Reading Denise Newman's The New Make Believe

Reading Denise Newman, this is my first time reading Denise Newman, her magical book of poetry, The New Make Believe through and by which she shares or opens up, uncovers fragments of experience, being Denise Newman at very precise moments of a day, days, a week, lives.

The vocabulary of speaking, the meeting and ringing of syllables, the poignant intersection of what is near joined in memory, sense, feel, emotion, projection and dream – the very richness of her “poverty lake” – that there is so much water, and “see” and accident, brokenness, open – the fine surface of syntax, the logic of our usual language which protects us – allows reason, a reason, a face of reason, a whole continuous logic of reason for our life is broken open and we are left with the beauty of a persistent speaking, a continuous rill, brook and stream moving, that is carving our lives : the sound of syllables, vowels, and consonants being sounding, speaking to and with one another; music.

Left in fragments of experience, real, dreamed, imagined her voice shakes us open to world.   Each of us holds a sac of seeds or is a bed of earth already planted.  Our once newborn child, now running across a street toward us stick in hand – the sheer joy of this moment.

I am left asking what is it.  But really: what is it! And we know don’t we?

Who then is this we marry?  And what is it we then think or allow that we then say “I do” or “I do and I don’t”.

I hold you pulsing in my hand or more likely by the tip of my digits, each or all aching for what we imagine is called sex and act out as what is called thus.  But who is this that commits?  And where is this four year old girl, once newly born, in our meeting, now a woman?

And what about that person in the Bronco who drives behind us seemingly so insistently? What is it that drives this person, that for these moments I know the insistence and this insistence is neither separate from me or me but it is that drive that we share – and these words, these sounds at once small, short, cropped, incomplete are huge, enormous even – these sounds, the motion of water running to the lake, the ocean, the dewdrop: they rill and brook and tumble and gambol across mind evoking this life, living.

Dearly beloved we are gathered here, for there are four memorial poems setting off sections of this engaging poem, and we are saying goodbye, letting go of some fixed reality laid in concrete or methodology determining power relations and likely outcomes, an architecture of answer, correct answer, completeness, rightness, order and entering a present of being whatever is may be. 

Soren Kierkegaard stakes his life every time.  Heidegger speaks about this gamble of language, entering deeply the gamble of this life.  Uncertainty, death always near at hand, there is only everything to lose and thus must we whether we I do or I don’t.

Denise Newman shares with us a wonder full and beautiful life opened, unresolved, steaming, finding the reality of our longing in just this, what we take to be our longing.  Knowing that rift will never be joined, that Denise may never be completed or you or me, except that we are already and no action we take be it management, control, complete and well wrought sentences and paragraphs will ever make it so and this is where life emerges, an unrequited yearning rising luminous and dancing with death, trees, lakes, rocks and other people who are in this world not too heavy to join in dance as Mr. Kierkegaard might not have imagined. This is where children come from, adults too.