No Matter
by Jana Prikryl.
Tim Duggan Books/Penguin Random House, 2019,
$15.00 paper.
In The After Party (2015), the poet Jana Prikryl threw a celebration for the end of the world—or at least her world. She delighted in this imagined end’s combination of humor and grief, in how we inflate minor things and tie them into elaborate, morbid balloon animals. In a reality saturated with death and despair, she leached out the world’s violent colors and left only the pastel hues of nostalgia. In her second collection, No Matter, Prikryl still goes on, evidently, and the end has unmomentously not come. Perhaps this world is not nearly so pretty as it once was. It is now muddied in shades of grey. While No Matter shares the same stateless characters and endless wandering as The After Party, these new poems feel less hopeful, but more accepting. We enter into a world in which Dido, queen of Carthage, gets petty on Instagram, where epic poems have shrunken down into sonnets that labor under the weight of their rhymes, where oracles try to navigate Midtown.
While Prikryl’s first book took place primarily in Rome (both ancient and modern), the scenes of No Matter are distinctly those of New York City, often specified merely by the names of neighborhoods (Inwood, Greenpoint, Fort Tilden). But New York may as well be any city large enough to threaten its residents with isolation, one where friendship is “the main mode of disaster prep” (“Stoic”). The “disaster” could be surrendering to what it means to be no matter against a backdrop of massive architecture and a mass of other bodies. Unlike William Wordsworth, who found pleasure in “the perception of similitude in dissimilitude,” Prilyl finds that a surplus of either similitude or dissimilitude only incites panic.
The voice of these poems is, to borrow one of Prikryl’s Romantic phrases, that of a “rootless cosmopolitan,” haplessly circumscribed by the city limits. And Prikryl may herself feel such rootlessness. She was born in the erstwhile Czechoslovakia and, at age six, relocated to Canada with her family. She moved to Dublin before settling in New York City where she now lives and works. Prikryl never seems shy about sharing such biographical information in her poems, and for her, biography is always registered through location. (In her first book she includes poems titled “Ontario Gothic” and “New York New York.”) In No Matter she discusses her time in Dublin, her home life in Brooklyn, and even her boss at the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers. Throughout No Matter, Prikryl watches her surroundings fall away. Not just the city’s apartment buildings or neighborhoods, but old friends whose names “now overlap / as if slackening, hardening, deaccessioning” (“Friend”) or the body’s “molecules coming and going” (“Sibyl”) as it sweats. Architecture and human lives differ only in their framing, their artifice, and in No Matter both collapse under the pressure of keeping up appearances.
In fact, everything in No Matter seems to be the matter. The phrase is an idiom at home in the mouths of dismissive millennials. Something that is “no matter” might be, in more late-Nineties terms, “no big.” Or perhaps this phrase presents an ontological problem, one of consequence (something will not matter) or substance (something that has lost all its physical matter). Thanks to Prikryl’s expert implications, the title often functions in multiple ways simultaneously.
Such multiplicity reinforces the collection’s obsession with feelings of insignificance. After all, how can anybody accept becoming “no matter”? Desperate for consequence, Prikryl turns hard towards the past. She alludes to canonical texts, quoting verbatim from Coriolanus, Moby-Dick, and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. (It’s telling that each of these referenced works features a vengeful, psychologically compromised protagonist, unable to escape a bad situation.) Yet the poems “Insta” and “Bowie” throw an almost pop-art glow over the middle of Prikryl’s book. “Insta” begins:
And do you suppose if there’d been phones that
Dido would have chilled, monitored his posts
as he sailed into a storm, the photos
parading purple cumulonimbus
What would have happened if Dido had been able to get hold of her lover, Aeneas? Would she have “monitored his posts”? Prikryl makes us wonder if social media causes feelings of isolation and loneliness equal to those Dido experienced when Aeneas left Carthage. After all, it’s hard not to feel insignificant when your beau departs with his fleet, then posts a photo without tagging you. Dido might “hate / read his captions” as vengeance, rather than hate-burning all his things. These lines, expertly enjambed, throw one leg over the wall between reality and abstraction. Here the line break reproduces a decidedly unmodern but still unnamed affect of the allure inherent in hatred. Prikryl plays the role of a modern-day Catullus, instructing us that the compound of hate-love cannot soothe our wounds.
As Prikryl weaves canonical texts with pop culture, she exemplifies how her poems exist in what she calls “the nick between / before and after” (“Inwood”). Into this reality she injects equal parts attention and abstraction, a scrupulous and witty sense of observation that lends itself to contemporary myth-making. The only way to create significance is to fight against insignificance, to reclaim our moment and ourselves as meaningful.
And Prikryl fights hard, attempting to use ancient stories, repetition, and marmoreal poetic forms as a temporary stay against dissipation. In “Epic”—which in our modern time ironically shrinks to the scale of a sonnet—Prikryl laments that we have arrived at the point when our efforts at Aeneids collapse into footnotes:
Your friends of friends in the city
seduce each other in the strong light
of their ambition by reading long
chapters of long books to each other
not seeing, in bed with this poem
that two chapters want repetition
as though by the guy who made Rome
Even an ancient, staid form like the epic shares little resemblance with its foundational antecedents. Like the nameless “friend of friends,” Aeneas loses his identity. As “the guy who made Rome,” his name does not matter.
Resemblance, or failed attempts to create it, can be comforting when it provides points of comparison. In “Ambitious,” New York appears a “simulacrum // Little York” as every “city leaves a little city in its wake, / even Troy had it done to it.” In “Sibyl” a prophetess navigates the streets of Manhattan to deliver a mysterious briefcase. In “Santo Stefano Rotondo,” Prikryl shows us one path to permanence with the thirty-four martyrdoms on the titular church’s walls. In one of the most loving, gentle descriptions in the entire collection, red paint splashes on these frescoes and lands in the grass like dewdrops. Poems like these aerate No Matter with fresh gasps of ancient air, with something permanent—or permanent enough. Prikryl turns to ancient scenes in order to salvage some significance and anoint the city of No Matter with a few drops of nostrum.
Yet nothing quite provides a panacea. In “Asylum,” (the comma is in the title), Prikryl stutters through bouts of “the” as she clutches the definitiveness of the article for stability:
the
the—
each article drenched to the bone in the
belief it attends something solid
. . . . . .
the the the the the the
does the trick if I can stick with it
not get swept into narrative
The “something solid” is little more than the promise that “the” points to a single object. That definitiveness can be good enough if it fights off the “narrative” of isolation. A little surety will do, as in “Stoic,” which relies on the refrain “I like ordinary days” (it appears fourteen times in almost as many lines). These days are, of course, completely “ordinary” or unremarkable, but they share no pattern of similarity—“ordinary days” encompass not spending time with friends and at the same time “running into friends.” The stability provided by an “ordinary day” allows us to not “think about things.”
Prikryl’s repetitions, by the end, start to feel like incantations. But what if significance resides only in our own lyric persuasions? How do we balance our need for comforting structures and our desire for the kind of freedom that allows us to feel like an individual? If, as in “Shades,” we find that
the clockwork
symptoms of a virus argue
against your uniqueness
then we see an antidote in “Friend,” which asks, “Are you more alone when you have experience?” Maybe in the end we should aspire to imitate the city itself, like the subway that is pleased “to lose the distinction / of being alone in being under everything” (“Snapshot”). We need not accept what it means to become no matter. We all matter, Prikryl asserts, or we all need to convince ourselves that we do.
Chelsie Malyszek is a poet who lives in rural Virginia. She is completing her PhD at Yale University.
