Northern Poetry Review praises Troubled

[Excerpt]

Vaughan’s Troubled: A Memoir in Poems and Fragments (Coach House, 2008) is a book-length confession and self-reflexive analysis of the rise and fall of the poet’s love affair with his therapist. This includes everything from the early flirtatious sessions between patient and doctor, weekend getaways, physical and emotional abuse, the revoking of the therapist’s license to practice and, eventually, said therapist’s reinstatement. Vaughan’s new book has all the nuance and technique of a poem like "The Tool Shed Bar." However, something’s changed. It’s not that the scope of his poetry has somehow expanded: no, Vaughan’s always had a sense of expansiveness, as exemplified by his iconic sprawling poetic line or his interest in travel ("All autobiography is travelogue, map play / some of us just get around more," writes Vaughan in "Palm Springs International Airport"). Rather, what’s changed with Troubled is the sustained intensity of imaginative energy expended over sixty pages, focused exclusively on the physical, psychological, and emotional minutiae of love and hate, of sex and death. It’s not the scope, then, but the magnitude of Vaughan’s imaginative energy -- so intensely channeled to "the rotten sweetness of corruption" (that’s Vaughan, quoting Faulkner) -- that contributes to Troubled’s brilliance.

The first thirty pages of Troubled is composed, primarily, of single-page poems titled "Sessions." The "sessions" include the constantly critical and refracting interior monologues of Vaughan, sometimes as patient, sometimes as lover. Other "sessions" are devoted to the typical "[calling of] all the old [therapy] gods to harvest," that is, the father ("mad as a paper kettle, / as three glass balls in a blender") and mother ("her sleepy violence, / a limbless she-cat, all caterwaul and cant"). As these "sessions" develop, so does the intimate relationship between patient and therapist. The doctor is repeatedly characterized as some sort of magician, lulling the patient into "love" with magical spells; and, perhaps more significantly, he’s figured as a betraying Devil:

Here is where you said Relax

and meant Come to my house, take dinner, meet my children,

buy me a book, sit in my lap,

grow used to the hiss inside.

Also interspersed throughout the book are excerpted passages from psychiatric texts, especially passages related to the "code of ethics" to which doctors must abide. In the latter half of Troubled, Vaughan also includes evidentiary documentary information: "private and confidential" letters and emails, for example, exchanged between Vaughan, therapists, and the College of Physicians and Surgeons. All of the recreated sessions and documentation ultimately find release in the cathartic final poem, with its repeated refrain, "It stops here":

Once loved,

better to empty a symbol than sink, sopping

blood-drunk. Better wound down

than winded. It stops here.

The "wound" magnitude of this drama is completely and utterly Greek.

Love changes one's relation to language. That statement, however sentimental it might seem, is an essential if unheralded fact, I think. Let me repeat: love changes one's relation to language. This is particularly important to poets, whose primary working material is, of course, language. How do we effectively connect the word and thing (feeling, object of desire) or language and memory -- that's what compels both the poet and the lover. Vaughan understands this. "Enough tugs and coverlets, hand jive," writes Vaughan, as he cheekily figures figuration in a statement against figures, then, adding, "I love him and comparison / is odious." So, there's one possible effect of love on language: a desire for direct statement. Indeed, there are passages of unadorned statement throughout Troubled. Yet only a few pages later, Vaughan also suggests that writing "love" in a direct, plain mode is, inevitably, impossible because love itself is neither direct nor plain. Love is far more mannered than that:

To tell love, name attraction ...

catching bats with envelopes.

The ellipsis is the mark of the impossible (i.e. love). The ellipsis is the existential limit of love. Vaughan's only recourse, after staring into the lexical, grammatical and syntactical abyss, is to compose the most audaciously mannered figuration in the book: its egregiousness is the source of its astuteness. The envelope -- through which love notes once were exchanged -- is now the obsolescent vehicle of delivery for that vile flying rodent which exceeds or resists envelopment. But Vaughan also take things one step further: Plainness or figuration are not the only linguistic effects of love. Love, a few pages later, in a section titled "Last Session," can cause both parties of a relationship to become "indifferent to signs" altogether, including linguistic "signs." Instead, actions in love become guided by something else entirely -- something the linguistic sign cannot contain. That reckless "something else" has the potential to uphold, yes, but also to harm the fragile human heart...

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