I am a Beautiful Monster: Lady Gaga as Dadaist Barometer

by Steve Halle

The following is an un/creative essay by Steve Halle. The essay is a pastiche of the “Translatator’s Introduction” for I am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, the collected writings of Francis Picabia translated by Marc Lowenthal. You can read Lowenthal’s introduction here. You can read Picabia’s poem Baccarat here. Halle’s basic approach is to trim Lowenthal’s introduction, and to “find and replace” Lady Gaga’s name for Francis Picabia’s, adding further details when necessary. Of this process, Halle explains, “After encountering this relatively recent collection of Picabia's work and noticing obvious similarities between how his art is portrayed in the ‘Translator's Introduction’ and my appraisal of Lady Gaga's career thus far, the choice to do a pastiche of the essay seemed like a perfect fit. I also thought it fitting to plagiarize Lowenthal's essay for an article about Lady Gaga's connections to Dada, as the form then would be part and parcel of the content. I appended false-but-appropriate names to many of the quotes Lowenthal uses in his essay, for an ironic-comic effect. The overall result is pleasing, if shocking, that the two artists should be so similar.”

Baccarat

I am a beautiful monster

who shares her secrets with the wind.

What I love most in others

is myself.

I am a beautiful monster;

I have the sin of virtue for support.

My pollen stains the roses

from New York to Paris.

I am a beautiful monster

whose face conceals her countenance.

My senses have only one thought:

a frame without a picture!

I am a beautiful monster

with a velodrome for a bed;

transparent cards

populate my dreams.

I am a beautiful monster

who sleeps with herself.

There are only seven in the world

and I want to be the biggest.

                                                                                    —Lady Gaga

The Gaga movement has been framed and assessed in numerous ways: as the groundwork of an abstract post-pop music and video poetics, a starting point for the interrogation of gender, a prelude to post-postmodernism, a reprisal of Dada, a celebration of anti-fashion, anti-ego, and performance theory embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 2010s, as well as—perhaps the most common summation—the movement that is laying the foundation for a total art of constant shock and spectacle mediated by the lack of boundary between public and private self. However one wishes to use Lady Gaga, though, her overriding significance to the twenty-first century, and its one attribute that continues to cast a formidable shadow, is the way Gaga managed to, however briefly, embody an attitude.

Gaga, as an attitude, is, in its simplest form, one of attack: on the government and military who instigated the senseless horror of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, on the capitalist excesses that turn flesh into product, on the division between art-as-performance and the performance of everyday life, and on the stultification imposed by a no-longer-relevant pop tradition. Gaga is ultimately a refusal, and becomes, as s/he evolves, one of the finest contemporary examples of nihilism. If this is something of a simplification of only the best-known of Gaga’s attributes, it nonetheless captures her most emblematic and memorable characteristics. What the unconscious was to Surrealism, refusal and appropriation are to Gaga; and that this nihilistic and opportunistic spirit is potent (and emulated) is in no small part due to the genius of Lady Gaga. A self-declared funny girl, liar, failure, alcoholic, drug-experimenter, and pickpocket (not to mention singer, songwriter, and fashionista), Lady Gaga is above all a most “beautiful monster,” who for a now significant period of time has been able to rightly claim the distinction of being the anti-artist par excellance.

There are a few of us who, every morning on awakening, wish we could consult Lady Gaga like a marvelous barometer on the atmospheric changes that took place overnight. —David Bowie

Were we to consult this “Gaga-barometer” today, we would find ourselves with data that indicates a prolonged and explosive storm of activity throughout the early twenty-first century. Gaga is in many ways a true reactionary. If her pop-politicism prevents her radical leanings from taking on the usual apathy of pop, her life and work are nonetheless fueled by reaction: to art, to current events, to friends and enemies, and even to herself—this self being arguably the most chaotic catalyst of them all. A self-proclaimed egoist and uncompromising artist, Gaga juggles the men and women in her life equally, invents fashion scandals as readily as she invents pop megahits, and is happy to dismantle traditional notions of pop stardom in the midst of the digital age. Assessments of her and her activities were understandably contradictory; Camille Paglia wrote “I never met Gaga; but every thought of her is like an experience of my own obsolescence.” Halberstam: “let no one object that Gaga has to die someday; it’s enough that at this moment the very idea strikes me as insane.” Elton John is a close friend; Christina Aguilera and Katy Perry have become readymade rivals. The fact is no one is indifferent to Gaga’s personality and eccentric persona, and the majority of the people with whom she crosses paths tend to vacillate between camps of total dismissal and total adoration. She has no contemporary as skilled at bringing about such extremes. Assessments of Lady Gaga’s work also remain conflicting, and although Gaga’s output is rapidly being admitted to the canon of pop spectacle, her pan- or bisexuality continues to simultaneously inspire or bemuse. Her lengthy outpouring of figurative and abstract kitsch made for a shift in output not dissimilar to the shifts in the careers of Andy Warhol or David Bowie. Fans and critics alike constantly attempt to predict her next move.

