Dissonance
by Kristin Dykstra
(The University of Chicago Press, 2025, 83 pp., $18.00)
For the 20th century modernists and their immediate precursors, mountains were a locus of attention and struggle where ideas and forms converged in a more perfect order and at the same time split apart, their incongruities made visible. It was by staring obsessively into the folds of Mont Sainte-Victoire that Cézanne grasped what he saw as a fundamental incompatibility between the concepts of drawing and the facts of physical form; in the same breath in which he unified his theory, reality was torn in two for the painter. Likewise, it was at a Davos sanitarium that Thomas Mann, in his bildungsroman The Magic Mountain, gathered and then split the mind of Europe.
This dual capacity is embedded in the perceptible form of the mountain: on one hand, it has a visual integrity that it projects across great distances, commanding our attention. On the other, it breaks up our sight plane, blocks our view, rives the sky. A mountain backlit by the rising or setting sun appears as an absence.
Robert Frost made his home in this negative capacity of mountains, staking out the territory with characteristic coolness in one of the pithiest topographical titles, Mountain Interval. The poems in that collection trade heavily in motifs of ellipsis and absence, embedding them in mountainous terrain, as in “OUT, OUT—,” which recounts the story of a boy losing his hand to a saw and then dying under anesthesia. It opens:
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
At the end of the poem, “those that lifted eyes” at the outset, “since they / were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” These nameless onlookers see the five mountain ranges, but they never see the boy, his injury and ensuing shock, his life or his death. The mountains eclipse him, another annihilation of the person in the long 20th century.
Kristin Dykstra’s Dissonance has deep stylistic and thematic similarities to Mountain Interval. It operates with the same understated, cool modernism and tightly controlled irony, deflating the human element by embedding it within geological space and time. Like Mountain Interval, Dissonance toys with the tensions between independence and interdependence that mark the history of Vermont and New Hampshire.
In Dykstra’s work, however, it is the motif of the foothill rather than that of the mountain that creates an ambient music of ellipsis, absence, and indeterminacy. The foothill is literally and figuratively overshadowed by the mountain. Mountains have names; foothills do not. “A view from within foothills is not a wide-angle vista—you see those from seats of power on the high ridges or along land so flat that it evokes the curvature of the earth. Within hills, you grasp land and sky in segments” (ix). This is contrasted with the “View from the F-35 fighter jet—?” (ix), a repeated motif linked, in the end notes, to the Vermont Air National Guard. Machines—drones, planes, satellites, and computers—occupy the apex of physical space in a work where the vertical axis is everywhere apparent.
Elements and Structure
According to Dykstra in an interview with the University of Chicago Press, Dissonance “might be a set of serial, drifting poems. Or, it might be just one long poem.” Whichever the case, the work is built mainly from four elements (not including the end notes): blocks of prose situated in the top third of the pages; less frequent, lineated sections running about four to seven lines, each separated from the adjacent ones by several spaces; black and white photographs overlaid with short fragments of text; and single sentences that run along the bottom of some pages, often separated from the prose blocks by a significant amount of blank space. The subject of these last is “the children” or, less often, “one child.” These elements repeat across the book’s four sections, “FIRST,” “SECOND,” “THIRD,” and “FOURTH.” Considering the four elements one by one sheds light on the logic of the modular structure of Dissonance.
The prose blocks often invoke a planar dynamic. Dykstra’s sentences scrape along surfaces, reacting to topography like the needle of a record player: “Isolated figure trots down dirt road, at the start of day, not the same day as the other days, not the same day to be seen by people to come. Dust flaps pointers at the sky” (19). It is a voice well-suited to describing work in the Biblical sense of toil (the intersection of task and soil): “If the road were an infinite surface, it wouldn’t get so easily carved. Rainwater wouldn’t cut the channels. Road crews wouldn’t fill them” (19).
The lines about the children that run along the bottom of some pages are like foothills among foothills. While the adult figures manipulate the soil with a costly expenditure of time and effort, the children engage with the land through ritual: “The children dig in the dirt at their finding place” (51). As they go about their hieratic play, the children are observed—carefully and meticulously, but remotely. The narrator’s tone is parental, but cool: “One child whimpers: words that will bring bad dreams” (53). Almost always described as a group (the preceding example is the lone exception) the children function like a Greek chorus. Confined to domestic spaces of home and curtilage, they stand outside the drama of verticality, literally below it on the page, almost like footnotes. And yet they carry the same weight, the same importance—a true counterpoint.
The lineated sections are the most abstract—literally dragged out in a way that evokes contrails, each line existing in exquisite isolation from the others:
A neighbor returned home. With assistance from hospice.
Why fog strains toward the sky.
Dissonance,
its endless ridgelines. (58)
At other times, they evoke, not contrails, but the aircraft themselves flying in formation:
Low-flying aircraft, here are we, under the jetpath of descendent furies.
Praise, we have accepted ourselves.
The foundations of our homes tremble through trajectories.
All sharp triangles, the squadron returns to its base.
Then we met out there on the road. (42)
Finally, Dykstra’s photographs—captured “during regular walks along the dirt road that forms the backbone of the whole book”—offer a pictorial complement to her highly textured language: muddy ruts, tracks in snow, and clumps of backlit woods are presented with cool directness. The text fragments imprinted across the images resonate with the text outside the frame, sometimes quite closely. On a photograph of a hill, a cloudy sky, and the tops of trees is written, “WITHIN 100 MILES OF AN EXTERNAL BORDER CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES DO NOT FULLY” (11). This picks up on other references to the Vermont/Canada border and law, including the U.S. Constitution. The images read like the prose blocks: frank, compressed in range, allowing tangles of dark and light to become the subject. Dykstra quotes photographer Jaime Permuth as saying, “Photography is an emotional response to light” (30, italics in original), and her own photographs read like a contemplative response to light as well as texture.
