Thus, when I read His piercing pince-nez, all kinds of trippy things happen to my head. First, I wonder who Berrigan is talking about with the adjective his which has no subject. As the New Oxford American Dictionary tells us, the definition of his is: "belonging to or associated with a male person or animal previously mentioned or easily identified." Right off the bat I'm faced with an impeh-impeh-impediment to understanding the true-mindedness of this line fragment. Next I'm struck with pince-nez, which, of course, I know is French for "pinched nose" and refers to those old early 20th century spectacles made famous by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt. Then I'm thinking that maybe Berrigan is actually referring to Teddy, because in many published photos of the president he has a kind of squinting look that you could describe as piercing, which fits in with his reputation as early American imperialist warrior on horseback kicking Puerto Rican hindquarters. And FDR also wore pince-nez glasses. And here a personal association kicks in (consider it an ad): Both Teddy and FDR, distantly related, attended Groton, an elite New England boarding school, and I attended Groton (well, for a while) and saw their pince-nezzed faces everyday on the walls of the schoolhouse upon which portraits of all the presidents were hung. Or maybe the pince-nez actually pierced and hurt the schnozzle of some poor un-named his. So by now I'm thinking: There won't be any waltzing through thith thonnet, mithter. But being an occasionally intrepid fellow, | gather the fractals of my male gaze and set them (it, really, when you think about it) to work hounddogging and flushing out from the metaphorical (and I'm beginning to suspect metaphysical) bush the meaning of the orphaned adjective, his. So I snark hunt the rest of the 'sonnet', looking for elusive clues, and am, presented not with a subject or owner of the adjective, but with more of the same: his music, his tomb, his sky. I've reached the end of the oeuvre and still the fugitive adjective might as well refer to Godot. Still, pince-nez, music, tomb, sky, connected by this adjective, together have a strange evocative power, and suddenly I'm channeling a Bach cantata-Jesu, Joy of Man's Desire (which I first heard as a pop song back in 1972, and brings back its own memories}-so, the music and Jesus decamping from the tomb and climbing the sky, all watched over by Pince-Nez of Loving Grace. Hey, I'm not looking for trouble, but that's exactly what happens as I start to read the very first line of the very first collage sonnet in this sequence.
Then, in the same first sonnet, having had a glass of Chablis and recovered my senses some, Berrigan starts in with the repetitions-dim frieze, dim frieze [which sounds dark and cold], sleeping hands, hands which play, for hands; For fire for warmth for hands for growth; room in the room that you room, [coupled, in the next line, with sonnet's one rhyme: tomb]; fragments. And then there's the other little tricky tricks that he tricks with-the sonnet's one posed question: Is there room in the room that you room in? which offers up three meaning-facets of the word room, and which, since Berrigan has paired it with tomb, has not only lexical implications but metaphysical as well. There's the introduction, in the next to last line, of a subject, We, that is every bit as mysterious as escaped adjective his-a subject sound-paired in the next line with Wind. And there's the interesting prepositional phrase, Upon his structured tomb, which suggests, to me, the sonnet form itself, while also having the personal association of the time I took my family to St. Mary's church, where the Bard is buried, and meditated upon his tomb until interrupted by an incident that is the subject of my own first collage sonnet, And, of course, there's much more here, so that by the time I have reached the end of this one sonnet I...
And then Berrigan carries over some of these metaphors, subjectless adjectives, sounds and furies, repetitions in his game of simultaneity, discarding BeginningMiddleNd for a BeHereBeNow that reduces one to a lip-doodling frenzy well into one's second glass of burgundy ("we" finished the Chablis many sentences ago).
F*ck it: Drink up: hold a collage party and pretend it's Tupperware; bring your decollage collection.. Also, BYO.
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