The Trouble with Saying What You Mean
“While the others spoke,” Jana Prikryl writes, “my meaning was coming through.” That’s how “Chorus,” the first poem in her fourth collection, “The Channel” (Norton), begins. Who are “the others”? Prikryl doesn’t say. Maybe she’s thinking of the nattering media, or other poets, or just the ordinary chorus of voices absorbed in the course of a day, echoing in her head. “You shouldn’t suppose they expressed my views / or even the opposite exactly,” she cautions. Rather, “meaning was elsewhere and I kept it to myself.” But how can you keep meaning to yourself and still write poems for other people to read?
“Basically I hate poetry that pretends it’s possible to say what you mean,” Prikryl has said in an interview. “For me, the excitement of writing something like a poem usually resides in prodding and questioning the words that claim to represent what my brain claims to want to be saying.” This self-interrogating method makes for a nervy, difficult style. In “The Channel,” Prikryl writes run-on sentences that layer fragmentary clauses, one after another. Her syntax twists this way and that, as if it were squirming to get out of her packed stanzas, before she pulls up short with a joke or breaks off altogether, choosing silence, with new questions floating in the air. A reader might reasonably decide that Prikryl is more interested in keeping meaning to herself than in getting it across. But that would be a mistake.
Prikryl’s suspicion of easy self-expression leads her to try on other voices. “The Channel” is full of references to Shakespeare—to “King Lear” in particular, featuring extended monologues by Cordelia and the Fool. (Historically, Cordelia and the Fool could be played by the same actor, and the two truthtellers appear to merge when Lear mourns his daughter at the end of the play, declaring, “My poor fool is hanged.”) These monologues are interspersed with short lyrics in what initially seems to be the poet’s own voice. But the distinction doesn’t hold. From the first, Prikryl mixes her life story into her characters’ speeches, while the autobiographical lyrics begin to feel like dramatic monologues in disguise. In the poem “Cliff Notes,” Cordelia declares, “Backstage I’m scribbling lyric poems / to prove there is a place where I can be.”
The mingling of voices works best when the reader is unsure whether it’s Prikryl or Cordelia speaking, and when they seem to speak together. Imagine that “Chorus” is spoken by Cordelia. Then “the others” would be her monstrous older sisters. Remember how the play starts: Goneril and Regan flatter Lear when he demands that they profess their love for him in exchange for a piece of Britain, whereas Cordelia, refusing the transaction, keeps meaning to herself. “What would I do without them,” the poem ends. If this is Cordelia talking, it is an admission that her strict truth depends on her sisters’ gross blandishments. If we hear it as Prikryl speaking, it is a wry acknowledgment that her style, for all its brio and individuality, is compelled by the poetic clichés she hates and, in that way, owes something to them.
In our era of No Kings rallies, the contemporary political relevance of a mad ruler demanding public displays of fealty is so obvious that Prikryl doesn’t need to press the point very hard. Fathers are important in “The Channel,” but Prikryl is less interested in Lear than in Cordelia, the banished favorite, who is known as much for what she doesn’t say as for what she does. She’s something of a missing character in “King Lear”—“an aperture in the story,” as Prikryl puts it. When Lear disowns her, the King of France accepts Cordelia as his wife and takes her back to his homeland. She is offstage for much of the play, returning in the fourth act at the head of a French military expedition to rescue her father and restore his rights. These absences give Prikryl room to imagine what Shakespeare leaves unwritten. With titles like “Dover Calais” and “Calais Dover,” Prikryl’s monologues follow Cordelia back and forth across the English Channel, folding the poet’s own journeys into Cordelia’s. In “Calais Dover,” an army approaches England on a passenger ferry “circa 1992.” “Anachronism makes all this possible,” the speaker observes.
