Empty Totality

A review of "Doe" by Conor Hultman.

One of the more jarring realities to adjust to when beginning to read poetry seriously, at least for someone like me, who was exposed to a great deal of fiction growing up, but very little verse, is that the standard for what constitutes a “full-length poetry collection” is far, far slighter than any form of prose. There are obvious reasons for this, of course: each word in a poem is of far greater consequence to the text as a whole than those of a novel, or a biography, or whatever. J. H. Prynne, rest in power, wrote whole monographs on individual sonnets by Shakespeare – this is close reading taken to an extreme, of course (both Prynne and Shakespeare, after all, were extreme outliers in the history of English letters), but that such an exercise is possible, even worthwhile, speaks to a more general principle, that being that poetry, generally speaking, quite simply does more than prose does, on a line by line, page by page basis. Compared to the novelist, it takes more time for the poet to produce less words, is how it tends to go. Thus we get “full-length” collections of well under a hundred pages, and thus this convention is entirely justifiable. But the book under consideration here, DOE by Conor Hultman, does not require these justifications. It is not well under a hundred pages. It’s not even close to being under a hundred pages, actually. It is, in fact, six hundred and twenty four pages long. Many of those pages, furthermore, feature more than one poem, all of which were all written specifically for this book-project, and had not been collected before. Hultman is certainly no Prynne or Shakespeare, although I do think he’s one of the more interesting young writers working in English today, but make no mistake: DOE is still an extreme outlier, in one sense of the term or another.

DOE is a monument constructed from the relics of human life. I had at first used the term “debris” here, but it felt wrong, too callous, dismissive. The book, it’s true, is full of refuse, full of things ripped, ruined, burst and broken, scattered, but no, not debris, not really: “relic,” a term with something of the sacred to it, and also something of the archaeological, I think is much more appropriate, because it is between these two poles, the sacred and the archaeological, which DOE oscillates, landing most often in something like the register of a police report addressed directly to God. The book’s core conceit, its “idea,” is so simple, and so obviously interesting, that it seems insane no one would have done it already; full disclosure, when I first clocked what was going on with the weird, elliptical little poems I’d seen finding placement in an increasing amount of litmags I respected (and some I didn’t, but that’s neither here nor there) in the lead-up to the book’s release, I was annoyed that I hadn’t thought to do it first. But while the idea is simple enough, to actually realize it properly, in a way that does justice to the material in question, to its overwhelming, empty totality, is another matter entirely, one requiring great patience and discipline. Even working procedurally, as Hultman is here, where many aspects of form and content are essentially predetermined by the basic nature of the project and his chosen approach to it, writing over six hundred pages of poetry is an enormous undertaking. Across its entirety, there are still thousands upon thousands of consequential compositional decisions being made – the procedure did not, could not do this work for him. To be honest, I suspect if I had had the idea first, I probably would have spent a few days on it, drafted a few pieces, gotten just deep enough in to begin to sense the true scope what I was committing to, and then thought to myself, “What the fuck am I doing?” and shelved the whole project. It makes sense to me that Hultman didn’t, though, that he was able to commit to it and see it through. I say this because I’ve read some of his other work, outside of DOE, in various publications. In terms of style and technique, it’s all very distinct, strikingly so, even, but the sensibility undergirding it is consistent and unmistakable. From what I’ve read, and I haven’t read a great deal, so don’t take this as a more authoritative reading than it is, Hultman seems remarkably skilled at striking upon conceptual poetic gambits which most would dismiss as too obvious to bother with, stupid or hackneyed, even, and then realizing them with a particular rigor and clarity which pushes them into being something beyond obvious, like Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. This makes for a very cold, depersonalized kind of poetic voice. Even when the resulting work is emotionally moving, as it sometimes is, one gets the sense that Hultman himself isn’t really moved by it, at least not in the way you, the reader, are, that he stands at a distance from it, that there’s maybe something a bit sociopathic about him.¹ I can understand being turned off by this, that it’s not what most people are looking for from poetry – but it works for me, because it’s actually interesting, is something more than competent and inoffensive, unlike, charitably, 97% of poetry being published today. What most people seem to want out of poetry, frankly, is far more alienating to me than Hultman’s tactics of self-negation. Anyway, in any case, I can’t imagine how you write something like DOE without being able to maintain a distance from it, without being a little sociopathic. At the core of the project is some very psychologically hazardous material. Protective equipment is necessary.

