MARY KONCEL: You Can Tell the Horse Anything

Surprising Juxtapositions and Surrealism Abound

Koncel, Mary. You Can Tell the Horse Anything. 1st paperback ed. Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2004.

Appreciating Mary Koncel’s You Can Tell the Horse Anything needs a reader who is appreciative of the surreal.

A first reading of the collection of 66 prose poems gives the reader a vague clue as to underlying motifs but leaves her adrift in attempts at “making sense.” There seems to be a non-relational air to the poems. They exist as separate entities, fed by Koncel’s liberated imagination, effectively barring the reader from a lucid understanding and emotional response. Titles act as explanation; give the reader a sense of direction. But when the content is reexamined, the elements of surrealism emerge.

Hirsch in How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry summed up surrealism with a quote from Andre Breton, when he said that the surrealists “were apostles of what Breton called ‘beloved imagination’.” This group of revolutionary poets “believed in the possibilities of chance,” he continued, “of emotion induced by free association and surprising juxtapositions.”

Koncel’s opening poem, “After the Weather,” encapsulates the movement of free association in a stolid, impersonal voice which narrates the unbelievable event of an airline passenger being sucked out of a plane while passengers “agreed. This was real life, better / than the movie or chicken salad.” They envy the man’s freakish release and descent, an adventure into “raw air and the breath of migrating angels.” His is a death that is a freedom from the humdrum and artificial, from the usual journey, the metaphorical living of everyday citizens. The image of “raw air” reinforces this separation from overlaid reality. The “migrating angels” speak to a heaven, an other-worldly life, where the usual is replaced with limitless possibility. The passenger doesn’t fall out of the airplane, he is lifted. He lets “the wind gather him inch by inch.” The inherent symbolism of the wind is a vehicle for release and works for Koncel as the motif of freedom, for the breath of human life as well as the transport of the gods (angels), and thus a link to divinity.

Yet this disengagement from the quotidian, this uncontained free flight so envied by his fellow travelers is ultimately denied. Given liberty, the man clings instead to the bonds and boundaries of reality, the explicable.

He didn’t understand. His
head began to ache. He
understood Buicks, red hair,
the smell of day-old beer.

In “After the Weather,” Koncel introduces a primary motif: the possibility for release, the potential for the limitless and the ecstatic, those flights with “migrating angels.” And when the path to transcendence is rejected, she shows the result: a fall into victimhood, death, “severed wings.”

In “The Big Deep Voice of God” Koncel depicts that separation from reality through another register. Here a man responds to “a voice” and packs his family in the family car. He orders them to remove their clothing and they obey. They are spurred to this act in response to an ultimate authority, “the big deep voice of God.” There is no individual determination. It is collective hysteria.

Tommy is the driver, the channel for the voice and the one in control. He and his passengers travel blindly, mindlessly, unconsciously. There is movement but no transport. They agree to remove their clothing, to bare their souls, a vulnerability of the highest order and reminiscent of those metaphorical characters in that metaphorical garden. In doing so, they transcend common moral and social codes. Stripped to the skin, these people are arching toward the angels, toward immortality. Yet their performance is a passive one, plunging toward some unknown destination, traveling faster for some unknown reason, blithely obedient. The poem’s action might as well be depicting the response to a schizophrenic auditory hallucination.

There is one exception: Tommy’s wife. She escapes the hysteria and is released into a passionate, pagan creature.

She hadn’t
heard the voice but thought if she did it would call her
“Sugar.” “Sugar,” it would say, “your thighs are hives of
honey, and I am the Bumble Bee of Love.” Quivering, she
pressed her left cheek against warm blue vinyl.

Allowed the freedom of nudity, she responds with hedonistic pleasure. Her reverie is transported by an ancient matriarchal symbol: the Bumble Bee of Love. She quivers in answer, presses her cheek against blue vinyl, the only warmth in the vehicle. This is Eve incarnate, possessed of her nature, the one who questions. “At home, she often wondered too.” The doubting is a solo performance that has already moved against the finiteness of earth, the chores of the housewife. Leaning across her kitchen sink, the wife finds transport across the “still white clouds of steam,” an ether akin to the expanse of air. She listens. “Opening her mouth, she always took in more than air and water.”With this inhalation, she imbues more than the primary elements. She is actively pursuing something other than her limited position. Koncel bestows potential on this woman. She opens herself to the “possibilities of chance.” She follows the quiet path of reflection in contrast to Tommy’s senseless drive toward salvation.

“Lake and Michigan” brings forward another image of nakedness. Here we have statues of “metallic and bare boned” horses in a city park being defiled by a youngster. The intimate first person voice decides that the exposure of these inanimate objects is a vulnerability that needs protection. “The horses need some hair.” The danger of public exposure is too risky. It is not inclement weather that will cause destruction but the perverted prank of a kid shoving an ice cream cone in the horse’s rear while his mother sits in passive audience.

This simple scene with its desecration, its errant child and detached mother, messily eating ice cream, typifies the surrealist’s complaint against society. Hirsch explains: “The surrealists were scandalized by the repressiveness of society and thus scandalized society in return.”

Koncel’s hit on society is mild, somewhat elusive yet present nonetheless. This vignette peers at the origin of scandal – the non-instructive parent and the clueless child who begins his journey toward scandal with evil acts committed against nonhumans. That the recipients of his incipient cruelty are horses is not random. Koncel returns to pre-Christian symbology with the horse, sacred to Celtic goddesses, signifying energy, power and freedom. The little boy’s defilement is an attack against those symbols. And he shows an emerging distaste for the corporeal body, its ends and outs and common functions. His mother’s inactivity is a passive acceptance of the boy’s assault. She is complicit in the shaping of a torturer, one who has no recognition of the sacred in everyday life. In her complicity, she is also denying the traditionally female alignment with wildness. She is contemporary woman - ignorant, inactive and divorced from an awareness of and respect for nature. She is the obverse of Tommy’s wife, acting as a direct juxtaposition.

The speaker is trapped in senseless society in “Blackflies,” a weird container of juxtaposed images introduced by the eternal question, “a flutter of Why’s.”The speaker encounters traffic, a man dressed in a chicken costume complete “with a sign that says Why?” A runaway hot dog cart snaps a flagpole in two, Americana destroying America. Blackflies chase the speaker, the dark gadflies of absurdity. Salvation comes when the speaker blows her horn for no reason other than “a moment of calm.”

This is a picture of the slow passage of surreal images, enmeshed in an elongated moment. Time goes forward and backward. Reverie is nonsensical, fraught with inner dread. The traveler is swept along in an amalgam of everyday craziness. It intrudes upon her sensibilities, her reason. Release must be claimed. It must be loud and harsh enough to break the spell and grant silence.

I Could Tell the Horse Anything continually reaches into the morass of the quotidian, showing doors of release, showing the gates of restriction, showing the danger of flight. It is populated by spark plugs and hub caps, balanced against rural scenes and farm implements, alive with domesticated, wild and immobile animals, housewives, evil babies, earth goddesses. Koncel takes them all, shakes them up and empties them into a container of prose verse that works as narratives of the absurd, a channeling akin to the automatic writing of the first Surrealists. The reader gets tossed in this crazy salad, the bowl of everyday living to make sense of the senseless, to see beyond the elements of confinement, to look within for meaning. Ultimately, this is where Koncel will succeed in her modern surrealism. If she can convince her readers that there is no interiority in outward scenery, that retrospection, independent of the circumscribed lives of society, is where one can discover what lies within. This inward look can sprout wings – not those of angels or demigods – but the kind of free flight that breathes life into living.