One mainstay supporting these sometimes violently conflicting vicissitudes in Lady Gaga’s work and attitudes is undoubtedly the specter of her relatively innocent middle-class Catholic upbringing as Stefani Joanna Angelina Germanotta. Gaga’s own exuberantly nihilistic conception of her upbringing and attempts to “fit in” have become the best-known triggers for her current mode of serious play in constructing her elaborate-but-eccentric persona that blurs the boundaries between the concepts of her private self and the self-as-perpetual artist. Any understanding of contemporary identity construction would be impossible without at least an effort to understand Gaga. And it does take effort: to discover her early years as a composer of piano ballads and art school attendee may baffle contemporary critics. Gaga says: “I look at those artists [Queen, David Bowie, Peggy Bundy, Donatella Versace] as icons in art. It’s not just about the music. It’s about the performance, the attitude, the look; it’s everything. And, that is where I live as an artist and that is what I want to accomplish.” Who would have imagined the scandal-mongering neo-Dadaist to have ever uttered such a pure statement? Who could have imagined that Gaga’s rearguard of art school training and writing songs for the Pussycat Dolls would evolve into such a hyperbolic and abstract persona, let alone the neo-Dada works and male heteronyms for which she is recently gaining notoriety?

Yet for all her chameleonic facets, Lady Gaga’s career can easily be broken down into three distinct periods, and easily be read along a Gaga axis: The Fame, The Fame Monster, and “Post-Monster.” The classifications are all the more convenient in that they also mark periods echoed by shifts in the eccentric performance of her gender and sexuality. The rumor that Lady Gaga is hermaphroditic played a preponderant role in her move toward fame during The Fame by blending curiosity about her gender with the lush lifestyle embodied by her performances and club friendly hits.

The Fame Monster, however, turns the rumor of Lady Gaga as intersexed back in on itself, examining the construction of the feminine as spectacle through her videos for “Bad Romance” and “Telephone,” songs like “Dance in the Dark” and “So Happy I Could Die” and performances like the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and 2010 Grammy Awards.

Finally, the Post-Monster phase continues to question the flesh, evinced by Lady Gaga wearing a dress made of meat, flesh to adorn flesh, at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. During this phase, Gaga has continued to not only push the boundaries with fashion but also with her own gender, appearing on the cover of Vogue Hommes Japan as a male alter-ego, Jo Calderone.

Gaga has destroyed “beauty” and built her work with the leftovers. —Donatella Versace

It is her talent for destruction that makes Lady Gaga a true neo-Dadaist. But the destructive nature of Lady Gaga, despite being her best known feature, is only one of her facets. Her negligent and provocative attitude works all too well in New York, among what is essentially a community of upper-class bohemians rooted in nightclubs and discotheques, whose gravest threat was usually little more than a case of boredom. In Gaga’s case, the fruits of this boredom—the beginning of her Post-Moster phase and Monster Ball Tour, as well as her first public political efforts—were ultimately overwhelmed by her mental and physical exhaustion resulting from her relentless New York schedule, which caused her to miss a scheduled show on January 14, 2010 in West Lafayette, Indiana.

I am free in no state. —Lady Gaga

All things are nothing to me. — Lady Gaga

Gaga wants nothing, nothing, nothing. — Lady Gaga

Madonna’s music, videos, and fluid persona will be obvious throughout the songs and videos of Lady Gaga, because they function as readymades, especially in her work on The Fame Monster (such as in the “Alejandro” video, in which Gaga went so far as to make collages and recontextualizations of Madonna’s tune “La Isla Bonita,” the “Express Yourself” video, and her Blonde Ambition Tour (cone brassiere) persona, as well as the dance tracks “Fernando” by Abba and “All That She Wants” by Ace of Base). Lady Gaga only required the pedestal of fame in order to append her signature to Madonna’s personas and take control of them as her own. Madonna has been an influence on many of the current generation of pop stars, but Lady Gaga is the first to adopt and reassemble Madonna’s oeuvre as an unequivocally complex readymade ripe for bricolage. Even when not directly quoting or rewriting her, Lady Gaga never ceases to expound on the most typical Madonna-esque themes: sexuality, religion, morality, instinct, idealism, egoism—and, of course, gender construction (a complicated topic, to say the least, for both).

