Body Clock

by Eleni Sikelianos

Lauded by Michael Ondaatje as an “unforgettable” writer and praised by The Washington Post for her ability to capture “the subtlest shades of the emotional palette,” Eleni Sikelianos now charts the curvature of growth and time, encompassing the bewilderment and delight of a new parent, while mapping the shape of our troubled world. Observing that “what is alive in the body clock is also ticking,” her poems and sketches illustrate the infinite possibilities unfurling as minutes give shape to hours, the body gives shape to a child, and events give shape to history. A California native, longtime New Yorker, and world traveler, Eleni Sikelianos lives in Boulder and teaches at Denver University.

Genres: Poetry

150 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon. Sikelianos directs the creative writing program at the University of Denver.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't getting it. I wasn't liking it. The poems clumped together, shot me pissy glances. I didn't "get" it. I pushed past, deeper. I saw just barely enough light to keep walking, to keep from tripping. And then I emerged into this clearing. "Experiments with Minutes" said the sign before the tall grasses, with the latin underneath. Though trees circled me all around, a breeze came through and swished the grasses, betraying where the thistles stood tall, rigid, their purple flowered heads proud. Beyond them, I saw a creature up ahead, but I wasn't scared. This is what it said:

If we could shine a flashlight
through the edge of a minute
see the membrane's red
corpuscle, & surface
tension of a second at
the interior atmosphere of an hour
Move the flashlight out
on eternity -- possible? Not. (Duh.)

For these experiments, Elani drew circles: their start and end not lining up, the middle filled with 60 (or so) little dots. She recorded how long it took to draw them, how most of them only took ~30 seconds, how when she attempted to draw one in exactly 60 seconds, "it required me to sometimes speed up / sometimes slow down."

Time is elastic. Time breathes. Time even bleeds. We can dissect and caress and even suture time together. To some very very very small degree, we are gods.

I stared at the Roku screensaver clock with my friend Thursday night, the movie over, our words spilling out onto the couch, dribbling onto the carpet. We watched the time go by, cheered at 12:34:56, and discussed how both of us as kids shared the experience of staring at a clock to slow it down and speed it up at will. We both did it again, just to make sure the skill still existed.

Eleni's book of poetry is similar to this. She experiments with time, pushing language to explore something we experience but don't yet have the words to explain. This, in my opinion, is the highest aim of poetry, and she achieves it. But, as many other reviewers noticed, the first read through many of the poems is disorienting, alien, obscure. It's only by watching the clock hands go around and around that they make sense. Every day has two sets of twelve hours, not twenty-four. Thus Eleni's poetry begs you to sit still. In a world of spoiler alerts and shock value, this collection is staunchly nonconformist.

Yes, it's a bit dated at times. It shows its age (2008 to be specific), with the Iraqi names used for shock value and little else. But this (and her occasionally childish tone of voice) is more than excusable. Never at any point do her reflections on hours feel stale, repetitive. Every hour is new, every hour is surprising, despite, or perhaps because of our petty little plans. God laughs at them. Time scoffs at them. To some degree, what's the difference?

I've speculated before that God is merely a being who can freely move in the fourth dimension of time, whereas we're captured in the stream, pulled along to an inevitable doom. Time is embedded in our bodies, our telomeres slowly unzipping themselves in deadly flirtation with eternity, which is obviously a circle, just like time.

The line which grabbed me by the jaw and kissed me was "clods & clouds / mercify me." I had endured the beautiful line "What is this pile of / darkness in the room?," endured because I didn't underline it, probably out of some monastic asceticism; but I knew at that mercified moment I needed to desecrate the book, deflower it, write in it, underline it, make it mine, Mark it, so to speak. Its pages were already a pleasant yellowed color, the book bought used (I find I prefer being newer than that which I consume).

I pity whoever gave up on it too early. A symptom of the medium, unfortunately. Poetry operates in a world slower than our own. I'm just now realizing that's why I get such bad whiplash whenever I enter and exit the flow state too suddenly; normal, boring life, and the creative world of flow states exist in two different time zones, operate at two different speeds. Transitioning requires some degree of decompression, without which it's like stepping off a still-moving train.

