DATABLEED READS Jennifer Soong’s ‘Requiem [I]’

Unlike an elegy – which is a poem memorializing the dead – a requiem is a dirge or solemn chant whose purpose is to call the souls of the dead to rest. Sleep, the term implies (from the Latin for ‘rest’). Your work is now done; it is time to be idle. In this sense, a requiem’s function – if we can say that such things have a function – is to break ties with the dead and with the past they inhabited.

Despite its title, nothing in Jennifer Soong’s poem, ‘Requiem [I]’, is at rest; rather, everything is in constant motion, or poised at a point of voluptuous, radiant, explosion. Nothing holds its shape firmly: shadows buckle and warp, darkness flocks, time drapes like fabric, oceans lose their form, chaotic hearts refuse to settle. The only hints at respite are chemical (‘klonopin’) or commodified (‘some commercial harbor’). The dead, in other words, are restless. As are the living. As is everything else in the cosmos.

While concerned with death, ‘Requiem [I]’ is also a love poem for our times: tumultuous, unapologetically theatrical, resplendent with regret and a melancholy felt within a necropolitical present that makes little or no space for life and the living of it. Putting to work a gothic materiality of devotional motifs, the poem explores celestial forces enacted upon a love that is both past and present, as time doubles and collapses in on itself. It is a romance (or perhaps that should be ‘Romance’) in which exaltation and reverence are signifiers of the selflessness of love; and the past – in which love exists as a constant – is a divine favour, a blessing.

Indeed, the poem makes of the past an object to be worshipped, particularly for the keepsakes it provides, out of which we fashion a kind of self. In its devotion to the past, and its gestures of reflection, the poem is constantly drifting backwards: there are flowings, foldings and flockings back, the past continually recurring, spilling into, slipping into, leaking into, intruding upon the present, even as the present passes on, becoming the past moment by moment. This outflowing and seepage of time speaks to a larger movement of leakage: the porosity of the world, and the species that populate it, and the capacity for a person to absorb. Just as nothing in the poem seems to hold its shape, similarly it is only life, bounded by death, that has any sense of impermeability.

But it is also a poem about how the self is made through love and language; how the fragile body is brought into being through acts of speaking and loving. The poem is full of selves: partial selves, surfeit selves, excessive selves, plural selves, collective selves, merged selves. And parts of these selves are frequently breaking off and floating away. Or, it is as if the self is fighting to be (or fighting against being) reborn. This sense of nascence is replicated in the poems recurring fluorescence, both in images of pyrotechnic light and of blossoms bursting open with dispersing seeds. These are eroticised images of light and flora – embers, cosmic darts, opening stars, dandelion pappus, mallow seedheads, iris spathes, spurting blossoms – each implying a faith in legacy, continuation, hope. Parts of the self might detach and drift away, but they will find new life elsewhere in the porous earth. An ‘infected life’ - an incandescent and gloriously contaminated existence - is wildly preferable to any attachment we might have to state or capital.

And yet, despite images celebrating life’s proliferation, the poem repeatedly resists its own rebirth, perhaps because refusal – as the poem suggests – is holy. ‘Why ask me to be new?’ the poem queries. Rather, that which might give birth to the self is ‘hunt[ed]’ and exchanged in favour of the past. This interaction – or perhaps transaction – with the past is more complex than mere nostalgic attachment or a simple rejection of the present and its horrors. There is something timely about its devotional mode and the theatre of divinity it draws upon: the solace of ceremony in profane times, perhaps; devout love as an alternative to despair; or a repurposing of something ancient and sacred for contemporary usage. ‘Requiem [I]’ is a poem of continuous transmutation that resists the idea of change; a poem in which the past is forever leaking into the present; a poem about death which is overflowing with life; and a mass for the dead who stubbornly refuse to rest.