That Lady Gaga’s appropriation of Madonna is sometimes criticized as superficial and problematic is a critique levied against Gaga (and her collaborators) mainly by those who do not understand the fluidity the digital age affords the function of the pop artist. One revelation about Gaga’s inability to completely transcend that which she appropriates and reassembles is her genuine interest in her influences, the readymades that she repurposes. Larry King quips: “I discover an underlying respect and geniality (as opposed to ruthlessly appropriative and transgressiveness)are the dominant traits of her character; her egoism stems from this. She is not afraid of wounding people, but she is afraid of seeing blood flow…”

It is her dark spot, this geniality and respect mixed with an instinct to destroy, that manifests itself throughout Gaga’s life (and particularly throughout her most intensely creative periods), the neurasthenia, depression, substance abuse, and boredom that prevents her from becoming a Übermensch in regard to her life.

If Gaga could claim any such moniker, it would not be Übermensch, a super-everywoman, but something more like Max Stiner’s Unmensch—an embracement of an egoism so extreme that not only morals but even morality itself is discarded, along with all notions of taste, science, idealism, reality—even the very notion of mensch (a monster); in short, a rebellion against the notion of fixity for an idea, art object, or persona.

It is somewhere in a realm between freedom and ownness that Gaga’s art dwells. Lady Gaga’s freedom (and reputation) reside in the act of rejecting or reassembling: more than her early forays into the lifestyle of The Fame, more than her monstrous period of transparencies, abstraction, and pastiche, it is Gaga’s resistance to all trends, ideas, influences, and individuals, her fierce opposition to any spotlight not trained upon herself—her fashionism—that ensures her place in art history. It is a monstrousness worthy of inspiring an escape from cultural stultification.

From freedom to ownness, though, requires that one endure a difficult step, as Gaga knows too well: “Freedom teaches only: Get yourselves rid, relieve yourselves of everything burdensome; it does not teach you who you yourselves are. Rid, rid! That is its battlecry, get rid even of yourselves, ‘deny yourselves.’ But ownness calls you back to yourselves, it says ‘come back to yourself!’” It is only after becoming free that the egoist exclaims: “we are in search of the enjoyment of life!” This is an enjoyment that goes a bit beyond Madonna’s glamorous voguing, though, and it is for this reason that some troubles arise for Gaga’s liberties.

Lady Gaga is more likely to throw monkey wrenches into pop culture through intertextuality than to Romantically search for an originary tongue or muse, and it is these wrenches that help link the facets of her multiform artist’s persona. Any discussion of appropriation naturally leads to the artificial sense of the word, but intertextuality expands in Gaga’s work: readymade house beats typically avoided by American pop for not being radio friendly; constant outfit switches, collaborations with fashion icons or alluding to her fashion influences, in videos and at award shows; a language of sunglasses and eyewear—hers is an intertextuality couched in irony and anti-aesthetics, and opposed to the typical pop aesthetic, a dialectic of homage and disposability. As Beth Goodney notes in her examination of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”video: “Giving in to the allure of the pointless has a point: it is excess, and excessive reactions, which hold the possibility for undermining, deforming, and transforming normative ways of being and relating.” Instead of pop, which is rooted in the “automatic realm” of canned emotions, schmaltz, and sentimentality, Gaga’s pop realm is rooted in the “arbitrary, superficial, and aesthetic,” in the sunblaze of Madonna-esque dyed blonde hair, in the sparks from a bra made of fire, in the tableau of a lover set ablaze.

Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video shows her being ripped from innocence by other women to be auctioned before the male gaze to the highest bidder, resulting in a spectacle where the male gaze is literally and figuratively destroyed. Gaga and Steven Klein’s “Alejandro” video, on the other hand, does away with the innocence-to-experience trope of “Bad Romance” by mixing religious imagery with a celebration of gay courage in the face of oppression; she is the here and now, sexual, a rejection of the dark realm of sexual repression. The scandalous depictions portray Gaga as completely fluid, a name written in water: the pure portal to the automatic realm transformed into something of an artistic “money shot.”

