Kent Shaw's Blog, page 2

“Yet,” by Alisha Dietzman

I’ve always liked thinking that sin isn’t really that sinful in the eyes of God, because when I sin, I’m conscious of God. God’s on my mind. I’m disobeying “Him.” Like in Alisha Dietzman‘s poem, “Yet,” there’s what she’s doing to God, and what she’d do so her body was the right body for God. Like is it really a sin to imagine feeding God to sharks if their God-given instincts won’t really go for it? I don’t know. I know there’s a test here, though, for the relationship between instinct and action, at least for the sharks. Or that’s what the poem’s ca-clunk poetic shift from one statement to the next would lead me to believe. The body is what God gave the world’s creatures. And in the body is instinct. And in human instinct is shame.

Not that the poem is preaching. Dietzman is intentional with each statement. But how one statement might connect to the next isn’t necessarily spelled out. The poem feels like riding in an MG convertible, with its manual transmission. How there’s often this gap between statements, where the poem coasts through to the next statement, like the car would coast up to the next gear. In the beginning of the poem, God speaks in the tone of voice a person uses when they’re addressing their animals. Something that might show how God loves animals, even the shark. But when the poet proposes to feed God’s body to the sharks, it’s not immediately explained why the sharks lack interest. Maybe as sharks, God speaks to them most gently through their blood lust. That instinct most deeply rooted in their bodies.

It’s like a device that lets Dietzman effectively round the corner from one idea to the next.

31.  I wander over bodies in my mind. I am bored
by even the word bodies—
they are,

32.  and longsuffering, sweetish.
Perhaps best described as small towns

The shift from dismissively imagining bodies to seeing them in their most humanistic suffering and sweetish qualities. To then identifying them as a kind of “small town.” It’s a process of thought where she’s always zipping ahead of me to address the next implication. Like those Spy vs Spy cartoons, when the beak-nosed opponent is always a step and a half ahead. Dietzman is thinking of gently addressing our most beloved animals, guiding God to gently addressing sharks, then after seeing the body as a small town, she envisions the shameful pieces of herself for having imagined this fate for God.

Or at least the poem’s explicit concern with shame leads me to various considerations relating the body to shame (which the last third of the poem is especially concerned with). Is shame human instinct? Is instinct an insular conversation the body is having at the self? Would it be best to read this poem as a prayer if it were in the form of a movie? Where the movie form is so much the mode for her book, Sweet Movie. Understanding the consciousness experienced with movies. And discovering this kind of consciousness will only happen in poems.

Yet – NOTES PDFDownload

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A view on disjunction

Reading poetry, for me, often involves a patient acceptance. Where the poem has a method of meaning or makes gestures towards meaning, possibly even withholding meaning. In ways that are unique to itself. It’s like a negotiation centered on access. Is this a poem that will teach me how to gain access to its material? Or is this a poem that absorbs me, as a reader, into its manner of telling and the material it wants to tell me about? Is this a poem that’s mainly about listening to the poet’s voice, the rhythms of their telling, the tonal accounting of events. And, yes. I mean to describe reading as an activity, a doing. I’ve long been sensitive to Stanley Fish’s directive about doing things to the text in Is There a Text in This Class? And one of the things I like doing is listening for a poem’s guidance and encouragement. “Read this way.” The poem says. Like maybe I should occupy the inside of each poetic fragment, or maybe I shouldn’t be so atomistic. Maybe the poem isn’t supposed to use a fragmented grammar, but instead a menagerie of images, like with Brenda Coultas’s A Handmade Museum.

And sometimes a poem is best read for the disjunction marking where two fragments stand juxtaposed to one another. Like they’re tectonic plates sliding above or beneath. Or they’re staring one another down, like macho men at the dance club. However it is you read the fragments, their disjunction might prove to be the central device, like how extended metaphor can serve as a conceptual map, or like a galloping rhyme scheme can feel like a smith hammering at a forge. I’ll admit, I like disjunction for the activity it brings. It can signal a shift in subject. It can comment on the velocity of perception. It can feel like collage, allowing various poetic images the affect of simultaneity, like it aspired to being visual art.

