Clangings by Steven Cramer

by Steven Cramer

Schizophrenia may be characterized by a surfeit of language, a refurbishment of our used up words with musical connections every day speech and sense cannot provide. These riffs are “clangings,” and Cramer imagines them into a poetic narrative that exults in both aural richness and words’ power to evoke an interior landscape whose strangeness is intimate, unsteady, and stirring.I hear the dinner plates gossipMom collected to a hundred.My friends say get on board,but I'm not bored. Dad's a nap lying by the fire. That's whywhen radios broadcast news,news broadcast from radiosgives air to my kinship, Dickey, who says he'd go dead if everI discovered him to them.I took care, then, the last timebedrooms banged, to tape over the outlets, swipe the printsoff DVDs, weep up the teastains where once was coffee.Not one seep from him since.

Genres: Poetry

Mass Market Paperback

First published November 13, 2012

Reviews

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I was reading the blurbs on the back of Steven Cramer's "Clangings: Poems" I should have been warned off by this one:

From Booklist--

Poet Cramer addressed loss in Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), polyvocal sensuality in Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997), elegiac nostalgia in The World Book (1992), and internal contradictions in The Eye That Desires to Look Upward (1987). In his fifth collection, he considers the cognitive disorder called “clanging” via a narrator who associates words through rhyme and wordplay rather than meaningful content. This attempt to represent lyrically a serious psychiatric condition presents peculiar challenges, especially since poets, by their very vocation, use wordplay and rhyme as artistic tools. Cramer complicates his project in a positive way through strict adherence to formal conventions: each page contains five quatrains of multivalent verse. This produces moments of odd disembodiment and strange dislocation, such as when the speaker’s body weeps through his shirt or when he recalls a time the “sky cried into seawater.” In the same vein, Cramer’s artistic liberties allow concrete images to emerge from the potential cacophony: “A blue forehead vine earmarks those people / to other people whose skin is made of marble.” --Diego Báez

I should've known that this book would try my patience.

Within three pages I was very sick of Cramer's experiment, and groaning at how many more pages I had to read before I'd be finished. The book kept me on the edge of a headache the entire time I was reading it. The experience was like swallowing down bitter medicine that served no healthful purpose.

I could definitely see the influence of Joyce in Cramer's punning, and indeed, the poems all had a lilting Irish musicality that kept me from being completely bored out of my mind, even if most of the content came across as borderline nonsense. Cramer would have been better off limiting his experiment to maybe five connected poems; forty-nine of them is really asking too much from the reader.

[Kim Triedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clangings (Streven Cramer, Sarabande Books) is one of the oddest poetry books I have ever read. Referring to a form of communication sometimes seen in schizophrenia and mania, “clanging” refer to a type of speech in which the sound of a word, rather than its meaning, gives the direction to subsequent associations. The speech of a patient manifesting “clang associations” would therefore be based more on interplays of sound (rhymes, puns, neologisms, etc) than on the substance of the connections.
Cramer’s new collection (which actually feels more like a book-length poem) is written in the voice of such an individual. It is at once both overwhelmingly chaotic and oddly controlled. What control Cramer does achieve he achieves primarily through form (the whole book is written in rhyming quatrains), and that structure is a lifejacket to the reader; it allows him a kind of safety net amidst the tumult. That said, I’m not sure it is enough. Although there’s so much to admire in this collection, I often felt flattened by the sheer weight of the disjointed language. Although Cramer offers a dazzling display of verbal acrobatics, and it’s clear that this work is meticulously intelligent, it’s just plain hard to read (there is really nothing here that would draw even a highly intelligent non-poet to continue reading). I stayed with it, but it was an effort, because in a sense there’s no relief. The clangings never stop clanging, and the brain never stops trying to make sense of them when sense is somehow beside the point. It’s just plain exhausting to sustain that level of effort for that long.
I will conclude by saying that I believe this book is probably brilliant, but I am not brilliant enough to take it on. To the highly sophisticated reader of contemporary poetry, it clearly offers a lot but requires a lot in return.

[Jason Rosenstock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful word play, puns and neologisms make this a challenging read but very rewarding. Funny, troubling, confusing. Read this several times and got more out of it each time.

[hh · Rating 5 out of 5]

daring as hell