Einstein Fledermaus, Marc Vincenz
SurVision Books, 2021 €9.50
S = EL2
As interesting as the poet’s philosophical musings and explorations of Johann Strauss’s operetta are, it is neither these, nor the way the post-Newtonian world of the operetta’s protagonist (von Eisenstein) and the physics of Albert Einstein are portrayed here, that fascinate me most. It is the animals going about their daily business, unconcerned with scores, librettos, performances, universal laws, relativity or humans.
The first creature that gently but firmly asked me to consider her as a metaphor was a racoon who ‘comes into the picture with all her whiskers; she stirs beneath the trees like she’s making soup.’ (‘Liquefaction’) Then, when I started reading more attentively, I discovered ‘Ducks and geese / set off everywhere’ (‘Oil of Sanctification’). As the poem ends, they are beginning their journey.
And at the end of ‘Undying Love Tentacles’
A viper slithers through tall grass.
[ ... ]
Out in the ocean, birds, whales and turtles migrate,
give birth, until they drift into sleep.
The racoon stayed with me through every poem and her equanimity and supremacy were only challenged, albeit briefly, by the image of the jelly fish in ‘An Undoing; or, At Three a.m. in the Pharmacy in a Big City on the Ocean’:
Three dollars for a gallon and two more
cents for a glazed donut. Eat it in
the moonshine, under the pines,
on the park benches. See how
the ferns bow, watch the puffed-up
plastic bags rise to the light like jellyfish, and listen
to the incessant clamouring and chittering
of all those damn squirrels and crickets.
Again, this poem ends with creatures going about their own lives and making no discernible judgement on human behaviour: creative, scientific or otherwise. Not even on the English in ‘Towards the Holy Land’ (a prose poem) who:
say they came to this place to write history, not for the jackals or the foxes, not for the mangy lions and their filigree of weeds
And at the end of ‘An Offshoot’:
Somewhere in the ocean
the eels are lost,
turning into seaweed.
Could Einstein have written an equation for that? Can anyone?
Sue Butler
The lure of a title
The starting point for this pamphlet — and its intriguing title — comes from playing with words and listening to where the connections might go. Marc Vicenz builds on overlapping names: those of Albert Einstein (mathematician and physicist) and the near-match with Gabriel von Eisenstein (Viennese man-about-town and protagonist of Die Fledermaus, the operetta by Johann Strauss).
The title of the publication works like a magnet. In a bookshop I’d be drawn to any book with this title, if only out of curiosity. What is the connection?
There’s another nagging question, too. How much background knowledge of Einstein (the man plus his work) and the operetta does the general reader need in order to read these poems?
The Contents page shows the poems divided into three ‘Acts’ — ‘Einstein’s Apartment’, ‘A summer house in the Villa Orlofsky’ and ‘In the prison offices of Warden Frank’ — plus a ‘Dénouement.’ The poems within each section don’t seem to have much connection to these headings. I’m happy to set the headings aside and concentrate instead on how words play out within the poems.
In a mix of prose poem and blank verse lyric, Vincenz sketches links between varying forms of desire and longing, stasis and movement. In ‘A Short Meditation on Birdsong’ (from Act 1), for example, exploring how models of creation ‘were concerned/ with meaning and purpose’, he writes
All the models
of creation are metaphors; all those waves
sweeping space trying to find a melody,
all those words simply a place to put your harvest
Is this a way to bring Einstein’s theories about instability into the circus of poetry? The ultimately unknowable meaning of birdsong makes a helpful metaphor for the shifting nature of reality that is the primary connection between these poems.
‘Dénouement’ closes the pamphlet with an image of migration —
Out in the ocean, birds, whales and turtles migrate,
give birth, until they drift into sleep.
Falling stars flare on the river.
This feels a long way from Einstein and Strauss. Perhaps, after all, the title is only a magnet.