It’s interesting, then, to read Jennifer S. Cheng’s essay, “A Catalog of Falling Things” (from a recent issue of Iowa Review) like it were a memoir to disjunction. Like the life story of Cheng, of Cheng’s daily struggles and fears, considered as emotional renderings of disjunction. A reading I bring mainly because I’ve only known Cheng through her poems. So the essay’s consideration of disjunctive moments rounding to a conclusion that on what feels like a fairly explicit craft statement on disjunction, my impulse is to couch everything in Cheng’s poetry.

If it were possible, I would spend all my days like this, between the cracks, where a strange confluence of smallness and largeness dwells; where fear and pleasure lose their distinguishing boundaries, and fragility and strength tangle so intimately and daringly, they are almost the same thing.

To be “between the cracks” for Cheng is to fear herself falling, like when she has her focus wrenched away by OCD or when she reiterates her fears causing her to overthink the present moment, she’s falling in that sense walking could be said to be falling down the sidewalk. And the quick reaction where you try catching yourself, that is disjunction, and it marks a “crack” in her perception. A “strange confluence of smallness and largeness.” Something she embodies with the essay’s list structure—each item an episode or consideration. Of “falling things,” as the title says. And in Cheng’s citation from Cecilia Vicuña, they mark where Cheng feels wounded by her reality, and the wonder that might be prompted by that wound. I would say that marks the poetic potential of disjunction—the gap between what she fears must inevitably happen and an observation of what really happens. In particular, the disjunction, marked as a wound, attunes her to the moment. Yes, it’s couched in fear. But, as the prose in this personal essay indicates, her elaborated experience of fear discovers itself more fully when she articulates it into language. When her heightened awareness can actively shape her writing. It establishes a keen sensitivity to the present. A sense of wonder surprisingly ingrained in the wound.

It’s Cheng’s comments on the wound, and how often poets write about “wounds” and “bruises,” that’s at the base of this post. A wound can be provocatively complex, and in a poem it can reference things like raw tissue exposed to the elements, it can speak to the ongoing emotional hurt that follows after physical harm, it can speak to those poignant aches existing below the surface, elaborating a felt presence, seizing on what feels sudden and tender. Where it could be a sharp pain, sometimes dull, and sometimes you forget about it. I mean, I’m never sure how solid my grasp on Affect Theory, but I feel Cheng’s thoughts on falling and the wonder she experiences in that wounded space, it notes a point of resonance, where “a strange confluence of smallness and largeness” might appear.

Surprisingly, this frame speaks to the reading I’ve long carried for Mary Jo Bang’s The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans. Not that the book dwells explicitly on a wound, but more because I’m never sure how to situate the book’s poetic speaker. On one hand, I read for the speaker’s exaggerated poise? But has this mannered speaker suffered a wound? Has she explicitly obscured the wound from my vision? What has happened to her that she perceives only the most arch motives playing out in a scene? Like there is a correct way this poem’s speaker should appear correctly to her reader, because she’s using only the correct language addressing the correct “subtleties” of the scene. Like when the woman’s “fitted knit” is explicitly matched to the sexual tension it brings in the opening of “The Harbor,” the speaker deflects. It’s merely “suggesting several possibilities but mostly the mouth // at the nipple.”

This is not to directly equate Bang’s use of sexual tension with Cheng’s wound. What I’m more interested in is Bang’s mannered description. How the speaker occupies the affective moment. “The Harbor” concerns a woman describing another woman, and she’s all too aware of the tension her “fitted knit” will inspire in the male gaze. And the poem exists “where everything regressive feels right,” between the speaker’s cool anticipation of others’ responses and the realization she is the one controlling what the poem even says. The poem is hers, the speaker’s. And only what she observes will be what actually happens. And maybe this far-fetched correlation I see between Bang’s work and the ars poetica in Cheng’s “A Catalog of Falling Things” is the surprise that “between” has discovered a space where one thing hadn’t really been troubled to be seen as two. Walking down the sidewalk for Cheng is now about “falling,” because it can be. Precarity as wound. Forward momentum the poet can personally fragment into many moments. Likewise the dominating mannerisms in Bang’s poem putting language into the tension of control.

Both methods carve awareness into that “between,” then occupy it with language. In that way Stephanie Burt describes in her “Beyond Baroque” essay. They create excess where there wasn’t supposed to be anything excessive going on. Moments like this could be explained as metacommentary, a poem aware of itself as a poem. But like when John Barth energetically comments on the narrator/character in “Lost in the Funhouse,” the meta gets complicated, because the person in charge of telling the story is currently being overwhelmed by the very emotion at the heart of the story. But what happens when overwhelm is subsumed into a poise, as it is with Bang’s poetry? It feels more like the wonder drawn out of a wound. Whose mannered telling is assuredly the final word.

