Dorothea Lasky's Animal; a Review by Mag Gabbert
Getting Real: on the Essence of Material Imagination
A review of Dorothea Lasky’s Animal
by Mag Gabbert
Publisher: Wave Books
Pub date: 10/01/2019
List price: $20.00
Pages: 136
Last fall I attended a friend’s wedding down in the Texas hill country. It was October, the evening light was spilling an alchemical gold across the treetops, and as I stood against the stone railing of a veranda overlooking the landscape, I felt a strange sense of nostalgia for places I’d never been—Italy, Nepal, New Zealand—and for things I’d never seen. A few minutes later I found a seat beside some old acquaintances, and I couldn’t help but notice their inquisitive expressions as one of the bridesmaids opened the ceremony with a selection from The Velveteen Rabbit, a children’s story by Margery Williams. In the excerpt, the stuffed rabbit asks his friend, the Skin Horse, what it means to be real. The Skin Horse replies:
“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
To some, it might have seemed strange to read from a children’s book during a wedding. And maybe it even seems strange to you now that I’m sharing this story. But, if I’m honest, this review is only intended for readers who like a little bit of strangeness. Because, like me, Dorothea Lasky thinks strangeness is interesting. Normal is just boring.
I was reminded of The Velveteen Rabbit as I read Lasky’s new book of craft lectures, Animal, in part because of her shared interest in “realness.” Throughout this collection, which is the latest installment in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series from Wave Books, Lasky considers how poems might become “real,” how they access or create a shared space of consciousness inside us, and how they can occupy that physical space, how they take on weight. Lasky explains, “what is important about writing [poems] is what we create within the brains of others. This is what makes the possibility of a world past this one possible.”
Maybe “a world past this one” is a good way of describing what I felt on that veranda just before my friend’s wedding. Or, I believe Lasky might have called it a “material imagination,” which is a central concept in her poetics, alongside the “metaphysical I.” But readers don’t need to be familiar with these kinds of terms—or, frankly, to care much about literary theory at all—in order to gain something important from Lasky’s lectures. They only need to understand that the mind can sometimes feel like a place, and that places can be haunted. They only need to be curious about what it means to live, and what it means to die, and what it means to create.
Throughout Animal, Lasky explores “the connection between the real and dream worlds,” and she does this through the lens of certain conduits, such as bees, colors, ghosts, and animals. For example, in “What Is Color in Poetry, or Is It the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word,” Lasky writes, “Color is not simply a decorative element in a poem. Color makes an expanse—a field, a shared formal field, with which to plant more shared components of the material imagination.” Each of these lectures also draws upon a wide variety of sources, ranging from Pablo Picasso, to the movie The Shining, to Finnish folklore, to Nicki Minaj. And although Lasky’s interests extend well beyond poetry—toward the occult, aesthetics, and language in general—she often returns to the question of whether poetry might empower these conduits, since “words together in the space of a poem make new realities—they make all the illusions of the imaginary real through language.”
Readers who’ve enjoyed Dorothea Lasky’s poetry (she has five published collections, most recently Milk) will not be disappointed by Animal. These lectures feature the same characteristically bold and direct voice as the speakers in her poems. And woven throughout the entire collection are several refrains (quoted lines from Fleetwood Mac, Alice Notley, and Emily Dickinson, to name a few) that contribute to the work’s familiar quality of incantation. Much like Lasky’s poems, these lectures are spell-like. They hypnotically manifest and resurrect. They reach out from the page, reminding us: “we lived as one in dreams.”
“In a poem we echo what will already be,” Lasky says. “Maybe we make what will be by being it already through language.” In this sense, you might call Animal a poem. A sort of prophecy. Or maybe just a friend—someone with the spiritual curiosity of Octavio Paz, the interdisciplinary aesthetic of Gaston Bachelard, and the eclectic intimacy and humor of Mary Ruefle. Or maybe, as Lasky promises, “it functions as a ghost,” speaking to anyone who’s known disenchantment and offering them a song. Or else this collection is “a gentle and awful animal. One that you can trust will come back again and again.” It is an animal that you know will return to you each time you seek it, when you revisit these pages. And you will.
Mag Gabbert is an American poet and essayist. Mag holds a PhD in creative writing and teaches at Southern Methodist University and for Writing Workshops Dallas.