Madeleine Cravens’ debut Pleasure Principle is a thin volume, perfect it seemed to me in the final weeks of summer to slide into a pocket or bag. The collection suspends itself in humid memory and thick air. Heady images crackle with electricity or desire as memories become plot, and plot maps onto the present. In its title poem, Pleasure Principle asks “Can there be a story where a character wants nothing?” (10). Perhaps, Cravens seems to say, not.
Refracted by temporal and physical distance, perception becomes the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell to others. Pleasure Principle tenders geography, topography as a new way to understand relation—to place, self, family and lovers. Plot is a term of both narrative and cartography. Cravens’ poems orient themselves through physical gate posts and recurring figures. In lucid and precise poems, the past, its grievances, pleasures, and failures, are transformed to narrative in an impulse of meaning-making. People become characters, ensconced in layers of mediation. As she notes in “If Any Plot Closes,” “love with the imposition of narrative” becomes romance (54). As readers, we wade into unknown waters, just as Cravens’ speaker and projections do: “My character wades / waist-deep in the bay waiting for a revelation” (8). Plot trades culpability for subsequence. Action rises. Conflict climaxes. Melancholic longing is a fact of the world. Poems are detached and sensuous—not of the body, but of the body’s perception and subsequent retelling.
The epistolary poems, haunted by a recurrent, if changing, “you,” are cast as private correspondence made public, letters that must travel physical distance to their reader. Straddling diaristic and storytelling modes, letters intertwine confession and personal account. In a 2023 essay, “Queer Correspondence: On the Radical Potential of Epistolary Poetry” penned for LitHub, Cravens argues epistolary poems, at once private and public, bridge “a gap” between speaker/writer and addressee (LitHub). Pleasure Principle reaches out to its addressees. A removed voice admits, “[a]t heart, I wanted to be possessed” (47). As public and private are collapsed, so are fear and pleasure—two sides of the same sublime coin.
Throughout much of the book, Cravens threads her needle and stabs at the page in musical yet narrative poems. The collection’s opening poem “Leaving” set different expectations for me on first read. Rhyme and anaphora form a spell-like tone, as desire is tallied and defined through negation: “Not the pleasure of lovers but the pleasure of letters” (xiii). Driven by anapestic trimeter and momentum-gathering anaphora, the poem’s incantatory register is not returned to in Craven’s other work. I am left to read the opening as outlier, red herring, one-off or misdirection. A reader’s double take is perhaps addressed on the next page. “I want to know how things will end. I’ve heard of the beginning” begins “Object Permanence” (3). The poem spins like a child’s game of Marco Polo: “The end’s already in motion, the end was starting this whole / time and today Brooklyn is a beautiful, devastating autumn. / Everyone I love is dancing in the plaza. A band plays below” (3). The lines evoke a fable setting, a harvest feast superimposed on modern metropolitan. The speaker observes the scene from above, as if from a private box or balcony seat.
A later poem, “The Photographer,” sets a similar tableau:
We sat in the narrow plaza filled
with metal tables by the construction site.
…
You think it’s about honesty, you said,
but it’s not, it’s about staging,
also light. Behind you, two floors up,
I could see into my room. The little vases
on the windowsill looked pathetic, girlish,
so carefully arranged. (48)
Here the speaker, seated with the collection’s ubiquitous “you,” is below a secluded room “two floors up” (48). She is in the plaza, the public arena, visible, treading the boards, conscious now of her youth and artifice. Staging a narrative requires blocking. Nearly all of the poems of Pleasure Principle appear as one strophe of text, a block on the page, a block of a city. In Craven’s writing, landscape elides story. People and memory are known not through setting but in setting.
“Desire Lines,” a long poem forming the book’s center, sets its scene in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Fragmented across twenty-two sections, the poem prompts us to read between the lines, to cut across the narrative or landscape to get exactly where we want to go. Desire lines, as Cravens marks in the collections notes section, speak to the practice of foot traffic creating informal paths and shortcuts. The poem itself charts divergence from pre-set or hegemonic routes: coming-of-age, clandestine desire, and the dissolution of a parents’ marriage. I’m struck by the declarative sentences that dominate the poem, “I live above a vet. / You live above a florist” (21), “The arch meets the plaza. The plaza feeds / into the park” (24), “I could be shaped, I could be changed, / I could see a future and be denied it—” (40). The independent, nearly paratactic, structure of “Desire Lines” conjures a sustained sense of loneliness. I was tempted to call this isometric syntax, coming from the Greek isos “equal” and –metria “measuring.” Isometric also comes with a physiological denotation, muscles’ static contraction. So resisting movement to maintain strength. The poem and its speaker are reluctant to change and clamoring for it. We bask in the tension of inertia.
Madeleine Cravens is a poet of deft restraint. In “Point Reyes,” interpersonal discord is brought to cataclysmic scale:
The day took hours to end. You look like me,
my father said quietly. We stood by the San Andreas Fault.
Soon, the plates would shift, topping multiple
cities. But the rift wasn’t visible; a bay
covered the fissure. We rested our arms
on the railing as the sky debased itself. (16)
The threat of the San Andreas Fault becomes metonym for the relationship between father and daughter. Euphemism reigns. The poem tilts its head towards future calamity. Despair, blame, guilt and whatever else lurks beneath the composed poems surface remains deeply buried. What remains visible, the sky, is doing something humiliating, degrading, “debased” (16). We are meant to avert our gaze. As the poem closes, a sunset reflected on water is “a lesser version, a replica” (16). The father’s observation, “[y]ou look like me,” echoes like a large, low bell (16).
Pleasure Principle is poised—at a sexual precipice, the cliff of interpersonal relationship, the end of girlhood. Mapping emotional typographies, Cravens’ matter of fact tone and unhurried pace is a balm to the frenetic energy of a city, the pressure of so many people and emotions densely packed into apartment blocks. Crystalline and restrained, Pleasure Principle deploys and questions narrative structure, luxuriating in the capacity of poetry to be complete yet unresolved. It is a delicate meditation on longing and landscape.
Works Cited
Cravens, Madeleine. Pleasure Principle. New York: Scribner, 2024. Print.
Cravens, Madeleine. “Queer Correspondence: On the Radical Potential of Epistolary Poetry.” Literary Hub, 6 Feb. 2023, https://lithub.com/queer-correspondence-on-the-radical-potential-of-epistolary-poetry/.
