Vibratory Milieu by Carrie Hunter

Front cover of Vibratory Milieu by Carrie Hunter, designed by Kit Schluter. The cover is powder blue, with the title and author’s name in black and white text respectively. Towards the bottom of the image is a grainy picture of a head with bobbed hair and shoulders with a collared shirt. The face is absent of any features.

Vibratory Milieu by Carrie Hunter

Nightboat Books, 2021.

The entrance to this book is through the featureless face on the cover. Looking at it, I’m reminded of the phenomenon of face pareidolia, in which we tend to see faces in objects. I think there is a kind of biographical pareidolia in criticism: both an autobiographical variety in which we perceive our life story as reflected by a text or the biographical variety, in which we reduce a text of any genre into a reflection of the life story of its author. I’m guilty of often doing both in my blog posts, this one included. Reading a text that is more resistant to pareidolic readings, like Vibratory Milieu, allows me to participate in Hunter’s reconfigurative imaginary.

Vibratory Milieu, like The Incompossible, is made up of five sections: Lusimeles, Carrie, Per Una Selva Oscura, Oppositions are Accomplices, and Vibratory Milieu. Does it help to know that the Greek word lusimeles is an epithet of Eros, and that it has been translated alternately as “he who tears apart” and “loosener of limbs” or to conjecture the section called Carrie as a textual analogue for HD’s absent face on the cover? It might help to know that oppositions have long been Hunter’s accomplices. Rifling through her previous book, The Incompossible, I find lines like, “A seeing that is not seeing,” and “We become what we could never be,” evidence of a dialectical process at work in Hunter’s poetics. Per Una Selva Oscura, the obscure nod to Hunter’s planned trilogy in response to the Divine Comedy, also gets me thinking about Vibratory Milieu’s sections as the postmodern residuum of Dantescan structure.

Vibratory Milieu—how opaque and richly suggestive this title is! Vibration encompasses ordinary oscillations, Lucretian swerves, Pythagorean tonalities of heavenly bodies, and it bears a whiff of Californian New Age spiritualism. Milieu is tony, Frenchy—a scene with some class or history to it (my partner, a therapist as well as a poet, alerted me to the existence of milieu therapy, adding another connotation). Given that, in her blog post on writing this text, Hunter acknowledges sound (that vibratory thing) as the beginning of poetry, it’s quite possible to read poetry itself as the titular vibratory milieu. However, I think the quality of vibration extends to condition of contemporary selfhood and sociality—the scenography of poetry.

Carrie Hunter is one of my favorite living poets. When I lived in the Bay Area, we used to cross paths at readings. I was more social then and a less disciplined reader, so I was more attuned to her poetry in performance, and her performance of sociality (dry, funny, observant—I got the sense that nothing was lost on her). As I’ve become more disciplined in my reading over the years since my move from the Bay to the Bay State, I’ve been reliving my time in SF and Oakland through reading, memory-work, and writing. And this engagement includes Carrie’s previous full-length collections, The Incompossible and Orphan Machines. 

After finishing Vibratory Milieu for the first time, I read my way through these two previous full-length collections from Black Radish Press. I think that Orphan Machines—published in 2015, and so the middle child between The Incompossible (2011) and Vibratory Milieu (2021)—is still my favorite. I love its formal range and its maximalist bells and whistles. The author’s note signals that Orphan Machines was written under the influence of reading Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. What Hunter makes of this encounter is not criticism but enactment, instantiation.

This literary enactment carries through to Vibratory Milieu, which makes use of a wide range of films and which, incidentally, Hunter also characterizes as “…a long project of maximalist fragmentation…” The list of films itself could be a poem. What to make of it? The student in me, who wants to fully apprentice herself to a text, wants to watch my way through them, but not only would this project be akin to cutting up a collage and attempting to restore the pieces to their original context, it would also neglect the other sources of language and thought which derive from:

…current events/news items, lines from my personal journal, from facebook/twitter quips, lines from films and my responses, poems written to music, poems sourced from dreams, writing poetry responding to friends’ poems, bits from the first section of a planned trilogy poem responding to the Divine Comedy, lines written after meditating, responses to poetry, spiritual texts, and theory in my feminist theory reading group.

As I read through Vibratory Milieu, and across Hunter’s oeuvre, the list of sources copied above corresponds to the thematic threads that start to emerge. These include reflections on dichotomy and dualism, mental states, affects, metacognitive reflections on mental states and affects, language games, dreams, spiritual practices (e.g. yoga), subcultural communicative modes. What does this look like in practice? Here’s a sample page from the section Oppositions are Accomplices:

Relegated to a life of horror.

“THE LESS WE SAY ABOUT IT THE BETTER.”

The darkness creates in me a panic, but I sort of like it.

There are dumpsters in this scene.

A memory leaking.

Notebooks are for spying.

“There are theories.”

                                                                                            God is not permission.

He is at the reading he can’t read at, at the time he is supposed to read,
and everybody is confused; Why is he here if he can’t read here?

A broken heart, but a broken heart that is a relief.

The Phallus, capitalized and abstracted.

“It was time to take a look at everything that I’d been taught to believe.”

I say I don’t need it, but he says here, take it.

Vibratory Milieu is the work of a very good noticer, with an ear for linguistic oddities that seem to go otherwise unremarked upon by others (why should calls ‘drop,’ anyway?). And deep listening “in today’s age of ‘continuous partial attention’” produces collage form almost as realism. I say this in full deference to Hunter’s anti-realist (or anti-traditionally realist) tendencies. That last sentence is a me putting a pin in something I want to know more about: what went down in fiction and its theorization in the 19th century, and how that might be brought to bear on some of contemporary poetry’s biographical and narrative fixations, and the assumption that the subconscious—drives patrolling its murky waters like living fossils, traumas reverberating erratically—is directly accessible. I love narrative, I do! I just also like poetry that challenges readers to without the traditional appurtenances of narrative.

As Hunter points out in her blog post on her writing methodology, her “contextless collage” derives, as you might expect, from “…cut-up traditions and Language poetry’s “the sentence,” but it also originates in having had to find a way to keep writing while working. She has taught English language learners for years, and there is something that feels vaguely traceable to language instruction in some of these sentences, something de-contextualized and exemplary. Hunter calls it “contextless collage,” but collage’s juxtapositions produce new contexts. Disjunctive phrases and sentences recontextualize units of language, imparting them with suggestive opacity. Arriving out of the context in which we typically meet them allows us to re-see their arbitrariness or to detect more easily the ways in which commodification deforms language.