Thank you Eleni for taking the time to slow down and investigate that which is beyond words and often beyond our attention spans. I can tell I will return to this time and again for inspiration.

[Sarkis Antonyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dirt is still stuck to the bone where you sailed in a mammal’s purse

Pitched shark body mailed from mother in a leather envelope

In my dream of publishing a face

The body’s velvets slide out to publish the face


O how the words in this book leap to me, they are so sharp and real.

[atito · Rating 3 out of 5]

i didn't connect with this unfortunately but it makes me happy to see it loved & lauded <3

[Natalie Villacorta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me a long time to read. The first time I was reading it, I felt so disconnected from the words—I didn’t understand how one image or idea moved to the next. The poems seemed so random, the transitions so jarring. I wanted some sort of unifying narrative, some way to follow along. Sikelianos began introducing drawings she had made, which helped some. Visualizing “time” is a cool idea. Even as subjects were repeated—the body, mothers and babies, time—I struggled to determine what Sikelianos was “saying.” So I started to read the poems out loud, which greatly helped. The sounds in the poems helped me understand the abrupt lines breaks, spacing, repetition: “she calls I/ answer swer a swerve a/ brush of air I swear a scarf/ a scarving her answer/ answer me”(108). And of course, the scientific language kept me moving forward. Every time I found a word like “quantum” or “placenta” or “hemoglobin” it was a little treat. I admired the way that Sikelianos was able to bring in scientific words, without making them distracting or changing the tone. I have a tendency to put in too many terms that people aren’t familiar with, which separates the reader from the poem. But, Sikelianos puts in just enough, usually in the form of adjectives, to create a unique tone without overloading the poetry. Almost every line was a different image or idea, which made it hard for me to follow along. I usually prefer a more narrative-style of poetry, or at least a more associative one, where ideas flow into the next.
But reading got easier once I got to “The Body Clock.” I knew that the book was written during/about Sikelianos’ pregnancy, and I had been waiting for this theme to become the central focus—before there had only been subtle references: “by June we move in perfect symmetry,” an occasional umbilical cord. I wanted more about the baby, and this is what I got. Sikelianos describes the baby: her teeth, her bald head, her shoes—how Sikelianos life has changed: “you were born & now you’ve torn our nights to shreds”(73). With a theme to cling on to, I began to connect with the text better, understanding Sikelianos' journey to capture time: “sometimes we feel the hour in which hydrogen sticks to oxygen, her its suction and situation, know surface tension at the top of the minute’s bubble”(74).
The more poems I read out loud, the more I embraced the frequent line breaks, they seemed less jarring, large spaces between words within one line, and random subject changes seemed less sudden. I think Sikelianos poetry definitely takes a couple reads—it’s not easy to dive into or immediately relate to. It requires time to appreciate the sounds and to understand how her poems move from start to finish. In order for me to enjoy the poems, I had to accept that they weren’t about one idea, one story or event, I had to let go of my ideas about what a poem should be and let myself be moved by the words. I had to stop looking for patterns, consistency of tense, and point of view. Only then, did I start to feel like I was “getting” it.
One of my favorite moments: “I’d like to pirate myself out perform surgery/on a town — lift off the roofs, stitch them back, rearranging/ streets, arteries, veins”(91).
I also really enjoyed the poem-drawings she included. It was really cool to see her editing process—how the words from the drawing left a residue on the page. The poetry-drawings were usually related to the content of the poem—a feather, seeds and stars, chromosomes. My favorite image was the “third experience with an hour” in which she took a diagram of chromosomes from a biology textbook and turned them into the legs of people, underneath scribbling ideas about how gens translate into names, faces, body parts, and disease.
This book really challenged me to expand my ideas about poetry—its content and form—and provided a great example for how to incorporate science into poetry without overdoing it. It contains a lot of beautiful, distilled moments, sincere attempts to understand the ineffable—time, the body as a clock. As difficult as it was for me to initially connect with it, I now feel that “The Body Clock” has given me a lot of ideas about how to move forward with my own work.