I’m aware that, for how long I’ve been going on about it, I haven’t actually made explicit what DOE or its project is. The reason for this is that it is the sort of thing which, once spoken, makes it sort of impossible to talk about things like page counts or conceptual gambits and have it seem meaningful, have it seem like anything other than evasion. I think those things are meaningful, and are worth talking about, but I’ve talked about them now, so there’s no reason for me not to speak it now: DOE is about America’s unidentified dead. It’s about murdered hitchhikers, lonely suicides, strangled infants, homeless drifters who drank themselves to sleep one night and didn’t wake up the next day. Each poem is about a single person, derived from their entry on the Doe Network, a web directory of missing person and unidentified body cases compiled over, at this point, nearly thirty years. All the entries on the site were written by volunteers. They’re not entirely stylistically consistent, or completely exhaustive. In some sense, though, they can be said to encompass what’s definitely, concretely known to the public about their subjects. Sometimes this is almost nothing, maybe a description of a necklace and rosary and the river they drowned in (“Laredo”, 416). Sometimes, in rare cases, such as the victims of known serial killers, the resulting piece in DOE can go on for pages. The median, though, is a poem probably around ten lines long, most of which simply list articles of clothing. Each one is titled with the place they were found (these titles stretching into high roman numerals for certain large cities), and the corpus divided up into fifty sections, one for each state. These sections aren’t organized alphabetically or according to any other logic I can discern. The ordering of poems within the sections seems equally arbitrary, save that if there’s more than one from a particular place, they’ll be grouped together in sequence. Reflecting dramatic disparities in the Doe Network’s directory, some sections go on for dozens of pages, while others consist only of a single short piece. Everything is a neatly catalogued, but the catalogue itself is a mess, a hodgepodge, impossible to make sense of, to really wrap your head around. This is what the book is. This is what DOE is.

Of course, DOE is also what it isn’t, is everything that’s missing from its catalogue: names, jobs, families, friends, lovers, accomplishments, aspirations – most everything, that is, which is generally thought of as making up a human life. Or maybe, more precisely, you could say DOE is an exhaustingly thorough study of what a human life actually is when it’s separated from this social context, what it is for the only proof of someone’s existence to be the body they’ve left behind, what they were carrying with them, maybe a few vague recollections of some strangers who saw them in passing, at a distance, and paid them no particular mind. In this sense, it is a materialist text of uncommon rigidity, fanatically strict in its refusal of anything beyond the information as recorded, up to and including the dutiful transcription of obvious typos and misspellings present in the source being worked from. There is no psychological interiority here, no real authorial voice, nothing of so many of the fundamental tools of poetry. It hardly ever rhymes, of course, and only then incidentally. One might fairly ask, why write this as “poetry” at all – but the thing is it has to be poetry, it couldn’t be anything else, everything about it depends on what it does retain of poesy, namely the line break and the stanza form. The work is inconceivable otherwise. Consider, for example, “Upland”, 484:

fragment of blue denim at scene

the victim was located in a rock quarry

This is an exceptionally spare, lonely example, obviously, but it reflects in miniature DOE’s general poetic structure: a telescoping movement, beginning at full “extension” with the most granularly forensic information available and pulling outwards into a broader and broader context, with each subsequent “level” of this movement being delineated by a blank line. The more that’s known, the more complicated this schema becomes, of course – in poems detailing murder cases in which the killer was identified, for example, there is, beyond the level of immediate circumstances of discovery which “Upland” stops at, a further “social” level which can generally be recognized in the poem, and sometimes even what could be termed a “judicial” one beyond that, both of which can involve multiple stanzas charting the unfolding of these complex processes. Basic formal decisions, like, say, the grouping of clothing and personal effects into a single stanza is consistent across virtually the entire book. Consider, now, another example, still short but much more representative of the average poem in DOE, “Atlanta (V)”, 59:

keloid scar on the left abdomen & left lower chest
keloid scar on the left shoulder
tattoos on both forearms

C A T diesel power cap & patterned orange shirt

the victim was located alive in an abandoned house
he later died at the hospital

Here, there are two important things to note. Firstly, in this three-stanza, three “level” poem, description of marks upon the skin itself (scars and tattoos, in this case; sometimes it is fresher wounds) precedes description of clothing and personal effects. This is, of course, consistent with the structure outlined above: beginning from that which, of the available information, is most intrinsic to the body as body, and moving outwards from there, widening the scope further and further, bringing in more and more which concerns the body as something in the world, until the point is reached where no more can be said, where the entry stops. This is also, I believe, why the physical marks are ordered the way they are within the stanza: a keloid scar is a raised scar formed from collagen – it’s unsightly and undesirable, and, more importantly, it is something the body does to itself. A tattoo on a body is evidence of consciousness, of this body really having once been a person who had the desire to look a certain way (or of having known someone else who desired them to look a certain way, as in the “slave & property” of “lady j” detailed in “Hudson”, 79), but a keloid scar is the body reacting not as a person but as an organism to something which has been done with it. Such scars are representative of something more essential, more fundamental about being a living body than a tattoo is – and thus they come first in the stanza, because it is from the closest point to the bare fact of corporeality which the poems in DOE most often begin. It is poetry which locates life as a matter of the body ahead of the mind; it is for this reason, above any other, that I insist on calling it materialist.

