Book Review: THE INVENTION OF MONSTERS / PLAYS FOR THE THEATRE by C. Dylan Bassett
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The Invention of Monsters / Plays for the Theatre Poems by C. Dylan Bassett |
| Plays Inverse, 2014 $10.00 |
It’s a businessman’s sadness . . . it’s getting lost on purpose.
This is how I moved through C. Dylan Bassett’s collection The Invention of Monsters / Plays for the Theatre; as if I’ve chosen to walk into a corn maze, knowing it will take some time for me to crawl out. Bassett’s model is interesting and concise, but it works to keep the reader wanting more. He writes: “it’s a bad habit, wanting to understand,” and the collection follows this ideology, offering up conflicting and often recursive images.
Bassett’s work is not a play in any traditional sense (though it is divided into four separate “acts”), but rather a series of compact prose poems all entitled “[scene].” Though what he accomplishes in these short poems is, in fact, a play, told through sporadic, brief moments that begin to piece together what it means to the narrator to be “the man the man declined to be.” In this vein, the collection desperately tries to find a certain sense of identity but repeatedly comes up short. We are not left with one clearly defined hero or heroine, but rather a series of images all working to coalesce into a being. With a style that has evolved past Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, Bassett leads us through the progression of a human life while describing to us how he is doing so. As he says, “the plot does not occur in sequence but in various sampled geographies.” And so we move from images of “a boy at a certain age [who] is mistaken for a girl” to images of “the carcass of a dog left on the highway beneath whose skin another child is born.” Bassett guides us through these identities shamelessly, as if each “mask” is as legitimate as the one before it.
We see these masks in segments, all the while being told that certain information is not being given to us. Through his constant manipulation of mise-en-scene, Bassett works to deconstruct the stage he has built. Take, for instance, his poem which begins: “the woman, the baby, the bedroom . . . in certain social settings, one defers casually to ready-made hierarchies.” He allows us brief glimpses into what one would expect in a theater and then casually plunges us deeper, showing us the bones of the stage rather than the stage itself. Bassett says that “one would like to know the context of this story,” and he’s right. But in this admission he shows us how deftly he is able to withhold information, forcing us to look harder. And this is where the genius of the work begins to come through. Each poem works to coalesce into one cogent piece, much like the individual is made up of scattered, often conflicting parts.
In the final poem of his collection, Bassett tells us that “totally self-contained is what we call beautiful,” and it is in this pursuit of self-containment that he both succeeds and fails. Bassett does not pretend to leave us with a perfect image of a being or situation, but rather he openly leaves us a collection of images that we must puzzle together. His in an incomprehensible work that begs time and again to be understood. Overtly sexual with no room for the pornographic, corporeal with an eye on the mechanical, Bassett’s often self-referencing collection is one we should look to in an effort to define contemporary poetry.