Prikryl, the executive editor of The New York Review of Books (where I’ve published essays), was born Jana Přikrylová in Czechoslovakia in 1975. Five years later, her parents fled the Communist state with her and her older brother. The family moved first to Austria and then to Canada. This period was “baffling” to the child, as Prikryl has described it. When her parents told her that they would be going to a new country, she asked, “What is a country?” In “The Channel,” the cognitive and emotional challenge of crossing borders is captured by Cordelia falling into the English Channel—a slapstick flourish that Prikryl adds to the source text. But Cordelia is not alone in the cold water:
Imagining this scene, Prikryl recalls an indelible image from the refugee crisis in Europe: “The two-year-old / left face-down on a beach nine years ago / came up for me.” The border is a zone of peril and potential death, but also a space of personal transformation. Prikryl says that crossing a border into a new life takes “a special kind / of willing. Assertion without basis / in history, sort of like a person.” Leaving one country for another requires an embrace of a life you cannot know in advance. Something similar happens when Prikryl speaks as Cordelia or the Fool. When she takes on another voice, who she is, how she speaks, and what she means change with the crossing.
Prikryl’s early dislocations made language feel as fungible to her as national identity. In Austria, German replaced Czech; in Canada, English replaced German. Those shifts may help explain her relish for the oddities and varieties of English. The new collection combines Elizabethan locutions with scientific terms like “siliceous ooze,” “vuggy leavings,” and “coccolithophores,” and sprinkles in French and Czech. “Haiku” is a seven-line poem written entirely in Czech. You can run its unfamiliar letter combinations and diacritical marks through Google Translate, but that’s not the point of the prank. Prikryl wants us to confront the raw-material strangeness of language. For a moment, you’re as baffled as a five-year-old who has just switched countries.
In “The Knots,” one of Cordelia’s monologues, Prikryl narrates a visit to her father. Dementia has made Czech more available to him than the English he has spoken fluently for decades. As words fail him, “what’s left is tone / a style, the substance that composes him / unmellowed in the light.” The juxtaposition of Prikryl’s family with Cordelia’s reveals the overlap of tragedy, fairy tale, and soap opera. Some memories are warm, almost cozy, as when Prikryl recalls, “So much television / as a family, I loved all kinds / through their eyes, facing the same way.” But she hardly idealizes her family history. Another poem asks whether her grandparents were “true / and hurt or never all that nice.” Its title, “Some Extra,” alludes to Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” which begins, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
“Letter Home,” which follows “Some Extra,” starts by calling out to Prikryl’s “brother never far, my only / ever nickname did he nick from where”—someone who knows her intimately and gets how she speaks. Midway through, Prikryl’s “I” gives way to her brother’s. In the book’s acknowledgments, she explains that “more than half the lines” in the poem “are drawn from letters that my brother, Voyta, sent me in the early 1990s,” making this another experiment in dramatic monologue. By taking on her brother’s voice, she reaches out to him and, through him, to her younger self.
Prikryl’s first collection of poems, “The After Party” (2016), was dedicated to Voyta, who died in a car accident in 1995. He reappears in “On Seeing the French Alps from a Distance,” the final poem in “The Channel.” That poem’s tension comes from the simple fact that night is approaching. The “Small Hours,” as another poem is titled, are the hours after midnight when, if we can’t sleep, we’re alone with our thoughts and the voices in our heads. Prikryl’s Cordelia suffers from insomnia. The night is, you might say, another channel that she must cross. Outside her window, Prikryl sees “mountains folded up like dioramas.” It’s beautiful “while the summit glows majestic,” but the sunset is too much of a cliché to be consoling. It will be dark soon, and Prikryl will be alone.
At midnight, “disarmed” by the view, Prikryl drops the device of Shakespearean monologue and reckons, “I might /be personal.” In truth, she has been personal all along, but, until now, she has been defended by various ruses and loose ends. She indulges a fantasy of communicating with someone resembling her brother: “We liaise, distant energies / exchange.” A “channel” opens, through which she can reach out and even
Prikryl initially describes the encounter at a distance: “A passerby notices her brother,” imagined as “always older, kinder, with a glamour / fled these thirty years.” Of course, the passerby isn’t him. The “I” returns with the shock: “I turned away at the first hint / of recognition,” feeling “petrified as when / the cable car stops halfway up and swings,” like one of her incomplete sentences, left up in the air. Is the intense intimacy she had with her brother, then, impossible to establish with the reader of the poem? No. This time, Prikryl has the words she needs. It was “as if he were the one”—not her, or not only her—“who saw the mountain in the small hours.” And you know exactly what she means. ♦