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“Lattice After Your Advice 2,” by Maxwell Gontarek

One thing the 21st Century is really good at is mediating reality. Like how reality in my life can often feel more like representation of actual things that happened, or things I think about happening, or it feels like these things must have already happened. Such a predicament is reality these days. Like reading Maxwell Gontarek’s poem, “Lattice After Your Advice” (from Denver Quarterly) there’s this idea that reality might benefit from an artful treatment. Distort it a little. Whimsical it to the very edge. Consider giving it a splatter of paint, for whatever effect splattering has for art in 2023 (when this poem was published). For Gontarek, there’s even some punning that can be included. The slide from whistling with your mouth to using a slide whistle, and that physical “slide” standing as an approximation of the pleasure “meaning” might afford to art.

I was thinking recently about how Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry overlaps with the argument posed by Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy.” In both, poems are considered for their imperfection. Meaning, poems reach for an articulation of what had at first inspired them, but every poet ultimately concedes they will never quite accomplish what they’d meant to. It’s a concession that leads Lerner to “hate” poems. And it leads Wimsatt and Beardsley to, I don’t know, critical exhaustion? Either way, reading a poem aware of its imperfect state can only be helpful. For instance, a poem committed to distorting reality (like Gontarek’s) would suffer from too much certainty. Especially that hard edge certainty can exert on poems. Especially where it’s not clear the poet has decided what is certainly a reasonable way to see the world.

And in Gontarek’s case, the poem is better situated as a collection of artful perspectives on the world. And the imaginative or otherworldly character to these perspectives make them uniquely his. Like how Sianne Ngai describes people’s feelings toward their possessions in Our Aesthetic Categories. How what they possess might represent who they are, or the possessions might prompt a person to perform their affection toward them. Ngai goes so far as to compare the relationship of person to cute objects to a guardian towards their child. Translating to a controlling or paternal or even aggressively affectionate.

In Gontarek the possession isn’t so much the objects he keeps in his home, as it is assertions towards the concept of “theme,” though that theme would never be so straightforward as to call itself a theme. Some mental place where the poet can “feel the force of externality within him.” Or where “A word like parole or rapport is the air that goes in and the song that comes out” And, maybe this is a stretch, but I think of these assertions similar to Jonathan Culler’s thoughts on apostrophe in Theory of the Lyric. I’m proposing a congruity between Gontarek’s assertions implying a thematic sense of distorted reality with Culler’s thoughts on poets addressing objects (“O rose,” for instance). In both cases, the poem benefits from its collection of objects / statements. The context that collection might form in conjunction with one another, and how the poet can address themselves to this selection of objects, fashioning themselves. How maybe the self-fashioned poet is easier to believe, then.

Who is Maxwell Gontarek fashioning in “Lattice After Your Advice 2”? Someone who can’t quite figure things out, but who’s willing to keep trying. He is the poet willing to “abandon blue as the mother of green.” To make sense of “art [that] wants to make a sponge for moonlight by stabbing you full of little holes.” Perhaps the point is to unsettle how someone reads the poet. Or to contextualize the poem’s subject in an irregular way, like blobby cute objects feeling so right but only after you’ve let the artist make sense of it for you. Like Marc Swanson’s conflation of disco and deer and all-white department store interior decorating, or Alex Da Corte’s twisted domestic settings under garish, Florida-flavored lighting, or Petra Szilagyi’s cartoonish worship space to the internet. The cute touches a sensibility that could be intentionally shameful or intentionally calloused or just intentionally weird for the sake of unmeaning what is supposed to be meaningful.

It’s a kind of ekphrasis I tried touching on in my reading of Sara Nicholson’s April, where her poem, “The Goatherd and the Saint” presents a frame of mind I wish I could adopt while viewing art. I find Gontarek’s ekphrasis like the performance of an artistic acrobat, who will demonstrate the art, like his writing was itself the body of art. Like the stanza that considers the implications of 46,000,000 grasshoppers converging on Las Vegas. Why not make them a currency. The individual stanzas proposing concepts and then navigating the statement they might be making. But what that localized commentary might say to the reader is the real statement of the poem.

