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Peter Balakian's Ziggurat: A Retrospective
asbarez
Friday, November 19th, 2010
BY HOVIG TCHALIAN
Peter Balakian's latest offering of poetry, published in September of
2010 by the University of Chicago Press, is a collection intriguingly
entitled, Ziggurat, after the pyramids built by the Sumerians in the
ancient city of Ur.
Balakian is perhaps best known for his non-poetic writings - Black Dog
of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past (1998), a memoir;
and the book-length study, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide
and America's Response (2004). Like those more explicitly historical
works, this collection, as its title suggests, is deeply informed by
the past. The book of poems is a retrospective of sorts, bringing
together some of Balakian's recent work in a collection of just over
seventy pages. More significantly, those pages are informed by - one
might almost say, imbued with - a profound, visceral sense of the
presence of the past, both ancient and modern.
The date of the volume's publication is no accident. The book is a
reflection on the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center,
nearly a decade on. Balakian witnessed the completion of the twin
towers some forty years before they came down in 2001. The moving poem
at its center, A-Train / Ziggurat / Elegy, deftly weaves together the
aftermath of the recent attacks with Balakian's own experience as a
mail runner in the late 1960's and 1970's in and around the site of
the twin towers, New York's lower Manhattan.
The poem, and by extension the entire volume, may be considered an
extended meditation on the meaning of the towers' destruction and its
ushering in of what Balakian has elsewhere called an age of `anxiety'
and `uncertainty.' The poem traces the historic rise and fall of the
Ziggurat of Ur by compressing it into the forty-year arc of the rise
and destruction of the twin towers, as witnessed by a mail runner. The
poem juxtaposes the ordinary experiences of construction workers and
employees in the tower, his speaker's personal experiences - riding
the A-Train, going up and down the elevator, looking out at the
Manhattan skyline - and the discovery of the great pyramidal
structure. The result is the lyrical equivalent of vertigo, a feeling
simultaneously of a great ascent and a sudden fall.
That fall, both literal and metaphorical, acts as the poem's central
structural feature. Ziggurats were built with steps on the outside
whose very purpose, the poem suggests, was to act as both vehicle and
emblem of soaring ambition: `O house of heaven rising / O foundation
of earth / O elemental zigzag.' Likewise, the twin towers, an
engineering and architectural marvel in their day, were built to
feature their great, glass elevators. The original, mythic archetype
of the Ziggurat, the tower of Babel, instead housed its steps on the
inside: `Peter Brueghel [the late Renaissance Flemish painter] had it
all wrong: / there was solid masonry in the middle, / a winding path
circling eight towers, / baked brick glued with asphalt.' The more
modern counterparts of the tower of Babel, it seems, proudly display
their ambitions. In Balakian's poem, that misguided ambition is itself
a shallow, feeble echo of an earlier rise and fall, eerily recast in
the towers' own framing: `twenty-eight grillages supporting the
columns of the elevator core of the North Tower, / core box-shaped
columns and box beam framing. / Who had ever heard of anything like
this?' The question is, of course, more than rhetorical - the elevator
core is already `embedded' in the very structure of the original
staircase, both a foreshadowing of the twin towers and itself a
perverse emblem of `modernity.'
The collection is deeply retrospective, then, in this sense as well -
emblematic of a modernity rent by cataclysmic events both personal and
historical, human and mythic, of a post-lapsarian (what the poem calls
`post-diluvian') existence burdened by self-consciousness: `You forget
that Nebuchadnezzar inherited the region [of the Ziggurat] a
millennium later. / You forget because it's just an excavation now. /
like [sic] my mind when it blanks into itself, / like the horizon when
it goes black and the flame / of one oil refinery flickers out at the
Syrian border / where once I picked Armenian bones out of the dirt.'
Like reels of film hurriedly spliced together, the ambitions of the
biblical tyrant, Nebuchadnezzar, fade into the ancient Ziggurat, the
ominous `excavation' of the twin towers, and the rupture of
consciousness, the emptying out of the speaker's `mind when it blanks
into itself,' returning finally to the primal act of excavating the
bones of Armenian victims of the genocide, strewn across the Syrian
desert of Der-el-Zor. The antidote to modern self-consciousness, it
seems, is a forgetting of the past that dislodges history and,
ironically, dooms its victims into the Sisyphean task of endlessly
repeating it.
What makes segments such as these remarkable is their ability to
repeat the lyrical vertigo, to yoke the mythic to the mundane, in
original and thought-provoking ways. Like the Warhol lithos that other
poems in the collection return to again and again, the series of
juxtapositions form a strange palimpsest, an agglomeration of myth,
history and personal narrative.
In the end, it is that personal experience that most closely ties this
collection with Peter Balakian's other works. Whether as a poet, a
historian, or a memoirist, Balakian has consistently cast himself as
the modern observer, the consummate `witness' - a New Jersey native of
Armenian descent, straddling the line between cultures, between past
and present, and translating that experience into poetry. Ziggurat
redefines that act of bearing witness as an act of retrospection in
its deepest sense, of a looking back that is as much about the
experience of a fractured consciousness as it is about what it
observes.
So while Ziggurat is ostensibly inspired by the events of September
11, it speaks to an experience even larger but no less human. If we
are to take seriously the proposition that it is a modern `historical'
poem, then the volume serves as a partial answer to what remains an
overwhelming question - how do we even begin to write such a history,
in such an age?
