BOOK REVIEW
“Upon Receiving My Inheritance”: Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara by William Fargason
The logical place to begin reviewing William Fargason’s debut poetry collection is with its eye-catching title: Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara. The title derives from the New Testament, in which Jesus is said to approach a possessed man, exorcise the demons from him (they give their name as “Legion, for we are many”), and send them into a herd of swine, who promptly rush from hillside to sea, where they drown. The man’s sanity is restored, and he’s enjoined to remain in Decapolis and spread the lore of the compassion the Lord has shown him. In Fargason’s collection, the title might be read in more than one way. Is the work of the book to exorcise the demons from the poet himself? Or to bear witness as his father’s demons are exorcised and transmitted to the poet? Or something else entirely?
Leaving some ambiguity feels appropriate, for Fargason is more interested in questions than answers. Love Song doesn’t mask its main concerns: a father’s abuse of a son, the inheritance of trauma, the specter of self-harm, a battered psychology seeking a way forward. It’s tempting, then, to see Fargason’s as a poetics of “clearing the air” or “breaking the cycle.” But while there’s plenty of mining and rebuilding here, Fargason’s achievement is far subtler than merely finding creation amid destruction. As a writer of great fluidity and movement, his ever-shifting poems resist binaries like creation/destruction, past/present, and even victim/perpetrator. The poet engages dualities and contradictions and, in doing so, pushes past them to wring deeper understandings from the entanglements of life.
The book begins with a poem entitled “When My Father Calls Me a Pussy,” which makes the tenor and stakes of the father-son relationship clear:
… it means swing harder it means
I should feel ashamed that I stayed inside all day
playing my Game Boy I should be proud of the mud
on my shins kicked up by the four-wheeler
it means this gun isn’t going to shoot itself it means
how does he tell everyone in his Sunday School class
that his son wants to quit baseball again
which means he tried failed might as well be
a woman it means I’m not the son he wanted
I’m the son he got it means when I gut
the deer I should start at the nutsack …
The spacing and lineation, the alliteration and internal rhyme, load the poem with tension and propulsive force. The poet seems hunched, hesitantly doling out bitter boyhood recollections, but also bent on setting the record straight. The spaces around “ashamed” bear silences that amount to an onomatopoeia of that very emotion. And the gun that “isn’t going to shoot itself” invokes a son hesitant to take up his father’s arts, but also hints at future self-harm. Yet, in a twist on Chekhov’s famous formulation, the gun may go off but the poet remains to tell the tale. In what way, then, does that gun go off? And how will it reach its targets?
The youthful speaker’s repetition of “it means” suggests a young poet trying to make sense of a father’s disdain. Indeed, Love Song is full of such searching. Fargason seems ever to be seeking out sources, or the suitable metaphor to convey a life infused with toxic masculinity. One explanatory device might be the old saw about “God, guns, and gays”—the trinity of cultural obsessions burning at the heart of American conservatism.
The father’s postures in “Pussy” show all three concerns, and the questions of sexuality and sexual orientation recur throughout the book. Indeed, Fargason surfaces veins of homoeroticism that speak to the style of masculinity running through his male lineage. Don’t the most alpha-male spaces tend also to harbor the most buried impulses? And isn’t the extent of revulsion at their unveiling revealing in itself? In “My Father’s College Roommate” (tellingly subtitled Auburn, 1978), his father, in a post-workout ritual, asks for a hand to “rub a knot/in his back, loosen the muscles.” Here’s the portion of the poem running from volta to conclusion:
My father didn’t know his roommate
liked to touch him—so when his roommate paused
in his massage for a second too long, laid his head
on my father’s back, my father jumped up, clocked
him in the jaw, sent his body to the floor. In his
confusion my father lashed out—scared at what
he didn’t know, he had never been shown tenderness
before. The sound must have been soft, as touch
can be, a kiss or a handshake or a fist in the teeth.
As quickly as Fargason points our ear to the “sound” of tenderness, he swerves our attention back to the effect of touch on body, in an escalating sequence from “kiss” to “handshake” to a “fist in the teeth.” We’re left to wonder how precisely the father’s treatment of his roommate foreshadows his approach to parenting. This very intimation also effects one of Fargason’s characteristic temporal shifts: a poem ostensibly frozen in the past seeps forward, slyly making the subtitled time and place seem a little too specific to be taken just literally.