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“Failure Matrix,” by Eric Tyler Benick

In John Ashbery’s “As You Came From the Holy Land,” I wrote about how daily life, as told by a poem, can be about the merest rhythms, can dwell on the most predictable boredoms. Some days, as Ashbery’s poem implies, are better spent forgetting time can pass uneventfully. And some days can be spent hoping something happens before the day ends. Where a poetics of the mundane makes time meaningless, until it’s so meaningless it’s hard to deny how meaningful it is. Like an airplane assembled from a collection of mundane objects. Bolts. Screws. Whatever that stuffing they use for a pilot’s chair. A couple weeks ago, I was reading Niina Polari’s Path of Totality, and assembling her complex views on grief were the mundane objects that populated her life. They were just sitting there. And then each of them were an occasion for reminding her of her persistent grief.

In the introduction to Andrew Epstein’s Attention Equals Life, he develops a couple different modes a poem might engage in to occupy the mundane world. There is a poetry surprised by what dullness reminds them of, and that reminder leading the poet to see a valuable new perspective on life. This can be the poetry of wonder, like Frank O’Hara noting each object in the Park Lane Liquor Store (in “The Day Lady Died”), or James Schuyler noting the special feeling of each object on the bay (in “Today”). It can be the lyrical narrative of 1990s American poetry, featuring a poet who sees something overly familiar, like a framed photo on their bookshelf, and it prompts them to rethink the past, and then, wow, an epiphany for re-seeing the past in this new present light.

There is another mode to the mundane, though. Where the ordinary objects are just ordinary. A poem set in an ordinary place, observing the ordinary parts of life noticed by the poet. This kind of poem can express the mere factness of dullness. Maybe as a consideration of the crowd of dull objects constantly in reach. I look around me right now and I see a coffee table, coasters, my daughter’s school backpack, her music stand. Everything is meaninglessness amplified, and why not a poetry about that? (Like, for instance, Martha Ronk’s Transfer of Qualities) There’s another side to the mundane, though. An ironic one. Where the poem recognizes how particularity can contrast against all the ordinary pressures put on a given object. Like when the ordinary object carries a particular history. The dish I used to give my cat his prednisone towards the end of his life. It still matters to me, though he’s been dead for eight years. It’s an inert object sitting on the edge of my bookshelf, seldom attracting my attention. But its particularity carries a significance that rises above meaninglessness. Or maybe it simply adds more data to meaninglessness.

This is my frame of mind reading Eric Tyler Benick’s “Failure Matrix.” Not because I think Benick’s poem aspires to make a statement about particularity in poetry. I would argue the poem’s primary statement is something more abstract and ambitious: what is it to grasp failure as a state of mind. However, to depict that state of mind, Benick relies on particularly specific images. “A luster of midnights” or “a poem like an equation” or “a coarse sea of hair / each an integer.” Each of these images reads like a gracefully tied knot, complicating what might be an otherwise conventional trope by associating a particular point of view on it. For instance, in the use of “luster” from “a luster of midnights,” I see a set of colors the poet recalls from the particular night he has in mind rather than the general darkness evoked by “night.” So as the poem addresses the “aporia” the poet feels when nothing seems to add up in his life, he thinks of a certain night, and how it appeared to him at midnight.

A poetry relying on a poetics of particularity like this are often told in a voice-y style. Like if a poem feels casual, it’s best to complement that style with the small details appearing to the poet. Each detail gives traction to the poet’s state of mind. Like in Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” (which I’ve already mentioned) the poet flies through many particularities, and each of them builds the real-lifeness of what he’s experiencing. They ground the poem, and they fashion the world he moves in.

And that might be what I am most interested in. The light touch particularity brings to a poem. It’s like that variable foot pace William Carlos Williams devised. Where fragments or portions of a sentence or phrases that feel like they modify some part of the poem’s larger statement but it’s ambiguous about which part, all of these can represent a “poetic foot” for Williams. A syntactic segmenting over the stresses used for a conventional poetry metric. The particular objects Benick uses for his poem are, as the poem states explicilty, an enumeration. An accumulation of visions that register what’s bewildering about the persistent failure that occupies his life. What a pleasant irony to realize failure through a series of mundane objects, their particularities, their vague accounts of what a poem can do.

