t write poetry. At least, that’s what he’d have us believe[1]. Fortunately for us, Everett is wrong. This is clear in the triumph that is Sonnets for a Missing Key, from behind which pages Everett peers, winking at us like a mischievous child at play. That’s not to say this work isn’t serious (Or is it? The author himself doesn’t seem to know for sure.) In Sonnets, Everett uses movement, tension, and questions regarding the role of the artist, bearing the reader along on a musical search for meaning that is by turns ironic and earnest, naive and knowing, despairing and eminently hopeful.
[1] https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-percival-everett/
About the reviewer:
Rachel Custer is the author of Flatback Sally Country (Terrapin Books) and The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She was a 2019 NEA fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, One Art, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. Rachel Custer is Editor-at-Large (Reviewer and Editorialist) at O:JA&L.
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Very well written Rachel!