The Port of Los Angeles by Jane Sprague

Abstract

165 BOOK NOTES The Port of Los Angeles, by Jane Sprague Chax Press, 2009 reviewed by Elizabeth Robinson The Port of Los Angeles, as its website informs us, is “the number one port by container volume and cargo value in the United States.” It is also a site of environmental, historical, and cultural significance, emptying into the second-most populous city in the United States. Not one to hesitate before challenge and complexity, in The Port of Los Angeles, Jane Sprague delivers a poetry that, much like Los Angeles itself, resists easy categorization , and richly rewards multiple readings. The Port of Los Angeles, like the best politically charged poetry, does not hammer its agenda home, but instead paces meditatively, sometimes even humorously, through its own dilemmas . Sprague has much to say about the state of the world she finds herself in, whether as cultural or natural environment. There’s an earnestness of attention in this book that presses gratifyingly against expectation and permits both poet and reader the freedom to encounter, and perhaps to self-indict, our bewildered complicity with a world beset by consumerism and perpetually tangled in the flux of the next arrival. The book begins with a portrayal of arrival (specifically but not exclusively in terms of the delivery of goods) and its eros— the intimacy of expectation—but comes around by the end of the second page to observe that “the goods” and their swift transport know the “same point of departure / as point of arrival .” Sprague further emphasizes the liminal nature of goods as she moves through a characteristic pattern of repetitions and variations to the conclusion of the third page, writing, “they waited // and waited // to arrive.” The endless circuit of consumption has been established. Sprague, a gifted craftsperson, modulates her verse to good effect: The aforementioned repetitions, for example, exercise an intriguing influence on the movement of the prosody. The many repetitions of “we [verb]” on pages 16 and 17 (e.g., “we arrive,” “we consider love and fucking,” “we pine,” “we follow,” “we colorado review 166 watch”) become incantatory. The “we”s morph into their own étude which Sprague then braids together with other significant words beginning with “w.” “Watch” is repeated four times. “Women” and “workers” appear and are presumably folded in as part of the antecedent “we” which further merges into a populace, striving for “ways of work // ways of sleep.” The recurrences create a sometimes soothing, sometimes enticing, and sometimes ominous suspension, for they seem static even as they move the poem forward via subtle changes. Thus at the end of page 17, “ways of work // ways of sleep” has lulled the reader into a sense of security disrupted by the page’s final startling word, “placeless.” The very concreteness of place and occupation slip abruptly away. Sprague is also expert at transposing repeated terms in ways that exploit the various meanings that freight the words. “Junk” is the cheap consumer detritus that clogs ports and bourgeois lives, and it is also heroin. In this conflation, Sprague circumvents cliché to demonstrate the ways that North Americans are addicted to their goods. The high of the narcotic is portrayed as erotic, and the poem moves on to depict a sexual encounter where “shared oily skin shared oily sheets” transposes in the next line to “shared lanes of oil lanes of derricks drilling unceasingly .” This swift, seamless prosody ensnares the reader in an inescapable cycle of commercialism resulting in the personal and natural erosion of our “extreme global village.” Approximately halfway through the book, Sprague shifts her attention from the human shape of the terrain to its marine life. “Aquarium of the Pacific,” which plays on the presence of an actual aquarium in Long Beach, is a poem of lyric witness. It begins with a register of dead creatures strewn about byways (Pacific Coast Highway, Alamitos Bay) and shows throughout the intricacies of urban life in conjunction with marine life: “fresh float canal side between two vertical rifts concrete rebar .” Sprague’s humorous irony is ever present in this poetry, but in this poem she also lets in a sense of wonder, chanting the names of species, absorbing the vividness of...