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“Entry,” by Amie Zimmeran

I should be clear at the opening. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be entering in Amie Zimmerman’s poem, “Entry” (the second of the two published in Mercury Firs 4 is what I’m writing about here). Like is the poem marking each of the situations as places where a reader could enter? Is it an entry into the poetic life? Or an entry into a poetic mundanity? In the first stanza, I can see an “entry” point, for instance, in the moment, “time is recorded by what noise our ears distinguish, length / of echo.” The concept that part of sound is an echo feels like an “entry” into a higher thinking. Or I have encountered an entry point in the second stanza, when the poem presents a series of mundane tasks someone would do around the house, and the poem labels them “covenants.” It’s an “entry” I would attribute to poetic ambiguity. As in, what an unusual but plausible correlation. But what headspace am I being given “entry” to from there?

This dilemma is what intrigues me when reading the poem. Because a lot of the poem feels like a catalogue of things that just happen. They’re the normal things that are the equivalent of a tree falling with no one to hear it. They’re the ambient whatever of reality. Do they matter if they occur marginally? Zimmerman’s poem says, “Let’s see.” Let’s let the poet observe some poet things about them. Like somewhere in the midst of the situation: “feet in mucky shore, squat for the heron, for the dragonfly, for the sweet sturgeons,” there is a poetic something to be perceived. And I can sense that to the degree the poem stands me beside the heron or with it, to be conscious there could be a poem happening in that place.

The poem is an accumulation of moments like this. What a poet like Walt Whitman would call a “multitude,” I imagine. But for Zimmerman, the poetic is framed differently. Whitman is all about praises and rapture. And that’s not what I hear in Zimmerman. Like are these various moments presented in the spirit of praise? In the spirit of matter-of-fact reality? I wrote on this blog about one of Laynie Browne’s list poems, 02.03.16. Where she engages with the todo list. In my reading, Browne’s poems are about the method of mind when it thinks about tasks at hand, how natural it is to associatively move to other tasks. Which is fun, because it’s like the task list has always had an associative poem at its heart. And for myself, as a productivity blog junkie, I love the poetic possibility of a simple task list. It makes Browne’s entire book, Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists, like playground for the procedural ethos. Write anything (even a task list) and your mind is subject to the writer’s mind.

I’m not entirely clear, however, how I would describe Zimmerman’s poetics of matter-of-fact reality. Something that accounts for not only the cataloguing, but also the incidental “entry” the title encourages me to consider. Here’s another quote from the poem:

remember the shoppers
who took pictures, who could not look. remember the aura of their fascination. when
the bars bent, though, we stayed. waited to be gathered. mud stirs in waters at the headway,
eagles watch glass folding in the bonfire. break off my calf, eat first the heel. to remain to remain
is joy to remain. mouth a tunnel of praise.

The imperative call at the opening to the above quote, that “(you) remember he shoppers…”, has that conventional element of poetic praise via noticing. But the comment immediately after the two “remember” sentences, “when the bars bent, though, we stayed” is one of many flatly stated situations in the poem. And yet I’m willing to entertain it as an “Entry,” as the title to the poem would maintain. But which part should I hear as entry? A similar question in the statement, “eagles watch glass folding in the bonfire.” It’s these non-imperative statements that aren’t entirely clear, but something in the poem makes me open to their connection to a sentiment like, “to remain to remain / is joy to remain.”

Perhaps this is a generous stretch on my part, but it feels like there is an “if” implicit somewhere in the poem, and it could serve as a needle to thread the reader into the flattened intentionality of the poem. (If you see the poetic,) “eagles watch glass folding in the bonfire.” (If you see the poetic,) “mud stirs in waters at the headway.” Like just reading with the knowledge that there should be an “entry” and phrasing the entry for the poem yields something. Does that help? For me, it does. The “if” helps open the otherwise inert statements. “If” poeticizes what I read as a slight tilt to these statements. “If” affords a continuity for me between the imperative statements telling the reader to do something that might be an unusual command for a reader (”unbuckle the palm and draw out pollen,” for instance). But what ultimately draws me into the poem is its invitation for “Entry.” The many different ways I’m encouraged to enter.