There is a logic to the grouping of the modular sections of the poem, but they also convey, intentionally, it seems, the sense of their having been arranged, that their order is not fully one of inevitability. Skipping around through the book is rewarding and illuminates connections between segments. To employ a musical metaphor, Dissonance is less like the anti-melodic dissonance of Arnold Schoenberg’s serialism than it is like the pleasant, modular shimmerings of Steve Reich’s minimalism; as Dykstra writes, “Ambient music but of which kind?” (72).
Person and Figure
As in Frost’s “OUT, OUT—,” human agency in Dissonance is embedded within columns of spatial reality that seem to outweigh it. Quotidian dramas exist like veins of ore in vastly larger masses of rock.
Though most of the three forms that make up the book maintain a third-person voice, Dykstra periodically employs first- and second-person constructions. At times, there are indications that the two have the same subject. Section “FIRST” opens, “It’s daybreak. Who are you?” (3). On the same page, she explains, “When I cast myself out of myself, see, it’s a separation of forms.”
After this initial introduction of first and second person lines, the poem launches into the radically removed third person that carries most of the action. It reads a bit like the clipped directions of a screenplay or a naturalist’s notes: “Mail car creeps along a dirt road, course charted. Figure inside into mailboxes, into the cost of mileage piling on the car, mileage along with the mud, …” (4). There is a tenderness, a courtesy precisely in the anonymity of “Figure” and the creeping way the line pans from car to driver, “… future running down with each delivery, stretching dinner into one next day, breakfast from one day into the next, lunch from day into day, the figure pulls the car to one side” (4).
Later, “You” and “I” merge momentarily in the interrogative, “Is there an us?”, before returning to the clipped descriptive: “Walking with an unnerved dog, one figure steps through familiar woods. Back in winter another glided slowly on skis, followed by a dog in narrow tracks” (8). The “us,” perhaps, is the duo of person and dog. Or maybe it is person A, in winter, followed by person B, in spring. The next sentences don’t really solve the dilemma: “One heartbeat follows another. If the dog doesn’t get in the way, this is order.” Does this refer to the beat of a human heart followed by a canine one? Or again, the skier and the walker? The heartbeats of those who were, those who are, and those who will come?
The next time “you” and “I” appear, it is again together, in a block about independence: “On the next hill is a little free library box nailed to a fat pole by the road. Also independent, in a neat schoolhouse shape. Not a box holding your past but still a box for your memory. I made it myself” (21, italics in original). This passage, one of the very few including “you” and “I,” begins in the dominant, fragmentary third person: “Builder of one’s own home pounds another shingle with independence, plans the next shingle with independence, gets interrupted and might come back another day to finish the job. That independence lives inside the space between the faces …” There is more than irony here; there are resonances with Vermont’s tradition of local self-governance, which is dialogical, interruptible, and can leave projects maddeningly unfinished. Still, it is funny how political aspiration, when frustrated in fundamental areas like housing, can be shunted off onto more attainable projects like a free library hutch.
There are other occasions of “you” and “I” along with a noncommittal “we” that may refer to contemporary people in general. There are also imperatives that imply a “you.”
In the foothills of Dykstra’s poem, grammatical caesurae break up any sense of character, replacing it with figuration: “figure” and “solitary figure.” It is the same kind of anonymity that we are all, to some degree, acclimated to in the internet age, but, in a topographical act, this anonymity is mapped back onto topos, place.
Dykstra’s figures are stripped of their personae—to an even greater degree than Frost’s—but retain an almost digital presence. We do not really wonder about their lineage. We aren’t led to ask, who is this person and where are his parents?, as we are in relation to Frost’s buzzsaw boy. Abstracted from most conventional sources of meaning but embedded in topos, they are subsumed by the landscape, placeholders in it: “Figure has always looked for a home on a hill, began in one house on a hill to the south, ended in another house on a hill to the north, sees both east and west from the house, east and west mark the nature of time” (27).
If persons are muted in Dissonance, three-dimensional space is dynamic and expressive, eluding and enveloping the technological forces that would quantify it:
Drones, the neighbor above likes the view, someone else’s machine flies over the forest, over a small hawk in the tree, over the parcel set aside with a conservation lien. Neighbor with infinite horizons surveils the future, its debts blanketed. The innumerable debts of others. Out of sight below, the laundry thumps, laundry dependent on water from a low-yield well, cold laundry day, warm laundry tomorrow, a daily tithe until the well will finally run dry. High above the curve of the earth, we bend our longing. (31)
Satellites (maybe) “above the curve of the earth” surveil the future, but laundry is “out of sight.” There is, in this block, the characteristic wrestling with the vertical slice that constitutes so much of the action of Dissonance. It is accompanied by the hyper-awareness of everyone’s financials that is native to the Zillow age. Everything is fungible, ascending and descending from a satellite array. The word “tithe” adds a faint theological note that draws these meditations together and hints that the absolute has been replaced by the best that our technology can achieve at any given time.
Dissonance stands at a remove from but in the same tectonic range as the mountain of the moderns, on which the Übermensch tried to wrestle the view into his own subjectivity but descended without any convincing account of reality. The stakes are perhaps lower now. We exist as a substratum of our technology, which attempts to map everything precisely without the impediment of having to understand it. Topos, in this situation, has an alluring vitality, but we lack a measure that would allow us to see the same presence in ourselves. Dissonance takes the temperature of this predicament and arranges the resulting data in a pleasing modular order.