Review of Hallelujah Time
by Virginia Konchan

Reviewed by Kevin Spicer

It is difficult to describe how exactly the poems in Hallelujah Time work. The content ranges exuberantly from allusions to Baudrillard and Bataille, Goethe and Melville, Dickinson and Wordsworth to Tennyson, Ovid, Nabokov, Agamben, and Heidegger. But this proliferation of references and faint shadows (of Deleuze and Guattari or Klein and Sedgwick? of Hegel or Hamacher-on-Hegel) does not result in a mishmash-amalgam, nor in a multifarious multiplicity of name-dropping and word vomit. Poem after poem manages to give rise to a heterogeneity that is ultimately cinched-up together towards a poem’s end. One reaches for a metaphor, for a textual precedent, in order to best describe how they work.

The first poem in “Part One” of the book, “Bel Canto,” exemplifies perfectly the different kinds of effects Konchan’s poetry produces. We begin with a speaker in whom “is a black-eyed animal / struggling to get out, be free. Inside me is a failed attempt / at explanation, a frozen pizza, / a botched murder, and a consumptive, / fallen woman heroine.” After being told “[i]t’s not love / until someone is willing to die for you, / or quotes you out of context,” we get an echo of Nietzsche: “My metamorphic body falls asleep / and has a dream it is inevitable, / this slow slog toward slaughter / in the form of a ruminating cow.” Nietzsche’s work seems uncannily apropos for the ways in which Konchan’s poems reel and wheel from theoretical reference to poetic allusion: so much is packed into each of these poems (indeed, the very last poem in the work has recourse to Zarathustra). Many readers of Nietzsche are fond of the philosopher’s use of the “lightning strike” as fundamental metaphor—it flashes and jaggedly yet precisely cuts the sky in two, always enticing (and seemingly always producing) an improper desire caused by our grammar to always want an agent behind every action and activity. “Hand me my opera glasses. / I want to shatter a champagne flute / with my perfect contralto; / I want to discomfit, then bring down, the house.” The lightning that strikes with instantaneous abandon and the contralto that peaks and shatters the champagne flute into fragments combines the speed and intensity that would no doubt find a very comfortable home within the space of the Nietzschean aphorism.

Very much like the aphorism that so often has a short and terse title—“Chemistry of concepts and sensations,” “Intoxicated by the scent of blossoms,” “Art is dangerous for the artist,” “Making Smaller”—so many of these headings serve as bookends of a sort for what occurs within the meat of the aphorism.^[1] Konchan’s poems work similarly as the titles dance in tune with the closure that arrives at the end (the “beautiful singing” of the first poem’s title serves as one bookend while the fragmented champagne flute bookends everything else in the poem tightly together at the conclusion). In between the two bounds of this poem is the “ruminating cow”—an animal that Nietzsche uses in many different places in his oeuvre (On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life and The Genealogy of Morals come most readily to mind). Indeed, the adjective in Konchan produces a wonderful mixture of speed and slowness as the German word for “rumination” (Wiederkäuen) can figuratively mean “to chew the cud again.” Poem after poem in Hallelujah Time gathers together all kinds of different velocities and intensities—and, just like the aphorism, one must not simply read them once; one must not merely read, one must ruminate, upon them, chew them over and over again, slowly, and, as Deleuze noted, it is helpful to avail oneself of the cow’s multiple stomachs: “… two stomachs are not too many for thinking” or poeticizing, we might add. The poems in Hallelujah Time are aptly connected together here under this title—if “hallelujah” is itself read as a tightly-compacted signifier of great emotional power, then each and every poem in this collection packs a punch—a punch well-worth mulling over, as there’s enough cud here to keep one’s multiple stomachs more than busy.

[1] The reviewer would like to give all credit for the “bookends” metaphor to his student, MaKenzie Munson—moreover, he thanks her for being the impetus for turning to Nietzsche’s philosophy as a way to think through and properly describe what Konchan’s poems are up to and ultimately what they are doing and effecting.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 4.

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