All the Possible Bodies by Iain Haley Pollock

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In “Is You Is, Or Is You Ain’t? (An Answer Becomes a Set of Further Questions),” Pollock writes:

 

          …historical records and family lore suggest 19th-century Pollock forbears were forced from the Scottish Highlands during the

          Clearances while the reddish tint of my father’s beard suggests a Viking in the woodpile—the colonizer and the colonized again

          rehearsing their psychodrama within the double-helix of me). What am I?

 

Welcome to a drama placed squarely within the psyche. But first, a question: where, in fact, does one’s psyche dwell? It’s one of the queries Pollock continues to raise throughout his masterful book, asking not only “What am I?” but also that sempiternal examination at the core of the world’s mystical teachings: who am I?  In good, metaphysical fashion, Pollock starts with the “what.” His “who” will come later, although at great cost. But the penuries of those colonized offer an almost-incomparable wealth when it comes to living the questions that become their own answers.

 

Pollock’s poems incur their own clearances, but in ways that include everyone—and everything—that’s been removed prior. His inclusions go down to the bottommost of the bottom, as he writes in “Turn, hell-hound, turn!”:

 

                                                                                               Hell

          is murky. Sure, most times there’s no silt in the river:

          I’ve done good that I knew was good & bad

 

          knowing it was bad. But then, I’ve done bad trying

          to do good & strangest of all, good when I set out

          to do bad.

 

Pollock’s possibilities offer a kindness (something which is always inclusive), as well as a way of seeing that asks “What do I know?” especially regarding the “what” located in the silt of himself. Pollock permits, and graciously, the river of questions that come from being alive, all while living and learning precisely what that means, as he does at the end of “Not a Prayerful Kneeling (For John Lewis):

 

          Survival will seem sweet. How will I walk then

          into the wall, the hands,

 

          the hardwood/How will I give myself up

          to be cracked open?

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          How will I bend my knee, bow my head the road,

          & accept the splitting

 

          of me, the splitting of me until I am spilling,

          until I am spilled?

 

David Biespiel, poet and founder of The Attic Institute of Arts and Letters, says that any question in a poem is answered by what immediately follows. Thus, does the next poem in the book, “for I think upon the price of my redemption,” hold answers for which the reader awaits:

 

          True, the only capacity for belief

          remaining in me is faith

          in each planetary spin unspooling day

          into next day,

                              next day when my body

          sweats to make risen bread, bread eaten

          in continuance 

                              of my risen body. 

 

In his way, Pollock is now free to ask “Am I my body? And to whom does such a body belong?” and all because the poet knows the heft of what it means to include the murky mess of those who’ve come and gone before, both colonized and colonizers. “Bread eaten / in continuance of my risen body” dances with the question “Who am I?” by literally staying with (and the mystics would say “by living within”) himself. Pollock is not out of his mind, nor is he beside himself. He is, quite palpably, offering his own experience as a meal to us all as he finishes the poem:

 

                                                            Always,

          I stay at the table to be with you.

          For the next day. And the next day.

          At the table with you, my body

          beyond this risen bread. With you,

 

          my bread beyond this doubting body. 

 

This is an embodiment of stunning capacity, ordinary as it may seem. The ordinary, however, becomes extraordinary just like extra butter makes a slice of ordinary bread all the more delectable. We do well to remind ourselves of the book’s title: All the Possible Bodies. Not some of the possible bodies; not “selected” possible bodies. All. Omnia. And in that gigantic container, Pollock stages the final act of his poetic drama, “6. Renders Itself Visible in My Body.” The book’s closing section holds herons, and rivers, and child-song, and a dancer making a movement that “would, / if [he] attempted it, break into pieces / [Pollock’s] embrittled body.” 

 

This section’s sudden and terrifying tenderness offers something the early Franciscan John Duns Scotus named “haecceity,” which is nothing less than those irreducible qualities of a person’s or an object’s “this-ness:”

 

          no doubt you’d see the water, the current,

 

          the bird, the wings, the sun, the trees, the trees,

          the trees—all of it—in a different diffusion from me.

          (from “Heron and Light at the Croton River.”)

 

Pollock honors the diversities once violated by the Clearances, but does so by claiming his “different diffusion” even while learning his place in this dance of differences. 

 

As an intern at The Center for Action and Contemplation, I spent time living in the city dump of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, working with the women and children of Centro Santa Catalina. A formidable stone wall surrounded their buildings and their sanctuary, crowned with the sparkling confetti of broken soda bottles fixed in place by concrete, intending to keep those within safe. Pollock not only tells us who he is in “Frequency & Amplitude: The Child/Sing,” he also tells us what we are, blessing the “this-ness” of everyone who’s been a child (which is each and every one of us) as we face whatever walls show up in the run of our lives:

 

                                                            An acknowledgement 

          that whatever broken glass is set into the next wall

          to be scaled / when the child’s name is called / there will /

          always & every day / be a loudness / from the back

          joy & and bulwark against ruin / joy & bulwark against wrack.

Pollock calls each of our names, and in doing so, promises that that song will keep at bay whatever Clearances may loom, many though they are today. This great, big “us” of All the Possible Bodies guarantees that our own bodies—every single one of them—hold mysteries and powers enough to face, and to overcome, the ruin and the wrack.

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Reviewer Notes: 

—David Biespiel quote taken from a conversation at The Poets Studio.

—Link to the Franciscan John Duns Scotus reference: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-haecceity/