Degrees of Romance
Degrees of Romance, by Peter Krumbach. Denver, Colorado: Elixir Press, 2024. 74 pp. $17 (paperback)
Peter Krumbach’s book of prose poems, already adorned with the Antivenom Poetry Award from Denver’s Elixir Press, sits at the axis of two poles—Czechoslovakia and surrealism. Krumbach left Czechoslovakia long ago and has lived in Southern California for 25 years, but he was born in Brno and stayed long enough to earn a degree in Visual Arts. I’m no expert but have always felt something distinctively earthy, unpretentious, also amorous and tender, self-possessed not self-obsessed in Czech Culture. Perhaps many viewings of Closely Watched Trains have skewed my judgment, yet certainly a sensibility unlike other national stereotypes—French self-dramatization for example—is perceptible.
Which brings us to surrealism. Hesitant to tackle that greased pig, I will just say that all three back page blurbs for Degrees of Romance use the term to describe these pieces. Lawrence Raab writes, “The most effective kind of surrealism—this kind—puzzles and disorients us…” And Czechoslovakia has a surrealist tradition-- “In March 1935 André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Paul Eluard left their usual Parisian haunts to visit Prague... They were invited there by the newly-formed Czech surrealist group, headed by the visual artist Karel Teige, and the poet Vitěszslav Nezval.” Breton gave talks and called Prague “the magic capital of old Europe.” This was not just a social call. The French wanted to somehow remain communists and surrealists at the same time and hoped an alliance with the Czechs could bolster that project; it didn’t work. Stalin grew cool towards modernism. In June, Breton had a fist fight with Ehrenburg who had linked Surrealism to “pederasty.” By 1936 Shostakovich would be denounced for Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and an apparatchik would block Prokofiev’s gigantic Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, asking the composer "Just what do you think you're doing, Sergey Sergeyevich, taking texts that belong to the people and setting them to such incomprehensible music?"[108]
Does Krumbach descend from Czech surrealism? Nothing in Degrees of Romance points that way. Asked for influences he names Mark Strand, Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Edson, Derek Walcott etc. Still something funky and mischievous in his work, a subtle whiff of the Good Soldier Schweik makes me think the acorn doesn’t fall too far from the branch. Whether Krumbach is a fellow traveler of the “Pop Surrealist” movement which once figured in the LA art world, I can neither confirm nor deny.
Make no mistake, writing surrealist prose poems, like other get-rich-quick schemes, is harder than it looks. “I try, with various degrees of success, to follow the logic of the unconscious,” says Krumbach. What a modest, simple explanation of a path as challenging as a mythological quest. How do we know when a poet has found the path? No answer, a sense of effortless movement? “Following the logic of the unconscious" creates a fruitful tension with another Krumbach quality--he enjoys scenes and situations. A scene is set, a narrative put in motion, then the reader follows as the piece may spin off into…anywhere, or return to the theme after what the Germans call wanderjahre. Sometimes the piece is simply an anecdote or vignette. “For My Wife’s Second Cousin Who Came to Visit for a Week and Still Sleeps in Our Guestroom” could be a bit of open mike schtick at a comedy club. The surrealism comes from the absurdity and dislocation native to comedy.
Another anecdote concerns a visit to a taxidermist neighbor. The speaker and his wife inquire into having themselves stuffed like a bear. Quietly funny: “for a neighbor I could probably knock something off the price.” The text is syntactic, no big leaps. Still the entire matter is funny, touching, and quite surreal in itself.
Even when there’s no anecdote or social setting, the speaker is clear and present. Even when images follow an unmarked trail, the voice is clear and present. If we look at a more traditional surrealist like Eluard, the voice is high, elegant, distant: “In one corner agile incest/Turns round the virginity of a little dress/In one corner sky released/leaves balls of white on the spines of storm.” With Krumbach, you always feel like you’re sitting at his kitchen table.
Am I saying Krumbach is too light? No, that’s just how he rolls. But the original surrealists achieved gravity by stationing, at the entrance to their fortress, two fierce lions—Marx and Freud, neither one at present the pathfinding sage he once seemed to be. Poetry is not made of ideas; it is made of words of course, but a theory, a complex of ideas, often seems to hover above a new voice. Maybe it just gives professors something to talk about—not always a good thing.
Krumbach does refer to the "unconscious" in a generic way. I wonder what he means by it? He doesn’t seem to see it as a seething magma whose occasional eruptions disturb the complacency of bourgeois life though bourgeois life in Southern California is not the starched collar, tight-ass world the surrealists and those who rode with them rejected—unless you are homeless.
Although I said Krumbach has a clear and present voice, he is also quite interested in how other creatures see the world. This is not a contradiction—his clear and present voice continues when he adopts another POV. "Birds Don’t Understand Us," begins when a woman on a park bench finds a second head inside her husband and begins pulling out things such as (“straining,”) his mother. A conventional metaphor, but then the POV of a Mississippi Kite gets our attention. Its consciousness is physical sensation—“little orgasms rippling the feathers”—and feeding its young. This is where surrealism rears its hoary head for we are seeing a creature set in the physical world and obeying its laws, watching someone pull objects from a human head. Quite reasonably, the kite makes no sense of this scene from married life, catches a column of warm air and takes flight, shrieking. This is an interesting play with surrealism: Krumbach begins with a witty gambit in the language of traditional literary surrealism, a bit like Prevert. (“I put my cap in the cage/ and went out with the bird on my head.”) But then Juxtaposes that with a creature from the “natural” world, a shrieking predator whose inner eye sees blind nestlings receive lizards and toads vomited into their mouths—a much more bizarre event. And of course juxtaposition of unrelated images is a classic surrealist technique, creating disorientation and alienation. No one could accuse Krumbach of sensationalizing; according to my sources, the Mississippi Kite has been known to “dive bomb” humans in public parks.
I have only skimmed the surface of Degrees of Romance. Many other pieces deserve reading and reflection. They are funny and fluent—“true ease in writing comes from art, not chance,/as those move easiest who have learned to dance.”
— Lem Coley is a retired professor of literature who lives on Long Island. He frequently reviews poetry books for The Manhattan Review.
