No Number of Dictionaries Can Save You: on Ian Ganassi’s True for the Moment

It would be easy to categorize the style of Ian Ganassi’s second collection of poems, True for the Moment, as black comedy. And there’d be a bit of truth there, since a dark thread of humor runs through the skein of his work, beckoning to the part of us that wants things to be okay, the part that believes in hope and survival, the survival of the voice we listen to in these lines and, of course, our own survival. If someone can joke, we assume, he hasn’t entirely given up. 

This facet of True for the Moment might also remind us of another kind of comedy, the comedy of Aristophanes and Dante and Shakespeare, the story with a happy ending. Does this story have a happy ending? Hard to say. The couplet that ends the book plays things agnostic:

Oddly enough, fate is chance and chance is simply fate.
Don’t go away sad, don’t go away mad, just go away.

But though there is humor in these poems, this is not a funny book. The sea in which Ganassi swims is what a hundred years ago we might have called “madness.” This is a madness that manifests in hallucination, melancholy, obsession, and a razor-sharp instinct for both the associative and the disjunctive powers of language—how words can offer the tantalizing hope of connection, with each other and with the world, but also betray us at nearly every turn.

Nope, no number of dictionaries can save you now.

Much of the madness begins in yearning, followed inevitably by a wry despair, which in turn is followed by an ironic acceptance.

She couldn’t “get into a relationship” without alcohol.
Which is significant: how many people can?

They try to keep going
At least until the uniform wears off.

Then you discover
You’re just another dockside casualty

Of rabid chocolate Easter bunnies.

There’s a teasing quality to these lines, as if they were daring you to make conventional “sense” of them. They may remind one of Ophelia in Hamlet, Act 4:

                            her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;

At first blush Ganassi’s poems appear to be making a fetish of non sequiturs (it’s not always apparent how A led to B) and manic word play.

A real belief in the “paranormal” only emphasized his banality.
“Do I look like a witch?” she asked, from her deathbed.
The lemmings knew which way to run.
It’s a question of how much you have versus how much you need,
Godzilla versus King Kong.
Mickey Rooney and the Cisco Kid sharing a bottle of port.
As the doctor said to the dentist, “I’ll see you in court.”

But this may be because we’re reading too locally. Something a bit more radical is happening here. Ganassi’s book organizes itself into discrete poems, it’s true, but the real organism is the collection, across which a sensibility grows by repetition, echo, and accretion. 

What appears as an absurdity or mere cleverness in this or that couplet deepens by the end of the book into a point of view. We can see with Ganassi’s eyes and share in the intoxicating madness of the poems’ voice, if only for a time. It’s the poet’s unrelenting commitment to the form that makes this possible. And it is what transforms the madness of the poems into the wisdom of the book.

One man’s “purposeful doggerel” is another’s “Zen-like beads.”

Essential to the form—and therefore to the sensibility or “attitude” of the work—is the way literary and pop-culture allusions and quotations are used. Ganassi invites the allegedly “sane” world into the madhouse, in effect layering or superimposing one on the other. Inhabitants of the poet’s world include Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Rabindrath Tagore, 1 Corinthians, Brer Rabbit, Buster Keaton, William Carlos Williams, FDR, Virgil, Patsy Cline, Abe Lincoln, Plato, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, West Side Story, Gone With the Wind, Allen Ginsberg, Wilkie Collins, Bette Davis, Richard Burton (not the actor), and T-Bone Walker. Sometimes the reference serves the poem’s train of thought; sometimes it is salt in the wound. Sometimes both.

The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of his tail.

One of the more telling presences in True for the Moment is Gertrude Stein, who, like Ganassi, clearly has a taste for life’s absurdities. Nonetheless, the venerable Modernist represents a different sensibility. Where Stein is unapologetically expansive—verbose, even—Ganassi is gnomic. Stein’s world is Rabelaisian, a waterfall or a maelstrom. Ganassi’s is compressed by a pressure that could transform coal into diamond. When you reach the end of the book, you can almost hear the air escaping.

Mordant, challenging and courageous, this is a book one lives with for weeks, months, maybe longer, a book that puts its mark upon you. And this is because it feels true, if only for the moment.