Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive » One Poem Review: Last Surviving Pencil by Arlene Ang

Aug

2009

One Poem Review: Last Surviving Pencil by Arlene Ang

Posted on 15:52, August 9th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

: Image by Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr

How would the last surviving pencil be regarded? Would anyone know how to use it? In The first line of Arlene Ang‘s “last surviving pencil” in Origami Condom 14 refers to it as a riddle and then places it in the context of yellow objects, even if we cannot quite identify those objects in the world outside the poem: “the book of cheeses / the claustrophobic yellow behind the ear”. In this way, the first stanza defamiliarizes both the (likely No. 2) pencil and the associative process by which we make sense of unfamiliar things (especially those from other cultures and other times).

This defamiliarization continues in the second stanza where yellow serves as a pivot. The first line of the couplet “in the horizon” prepares the reader to expect the yellow light of sunset or sunrise. Instead of seeing the sun appear or disappear, however, something that should take much longer to move emerges and from an unexpected place: “a mountain gushes from a skirt slit”.

The woman thus introduced goes on to “slip / on the eraser head” and have “her fingers swarm with paper cuts”. To me this suggests the occasional invisibility of women, our erasure from grand narratives of history; we slip away on eraser heads. The paper cuts suggest the thousand small ways in which sexism digs into a woman everyday. The power of Ang‘s images here, however, lies in their openness to multiple interpretations. There are many ways to fall over an eraser and many small wounds that sting.

From the woman, the poem moves on to a laptop (the reason why all other pencils have died?) and a kleptomaniac whose pocket has filled with so many identities that each one is empty. S/he is classified all at once as

soup
animal
rock

three categories which share only one with the more familiar set of animal, vegetable, mineral. It is as if one created too many personae on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to believe in one “true” identity.

These empty identities, these “zeroes” add up, like all zeroes to nothing or

to a generation
to a suicide note that says—

turn to page 51
if you’re ready for extinction

This reminds me of choose-your-own-adventure books, a series of books in which the protagonist, being the reader with a slightly different background, lacks an entirely stable identity. The reader, in taking on that background, also temporarily sheds much of their identity. (In both respects, these books make explicit the process of reader identification so common in reading.) Given the multiple paths possible in such books, there are also multiple endings. Thus does this poem of defamiliarization end with an end (there are few more conclusive with death) that is not certain—that is, like the identity thief’s identity—empty.