The Hello Delay
Julie Choffel offers a warning at the start of The Hello Delay, winner of Fordham University Press’s 2012 Poets Out Loud prize: “my poetry has no camera.” Photographs tell stories; their tableaus create the “‘everyone crying’ scene” or the “‘everyone looks elsewhere’ scene” (“The Sorrows”). Still, in a photograph’s version of reality: “mud is paper mud / the sky has creases in it” (“The Rain Falls as a Cylinder”) or “the sand is never real sand, but some uncatapultable feeling of / sand” (“The Sorrows”). Besides a natural disconnect between the image and the physical object, photographs have their own contexts, back stories, and intrigues that make meaning depending on the beholder. When the speaker of “The Sorrows,” for instance, gazes at a photo of herself, she “can only see [her] own eyes / seeking their place” and not the whole of the composition. Choffel’s collection resists “easy combinations” and singular definitions. In fact, her photography metaphor informs how the collection thinks about language: exploratory, changeable, and exhilarating.
Julie Choffel offers a warning at the start of The Hello Delay, winner of Fordham University Press’s 2012 Poets Out Loud prize: “my poetry has no camera.” Photographs tell stories; their tableaus create the “‘everyone crying’ scene” or the “‘everyone looks elsewhere’ scene” (“The Sorrows”). Still, in a photograph’s version of reality: “mud is paper mud / the sky has creases in it” (“The Rain Falls as a Cylinder”) or “the sand is never real sand, but some uncatapultable feeling of / sand” (“The Sorrows”). Besides a natural disconnect between the image and the physical object, photographs have their own contexts, back stories, and intrigues that make meaning depending on the beholder. When the speaker of “The Sorrows,” for instance, gazes at a photo of herself, she “can only see [her] own eyes / seeking their place” and not the whole of the composition. Choffel’s collection resists “easy combinations” and singular definitions. In fact, her photography metaphor informs how the collection thinks about language: exploratory, changeable, and exhilarating.
I interpret “the hello delay” as a gap in comprehension. Consider that uneasy pause on the street as our brains work to identify the figure coming toward us with a smile and a wave. Between the greeting and recognition, we must connect what we see with what we recall. Who is this person? What is his relationship to me? A technological example of this remove is the telephone, a theme which reappears throughout the book. Choffel writes in “Public Service Announcement”:
Have you come around to listening to
the sound of your own voice recorded:
When messages repeat they delay their messages;
when messages delete they’re afterwards fixed
in time; how then the play commences.
Answering machines and voicemail boxes follow the same narrative impulses as the camera. A message freezes one version of things, one impression, one reading.
Choffel explores this disconnect between what we say and how it is interpreted all the way to the grammatical level. There is a cognitive delay on the street corner as a figure approaches before we give the pronoun “he” over to “Steven.” Just as the message stands in for the speaker, or the image stands in for the object, the pronoun is typically bound to its antecedent. Yet Choffel is interested in variations. In her collection, “Pronouns are disasters”; they are “essential words.” Their use and misuse speak to the concept that “containment / could pluralize us too, like life life life / in a fallout shelter.” Like a collection of photographs, pronouns can contain many versions of the self both perceived by and presented to the world, such as in the marvelous “How Do You Do”:
My sister and your layer cakes
you-hoos and formal
introductions,
enchanté, glissade, my country
how many yous do I have to choose from
Similarly, in the first line of “Can I Be a Part of Your We,” she wonders, “Can I be a part of your me.” These combinations explore not only who we are to each other, but who we are to ourselves: “Can someone have a soda with herself? / My kisses are very brightly / on my mouth.”
John Ashbery has described the subject of his poetry as “the experience of experience.” Choffel’s poems feel like that; at once abstract and precise, they are constantly in the process of making. Language builds upon itself (“like like like”), but, as with erasure poetry, there’s a scaffold, too, in the holes between words or between understanding: “nobody knows if nothingness has a form / but should it come, would we know it / or would it be our lack of knowledge” (“Plant Life”).
Choffel is wry about the poetic impulse to “make” in “Producing for a While,” which marries this craving with vague business jargon: “I think I’m done producing for a while. I know I can con- / tribute a lot to the overall production. But I’m done with pro- / ducing until I can get some input.” Similarly, Choffel repurposes popular song lyrics and sayings—“on the phone” and “how could you”—into something other, the way a word repeated becomes strange again:
as I stumble over you as an essential word
What is the recognizable form
What is the recognizable form
What is the recognizable form
—“Post Script”
The reader, too, may stumble because, as Choffel puts it, “Sometimes the very very very is unnerving.” There is supreme delight, though, in living in the present with this collection and in never surrendering to a fixed “canon of information.”