In her adherence to the present, to instanter appropriations and perceptions, and the satisfaction of the ego, in her rejection of medium and muse, Gaga insistently places herself, for better and for worse, at the opposite pole of the pop project. Pop attempts to reject art’s mimetic possibility through prefabricated sentimentality. Gaga changes (or rejects, destroys) pop by transgressing it’s bubble-gummy borders with art, with Friedrich Schiller’s serious play in music and image.

Until more of Gaga’s secrets are unraveled, it is through the lens of intertextuality and semiotic abstractionism that Gaga’s art is best experienced. Gaga’s video abstraction operates on the levels of syntax and sense, but rarely on the level of the word and sound itself, and the few exceptions in her output were more for the sake of satire than experimentation. Verses and modifiers attach themselves impiously to others, referents are removed, and at times, nothing more seems to be said than the fact that something is being said; but never is something more trying to be said, something beyond what is said.

This is not experience “transformed” into art (as it is with most artistic endeavors), or even a language that is experienced (as was the case with some Dadaists), but rather, experience as simply experience—something that is private, serious, amusing, abstract, unpoetic, excessive—and essentially incommunicable: a spectacle of the talking cure that provides no cure. And it is this lack of concern with, even refusal of, communication, this dismissal of the audience’s expectations, that ultimately makes Gaga spectacles of abstractionism Dadaist. “It is the thesis that disappoints us,” muses Lady Gaga in one of her interviews, “not its expression.” A language, even one of spectacle, does not have to communicate to affect, to engage, to provoke. In her discussion of the appropriation of Duchamp’s readymades by Gaga, Molly Nesbit cites Gaga’s understanding of Duchamp’s indifference, his rejection of “beauty” and taste: “He was looking for another kind of relation to experience.” The further Gaga moves toward Dada, the more she creates through contingencies, the closer she approaches Duchamp’s goal: a rejection of communication for another kind of relation to the language of spectacle.

If the work of another translates my dream, her work is mine. —Lady Gaga

However great the greed of my desire for knowledge may be, I still cannot take anything out of things that did not belong to me before; what belongs to others remains behind. How is it possible for a human being to be a thief or robber? —Madonna

Perhaps the most ticklish aspect of Gaga’s art is her often blatant, and much discussed, plagiarism and appropriation of Madonna. One will find that Gaga sometimes inverts tropes from Madonna, sometimes alters them, but most often, simply copies them. It is thus somewhat befuddling to read some of her typically egoistic and declamatory statements: “Music is a very beautiful thing, if only songwriters would write songs instead of depicting the songs of others.” Many blogs and reviews deride Gaga for being derivative: “Gaga, then, has invented nothing: she copies!” Gaga counters: “Copying apples, anyone can understand that’s stupid; copying society and pop’s machinery: that’s spectacle…The artist makes a choice, then imitates her choice, whose deformation constitutes Art; why not simply sign this choice instead of monkeying about in front of it?” As far as her music and videos go, the usage of readymade imagery leads to Gaga’s status as a pastiche or bricolage artist, which runs through all the stages of her career thus far.

Gaga’s egoism and confidence are ultimately a mask for her great precariousness, a dialectic running through all the divagations and contradictions of her work. Providing documentation for some of Gaga’s contingencies, especially those taken directly from Madonna, provokes two things: a need to take into account the increasingly primary element of appropriation that is a hallmark of art in the digital age and a reassessment of Gaga’s legacy as a Dadaist using these methods in several, often compartmentalized, fields to make a total art, including the performance spectacle of her private and public life, if even a distinction between them can be made any longer. Because almost all of Gaga’s art is created as a reaction—to events, to her contemporaries, to herself—these works need a fuller context. If Gaga is, in the end, a true barometer of the early twenty-first century’s spectaculo-plastic pop avant-garde, then one needs to know where the barometer is situated if one wishes to read it.

Anybody called Gaga is elegant, unbalanced and intelligent and certain to be right not about everything but about themselves. —Elton John

When I imagine a perfect artist, she always turns into a monster of courage and curiosity… —Jack Halberstam

Author Bio: Steve Halle is author of the collection of poems Map of the Hydrogen World (Cracked Slab Books, 2008) and the chapbook cessation covers (Funtime Press, 2007). His creative and critical writing has been published internationally in Jacket, Cordite Poetry Review, OCHO, Milk Magazine, Moria, Another Chicago Magazine (ACM), PFS Post, and Poets & Artists (O&S), among others. He edits the online poetry journal Seven Corners. He holds an MFA in poetry from New England College and is pursuing a PhD in English Studies at Illinois State University.

