Margaret Wappler

Two years ago, Simone Muench sent away a collection of her poems to Helicon Nine Press for their annual Marianne Moore Poetry Prize contest. She promptly forgot about it. "You have to forget about them, or else you'll be waiting by the mailbox. Such is the life of the writer."

About a year later, Muench received the call that she had won the Moore Poetry Prize -- a respectable chunk of change ($1000), and publication of her first collection of poetry, "The Air Lost in Breathing." When asked to sum up some of the defining traits of her book, Muench points out its accessibility.

Most of us think of TV, magazines and other versions of mass media as accessible. But certainly not poetry. By some accounts, poetry is a whirling dervish of expression, elusive to catch and often lobbing albatrosses of crusty academia and near-extinct adjectives. That said, it should also be noted that for many, poetry has the power to quicken the heartbeat, goose-bump the skin and enrapture the mind.

As Moore Poetry Prize's judge Charlie Smith puts it, "The Air Lost in Breathing" encompasses "sass and flash, eros and sweet love -- humanness -- the awful fall into the heart that takes us down into our deep being." So while it may be accessible, "The Air Lost in Breathing" doesn't include notions of simplification or pat resolutions. With elements of erotica, it achieves results of arresting the body, but only because it tantalizes and challenges the mind. How does one make erotica function as complex and not individually based, while at the same time steering clear of the common pitfall of having a whole poem -- or worse, one's whole oeuvre -- defined as merely "sexual"?

One way is by navigating the tricky straits between desire and lust. Desire pokes its head in many of "Breathing"'s poems, but Muench is quick to point out that it shouldn't be mistaken for lust. "I talk a lot about desire, as opposed to the notion of lust. To me lust is one-dimensional. I consider it dismissal when my book is either [described as] "lusty" or "lust-driven." It's not about lust as it is desire, which is multi-faceted. We have desire that is sexual and sensuous, desire for transcendence, solitude, for the other, for the self. And it's not just body-based."

In one poem, "The Fix-it Man," the reader can see the manifestation of desire in wishes, tempered by accessibility, but ultimately bound by complexity. It starts out simple enough: "I want a man who can fix things:/ solder and suture the mechanical/ entrails of appliances, redeem/ beef stew from too much salt... " But later in the poem, the man gets a tougher set of expectations to fulfill: "A man with hands/ the span of a plate, but fingers so skin-/ sensitive they can shave my legs, the summits/ of knees without a nick."

"All my female friends, at the time, were single," Muench explains about the origins of the poem. "And we'd always have these 'what we want in someone' conversations. The things we'd want were always simplistic at first: We want someone who's cute and nice, smart, empathetic. But then that becomes such a stereotypical idea of what someone should be. So I like the idea of this woman [the "I" of the poem] who wanted the stereotypical things, then the sexual, but then at the same time wants beyond that. Someone that 'has hands the span of a plate,' which is obviously hyper-sexual, but then they can shave her legs. It's that small detail of tenderness."

Muench's motives behind her poems, or at least the concerns that often permeate her poetry, "The Fix-it Man" in particular, have much to do with Muench's identity as a woman, and with changing much of the way our society straightjackets what women may or may not express. "I also wrote it, because even now, sexuality is still such a double-standard. Women aren't allowed to say what they want. It seems so absurd to me, that I forget it. And I refuse to not say what I want, because somehow that makes me 'vulgar' or 'tawdry.' Just those words!" Muench laughs. "It's the twenty-first century! Why can't I talk about sex? So it was this proclamation, anthem kind of thing. But of course, I didn't think all these things as I was writing it."

It is not just in subject matter where Muench embraces traditionally shunned elements of femininity. In sort of a flip version of the designing adage, "form follows function," Muench also, though somewhat by accident, takes care to sculpt her language around the subjective point of view; traditionally a "female" construct. "I use the language I use because I want connection, I want to be encompassing. I want to avoid this starch, intellectual theoretical language, which isn't necessarily male, but I associate it with male, that sort of objectivity. I hate doing this in a way, because this is what society so often does; compartmentalizing males as objective and females as subjective. I think we both get tangled up in that... I prefer being less objective and making that space less instead of greater between the writer and the reader. That's all tied up into what I see as my accessibility."

Thankfully, one of the hallmarks of a good book is present here, in that you can't see, so to speak, the woman behind the curtain, pulling on levers here and there to chuck out political statements or even up some sort of feminism-versus-patriarchy scorecard. Muench simply expresses a collective existence that she knows, as a woman, as a young person, as a poet that frequents Wicker Park's neighborhood bars, as a human being.

"The Air Lost in Breathing"
by Simone Muench
Helicon Nine Editions, $9.95 (2000-11-30)

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