A Review of Cait O’Kane’s A Brief History of Burning — March 31, 2021 by Arden Levine
I read Cait O’Kane’s A Brief History of Burning for the third time on the weekend of the second impeachment acquittal. But I didn’t start from the beginning. I turned first to “An Alphabet for the End (Multiple Choice),” a poem of lines like insect body segments that starts with “a Time—a Stamp—a Date—a Spell—a Speech—” and moves quickly, a Morse code distress signal, towards "an Uprising—a Zenith—an Edict— / —an Outbreak— / —a Zone—.” And I wondered (yet again) at O’Kane’s apparent clairvoyance.
By the time the reader has reached this poem in a chronological read, she has learned much about the author / speaker of this debut collection: a young woman born into a literally burning Philadelphia, whose experience of drug abuse and economic vulnerability have made her a true witness to America, have perhaps given her second sight. In structure and in (un)sentiment(ality), the book embodies the principles of its publisher Belladonna*, an august and avant-garde feminist literary collective raising the visibility of experimental / political poetry and scholarship.
A Brief History of Burning opens with the found poem “Problems of American Society”:
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Crime and Juvenile Delinquency Poverty and the Poor Air and Water Pollution The Traffic Jam The Consumer Drugs Hunger Racism Prison The Police
This invocation becomes a syllabus: Over the course of the book, O’Kane takes a deft thumb and smash-smears together political despondency, opioid addiction, and urban abandonment; the result are poems in which America is writ grotesquely large and seen in heinous detail, all thick pores and broken capillaries: Here are its fears, its dependencies, its obsessions and disinterests. Here is where its citizens are guilty, blameless, guilty again, where they are righteously enraged and what (little) good it does. As my career is in public policy, I was grateful for O’Kane’s ruthless, poetry-based lesson plan in social determinants of unhealth.
The book contains four chapters. In the first, Problems of American Society, the chapter’s title poem is followed by a series of “EPIDEMEPIC”s (I–V), a lean, harsh autobiography in spare word-snapshots. The prose poem “EPIDEMEPIC II: Disaster Plan” retells, slurred, the overdose of a friend during a storm evacuation (“He died sprawled out onna couch, ass up, mouth fulla chewed-up plastic”) who becomes, like his waterlogged home, “all broke n’ fuckedup wit overstuffed gutters, a floodit foundation.” In “EPIDEMEPIC IV: Abando Ghazal,” another OD ends unceremoniously on the steps of an abandoned VFW when “The lead EMT said that’s it.” And in “EPIDEMEPIC V: Ritornello for J,” we receive, in slow-motion, an accident in the rain that falls on the reader with relentless repetition and thunderbolts of ampersands:
September 27, 2011 was cold for autumn & it rained & rained like in the video for Rabbit in Y/r Headlights (a song we loved) where a man lurches down a highway & keeps getting hit by car after car but he gets up & keeps moving & clutching his face & yelling under the piano ritornello which means little return & September 27, 2011 was cold for autumn & it rained & rained the climax to the video comes after the ritornello which means little return referring to a recurring passage & in Rabbit in Y/r Headlights the ritornello is four piano chords in the key of E-flat minor 7
In the latter three chapters (art imitating life imitating, life imitating art imitating, and imitating art imitating life), O’Kane increasingly tightens the ligature between her personal story and her expansive analysis in verse. Nothing is safe from her flashlight cross-examination, even her own identity as observer / implicated / implicitly exonerated; take “::prime time for ritual::”: “O also as in osteomyelitis, recurrent as in 60 count oxycodone, also as in under the cover & shielded by P for Privilege AKA what kept me uncaught AKA why when we OD it’s a disease, whoopsie.” Other targets of her interrogation include terrorism in its many forms, money and government in their mutual corruptibility, colonialist legacies of technology, and gun violence in its complexity. The latter in particular, in “Peace Through Strength / AKA Citizens”:
citizens w/guns protect themselves from citizens w/ guns protecting themselves from guns gunning citizens protecting themselves w/ guns from citizens themselves protecting guns themselves protecting citizens from themselves themselves guns themselves citizens protecting themselves w/ guns
Several times, she loops all themes together in a single sharp beat, such as in “Some Recent Rooms” where, during a period of recovery, a swig of root beer “tastes like… swallowing a thousand pennies, like gagging on a copper forged memory stuck in y/r throat & stamped with a President’s stern, somber face.”
Regarding beats/Beats: O’Kane’s musical motif is not incidental or convenient; as a poet-musician, she created, with her band Notable Deaths, a recorded performance and sound supplement to the book. The sonorous echo in her lines reveals two intentional influences: the reverb of techno and rave tracks, and the thrum of Beat poetry. (O’Kane was trained at Naropa University; Anne Waldman is a mentor to her.) Her litanies feel especially Ginsburgian, not only in structure but in their ability to reverse or revere the sacred and profane. Finally, each poem in the book is a small amplifier, pumping the blood-beat of Belladonna*’s publishing commitment language: “multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, unpredictable, and dangerous with language.”
In his forward to Robert Frank’s photo collection The Americans, Jack Kerouac claimed that Frank’s images (dark in both subject and appearance) had “sucked a sad poem right out of America.” I think of this description when I read the book’s title poem, its first paragraph-stanza:
I came into the world during the row house conflagrations. My mother was a washrag & my father was a denim shirt. The sacraments could be injected. Doctors were our Holy men. My mother was a camera and my father was a lens. Impossible to see it all. The machines sometimes choked on the tapes. The book inside myself is blurry. The book inside myself is banned.
More than a generation later, we still crack new messages in Robert Frank’s visual critiques. O’Kane, likewise, is a foreteller for her generation, and America, if it knows what’s good for it, will keep these poems near at as it attempts to make sense of this strange moment in history.