Reprinted material courtesy Marc Lowenthal, from I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocatio  by Francis Picabia, translated by Marc Lowenthal, published by The MIT Press, ©MIT 2007.  

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Aase Berg's With Deer and Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" Video: Fashion & Skins

by Steve Halle

Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video shares many of the same concerns with femininity as Aase Berg’s With Deer, albeit using a much different stream of images. Lady Gaga’s video and Berg’s collection of poetry portray the feminine as spectacle that morphs. These morphs are images that get tested, tried out, put on, and taken off again. They are fashions that are shaped, woven, chosen, or imposed.

First, off to the Bath Haus of Gaga to talk about spectacle and the gaze. The opening of Lady Gaga's video, set up like a painting, like portraiture, lets me know that this video will be all about looking, being looked at, and the self's capacity to imagine all the angles of that looking. Lady Gaga will be the center of it all, the hinge for the action upon which all gazes converge. In the opening tableau, Gaga is enthroned with her entourage and her posh accoutrements (Zikmu Parrot by Starck $1600 wireless speakers product placement), revealing that fame has placed her into a rarefied position, and the spectacle of her fashion positions her as well aware (razor-blade spectacles as razor-sharp vision; outfit that looks reptilian and tough yet gilded, armor-like). This image is much like an album cover and the stasis it implies, but once the video becomes dynamic, this (self-)image starts to morph.

The first change we gaze at is Monster Gaga born from the womb of a sensory deprivation chamber, complete with monstrous vinyl innocent-white catsuit and mask alongside background dancers who participate with Gaga in awkward/awful dancing, juxtaposed with a doe-eyed, cute, baby-like Gaga resembling a child's toy and a black-clad chic Gaga, complete with crown, looking at herself in the mirror (mirror-stage?), a reflective, self-examining stance.

And who should come to yank Gaga out of her innocence? Not men as might be expected, but two women, and they appear in the video around the same time as a pristine, status-quo beautiful, Madonna-clone Gaga while almost simultaneously Monster Gaga begins dance moves that parody Britney Spears, the status quo image of feminine fame with her fist pumps. The female orderlies give Baby Gaga a martini to desensitize her, and this produces a Debutante Gaga, complete with tiara and silver lingerie, whose femininity is covered up and cloaked but not for long, as women again expose her to the gaze of the waiting throng of dark-clad men. As Debutante Gaga sexualizes herself, crawling on all fours toward the men, a new Monster Gaga appears in a separate location (later I learn it's the bedroom), complete with grotesque reptilian spine and bat-like form on her head, even as the men begin to bid on her.

Using the bullet-time shooting popularized by "The Matrix," the next Gaga is in black lingerie, jewel laden, and surrounded by men, with an S&M mask that signals her dominance, perhaps, juxtaposed with a Satellite Gaga, transmitting a version of her sexualized body in the round. Cut to a Super-Fashion Gaga in her costume, which is fashion gone bad, turning Gaga into an animal form (note the hair as an ear-like coif) in an ornate suit that looks like a costume Louis XIV might have donned at Versailles. Rarefied by the fame from her transmission into the object of desire, to the point where she can wear golden, decadent outfits, we see Gaga wearing a faux-polar bear skin wedding train and marching to the bed with the highest-bidding suitor, who we can watch Gaga gaze at as the reflection of him undressing is in her mirrored sunglasses.

Vixen Gaga clad in red lingerie emerges next, face made-up the same as the Polar-Bear Gaga, and these are juxtaposed with pristine Madonna-clone Gaga, who looks pained, screaming and is revealed to be wearing the same bat-like hat/headpiece as the reptilian second Monster Gaga. Polar-Bear Gaga does the big reveal for the suitor while the viewer gazes at the scene, Super-Fashion Gaga fires the gun, and the suitor's bed begins to burst into flames as Vixen Gaga  comes into her own and pristine Madonna-Gaga weeps over the corruption of self by lust (romance gone wrong). Polar-Bear Gaga stands in a pose resembling the opening tableau, in the bedroom but not of it. Vixen Gaga triumphs and we get a dirty-legged, smoking, Grotesque Gaga lying in bed next to the skeleton of her suitor, her tits shooting sparks through her bra, the final tableau. She is now the stereotyped sexually "hot" female, sitting and smoking after destroying the suitor with sex, but that's the cliche, isn't it, a monster's been created.

Which Gaga is the real one? All of them, of course, although the reflective, rarefied, toughened-up Gaga of the opening tableau may be the one with which she most identifies now.