[Elevate Difference · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, the book chooses the reader. For me, Eleni Sikelianos’ book of poetry Body Clock falls in to this category. A large and varied collection of poems about the nature of time, presence, and inner life—both literal and figurative—combine with reflections on creative potential and destructive capacity, the authors’ free verse and imagery evoke dreamscapes which are elemental, or perhaps universal, shared in our collective unconsciousness. Many of the author’s poems reframe images of ordinary life through linking commonplace observations to more profound events, such as in the following poem:

Contenant et Contenu
(This was on a bottle of shampoo.)
The water evaporates from the glass,
the child outgrows her shoes, the wood
erodes, the paint chips, the painting fades,
the leg breaks, the war
explodes.

What is the body’s container?
From soldiers we learn about each other.
Nothing is contained.

Impressive for their sheer breadth in tone and subject, Sikelianos’ poems were a welcome escape from the literal for this reviewer. Using the intersection between her self and the environment surrounding her as her muse, the author both reflects on and experiments with the experience of time in poems and "poem-drawings”, in addition to exploring the creation occurring within her body and the world actively being created around her. Many of her poems seem to draw upon a very present contemplation of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood in all of their abstract and concrete realities, while capturing the perspectives of an individual tethered to the reality that, as creative beings, our humanity simultaneously renders us both infinite and finite.

At times both humorous and bitter, this collection functions as a letter to her progeny and a journal of the time, measured in days, events, hours, trimesters, and minutes spent in her pregnant and forever altered body, looking inward and out, summarized best in the surprisingly sweet poem “About Being Dead”: "You wouldn’t know, biscuit-hand/you’re so alive."

Review by Ruth Cameron

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was told 'You might like this book."

That might be right.

Sikelianos is able to create a somewhat dialectical relationship between time and body. Yet while these two things remain the focus she is also able to zoom in and out; this book contains the molecular and the century as topics of inquiry.

"Did any hundred years lie down and did we
Lie down quietly in sunlight Did
Any century leap windbreaks in silence
Like a lunged dog-devil
Did any century not crush
Not crash not gnash and creak
Not gnarl did any century
Not devour not mountain not
Man not amused not woman nor river nor child
thicket nor arm
No century was ever an asylum
It was never a valley never
A long deep sleep"

[Sebastian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The associative nature of these poems has the potential to scare the reader - afraid I won't understand, afraid the poetry doesn't actually mean anything - but Sikelianos leads the reader through the barbs, boils the language down to brilliant, beautiful text.

"why is midnight the hollow crux,

resting on a V - apex, ilex

why I saw it sickness unfolding

empty as an egg (cascarone)

a volcano pointing down

& up - midnight points too

back through the hours of the night &

forward to the hours of the day

Midnight is a cunt that way"

from "Doubleblind (Body Clock)"

[Blueberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book inspired me to do my own time experiments with writing. she draws little round pictures of minutes. and, I love the idea of a cosmic baby book (that's what c.d. writght calls this book on back cover. there's a feeling of epic & of new ground being broken--

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I said "oh wow" out loud to no one after to reading this one--


A RADIUS COUNTESS OF WHAT'S IT

I love it
when women eat sweet ribbon, sweet
rabbit, sweet meat, when women

are the scene
of several utopias

when the body melts back into shadow
beginning with the feet

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book of poetry I have read in months! This is a book to savor.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laser-precise and lush at the same time. Like clock, body.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why is your elbow an hour? Eva Grace already the poet. I, too, know that crabapples are delicious (bleh).

Another treasure from Mrs. Eleni.

[James Grinwis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!!!

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Eleni's mind; it's sharp yet hip and her poetry is always unexpected.

[Siel Ju · Rating 3 out of 5]

Especially liked the minute and hour drawings and dross --