Introduction to Gray Matter
How much of a body is a spirit, and vice versa? Does the biology of our minds make for our behavior, become our destinies? Can we make choices not determined by the chemistries that comprise our brains? What does this mean for free will and fate, and for faith itself? Is the spirit quantifiable?
Each era of scientific revolution - a reconceiving of our world as well as the terms in which science defines it - has had its own profound poetries, from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to William Carlos Williams' The Desert Music and Other Poems. Now Sara Michas-Martin's Gray Matter evokes our most immediate scientific revolution, the discovery of the interdependence of biology and environment - even if we don't yet understand to what extent each is altered by the other, and just what the effects may be. It is no accident that its title echoes that of George Oppen's post-nuclear masterpiece, The Materials. As Oppen presaged, material is altered by matter's will.
Gray Matter is indeed the manuscript's matter: gray in its infinite gradations; the material of the marks on the page written language makes; the hard-wired biology of our brains as well as the matter of our thinking and sensing, our expectations for ambiguity; and how the best writing is obtained via precise utterance and image, as in the book's opening lines:
Hello internal assembly team.
I am un-singular today in this rash of faces.
I sense the careful in me trolling.
Is the sound of someone crying inside of us or outside of us? What is it in our wiring that (falsely) constructs continuity? What would it mean to let go into just that that overwhelms us? What matter makes our camp cabin-mate pull her eyelashes out, blissfully? At the heart of all of the questions in Gray Matter is the dance, the negotiation, between imagination and science, perception and thought.
The language in these poems juxtaposes the abstract precision of vocabularies around thought with viscerally precise descriptions of material events, tacking, with urgency, from surprise to surprise. "Could these things be happy, in the way ice cream is happy?" asks the prose poem "How are You Feeling?" "There must be a moose somewhere in the yard. And a harpoon and a pint of oil," it continues. Undogmatic, the poems in Gray Matter still press upon us the precariousness with which selves and communities are constituted, and how errant, in the end, any notion of control may be in their construction. Wry, profound, these poems move like quicksilver.
This is a stunning, important collection of poetry: a book with a strong through-line that doesn't come close to feeling programmatic; nuanced and deftly balanced in its figures and forms, without ever calling attention to its intelligent use of each; steely and economical in its syntax, as we expect great poetry to be; and, in the end, multivalent and porous, giving the reader plenty of entrances and the room to arrive at varied readings each time through.
That these poems also plumb what is most fundamentally altered in our new world is pure boon.