I’ll close this on a counterpoint. This morning I was reading some poems from Medbh McGuckian’s Shemalier, a book hovering over subtly contoured sentences that are dense with imagistic references. I was thinking of how McGuckian and Zimmerman are similar in how they rely on many poetic moments occurring in a single sentence. Where Whitman’s catalogue will use the sentence to magnify its praise of an individual poetic observation, I think McGuckian and Zimmerman consider the sentence a topographic entity. However, their differences are what poetic consideration they open the reader to. For my reading, McGuckian often has some essential notion at the heart of her poem (even if the essence remains clouded in lyric gestures). All the images and objects provide further insight into her reasoning. Zimmerman, on the other hand, doesn’t exactly let me into what she has placed on the other side of the entry. It’s more the gesture to have a poem titled “Entry,” so her showing the reader to that entry is the poem.

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“Feldhase,” by Kylan Rice

My frame for Kylan Rice’s poetry will always be the piece I read in Colorado Review last year. “Shield or Bee” is this remarkable exercise in density and the sound of density and the sound when making sense amidst a dense phrasing. Like what I could imagine a bee doing. But the poem isn’t “in the voice of a bee” or even speculating about a bee doing all its bee-ness. Rice’s poem, “Shield or Bee,” is personal, perhaps about his life, negotiating the complexities of life, thinking through ideas like “coherence needs a seed” or “marriage is a sudden hardening.” And what surprises me in “Shield or Bee” is how easily I can see the bee qualities that would have prompted the bee to appear in the title.

What, then, does the title of “Feldhase” (published in Mercury Firs 4) mean? And how would it relate to this personal reckoning of the poet? It’s not as easily negotiated. Because, according to my best Googling, the title is a German word for “European hare,” or a very large rabbit. And with the poem opening onto a field, my first instinct is to the poem served up from the animal’s viewpoint. Or at the very least a poem that views the world from the limited perspective an animal would carry. I don’t think the poem has this intention, though, given the immediate complications it lights on. Like, yes, the poem opens on the physical setting where I could imagine a hare appearing, but I don’t think that animal would shift to a discussion on the “many English words for dense light / structures.” Rice’s poem is positioned around a poet who’s occupied a field, wondering how he might describe it. And perhaps the role of the hare is to account for a kind of perspective. What would it mean for an animal to occupy this field, and how would a poem account for it. However thoughtful and sophisticated these “many English words” might make the poet, he is still beholden to the same physical surroundings a hare would perceive, like the gunshots he can hear at a distance, or the angular fence he sees.

Maybe a hare’s perception correlates to the “patience and careful / selection” a poet feels in these environs. Though “patience” would be a mere fiction a person projects onto a hare. Which is an understandable mistake. Because there is something entirely absorptive in an animal occupying land. Larry Levis called it “gazing” in his essays from The Gazer Within. Robert Pinsky accounts for an idealized naiveté Keats attributed to the nightingale in The Situation of Poetry. A poet can envy the animal’s seeming presence and absorption in the moment. I’m not entirely sure Rice intends to connect the poet so closely to the hare, however. Because the poem turns at the “patience” line to a first-person account of the poet’s actions, and what he was thinking. Given the quick clarity, and how that contrasts with what came before and what follows, I’ll quote it.

[the gunshots] gave me an impression of patience and careful
selection. As I walked toward them, I paused
now and again beside the river to read, make
note of images that evoked, for reasons
I couldn’t explain, a feeling of desire.

I’m in the middle of Rice’s poetry book, An Image Not a Book, so I have more perspective on his poetic use of clarity. Or at least kind of meditative clarity that appears here. Because Rice’s poems often occupy a state of mind, a thinking through, with the natural world sounding into the poem using kaleidoscopic methods. In the book, I can sense the poet’s reluctance to indulge a forbidden love. And the complications that surround that.

It’s not often I find his poems living with him, passing record of his actions. He’s often a Poet in the poems—a central figure who interacts and thinks about the world via misshapen language. This middle portion of “Feldhase” is such a tender passage. It shifts the register from the poem’s opening. And, significantly, it lands the poem’s concern squarely on “desire.” For “reasons / I couldn’t explain.” And I find when Rice takes the opportunity to explicitly reveal the poem’s central concern, the piece blooms with complexity. Like one of those sped-videos of flowers in bloom.

Which is what each sentence following this middle passage accomplishes. From a VR headset’s presentation of landscape even to the peripheral vision to the action of a pocket watch lid to a fawn walking on hardwood floors. It’s reality as multiplicity and the poet’s readings that can both lavish in their particularities and in their congruence and in their accumulative account, like phenomenology but viewed through that animal “gaze” alluded to with the title. To the point the poet closes the poem writing in his notebook: “Reality opened before me.” And in my mind I think, “Yes. It did. Like the multiple blooms of a hydrangea in early fall.”