The temporal shift is reinforced by a shift in voice. On its face, “My Father’s College Roommate” is the poet’s recounting of a sort of twice-told cautionary tale spoken by father to son. But the speaker’s adoption of omniscience at the end (“scared at what he didn’t know,” “The sound must have been soft”) enacts a deft twist. It interleaves a layer of empathy in an otherwise unflattering portrait, even as it allows Fargason to wrest some control the narrative himself. Giving voice to the poet’s inferences also infuses mobility in the poem, allowing us to read the “kiss,” “handshake” and “fist” forward to the speaker’s recent-past. If the generational transmission of culture and trauma are among the main themes of Love Song, then the way Fargason manipulates time and perspective only adds to the sense of movement.
Abuse isn’t the only demon coursing through this book. Fargason’s work is also possessed by racial and religious demons that are themselves passed down the generations. Consider “When My Father Tells Me My Great-Grandfather Was in the KKK.” The scene plays out in a living room startlingly “lined with animal heads”—among them largemouth bass, a deer, a “red fox at full alert.” The revelation at the heart of the poem unleashes a kind of intergenerational fatalism conveyed, appropriately, by lines that recur, like patrilineal secrets, back on themselves:
he leans in when he tells me as if anything could change
where we are no one can change where they are
only where they are going we share a family name
my father my grandfather my great-grandfather
I’m the fourth and the last of that lineage
that system of blood my father’s hand
runs through the dense fur of the moose head
on the wall he says one day all of this will be mine
it makes sense now why he said for me to always keep
the pistol he gave me in my glovebox when driving
through a bad part of town …
As ever, spacing and lineation are used to great effect. We see a mind unsettled—pausing, sifting, spinning off toward desperate conclusions. Like many of Fargason’s poems, the effect is of a large room suddenly turned claustrophobic. Especially affecting are the spaces around “bad.” I’ve lived in enough multi-racial cities to know the way White people will cast aspersions on the “other” side of town in a blend of denigration that invariably invokes (but refuses to examine) race, crime, class, and fear. As in real life, the work here is done by the awkward silences cropping up around that simple but damning qualifier “bad.” Lest we overlook the striking imagery, it, too, suffuses the poem with racial weight. For the jarring images of mounted animal heads evoke an unpleasant pool of associations with the Klan, its hooded white terrorists, and its specter of murder for Black Americans.
There’s not a little religion in there, too. The poet at once seems constricted by, pushes back at, and embraces the Christianity in which he was brought up. Whatever his opinion on spiritual matters or organized religion, ultimately it’s clear that Fargason, in a way that calls to mind Baldwin, has internalized and cannot help but deploy the lexical, spiritual, and emotional tableau of the church. Often the effect is oblique, religion seeping out around the edges of words and lines. In “Upon Receiving My Inheritance,” the repetition of “Thank you father” nominally addresses the father who has passed along a genetic disease, but carries the obvious double-meaning. Elsewhere, poems seem to witness a pilgrim journeying through landscapes freighted with biblical and mythical imagery, often edging into the surreal. From “When You Were Out of Town Last Weekend”
I rode the horse alone. Every bank of snow
had your face on it. The tree branches
only offered dead fruit, but I ate it anyway,
branch and all. Here I hungered for
distance, but what I found instead was
muddy paths with tracks I couldn’t
identify …
Elsewhere, the poet’s more explicit. He writes an entire poem “Cain” centered on that conflicted figure. He imagines “In a past life my wife/was Bathsheba …” In “Song,” he employs the anaphora “I have seen the kingdom,” and while the kingdom is many things, including “a hermit thrush/with a piece of popcorn too big for its beak,” it’s also this rather Eve-like symbol: “The kingdom of her/standing naked in the kitchen cutting/a peach into slices.” Whether Fargason is possessed, or freed, by religion, suggests a duality the poet is unconstrained by. In his hands, the language of scripture is yet more raw material to sculpt into compelling poetry. In a way, his relationship to the Father parallels his relationship to his father: he bears the marks of the relationship on mind, body, and soul, but has succeeded in taking control of its language, and thus the myriad narrative possibilities.
