[REVIEW] Wolf Centos, by Simone Muench

72 pages, $14.95

Review by Carlo Matos

Simone Muench’s Wolf Centos is a collection of short, muscular and sinewy centos drawn from a dizzying array of sources—from Anna Akhmatova to Fernando Pessoa, from Paul Celan to Edith Sitwell, not to mention Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Dara Wier, and W.B. Yeats. Indeed, as the epigraph to Section 1—taken from Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, The Doors—makes perfectly explicit, “All the poetry has wolves in it.” The book that immediately came to my mind while I was reading these poems was Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, which interestingly is not one of Muench’s source texts. Their respective approaches to the symbology of the wolf are quite similar—at least at first glance. In Steppenwolf, for example, the aging protagonist realizes that his nature is dual: “He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes.” As Hesse’s novel progresses, however, the human/wolf dialectic fractures into a multitude: “His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.”

Simone Muench also deals, to some extent, with these ideas but her concerns are a bit different. Where Hesse is concerned mainly with the metaphysics of the self, Muench is aiming at something more immediate, more primal, or more elemental. In an interview in The Jet Fuel Review, she says, “Ultimately elegiac, these particular poems oscillate between transformation and stasis, wildness and domesticity, damage and healing.” But she goes beyond these polarities when she says, “The ‘wolf’ of these centos becomes a symbol of a threshold, a transformative space, as well as a mode of meditation.” Her speakers do not merely oscillate between two poles (the human and the animal, the interior and the exterior, the domestic and the wild), they are always “under,” “behind” or “in” the wolf and the wilderness it carries in its mouth and in its fur. If you follow these prepositions, they tend to arise when Muench is contemplating the wolf who “like a much-hunted animal fix[es] us in her eyeshine.”

It seems to me that Muench is much less interested in dialectical opposition and is far more interested in the complex nature of embedding. I do not have the space to enumerate all the examples I would like to, but I think this partial list should provide a pretty good idea of the ubiquity and complexity of the embedded imagery of the wolf: “Inside the wolf’s tongue, the doe’s tears;” “the she-wolf bathes herself . . . in my mouth;” “What can’t be said is the dark meat, / seeking your mouth in another’s mouth.”

One speaker concludes,

I have lost my being in so many beings:
travelers passing by night, the great wolf
who goes wounded & bleeding through the snows.

My favorite of these embeddings is the speaker who, when tired of tenderness, sees her wolf self as a girl nestling down inside her “with her she-wolf’s mask.” More than merely acknowledging the presence of the untamed under the mask of the conventional, it describes this particular embedding as an active state of suppression. The girl with the she-wolf’s mask is busy putting words “in the hollow/of my mute being” and bathing herself “in the blue vertigo in my mouth,” daring the speaker, I assume, to run wild.

Ultimately, the power of the wolf image is tied to the notion of unmediated necessity. In one cento, the speaker says, “[U]nder my skin I change dog to wolf/ muscling an outline on the chalky bone.” The dog, although closer than we are to our animal origins, is still a part of the domestic world—the end result of thousands of years of co-evolution with humans, which is why she must devolve it further into its wolf state. I guess the simplest example of this kind of proximity of the animal world to direct necessity would be the need to kill prey: “The kill of the wolf is the meat of the wolf:/ he may do what he will.” A wolf does not kill for pleasure, or out of perversion, or for personal gain of an abstract nature. It is not afraid of death. Its relationship to death is direct and undistorted by language and all its cultural manifestations. It kills so it may live; the meat of the slain is its body. This isn’t a metaphor. It is the very nature of the wilderness and what we are farthest from, what makes death unnatural to humans in a way that it isn’t for any other creature. It is also, of course, what draws us to it.

A true believer in the art of the cento, Muench demonstrates that it can go far beyond the limits of pastiche and homage. The cento is the perfect type of poem for this collection, where anxiety of form is a necessary component of the poetics. The cento is always aware of the other face “under,” “in” or “behind,” as it were, and that is the very essence of this collection:

Nor could I recognize you in the haze
with a plain face hiding thousands
of other faces, fasciculated, beautiful.

The word “fasciculated” (which simply means, “occurring together or clustered in bundles”) made my heart beat strange and wonderful. A true cento is dual by design; it does not seek to hide its sources (“Perhaps this music you are listening to/ is lovelier than these loaned words”), but it must also make a claim to its own originality. Muench’s centos do this to an exceptional degree and that is why these wolves can compel us, whether we like it or not, to “rage on raw meat.”

***

Carlo Matos has published four books of poetry. His new book, The Secret Correspondence of Loon and Fiasco is forthcoming from Mayapple Press later this year. His work appears in such journals as Paper Darts, HTML Giant, Another Chicago Magazine, and The Rumpus, among many others. He blogs at carlomatos.blogspot.com. Follow him on Twitter @Carlomatos46.