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“The Mice,” by Lindsay Turner

In Lindsay Turner’s first book, Songs & Ballads, I felt like the poem used language as an imposition, or a fabric of the scene. Or there was something the poet wanted to comment on, and the language for the poem was an impetus to think about her response. Looking at the sky in “Song of Household Goods,” for instance. All the colors in the sky. How do they change the poet’s view of her domestic arrangement when these picturesque skies surround it. Or another example from Songs & Ballads, the various domestic evidences that the days in fall really are getting shorter in “The Days Getting Shorter.” The look of your backyard. How you see the laptop open on the dining room table a little differently. Life as a series of impressions. Life as an opportunity for language to step in and identify what’s making the life feel like it’s happening.

Turner’s poem, “The Mice,” in Oversound Issue 9, is about mice appearing in her house. Or it’s about how elaborate your feelings can be when you find mice in your house. Or it’s about how thinking about the mice in your house they assemble into a vocabulary of their own, words you might use when talking with an old friend, and the words the two of you are using remind you of the small mice that scampered from beneath a dark car. “The Mice,” for Turner, have so much potential for meaning. Is it because it’s unnerving to find mice in your house?

At the beginning of the pandemic, a mouse jumped out of the toaster at my house, and we spent the next few weeks cordoning off parts of the kitchen. Searching for how the mouse might have come into the house. Plugging those holes, and laying traps. To this day, we talk about the mice. Where they might live. How many of them will get in the house come spring. There is an acuity to knowing they’re out there, they will try to get inside, they bring a rhythm to our thinking.

In Turner’s poem, the rhythm feels like a carousel. Where each section of the poem is like a line of sight. The mice in the house. The mice that came from the yard. The mice as an analogy to something that was important to the poet’s friendship. And the clarity in each section is perhaps what I find I want to try reading past. For instance, in section 5:

little nose, mouse
while it snows, mouse
rosy paws, mouse
in the house, mouse

It’s so cute. The mice as cuddly, nursery rhyme creature. The surprising opacity of a poem mainly concerned with the rhyme, or address. How differently the poet is engaged with this section versus the prose poem in section 7, indulging a dream and the disoriented telling that comes naturally to describing a dream. What does it say that these two sections assemble around the same impetus: “The Mice” and their relation to the poet’s house.

I was reading in Robert Pinsky’s The Situation of Poetry, where he identifies this vague, imaginative space in W. S. Merwin’s work. Pinsky calls it “there.”

“There” seems to be an internal place, and a region of the mind which the poet chooses repeatedly to visit; knowledge of that place seems necessary to [Merwin’s] imaginative life.

It seems to me a helpful reference for reading Turner’s poem. Because the impetus for the poem seems so clear, and yet the assembled sections, in their rhyming sing-songy opacity to their prose poem-y chaos, point to something more than just a statement like “The poet found mice in her house.” Like I can read individual sections and feel confident Turner is saying that.

But how is the clarity of an individual section supposed to serve the larger assembly of sections. This assembly is what fascinates me most, its sustained engagement with the mice as a problem, the relatable and low-key domestic terror of mice (though I suppose the “low-key” part depends on who you are). Turner’s assembly proves to be a delight for thinking about what makes people have feelings about mice, how far do they go in that “there” of their mind, The sections together keep me engaged for so long. It stretches the subject so it pertains to the poet’s other concerns. And if there’s an “about” to this poem, it exists for me in this stretch, in the variety of concerns that exist in Turner’s “there” mind space. “The Mice” is about the feeling when a poem exists in the middle of something, and it wishes it had an about to it (where the mice are coming from, whether they will come back into the house), and then being unsure there was ever an about waiting to be found out about anyway.

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[they won’t see us coming], by Valerie Hsiung

It’s helpful to understand the slipperiness inherent to a Valerie Hsiung’s poem. And by slippery I mean that feeling when you think you have ahold of something, only to feel it slip out of your hands. A bar of soap. A dish you’re washing by hand. Reading [they won’t see us coming], Hsiung coaxes me to frame the reading in certain lights. She provides poetic handles, like in this poem the “us” opposed to “them” appearing in the first stanza. Or further into the poem, the journey. It’s reasonable to approach a Hsiung poem looking for what would be familiar: rhetorically familiar, trope-familiar, sequence-of-events-resembling-plot familiar. I would argue the poem even encourages you to grasp the poem by that familiarity. But be prepared for it to slip right away from you.

