The voice of Eleni Sikelianos’ Make Yourself Happy (Coffee House Press, 2017) rings with an infectious energy which is only enlivened by the emergency of which it warns — the critical condition to which our species has brought our planet, and the other species who once shared it with us. Sikelianos’ unique poetics distills this disarming yet hard-hitting journey into an artistic entity as refined as it is relaxed, as profound as it is unpretentious. These poems have the depth and resonance of folk wisdom — in a tradition as capable of honoring Stein, Guest, and Waldman as Sappho, Dickinson, and Whitman.
How does Sikelianos square the abuse we have inflicted on our only home with the injunction to make ourselves happy? By no more nor less than a radical re-comprehension of happiness itself, and its relationship to responsibility. The poems in the first section, “Make Yourself Happy,” unpack that titular exhortation, while those in the second, “How to Assemble the Animal Globe,” elegize a sampling of the species we have eradicated. A long poem, “Oracle or, Utopia” rounds out the endeavor, which is closed by an Epode and a Rider.
Sikelianos sets the stage in this opening poem:
THROUGH THE LOWER window I see
a man pass his bald
head is ecstatic in that way
it can be smashed
in a second shining bound
with drunk flowers & hot
to sing himself human O
human head stuffed
with ideas and
noises good and
not good which I say
(good) which I say
(not good) the syntactical violence inside a head
Beast head Get on a donkey
and learn some grammar Get on a donkey
and ride
If, as Delmore Schwartz observed, in dreams begin responsibilities, happiness might be the most essential, and potentially lethal, dream of our beautiful, dangerous species — and our weightiest responsibility. Illuminating the wreckage we have made of our planet by focusing on the species we have eradicated, this book begins by regarding the prototypically human. Why? Because, Sikelianos reminds us, we are the problem, and hence the best, and only, solution. To the extent that we (spoiled) have despoiled our home in pursuit of our pleasure, it is not abstinence, austerity, nor lament we must adopt, but responsibility. That is, it’s up to us to ‘make yourself happy.’
Consider the bald head seen passing “through the lower window,” in which the narrator discerns the vulnerable menace of our species. The hairlessness of the “shining” scalp makes it especially “human O / human.” That culpable head, “stuffed / with ideas and / noises good and / not good” embodies the crux of the crisis in which we have stranded ourselves. It is the disease as well as the cure. Notably, its pleasure is its vulnerability: “his bald / head is ecstatic in that way / it can be smashed / in a second.” (Emphasis mine). Note Sikelianos’ mastery of enjambment, here and throughout the book, enacting a conceptual, graphic, and sonic erosion of the boundaries between one part of speech and the next; one line and the next; one protagonist and the next — even, perhaps, one species and the next.
At the same time, the poem points out, mankind, with his “beast head,” is an animal: a brother to the creatures with whom he shares, or fails to share, his home. Which is not to excuse us from responsibility for that which is distinctively human: our power to combine “ideas” and language with action, creating the option to destroy, as well as cooperate, and thus progress: “the syntactical violence inside a head” which the poet exhorts to “learn some grammar Get on a donkey / and ride.”
This poem introduces a number of the book’s strategies and arguments. Distillation, a hallmark of these poems, is enhanced by enjambment, which lends many phrases a kind of “two-for” utility. Repetition, with its heightening effect, also serves compression. Consider, for example, “noises good and / not good which I say / (good) which I say / (not good).” For distillation of an idea inside an image inside an idea, consider the verbal equation: “the syntactical violence inside a head / Beast head.” The ordinary diction of this poem also sets the stage for the high-impact punch of informal language to come, such as “barfing” (p. 83) and “bust your ass” (p. 18). Like the book as a whole, this poem is about humanness as similar to, as well as distinctive from, the bestial. And it uses the language of pleasure alongside that of horror to be cheerful and yet blunt: an “ecstatic” head “shining bound / with drunk flowers & hot / to sing himself” (c.f. Whitman) “can be smashed.” Pleasure and horror, this book argues, are sometimes inextricable.
What if inclusion itself is the key to making ourselves (and our non-human neighbors) happy? This is one implication of those poems which treat the poet/narrator’s personal experience, both pleasurable and regrettable. I’m thinking, in particular, of the unflinching self-examination of “Why was I smothering small raccoons” or the unvarnished eudemonia of “I bought something / It was a fancy thing.” Perhaps, as Sikelianos suggests, it is by interacting with, rather than acting upon, that we might manage to move forward, “learn some grammar Get on a donkey / and ride.” It’s certainly worth a try.
Make Yourself Happy
Eleni Sikelianos
Coffee House Press (2017)
ISBN: 978-1-56689-459-3
$18.00
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