Secondly, the last stanza, the one concerning the “level” of circumstance, is very instructive about the importance for DOE of that other basic tool of poesy, the line break. The first thing it’s important to note is that in terms of case specifics it’s very, very unusual; almost no one in this book is located alive. Despite this, in form it is very much typical. The second thing it’s important to note is that although it consists of two lines, it doesn’t have to – joined together they would still be far shorter than many of the lines in the book, which routinely run to twenty words or more, and in the prior two stanzas of “Atlanta (V)” itself, Hultman demonstrates no aversion to the strategic deployment of an ampersand. No, the line break is here because there’s a choice that’s been made to put it there, one of the thousands of compositional decisions alluded to above as present in the text, despite its schematic rigor. The question, then, of course, is why. I think it’s for two reasons: for the absence, and for that “he.” By “the absence” I mean, first of all, the literal emptiness of the page, the wordless expanse (I won’t call it “blank” because it’s not; DOE was put out by cloak.wtf, the imprint of Mike Corrao, in my opinion one of the most striking and distinctive designers currently working in American publishing, and every page is dusted with a coating of ultra-fine gray specks, like funeral ash) which stretches out to the edge of the page beyond where the line stops, and second of all the symbolic absence which the literal one indexes, the absence of everything which is not said, everything which cannot be said because no one wrote it down, and no one ever will. This is especially striking in this case, because what is absent here is part of someone’s actual life, not simply what happens after their death. Most often, absences of this particular sort are introduced into the text via the recollections of others, their descriptions of a person’s general character or behavior, of having seen them at such and such a place at such and such a time, with any details petering out somewhere well ahead their passing. It’s very uncommon, as we see here, for the time enclosed to be definitely that of their actual last hours. We are told where he was found (an “abandoned house” – not an address, you’ll note, although one is present in the Doe Network’s entry, but a type, a symbol, an implication, a very sad, desolate one), and where he later died. What came in between is, must be, passed over in silence. We can presume he was unconscious. And yes, the matter of that “he,” the other reason I think the stanza is structured the way it is. It is only at the start of the last line, you’ll notice, that there is a pronoun of any sort. If the two lines were joined together, there wouldn’t be any need for one at all. That there is one, and that its presence is a choice, a formal question which did not have to be resolved in this manner, demonstrates that, for all I’ve said about coldness and even sociopathy above, DOE is very clearly not a dehumanizing project. The “he” is there, I think, because Hultman wants us to know who this person was, as far as this is really possible, and no farther. It occurs only on the last line because it is, for this particular entry, the point farthest from the keloid scars, farthest from bare corporeality and closest to a fully realized human sociality: the point of gendered subjecthood. It is significant, of course, that he’s identified as “the victim” before he’s identified as a man.

The analysis above could have been conducted in essentially the same manner using almost any poem in DOE. I chose the examples I did more or less at random, simply on the basis of their brevity making a full block-quote reproduction easier to justify. There are many with far more idiosyncratic line breaks than seen here, although few, if any, that demonstrate comparable irregularity in their stanza structure. This is not to say the poems all the same, of course, far from it. Exceptional cases will sometimes result in exceptional poems, such as “Baltimore (XXII)”, 98, which is made up of an incredibly long list of clothing and personal effects, including multiple plastic bags, packs of cigarettes, pairs of socks, and scraps of paper with notes written on them, reproduced in full, followed by a second, single line stanza simply stating “the area is known to be frequented by homeless persons.” Or “Belle Chasse”, 239, which, not already being familiar with the case (it has a Wikipedia page), was one of the most shocking experiences I think I’ve ever had reading a poem. Mostly, though, what is found in DOE is more or less like that seen above. There is always something to discover in these poems, though, traces of the uniqueness of each life, suggestions of what they might have done, who they might have been, some evidence that, yes, they were someone – but, vitally, there’s never any “point” being made about this, never any pretense of an “argument” being put forward, of an “answer” which might be found. The poems never mean anything more than what’s right there in front of you. For this reason DOE, despite superficial appearances, is not a book for the true crime obsessive, who will be frustrated at its total refusal to make a “good story” out of all this, nor for the edgelord who just wants to jerk off to human misery, who will be frustrated by how much of the book is just lists of mundane clothing items. It is for someone who wants to think seriously about death in America, and about what it is that poetry can do today. That is, for someone like me.

Doe can be purchased from Asterism Books.

1. Conor, if you’re reading this, I hope you understand I mean this in a good way lol.