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How does the poet make sense of all the life passing through him? One of Love Song’s achievements is how it dramatizes the liminal spaces in which sexuality and violence, trauma and grief, play out. One of the ways it brings this material to light is by an alternation in poetic forms. Alongside tightly constructed narratives and montages are numerous poems (“Cain,” “Upon Receiving My Inheritance,” “There Is No Power in Blame,” “Song,” “Prayer”) that, while remaining alert at the line and stanza level, also rise into flowing incantations. As the poet navigates therapy and forges resilience, these poems both dramatize that content and give novel form to the content. That is, adopting a voice that chants, moans, invokes, that jumps registers, these poems allow bolder, freer sides of the poet to come out—a kind of therapeutic act in itself. Even if the literal voice remains Fargason’s, new figurative voices become possible. Like the shifts in syntax, subject, and time that occur at the line- and stanza-level of so many poems in Love Song, the varying of what one might term “vocal states,” viewed from the book-level, are another way that Fargason’s poems move. In creating space for these diverse vocal states, Fargason offers readers a window into the poet’s larger pilgrimage, even as the poems themselves help him take steps in that very journey.
Many of Fargason’s incantatory pieces are driven by anaphora, the repetition of phrases like “Thank you,” “I blame,” “I have seen,” “because,” and, in “Prayer,” the praise-like “O”:
O flock of buzzards no longer circling just waiting
on the ground for their turn O buzzards pick my bones
clean let my ribs sing in the wind if the wind
so passes over them O blown-out candle
give me the finality of amen without having
to say it O dust let my bones forget
where they came from …
If such poetry feels like a therapeutic release, in many places it explicitly points to (a perhaps ambivalently undertaken) therapy. Take “Not an Entrance,” a poem that unfolds like a stream of consciousness but is bolted to the idea of that title phrase, printed on the door of the outpatient mental health center the poet leaves, after “the first week of therapy that you signed up for/not so willingly.” Here, Fargason meditates on life’s Mobius-strip-like iterations of entrances and exits. The poem’s an outpouring of metaphor that’s grounded by the specificity of the setting, the stakes of the poet’s health, and the weaving-back of hard reality:
… the sparks saying you fool, you knew
all along that this wasn’t an exit but you
kept trying anyway, you desired every entrance
to be an exit, like the bike wheel left chained
to the lock after the thief took everything
else and only left you that one wheel, which is not
any way to get anywhere, but here, in front
of a door that reads not an entrance …
In Fargason’s characteristic fashion, the energy in this passage comes from how the detail of the bike makes the mind’s eye linger—it’s not just a “stolen bike” but the more vivid (and morose) “wheel left chained/to the lock.” Of course, there’s movement here, too, the way the concrete wheel-lock image abstracts slightly out to the “thief” who “only left you that one wheel,” with all the metaphorical possibilities that might entail, then moves us back to scene of the door.
One can’t meditate on something, of course, without some level of metacognition. In this way, the collection embodies the poet’s larger journey. A reader familiar with mental-health will see echoes of the long-ascendant method of cognitive-behavioral therapy, in which a central tenet is the honing of tools to reframe one’s thoughts and feelings, obsessions and compulsions. To make sense of them, to fit them in an appropriately balanced way, into all the other channels of one’s life. In Fargason’s work, we see a mind ever more able to step outside itself, to gain a kind of metacognition that mirrors (and in a way, makes the case for) the larger therapeutic journey.
But even then, it speaks to Fargason’s skills that his poetry won’t settle for a simplistic narrative of “progress”—less still “closure.” The poet may locate resilience in a “Worry Stone,” but the recollections spurred by that rock show how grief and trauma are lasting burdens, not fleeting weights one can simply “get past.” The mere grabbing of a “round quartz stone/with a cross carved into it” triggers memories of panic attacks that can still seize up the poet: “I think of all the times my body/would not let me get off the floor … I called/my mother four states away told her my goodbyes … ” The only way the poet can ultimately “let go of the stone for once and be free” is to plumb the darkest moments when he desired to kill himself. When the speaker narrates the moments between attack and arrival at a hospital, perhaps it’s the image of the siren, with its never-ending loop, its shifts of color and sound, its demonic howl through time and space, that best capture the achievement of Fargason’s poetics:
… who among you can add a single hour to his life
from worrying the word of my Lord spoke the siren in the air
I was alone with the Lord I was alone the road pulled away
from me through those two back windows like my future
unspooling the streetlights getting smaller and full of shadows
until my parents dropped me off
Christopher R. Vaughan is a teacher and poet based in Minneapolis. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Off the Coast, Review Americana, Canyon Voices, Del Sol Review, Connecticut River Review, and What Rough Beast. He reviews poetry for Great River Review and the online version of Kenyon Review.