Kim Addonizio
Exit Opera
W.W. Norton
Reviewer: Erica Goss
Reading Kim Addonizio is like spending time with a witty yet reckless friend, one who drinks too much, wakes up in the beds of strangers, and suffers through numerous hangovers. Despite her questionable behavior, however, this friend is a wellspring of unvarnished truths, expounding on topics ranging from climate change to zombies. Little escapes her gaze; behind her slightly tipsy demeanor lies a fierce, ever-watchful intelligence.
Opera, with its dramatic twists and turns, is a fitting simile for Exit Opera, Addonizio’s latest collection of poetry. “Exit Opera,” the book’s opening poem, juxtaposes scenes from Act III of Wagner’s Die Walküre against the threat of forest fire: “The shieldmaiden waits in the wings. The operagoers wait, shifting in their seats. / Out in the forest the ember waits in its cigarette to make its black mark on the world.” Tension rises; the ember “wants to show / it can murder more trees than the last bitter fire.” The audience, unaware of the threat in the woods, “must wait for what feels like eons for Brünnhilde to deliver her aria as she throws herself / on the funeral pyre & everything goes up in flames.”
“Exit Opera,” not content to leave the reader teetering between Die Walküre’s staged fire and the actual inferno in the woods, delves into the emotional toll of climate change, a topic too few of us have yet to fully acknowledge. Addonizio warns, “Once you escape a wildfire, / leaving everything behind, a little void appears beneath your heart & lodges in your ribs.” The fire is both metaphoric and literal; its implications return in “Existential Voyage:”
Maybe you’ll understand this life when you slam
your fist into a cloud. When you’re lashed to the mast
listening to the songs of space aliens
trying to dash you on the rocks of hermeneutic texts.
But probably not.
Doomed to repeat history, we humans distract ourselves with the pleasures of the flesh: “Let’s eat too much and drink / our faces off; anything else is a waste of time.” The poem swings from the futility of prayer: “Who do you think is listening,” to hopelessness: “Camus suggested suicide was rational,” to the reminder that “neither despair nor a dearth of taxis can last.” Despite the odds stacked against us, the poem instructs us to surrender to blind trust: “When you lose sight of the shore, / the sea will take you where you need to go.”
Balanced between the illogical and the pragmatic, “Some of the Questions to Consider” prompts us to let go of our expectations. “Is it better to offer your heart to the wolf / or wait for the wolf to tear it out of you?” Addonizio asks, advising that “It is best to disappear into one’s work. / Best to be ceaselessly drunk, Baudelaire suggested.” Despite this counsel, the poem stays relentlessly sober:
We’ll all float in the same solution.
Would you like to trade some molecules with me?
Better to sketch a few atoms than fire neurons at them
to create a chain reaction.
Faith is one of the questions Addonizio considers in this book, starting with the mawkish trappings of religion she finds in a souvenir shop. From “skinny wooden crucified Christs” to “crystals, colonics, when you die you get virgins or your very own planet / where you can spin for eternity in your celestial underpants,” the poem “In Assisi” compares the things we beg for from the divine, i.e., a miracle to “tear apart the lambs of my addictions” to what we really long for:
I know my soul is small, it just wants a decent hotel room
& the man who lies down to sleep so trustingly beside me
to open his eyes & love me
Charity gets a cynical spin in her comparison of St. Francis to a street person “dressed in a mended sack & old worn sandals / If you saw him in Berkeley you might cross the street to avoid him.” That ragged man might just be a saint, however; as Addonizio writes, “I guess they figured out that the job of a saint is to suffer as horribly as possible.”
Addonizio continues her investigation of faith in “According to the Buddhists,” this time focusing on suffering, detachment, and impermanence. When she tries to find the connection between a precariously balanced bottle of Patrón Silver tequila, two elderly cats, and a scene from an old movie, she comes up empty: “I think maybe I’ve got it backward, though, or just don’t understand the point / I guess it’s okay that everything gets broken, so we can just … relax … & meditate.”
As many eventually discover, Buddhism proves difficult to engage in. “I’ve never been able to meditate, mostly I drink / to feel calmer & stop thinking so much about death & impermanence.” It’s nearly impossible to stop the cycle of desire, especially for someone deeply grounded in the material world: “According to the Buddhists, wanting is the cause of suffering so it’s best to just … give up … & not mind”—difficult to imagine a less likely scenario for this poet.
More likely is the scene Addonizio sets in “Beatitude,” a dive bar where the presumably meek and poor in spirit seek forgiveness: “dimlight, darklight, the lost & half-assed / more denizens than citizens who cast // their prayers high into sagging nets / tangled with lacy fish, blessed // by no one.” In this hypothetical bar, people who care too much gather, their “hunger // assuaged by peanuts & pork skins.”
Departing from the rough benevolence of “Beatitude,” Addonizio asks us to consider the consequences of exposure to violence, using the TV series, The Walking Dead, as an example (“Compassion Problem”). “By season two,” she writes, “I’ve almost grown immune / to corpses staggering along a road.” The fact that consuming violent images as a form of entertainment desensitizes the viewer is far worse than what is actually shown: “you have to shoot / between their eyes or sink an axe into a skull to kill / the brain.” Once those images caused horror, but now they elicit a shrug— “who’d want to see that on their way to get coffee.”
Like a rum cake that gets you drunk after one slice, Exit Opera is strong and bitter and irresistible. It consecrates the ragged man on the street and beatifies the afternoon drinkers at the corner dive bar. Over and over, it repeats the question what does it mean to be alive? As Addonizio writes in “Aria di Sorbetto,” “if you ask / me to love this world yes, oh yes, / I will.”
