Contributor’s Marginalia: Peter Kline responding to Traci Brimhall’s “Hating the Phoenix is”

Traci Brimhall builds her poem “Hating the Phoenix” on an algebraic syntax of equivalence. Each idea or image is equated to another, which in turn is repeated and equated to a further idea or image, so that a=b and b=c and c=d and d=e and onward into infinity. But through the alchemy of language, which requires only two letters of the alphabet to turn lead into gold, the poem’s opening statement, the idea of “hating the phoenix,” transforms, by the end of the poem, into a fiery new emergence of the phoenix, as the speaker feels “wings beating / red and breathless beneath my dress, alive enough to burn.”

Part of the effect of this syntax of equivalence is to call attention to the inherent but often invisible tension between common uses of the verb “to be.” Some of the equivalencies established by the poem are literal, as in the opening lines: “Hating the Phoenix is / hating a myth.” The phoenix is, uncomplicatedly, a myth; calling attention to the phoenix’s mythological quality might also suggest the futility of such antipathy, due to the shade of meaning of “myth” as “something false or unreal.” But even so, such equivalency is relatively straightforward. Brimhall greatly complicates the use of “to be,” however, by her inclusion of metaphor, which of course equates two things that cannot be straightforwardly equated, and which therefore can yield vastly divergent interpretations. Thus, “sadness is a sane emotion” (an intriguing statement, and one that sharply characterizes the speaker, but not an overly complicated one to interpret) then transforms into “a sane emotion is candling an egg.” This latter statement might mean on the one hand that comprehensible emotions give a useful view into the life of those that experience them, or, on the other hand, that the self-objectification required to consider one’s own emotion has the same scientific sterility as an industrial egg-candler! And these are just two of a multitude of possibilities. The imprecise slippage of the comparison here—that is, the comparison between the passive fact of an emotion and the active process of egg-candling—is part of the poem’s alchemical apparatus. Such a metaphor tends to gesture impressionistically at meaning rather than crystallize it, yet a reader can still make meaning(s) of it, and the chain of equivalency continues. Later details in the poem might be considered in either a literal or metaphorical way, further ramifying the potential implications of equivalency. This occurs notably in “a valentine is kindling for February,” in which a valentine is either a love-message to set a heart on fire or the discarded paper twist that gets the wood stove going.

There’s a further algebraic aspect of this syntax of equivalency that makes it even more fabulously complex. In algebra, if a=b and b=c, then a also equals c. Therefore, any entry in the long chain of equivalencies from “Hating the Phoenix” might theoretically be replaced with any other. All of this very quickly becomes far too much for the human brain to hold—and this overload is central to the poem’s delight. While some may get caught up in tracing the vast web of tubes and funnels and flasks and condensers, most of us are just happy to watch the sparkling gold emerge where there once was lead.