From: A. Papazian
asbarez
Friday, November 19th, 2010
BY HOVIG TCHALIAN
Peter Balakian's latest offering of poetry, published in September of
2010 by the University of Chicago Press, is a collection intriguingly
entitled, Ziggurat, after the pyramids built by the Sumerians in the
ancient city of Ur.
Balakian is perhaps best known for his non-poetic writings - Black Dog
of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past (1998), a memoir;
and the book-length study, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide
and America's Response (2004). Like those more explicitly historical
works, this collection, as its title suggests, is deeply informed by
the past. The book of poems is a retrospective of sorts, bringing
together some of Balakian's recent work in a collection of just over
seventy pages. More significantly, those pages are informed by - one
might almost say, imbued with - a profound, visceral sense of the
presence of the past, both ancient and modern.
The date of the volume's publication is no accident. The book is a
reflection on the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center,
nearly a decade on. Balakian witnessed the completion of the twin
towers some forty years before they came down in 2001. The moving poem
at its center, A-Train / Ziggurat / Elegy, deftly weaves together the
aftermath of the recent attacks with Balakian's own experience as a
mail runner in the late 1960's and 1970's in and around the site of
the twin towers, New York's lower Manhattan.
The poem, and by extension the entire volume, may be considered an
extended meditation on the meaning of the towers' destruction and its
ushering in of what Balakian has elsewhere called an age of `anxiety'
and `uncertainty.' The poem traces the historic rise and fall of the
Ziggurat of Ur by compressing it into the forty-year arc of the rise
and destruction of the twin towers, as witnessed by a mail runner. The
poem juxtaposes the ordinary experiences of construction workers and
employees in the tower, his speaker's personal experiences - riding
the A-Train, going up and down the elevator, looking out at the
Manhattan skyline - and the discovery of the great pyramidal
structure. The result is the lyrical equivalent of vertigo, a feeling
simultaneously of a great ascent and a sudden fall.
That fall, both literal and metaphorical, acts as the poem's central
structural feature. Ziggurats were built with steps on the outside
whose very purpose, the poem suggests, was to act as both vehicle and
emblem of soaring ambition: `O house of heaven rising / O foundation
of earth / O elemental zigzag.' Likewise, the twin towers, an
engineering and architectural marvel in their day, were built to
feature their great, glass elevators. The original, mythic archetype
of the Ziggurat, the tower of Babel, instead housed its steps on the
inside: `Peter Brueghel [the late Renaissance Flemish painter] had it
all wrong: / there was solid masonry in the middle, / a winding path
circling eight towers, / baked brick glued with asphalt.' The more
modern counterparts of the tower of Babel, it seems, proudly display
their ambitions. In Balakian's poem, that misguided ambition is itself
a shallow, feeble echo of an earlier rise and fall, eerily recast in
the towers' own framing: `twenty-eight grillages supporting the
columns of the elevator core of the North Tower, / core box-shaped
columns and box beam framing. / Who had ever heard of anything like
this?' The question is, of course, more than rhetorical - the elevator
core is already `embedded' in the very structure of the original
staircase, both a foreshadowing of the twin towers and itself a
perverse emblem of `modernity.'
The collection is deeply retrospective, then, in this sense as well -
emblematic of a modernity rent by cataclysmic events both personal and
historical, human and mythic, of a post-lapsarian (what the poem calls
`post-diluvian') existence burdened by self-consciousness: `You forget
that Nebuchadnezzar inherited the region [of the Ziggurat] a
millennium later. / You forget because it's just an excavation now. /
like [sic] my mind when it blanks into itself, / like the horizon when
it goes black and the flame / of one oil refinery flickers out at the
Syrian border / where once I picked Armenian bones out of the dirt.'
Like reels of film hurriedly spliced together, the ambitions of the
biblical tyrant, Nebuchadnezzar, fade into the ancient Ziggurat, the
ominous `excavation' of the twin towers, and the rupture of
consciousness, the emptying out of the speaker's `mind when it blanks
into itself,' returning finally to the primal act of excavating the
bones of Armenian victims of the genocide, strewn across the Syrian
desert of Der-el-Zor. The antidote to modern self-consciousness, it
seems, is a forgetting of the past that dislodges history and,
ironically, dooms its victims into the Sisyphean task of endlessly
repeating it.
What makes segments such as these remarkable is their ability to
repeat the lyrical vertigo, to yoke the mythic to the mundane, in
original and thought-provoking ways. Like the Warhol lithos that other
poems in the collection return to again and again, the series of
juxtapositions form a strange palimpsest, an agglomeration of myth,
history and personal narrative.
In the end, it is that personal experience that most closely ties this
collection with Peter Balakian's other works. Whether as a poet, a
historian, or a memoirist, Balakian has consistently cast himself as
the modern observer, the consummate `witness' - a New Jersey native of
Armenian descent, straddling the line between cultures, between past
and present, and translating that experience into poetry. Ziggurat
redefines that act of bearing witness as an act of retrospection in
its deepest sense, of a looking back that is as much about the
experience of a fractured consciousness as it is about what it
observes.
So while Ziggurat is ostensibly inspired by the events of September
11, it speaks to an experience even larger but no less human. If we
are to take seriously the proposition that it is a modern `historical'
poem, then the volume serves as a partial answer to what remains an
overwhelming question - how do we even begin to write such a history,
in such an age?
From: A. Papazian