Oracle Smoke Machine
By Christianne Goodwin and Stephen Proski
Staircase Books,
2024, 34 pp.
$28.00
It is rare for poetry to smack of truth. After all, the imagination guides the art, not fact. Even the Confessional poets added and subtracted from experience so artistically as to justify the claim.
Imagination is the key.
So why, then, do the poems of Oracle Smoke Machine seem to be not poems but events? They don’t seem to have been written but to have occurred. Their sphere of interest reaches no farther than the everyday: train rides, highway commutes, second-language instruction. Even when an extraordinary character—the devil, for instance—enters the stage of this chapbook, it does so with the leisurely meander of someone at home. Perhaps this is a sign of Christianne Goodwin’s adept poesy; so much feels at home here.
Stephen Proski, the artist, matches the tone of the poems to the tone of their paintings. Or vice versa. It’s unclear who did what first, but does it matter? The combination of image and text creates a hybrid work with a soft but indelible touch. The poems move at the pace of time. The artwork reserves space for the viewer’s own imagination, permits them to digress from minimalist representations to, naturally, a poem. The hermeneutic spiral of this chapbook ensures an easy passage between the mind and the senses for the first reading, as well as for every reading subsequent.
Taken separately, the poems seem to come from a variety of collections, not one unified whole. Their respective terrains seem so inimical to each other: glee and heartache, loss and accruement, relief and stress. It surprises ever the more that such vast ground is often covered within a single poem. “The Underpass” personifies the I-90 highway in Massachusetts as a roller-skating queen flipping over bridges, a lunatic image but a funny one. “The Queen of I-90 whips by us,” the poem begins, “with semi-trucks for roller skates.” Astonishingly, the poem ends on an unutterably somber note when the rolling queen contemplates all the lives lost spinning over her highway’s side. The contrast feels not forced but inevitable. And still, throughout Oracle Smoke Machine, Goodwin manages to surprise.
Few of the poems span more than a page, so the artwork and poems are almost literally in conversation. They are like reflections of each other, and it is impossible to tell which is the reflection and which is the originator itself. The obvious question becomes which was made first, just how one asks whether the chicken or the egg came first. The fact, of course, is life. This is a living text. In the expanse of the artwork, one can almost hear—feel?—the poems breathe. This is despite the collection tackling age-old images, scenarios, and themes. The poem “Sunrise” is self-explanatory. One almost need not read the poem but write their own. The poetic imaginary around dawn is so detailed, the tradition so chock-full, that it would seem there’s nothing new or interesting to say about it. To this, Goodwin says no. What she manages to say may not be new, but interesting is an understatement. The speaker describes the day’s sublime start saying, “I stepped out this morning, / left you asleep with dawn / slanting across your face.” What we find is a shared moment of affection between partners as old as time but new in the diction of Goodwin. This contradictory accomplishment may be the most impressive part of this chapbook.
The choir that is these poems sings. Or rather, they are dancers. In the final poem, “The Techno Poem,” Goodwin and Proski fittingly decide to end with a party. The ensuing romp makes one want to read more, yet one also appreciates that this poem contains the others, just as the others contain this poem. Its “horizon / of green laser light” substitutes the finitude of the natural horizon for one of the poet’s and painter’s wellspring of creativity. The result is a small chapbook that packs a punch.
Only thirty-four pages in length, Oracle Smoke Machine nevertheless suggests the depth of a full-length collection. The ease of these poems, the marvelous relaxation and push, recall the common wisdom that easy reading is strenuous writing. If this is true, then Goodwin and Proski must have labored immensely to achieve a work so concise, casual, and profound. Nothing else could explain this phenomenal debut.
Michael McCarthy’s prose has appeared in Barzakh Magazine, Beyond Queer Words, and Prairie Schooner, among others. His debut poetry chapbook Steve: An Unexpected Gift is forthcoming from the Moonstone Arts Center this year. Originally from Massachusetts, he is currently an undergraduate student at University of Carlos III in Madrid, Spain.
