Emily Dickinson's gynecologist, van Gogh's ear,
the first real televangelist (a progeny of religion and television,
machine and soul), and "a mythological creature named Stan, who
had a human head, an elephant's body, and kangaroo's hind legs, and
an ostrich's vestigial wings," (11) are just a few of the characters
and tropes that haunt the pages of Christopher Kennedy's first book
of prose poems, Nietzsche's Horse. A disturbing collection of Edson-like
fables and pseudo-fairytales, reading Nietzsche's Horse is like entering
a nightmare of frightening creatures and oneiric landscapes that is
just as surprising and funny, as it is unsettling.
Weaving a unique blend of humor, delight, terror
and despair, Kennedy writes each poem like an enigmatic puzzle, whereby
the metaphorical and figurative devices implode at every turn, and
the (dis)logic creates its own universe, sentence by sentence. He
writes, "In this tent, the Sword Swallower attempts to slide
a long series of words down his throat, each letter barbed with anguish
and regret. The crowd winces as vowels and consonants disappear into
his mouth" (44).
The book, as suggested in the title, echoes aspects
of Nietzsche's philosophy in some ways, but more in particular, Nietzsche's
plunge into insanity while traveling through Italy in 1889. Shortly
after writing Ecce Homo, Nietzsche came upon a horse that was being
flogged. Seeing this he embraced the horse and refused to let go.
This event became a sort of catalyst that led him into an insanity
from which he would never recover. Kennedy's work has a similar kind
of resonance; his scenes are vividly disturbing landscapes that are
a mixture of beauty tainted with dread and strewn with a bewildering
surrealism. The title poem, from the horse's perspective, is a wonderful
glimpse into this aspect of the author's mind: "For a moment,
when he clung to me, we were a god, half-man, half-beast, a genius
of muscle and thought. I rode off under my cruel master's hand; he
walked off under his" (35).
Kennedy's nihilistic impulse and sense of comic
irony provide a weird and provocative urgency that underlies the entire
book and carves a new space into the genre of American surrealist
poetry, paralleling the works of Edson, Tate, and Knott: "A woman
told me she liked the way my mind works. I said, When the squirrel
runs the wheel everything's fine, but when he stops, I get a little
nuts. She said she had second thoughts" (25).
Nietzsche's Horse is an eclectic menagerie of poetic
and psychological possibility; the poems reveal a gesture of absurdity
that pokes fun at family, relationships, American values, science,
myth, and religion. Forcing us to confront our very being, Kennedy
makes us realize that we are, as one of the titles of his poems suggests,
"Incapable of Being Elsewhere." He writes, "The catalysts
for these dramas remained situated on the shoulder of the road . .
. so they began to make up stories . . . each in a little world of
his or her own, incapable of being elsewhere" (42). -- Copyright
©2001, Rain Taxi. All rights reserved.
