In Paradise Lost, Milton describes Satan’s army of fallen angels as engaging in swarm behaviors: “As bees / In spring-time,” upon their summoning the unholy host “Thick swarmed, both on the ground and in the air, / Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings.” By the 18th century, the supernatural ensemble of an epic — or a mock-epic, like Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock — was referred to as its “machinery.” So Pope’s machinery, the tiny, airborne, spritelike Sylphs, will “sport and flutter in the fields of Air” before collectively “surround[ing]” their favorite human, the beautiful Belinda, primping her up for primetime as would Cinderella’s helpful bluebirds: “These set the head, and those divide the hair, / Some fold the sleeve, whilst others plait the gown.”
In a new collection by Peter Mishler, who alongside Stephanie Choi is one of two winners of this year’s Iowa Poetry Prize, the role of the neo-machinery is played by the eponymous Children in Tactical Gear. (Though a similar case could be made for the “children running from jet bridge to jet bridge with no discernible end” in the book’s one prose poem.) The geared-up children appear in the lengthy title poem, which is given pride of place in a central numbered section all its own. Mishler must think it is some of his best work, and I agree, so I linger on it here.
The poem’s six-page opening sentence begins: “As I was walking all alane, / they came to me, / and they were very well, / their upper lips beaded / with Tamiflu, / their bodies dressed / in tactical gear…” From there the children ritually “shepherd” a sacred bullet toward “a mountain / of colorful plastic,” show the poem’s speaker their sea inhabited by “very colorful weapons,” and sacrifice the youngest of their number by spinning him to death in “a steel centrifuge” in order to generate “a fresh, new wellness / for each of us.” The poem inhabits a garish plastic cosmos, as if the designer of the McDonald’s PlayPlace were promoted to the status of deity and, mad with newfound power, evolved a taste for violence.
The poem illustrates the pleasure Mishler takes in (and gives by) infusing his miniaturized, mock-epic world-making with the ultracontemporary details of American social life, in a time of flourishing for what Philip Roth called “the Indigenous American berserk.” Mishler mines the language for the ironically disparate valences of “well”: its incantatory repetition in the poem summons by turns a resonant, eschatological finality (owed to Julian of Norwich’s “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”), the phatic banality of professional email-speak (as in “I hope you are doing well” — a phrase not in the poem, but doubtless in your inbox), and eventually, the “well” of wellness culture (“the bullet, as it rode, / was practicing mindfulness, / and the bullet was very well”).
The result is a richness of language rare in poems so comic and nakedly political. George Saunders’ first book was memorably called CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. The phrase captures the ethos of Mishler’s book, and if a young George Saunders wrote poetry, it might look something like this.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s September 2024 issue.
