RENDER, and the Shock of the New: A Response by Alicia Ostriker

America has a rich literature of farm life, its pleasures, struggles and tragedies—most of it in the form of fiction, from Cather’s My Antonia to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Rural life has always inspired poetry as well, much of it romantic and sentimental, some of it striving for realism. Recent superb poets of farm life are Wendell Berry and Maxine Kumin. But there has never been anything as trenchant, as fierce, as Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse.

How can I do justice to this remarkable, astonishing book? When I first read it ten years ago I felt in my bones what has been called “the shock of the new.” I still experience that shock. Render jolts me like Picasso’s painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” which hit the art world with “compelling even savage force” in 1909 and still can produce gasps. Gasps like what Render will produce in its readers today.

Picasso’s painting is an angular proto-cubist study in flesh-tones and black of four nude prostitutes with cartoonlike faces, two wearing African masks.  It utterly overturns all prior ideas of what a nude should be. “Render,” a sequence of supposed “How To” poems of rural life based on the basic tasks of animal-raising, smashes to pieces the myth of a difference between the animal and ourselves, between the butcher and the butchered. I imagine it standing at the outset of a new movement in the poetry of the rural. I also imagine you will never look at a barn the same way again.

Facing facts in this book starts with its mysterious title. The word “render” has no single settled meaning. It may mean to depict, or perform, or provide a service, or translate, or hand over, as in “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” or all of the above. In cooking, it means using heat to melt animal fat and turn it into crispy bits. You will find that the poems in this book are very crispy. Note also the relation of “render” to “rend,” which is to tear apart. This is a book largely about tearing apart.

As to “apocalypse,” we might turn intuitively to the complete and final destruction of the world, as described in the closing book of the Bible known as Revelation. More mildly it can signify an event of destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale. But “an apocalypse” clearly implies that there may be more than one such. And so this book in your hands is an imaginative rendering of catastrophe, the catastrophe of everyday living, and dying, and killing and eating. 

It is also a revelation. Ongoing revelation.  Look at the first poem, “How to Wake,” which begins

Learn your lesson
from the calf

Look how he rams his head
into the cow’s sack

when she does not drop
when she holds her drink

like a warm secret
Let her know your thirst is there

The lesson is not pretty. To wake is to acknowledge in yourself the natural aggression of a newborn toward its mother. By poem’s end, you are literally drinking from the cow’s udder, telling her your own secrets. This is your “private pleasure.” You need not be ashamed. But you are warned:

Watch yourself
You’ll get shit on

or kicked in the head

 The aura of such poetry, like a sphere of thirsty flies in the heat around you, is violence—man versus woman, power versus the powerless, need taking what it wants, intimacy with what you are going to kill. “How to Kill a Rooster,” “How to Kill a Hen,” “How to Kill a Pig,” “How to Kill a Hog” are some of Howell’s titles. We learn that to kill a hog you must use the lotioned touch you employed in the past to wash her vulva softly without chafing when she was farrowing, and needed you, and you “took each piglet / out of her night and into yours.” In “How to Be Civilized” you build a pen for a creature that “once ran forest and field / but came to you when called—loyal beast” and make her think “she has a choice // she can defecate / away from her feed // she can still be clean.” In other poems of Howell’s imaginary pig farm, it is the pig itself we hear, in italics: “Feed me to your children / feed me to the dog.”

In the book’s final section, entitled “A Calendar of Blazing Days,” you have become a machine, a desperate woman, one who steals from another’s plate, one who repeats the road sign Hell is Real. You are also the consciousness capable of knowing opposite truths, both “As you have been stolen from, steal,” and “As you have starved, say no one will starve.” Again and again I feel stunned by the fearlessness of Howell’s empathies. Beneath the violence and violations of this book is an immense compassion, even a holiness. Reading it, you may feel as if someone has taken an axe to you. Yes, someone has. Only it is an axe of air, a hard wedge of spirit. Let it split you. Let it leave you open.

Alicia Ostriker

New York, March 2023