On the Importance of Poetic Resistance: “No Sign” by Peter Balakian
No Sign, Peter Balakian’s latest collection, overflows with allusive, resonant poems that both challenge and reward readers for engaging with their complexities. From the opening “History, Bitterness” which begins with Balakian in a phone booth, “sweating into the phone” and a dying James Baldwin’s “frail but unmistakable” voice on the other end, to the concluding juxtapositions of “Walking the Ruined City,” No Sign covers wide expanses of thematic territory, and in the process, explores how much a poetic line can hold. This lushness reflects an understanding of lyric poetry Balakian previously expanded on in his essay collection Vice and Shadow: “The vice-grip of lyric language…gives the poem or visual work or song a value and a legacy as a deep mine of knowledge and culture in which human thought and emotion, language, and insight intersect and mingle, and come together as distinctive, memorable, aesthetic form.”
The interplay of time and memory is a central motif in No Sign, and many poems in the first section find Balakian taking stock of personal experience against a broader backdrop of historic events, such as growing up during the Vietnam War (“American questions spilling in sunlight on white / shutters, and I’m home on plush carpet waiting for a number.”) or more recent bewilderments of the Covid pandemic (“when I got out at Penn Station there were no faces / along the tracks— / wind blew through 32nd Street with a faint whiff of onions / and hair spray”). There is an elegiac, almost haunted undertow to these reflections, although they avoid slipping into nostalgic indulgence. Again, from Vice and Shadow, poetry “is a partially opaque light that might cast a dark light on a person, event, object or form in nature…[it] casts its own kind of illumination, often unromantic, sober, and shadow-like in its truths.”
The food / object lessons of the second section demonstrate Balakian’s unique ability to use one specific image as a springboard to reach much broader considerations. In these transformations, a pomegranate is not only “seed-apple, / garnet, cochineal, / spiritus ovum—” but a reminder of the hell his grandmother passed through surviving with her two daughters, “Every day one seed / for each of them. // Whatever death road / they walked down”. Quince evokes the “Hard-ass, bitter pucker” of memory, even as eggplant shows the sensuous, tactile intersection of self and family history: “My mother made those white moons sizzle / in some egg wash and salt— // …We used our hands.” A scent of zucchini “sautéed in olive oil / garlic, oregano,” intersects with an image of his grandmother coring them “with her hands that had come / through the slaughter—” and prompts: “Can holding on to this image / help me make sense of time?”
The third section and heart of No Sign provides no easy answers to the nature of time, but is the latest in a series of long-form explorations, following “A-Train / Ziggurat / Elegy” and “Ozone Journal” from previous collections. Through fragments of dialogue between voices known only as He and She, this virtuosic word collage sprawls kinetically between meditations on time, love, war, history, geology, cinema, and more. As Balakian writes in “Collage and its Discontents,” this form “isn’t interested in resolution or closure” and is “always bigger than the sum of its parts…energized by their relationship to other parts of the work, and so the work generates an energy and dynamism that draws the reader into a swirl or vortex of motion.”
Part of what “being drawn into” a lyric sequence like “No Sign” means is slowing down and engaging with its many allusions and layers. Readers should go ahead and Google Hiroshima mon amour in order to appreciate how the poem ingests that movie’s dialogue of Lui and Elle. Or perhaps look up what the “Palisades Sill” is to better grasp what “geological time” encompasses, or simply find a picture of the George Washington Bridge to get a sense of what those disembodied voices might be looking at. One of the paradoxes of lyric poetry lies in the way its multifaceted language functions to reveal and conceal: poetry is powered by words, even as the associations and resonances of those words deter straightforward understanding. To its critics, this lack of instant gratification reduces poetry to an exclusive, even obscure endeavor. But for those willing to engage with the form on its own terms, this push and pull of poetic resistance is the engine that enables lyric poetry to contain the complexities of reality and imagination.
There is, however, a deeper purpose to nuance and poetic resistance that goes beyond creating an aesthetic experience. Through its 45 short sections, “No Sign” skirts the line between poetry and politics: “She: And now. The inconceivable, / with Trump everything’s a moving target” or “He: American implosion: Conservative need to / deny history.” Taken out of context, this could easily devolve into polemics, but in the scope of a lyric collage, the political commentary is just one aspect of a broader experience that leaves a place for the reader to step in and, in a manner of speaking, join the conversation. The enigmatic statement that underlies the poem’s title: “2019—here—again—no light at end of the tunnel / no sign—” gets at the cyclicality of history. But by locating this in the middle of an open, strikingly democratic poem that is the antithesis of spin and single-narrative, Balakian enacts how poetic resistance to easy answers might be a way to avoid the dangers of refusing to learn from the past.
The fourth and final section of the book gathers the thematic strands of time, memory, and personal experience through poems that are rooted in place. The physicality of Istanbul, the British Museum, even the Cross Bronx Expressway provide starting points, like the food poems, that open to broad, associative vistas. “Walking the Ruined City” closes the collection on a particularly uneasy note, as the ruins of Ani along the Turkish / Armenian border, are both specifically, painfully, somewhere, but also a place where only fading impressions of the past currently exist. “I can see Armenia clear as grass through the wire / fence on the other side of the river” but “Here the bridge is gone and a broken wall crumbles into the river, / the Armenian palace circa 975 still has shaped walls on the ramparts.” It is also a place that embodies an existential state of “No Sign”: “I feel emptiness” and “Why do I feel that here—the body is nothing.” But even more significant than the erasure of self, “The word Armenia appears nowhere on any sign or wall—outlawed by the state” and “What do Turkish schoolkids think when they come here on class trips?” Here then, is a final form of poetic resistance, providing witness to and preventing erasure of the Armenian Genocide that underscores many poems in No Sign, and that Balakian has been writing about for much of his career. As Aristotle makes clear, poets are not historians, but provide the moral clarity to bridge the particularity of history to what must happen in the future. Let us hope that Balakian will continue doing so for many more years to come.
Poet, translator, and educator, Yoni Hammer-Kossoy's writing appears in numerous international journals and anthologies. A graduate of the Shaindy Rudoff program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University, he is the winner of the 2020 Andrea Moriah Prize in Poetry. Yoni is originally from Brooklyn, New York, and has been living in Israel with his family for more than 25 years.