• Metonymy in Motion
• T. C. Marshall (bio)

"There's no such thing as knowing what you are going to say and no such thing as having said it."

Tribunal is not the kind of testimony that poetry has made us used to. The poet is not delivering a realized truth harvested in epiphany. There is certainly a poet in there somewhere, making this writing for us to read, but she is actually trying out something in a trial that has not simply led to convictions or conclusions. A tribunal is a hearing, and Tribunal is listening as it puts hearing and saying in play through its forms and through its metonymic accretions of images and phrases and topics and tones. The connections this poetry makes are not metaphorical leaps to meaning but associative and dis-sociative gatherings and unfoldings. The poet keeps this in motion to create her trial run at something more complex than a truth, something that cannot be all said but is made of saying and hearing.

This requires a kind of "performance" on the part of the poetry that will resist closure. The poet achieves this by creating a tension between what this poetry is (lively use of language), what it isn't (epiphanic and finalizing), and what may be thought to be its contrary but is not (prose considerations). These three angles play with possibilities and impossibilities in a way that may remind us of Hejinian's studies of Stein. This book tries to listen as it goes, to follow the way of Gertrude Stein's little aunts in Baltimore—able to talk and listen at the same time. The fun and enlightenment in this activity is there for us as readers relieved from having to find the poet's wisdom and come to know it in a fine and finalizing way. Tribunal offers crazy rambles, surprising links, and sharp observations that hit a few nails on the head as they go by—without nailing anything down to a truth. It tells serious truths while having some fun. It reflects on its own mode of telling and on the tricky balance between rationality and irrationality: "It's irrational to take the prophetic seriously, doing so is generally characteristic of the credulous or superstitious or blindly faithful."

It may seem to contradict itself as it takes into account the sense of prophecy and the faith, also somewhat blind, that the artist must place in her audience: "A work of art is a prophetic loan, drawn on fugitive premises; the artist acts on it, and, presumably, sustains some faith that others will do so too, or at least could." Tribunal seeks effect without predicating or predicting what it should be. It is tentative as it "does what a poem does, making itself / understood, industriously caging a tune" and leaving the rest up to you. If the poet's effort reaches a fruition in trying to effect change, she admits that the community must step in to take up the debt and do the further work of change:

... The costs are myriad

for those who are as myriad as the hours it will take

kindly to decide how to make changes and what they should be.

This is the spirit of democracy.

This book responds to many topics and ideas in the air today; perhaps chief among them is "tyranny," which has an odd relationship to democracy and the work it asks of us. Scattered throughout the book are comments on the tyranny we face. These are truths but not final, not blunt points; they are part of the breadth of processing thought in Tribunal. There are concise assessments of our situation:

We live in toppled times under a feat of tyranny

and

Trembling under a new head of state, the body politic is falling apart.

There are also sharply imaged and complexly [End Page 26] developed thoughts about tyranny's effect on minds and lives:

Tyrannized, consciousness orbits the world, vexed, exacerbating bodies to which it's all the while obliged.

This critical thinking justly binds first person and third, expressed in images familiar...

• 运动中的转喻
• TC马歇尔（生物）

“没有什么知道你要说的话，也没有说过话的事。”

法庭不是诗歌使我们习惯的那种证词。诗人没有传递顿悟中收获的已实现的真理。当然某个地方有一位诗人，可以写这本书供我们阅读，但是她实际上是在审判中尝试一些事情，而这并不仅仅是导致定罪或结论。法庭是聆讯，而审裁处通过其形式以及通过图像，短语和主题以及语调的转喻性发音，使听觉和言语在游戏中发挥作用。这首诗所产生的联系不是意义的隐喻飞跃，而是联想和分离的聚会和展现。诗人保持这种动感，以一种比真理更复杂的方式进行审判，这是不能全部说出来的，而是说和听的。

这就要求诗歌的某种“表现”能够抵抗封闭。诗人通过在这首诗是什么（生动地使用语言），什么不是（诗性的和定论的）和可能被认为是相反但不是事实（散文考虑）之间的张力之间实现张力。这三个角度在可能性和可能性上发挥了作用，这可能使我们想起了赫金尼对斯坦的研究。这本书试图顺其自然地听，仿效Gertrude Stein在巴尔的摩的小姨妈的方式-能够同时说话和听。读者不必去寻找诗人的智慧并以精妙而最终的方式来了解它，这给我们带来了乐趣和启发。法庭提供疯狂的漫游，令人惊讶的链接以及清晰的观察，这些观察在经过时会碰到几根钉子，而不会使任何事情变成事实。它在玩乐的同时讲出了严肃的事实。它反思了自己的讲述方式以及理性与非理性之间的棘手平衡：“认真对待先知是不理性的，这样做通常是轻信，迷信或盲目忠实的特征。”

它似乎自相矛盾，因为它考虑到了预言的感觉和对艺术家必须放在观众面前的信念，尽管有些盲目：“一件艺术品是在逃逸的场所绘制的先知借贷；艺术家的行为对此，大概可以保持某种信念，相信别人也会这样做，或者至少可以做到。” 仲裁庭在没有预见或预测其后果的情况下寻求效力。这是暂定的，因为它“做诗，使自己/被理解，努力地演唱一首曲子”，而其余的则留给您。如果诗人在努力实现变革方面的努力取得了成果，她承认，社区必须介入以承担债务并做进一步的变革工作：

...费用众多

对于那些需要花费大量时间的人

请决定如何进行更改以及更改内容。

这是民主精神。

本书回应了当今流行的许多主题和思想。其中也许最主要的是“暴政”，它与民主及其要求我们开展的工作有着奇怪的关系。整本书中散布着对我们所面临的暴政的评论。这些是真理，但不是最终的，不是直截了当的观点。它们是法庭处理思想广度的一部分。对我们的情况有简要的评估：

在暴政的壮举下，我们生活在一个倒塌的时代

和

在新的国家元首的颤抖之下，政治机构正在瓦解。

关于专制对思想和生活的影响，也有清晰而复杂的构想[End Page 26]：

暴虐，意识环绕着世界运转，烦恼，加剧了人们必须尽力而为的身体。

这种批判性思维公正地将第一人称与第三人联系在一起，用熟悉的图像表达出来。