The Wicking of the Broken Heart by Robin Eichele (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Wicking of the Broken Heart by Robin Eichele
• Joy Gaines-Friedler (bio)

the wicking of the broken heart
Robin Eichele
Cyberwit.net
https://www.cyberwit.net/publications/1836
130 pages; Print, $15.00

Robin Eichele's poems ask these heady, existential questions: Who are we? Why are we here? How do we fit? What is real? What is the world trying to teach me? What am I to know beyond the knowing? That is exactly what a lyrical poem is—a moment that reveals a knowing beyond the moment. From, "Feeding the Pigeons":

In the world of small who is the smaller?The chill of the bench seeps the heat from my thighs.The fog of the day usurps the green of leaves.Here is the privacy for askingwhat is the consequence of matter or time or space?Grey heads bob in Washington Squarejust as they bobbed in Leicester—a sea of them–so many years ago—pecking at crumbs withconfident precision—in cracks, on sidewalks, onconcrete and stone—tapping survival signals demanding that I play a role as unwavering demanding that I pose with my random rhetoricals demanding that I scratch for meaning.

This "transcendentalist" seeking of the grandeur that connects us to all things through the intermediary of the self (with the guidance of the poet) permeates the work in this collection. Eichele acts as a spiritual guide. It is clear that he sees this guidance as a calling.

In the mid-1960s a group of students at Monteith College, an experimental liberal arts college within Wayne State University, formed the Detroit Artists' Workshop. The group included Eichele, activist John Sinclair, photographer Leni Sinclair, and others. Theirs was a radical community of students and artists [End Page 129] who not only lived together but hosted concerts, poetry readings, classes and exhibitions. They formed a press. They founded a co-operative record label, they rallied against war, and on behalf of women, they were outspoken activists, humanists, organizers, and early founders of the anti-nuclear movement. They became known as subversive, and police assigned undercover agents to infiltrate the group.

Nearly sixty years later this volume of selected poems embodies those origins, and ideologies. Eichele generously celebrates the poet-artists. All artists. The now "grey heads that bob" are indeed those radical, soul-seeking, cultural icons of that community of artists, poets, professors, and musicians in Detroit and elsewhere, those who have not and will not give up, as Eichele proclaims, "scratching for meaning." His tributes center mostly on the legacy of poets, including that "sea" of contemporary, ancient, and historic poets and philosophers.

The book is organized in three parts, simply marked part 1, part 2, and part 3. Each part opens with a print by famed Detroit artist Stephen Ligosky, whose work complements Eichele's. Ligosky's black-and-white facial prints show up as an introduction to each section. Here is the human portrait shape-shifting, morphing, multidimensional, as though to prepare us for the poems that are about to come. The artwork acts as a sort of mystical third dimension to the poems. An ink painting and the cover photo are offered by artist Ellen Phelan.

There is purpose to each poetic form Eichele creates: to shake up the reader to order and disorder; to expose artifice and deception that we perpetrate on ourselves; and ironically, to connect us through that disorder. As Eichele writes in "tending to the estate": "only we of the lesser mindfulness must wrestle with the forms of being." Even death is among the "illusions of the world."

Most often Eichele uses little or no punctuation, creating an experimental, reader-participant quality, a democratic quality whereby one is invited to participate in the meaning-making. In "displaced bones," for example, one must find the capitals, periods, commas, sometimes located in the middle of a line: [End Page 130]

the words that should have been saidcollect rain water gushesin the guttergravity's verificationthe words that should have been saiddrowned mice flutter

This is how form informs meaning, which Eichele does well. He feels the rhythm of language, and like a...