***

The correlation between Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video and Aase Berg's With Deer is a loose one as Berg goes about exploring skins in a much different way and without the burden of fame that is part of Gaga's spectacle of the gaze and the creation of her multiform feminine self. Jordan Davis, in his review of With Deer on Constant Critic, notes the cinematic aspects of Berg's prose poetry, comparing her moves to Bjork or Werner Herzog, while Lara Glenum sees teenage sci-fi parody in Berg's work in “‘From Cosmos to Cosmetics’: A Note on Aase Berg’s Guinea Pigs & Girly Kitsch” in Action Yes!. 

I agree with these readings, but I view Berg's poetry as having the ability to look at the world through not only a totalizing lens but also a microscopic or subatomic one (her later works like Dark Matter use the language of string theory and theoretical physics). Her work often appears like one of those blacklight fantasy posters with its hard neon colors when shown from afar, but her work also has the ability to zoom in, not unlike the opening juxtaposition of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," where we toggle back and forth between the idyllic Lumberton and the awful writhing beetles, from quaint meadow to trash to the ants on the decomposing ear.

Berg's work, like Lady Gaga's video, sets up a series of allegories in which Berg puts the narrator into certain animal skins, such as the fox and the deer, and compares the he of the poem with the horse in "In the Horrifying Land of Clay:"

There was an evil horse that galloped with me on its back. Beneath the hair-strap his muscles moved and chafed against the muscles of my taut inner things which clamped down around his body. I was scared and breathless and dynamic for this tall evil horse was my enemy.[...] I froze in my skin—it pined and chafed against the sharp wind that hurled its sharp drops against my egg-face. There was an evil horse that galloped through the horrifying land, an evil and dark horse with manhood and musculature, and I was thrilled to have him as my enemy.

More chafing and discomfort occurs in "Seal Mutilation" in lines like "The seal flesh loosened slowly.[...] I too waited and had sensations in my hull. [...] The armor plates began to chafe against the fur" (the seal skin echoed later in "Deep Inside the Rock") and in the subsequent poem "The Snail Ancestry" where "The girl's skin was bare and chafed-up from the friction of the limp, flailing animal. It was vaguely reminiscent of a fox, but he could not be sure—the animal's forms and shapes had long since ceased to be determinable in this evil landscape."

Later, we find her carrying "Deer Fabric:" "The deer fabric is thin. I carry it cautiously as if it were a cloud in my hands," which later gets dropped: "I release the cloud now, the bundle. And nailed to my increasingly deader body I wait for everyone to turn in my direction, to me and the glowing fabric." Even geometric forms discomfit her as "The Hypotenuse" reveals, and a galaxy is no safe haven:

Out in the Andromeda, out in the hybrid galaxy, the Hypotenuse writhed around her own shoulder. She writhed inside her horrible, backward body, she writhed so that her insides chafed against the shell, so that her muscles rubbed raw against the inside of her skin.

In the poem "Deer Quake," the speaker recounts being inside the deer, inside the cute or pretty body ("I have moved around the deer, I have fastened my fibers to the dancing, severe deer. [...] I have moved around the rare glass deer of September.")  and feeling completely uncomfortable before a change, an emergence, a distancing from the deer happens:

There is a light in the deer, there is a light in the deer, there is a light deep inside the cavity deer! Now the blood surface song surface is heaving! It quakes through me and the deer. Fibers ache in my sharp border. Now the painful deer tears now it breaks. Now the deer and I burst and are exposed—

Here the speaker is born out of or separated from the deer, exposing them both, like the illusion that one can stay within the cute, within the deer fabric that has been fashioned and the speaker has been forced to carry. She has become that thing and separated. There is no skin that does not chafe, nothing in nature has a comfortable flesh to inhabit, from the grass that gets chewed to "seed flour" in the deer mouth to the geometric forms of the galaxy. The speaker finds only chafing, cutting, fluid leakage, and open sores, but the painful discomfort comes before the "time for the cutting to slowly start to heal."


Author Bio:
Steve Halle is the author of the poetry collection Map of the Hydrogen World (Cracked Slab Books, 2008) and the chapbook cessation covers (Funtime Press, 2007).  His creative and critical work has been published in Another Chicago Magazine (ACM), Cordite, Jacket, Moria, milk magazine, and OCHO, among others.  He edits the online journal Seven Corners and is a staff reviewer for Poets & Artists (O&S).  He is a PhD candidate at Illinois State University in Normal, IL.

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