(Dan Schneider’s Complete Poetry pg 2086/3339)
That unfractured fastness suddenly seeps:
the wings without flapped, they bruited pain,
as if voguing were a talent it lacked,
for a maximum forum of disdain.
The face of the slight hides the chase within:
deific proteins surged, recombinant,
as no lips dripped over unfeathered skin,
and the crush of the cross-link was not sweet
No tether of flesh entendered itself
as the broken
woman gathers her mind
about the cygnet forming, monstrous breed,
borne of fleet action. Will the child feed,
in vivo, her need to fuck herself blind?
Or will it forget the once-disturbed pool?
If the Yeatsian Leda depicts the myth as a sort of cosmic encounter, both sublime and terrifying, the Schneiderian one brings it back down to Earth, grotesquely so, by recasting Leda within the very modern context of hookup culture. The very form of the poem is a reference to the Yeats one, with (half) rhyming quatrains for the first two stanzas, a sestet with a cleft line for the last stanza, and a question at the end, though it also positions itself as being a direct subversion by breaking the traditional form with an inconsistent rhyme scheme. Leda is characterized as a woman needing to “fuck herself blind” and the idea of rape is turned on its head by treating it like an undignified fling carried out by a promiscuous woman with agency (only hinted in the penultimate line). But this characterization isn’t even the focus of the narrative. The biological reality of the pregnancy engendered from the fling, the ‘genomica’ of the title, is the focus. Dan performs two displacements here, first subverting the victimization of Leda herself, then shifting the cosmic and sublime aspects of the myth from the sexual act to the aftermath.
From the very first stanza, the ugliness of the sexual act is emphasized. We get an image of an “unfractured fastness” that “seeps” (the phrasing reminds me of Hart Crane’s ‘unfractioned idiom’). Dan directly plays off Yeats’ first line which is also a ‘sudden’ hanging action whose details are further colored in after a colon (“A sudden blow:”) Compared to Yeats, the action is even more mysterious and multiplicitous, as the ‘fastness’ is a quality turned into noun, treated like a material substance that can ‘seep’, and the determiner ‘that’ hangs it in the air as if describing a specific yet unspecified process occurring from without. But we get the idea of something whole, experienced as a ‘fastness’, becoming slow, sluggish, and seeping out. The basest & most basic interpretation is that it describes the sex act and ejaculation directly, how the intensity of the sexual act can transform into disgust after orgasm. It could also reflect the woman’s psychological state, or any sort of biological process. On a more abstract level, one senses a sort of decline from a state of becoming. Thus we see how Dan betters Yeats’ technique, as Yeats’ ‘blow’ more neatly attaches to the rape alone while Dan’s ‘fastness’ springs off into other possibilities. The rest of the stanza fills in the image of the swan, similarly fragmented like the Yeats sonnet, but even more undignified and enigmatic (‘swan’ isn’t even mentioned directly in title or body, only hinted at through ‘wings flapped’, ‘unfeathered’, ‘cygnet’). The act ‘bruits (spreads) pain’, and the choice of ‘bruit’ just sounds more, well, brutal, than any alternative. The swan’s wings are described with awkward motions that invokes a bad dancer being shamed at a drag-queen ball by a disdainful audience (voguing explained here): “as if voguing were a talent it lacked/for a maximum forum of disdain” – the pop cultural reference obliterates the mythic context, though even without the knowledge of the reference we can understand that what is being described is more vulgar than sublime. Even the music of the stanza (and the poem as a whole) is purposefully grotesque, avoiding euphonious phonetics with a lot of rough ‘r’ and ‘g’ consonances; the poem freely dips into the lexicon of grandiose myth, jargony multisyllabic biological terms, American pop-culture, and even vulgarity (through the well placed ‘fuck’) to achieve its effects.
The second stanza describes the impregnation caused by the sex act, even while continuing the debasement of the act: “the face of the slight hides the chase within” – “the slight” here can refer to the act being like an insult, or refer to the woman (‘the slight’ read as an adjectival noun ‘the slight one’, ‘one who is small’, possibly her view of her own status, or judged by the narrator) – the “chase within”, perhaps the impregnation (sperm chasing egg), is described in divine terms, “deific proteins”. This divinity contrasts against the further lovelessness of the sex: “no lips dripped over unfeathered skin”, “the crush of the cross-link was not sweet”. Simultaneously, it could also be paralleling the child’s own reality, who will likely be unkissed, and whose birth will likely not be ‘sweet’.
The final stanza recapitulates the various themes, focusing on the woman broken in the aftermath of her own actions (beautifully philosophic description of the woman ‘gathering her mind’ around the child, as if attempting to reclaim pieces of herself or being conscious of what she has just done), and how the child, the ‘cygnet’ of ‘monstrous breed’, might choose to live. “No tether of flesh entendered itself” – the act of sex provided the woman no tenderness, or, if ‘tether’ is interpreted in terms of family bonds, the bond between mother and child will also likely not be tender (note the varied meanings, psychic, genetic, familial, ‘broken’ can link to as the enjambment allows it to be read in reference to the tethering rather than just an adjective describing the woman). The monstrousness of the child invokes the mythic roots of half-animal, half-human children born in divine consummation, yet contextually we know this is more the mother’s view of the child than the actual reality (incidentally, ‘borne’ allows for more meanings than just birth, a sneaky pun; ‘fleet’ may also be punnable since it can uncommonly refer to aircraft). The last two questioning sentences ask of the child – will it merely be a sort of sacrifice for the mother (either psychically or physically, perhaps through abortion/adoption), “feed, in vivo, her need to fuck herself blind” – or will it transcend its station and “forget the once-disturbed pool”: the mother reinterpreted as a mere pool, a biological soup for the formation of the child (the archetypal mother = water symbology subverted). Given autobiographical knowledge of Dan as adoptee, the poem could have been written with himself in mind, but its multiplicities are wide enough to apply to anyone.
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