Abstract:
The poems of Investigations in the Funhouse represent a kind of movement through outrage. The poems sit at the convergence of the personal and the national interest story, at the rise of anti-intellectual fervor and ultra-conservative populism. They move between ravings and reverie through which we come to know the various politics of our speaker. The resulting structure is designed to create the sense of a descent into madness. Counterpoised against the irreverent, if callous, lyrics of the rest of the book, the "investigation with letter x" and "the funhouse" are a kind of sterile, formulaic act. They are positioned throughout the collection in order to engage with the themes of the surrounding lyrics in their own way. They are not designed to be directly conversant with the content of these lyrics, but instead function as a renegotiation of their themes. There is a latent sense of confusion in the investigations' hyper-focus on meaning. Though meaning-making is the premise, the resulting effect is miscommunication or unmeaning. Think of this in terms of cryptography and each investigation functions as a kind of cypher, a node that analyzes, and in some ways corrupts, the meaning of its attached lyrics. This lends a tangible interiority and complexity to the speaker of the poems: the disparity between the investigations and the lyrics is not a fracturing of the continuity of the speaker's thoughts or experiences but are inexact replications of the same convictions. Contradiction in voice is then a more accurate portrayal of the evolution of opinion into meaning, the personal into the national. In Investigations in the Funhouse the attempts of the speaker to make meaning, or at the very least arrive at an understanding of the personal/national interest story, are a response to the descent, from exuberance to outrage and further down, into the political, and deeper still, into the heaven of the hell of self.