Sometimes the slip happen on the sentence level in [they won’t see us coming]. It’s one of the hazards when punctuation is so sparingly used. And the poem’s lineation doesn’t really coincide with grammatical units either. Semantically, the poem could slip away from you if you try too hard to nail down whether all the references to “people” are the same. And if it’s different groups of people, should that be in support of whatever plot line exists around “a poet’s journey,” or are there many different peoples because the poem wants to think carefully about what “people” as a metonym for “country” might mean. As though all the people in a country or a certain region share some collection of traits or attitudes that would bind them together. Is it fair that “everyone” would imply each person in a country subscribe to a set of uniform qualities? Is this just what the person on a journey does? Think of what it means traveling among a “people,” comment to themselves how this “people” has essentially been folded into the landscape, like how you might think of a country as having a lot of tree. Or a big urban city having a lot of trash. And what the journeying person thinks is how the “people” in the foreign place are different from the “people” in their native country.

I am hoping you sense what I mean by “slippery” in Hsiung’s work. It’s like bewildering her reader is her number one mode. And it can appear in many ways. In the sentences that seem to have a hobby of french braiding themselves around a stanza’s other sentences. Like it’s not just about the continuity of thought threading stanzas together, and it’s not just the condensity (”condensation” and “density” collapsed on one another) and abstraction of setting, where there are enough details and circumstances among the stanzas that you might read them like they’ve settled on a certain world or they provide insights on a protagonist, thus hinting at plot. Or perhaps the slipperiness would make it more an eau de plot sprayed on cambric curtains so the air coming in the window will fill the room with the plot-ish, setting-ish feelings as you move from one stanza to the next.

Color me pathetic, but this slipperiness and the swim of ideas they bring to my mind makes me want to be Valerie Hsiung’s writing style. I would like to impersonate her when she’s the poet with a whole poem fashioned around her. Or I am helpless to it, possessed on some level. Because there is a way that Hsiung just makes sense in these stanzas of [they won’t see us coming] (whether they are an excerpt from some longer piece (her books tend to swallow any single portion existing in them) or what Mercury Firs has published is a set of stanzas that exist together in some ephemeral fashion. Maybe they are documentation of what she’s thinking about right now).

It’s difficult for me, then, to close read the poem so I can find some “center” or string of thought. Partly because reading Valerie Hsiung’s poems makes me delirious! And partly because Hsiung’s mode is to be writing as thinking would look if it were in writing. Which is a total mode in poetry that appears in many ways in these 2020s. Pull up something by Dawn Lundy Martin. Pull up something from Tess Brown-Lavoie (who I just saw Valerie Hsiung read with a couple weeks ago!). Pull up something from Kevin Holden, who I was just reading this week. Pull up something from Jorie Graham. From Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. From Tommy Pico (will he ever write poetry again???). From Cody Rose-Clevidence! I marvel at this kind of writing. I’m often writing about this kind of writing in these blog posts. (for examples: “Althea,” by Molly Ledbetter. “Central Oregon,” by Patty Nash. It’s often just this immersive style that I respond to that heightens my attention, so I might discover how it is used differently in the hands of an individual poet.

Thus my argument that Hsiung’s work shifts itself. Its slipperiness. On one hand, the poem deals with a concrete occasion or circumstance situating the poet (she’s leaving where she’s from and realizing the complexity of any journey). On the other hand, the poet is realizing she’s realizing some new frame that redefines her reality. If her perspective on reality is changing, how should that shift appear? Like in the opening of [they won’t see us coming], the “us” is opposed to “them,” but then the poet isn’t sure she wants to be included in the “us” anymore, the reference for “us” seems to shift. When “babe” appears in the poem, with the sense that someone helpful has arrived on the scene, should “babe” be how the poet addresses the mountain that had just arrived? Is “babe” an earlier reference to the “protector” that will appear later? It’s hard not to feel like you should know what’s going on at these moments, because the poet relates the poem as though you would be on the same page as her. My best advice, however: Ride through the stanzas with ambiguity as an enabler for your read.

Or maybe not ambiguity but precarity. Whatever you normally use when navigating through a series of rhetorical gestures. Like think of that Kathleen Turner movie “Romancing the Stone.” When she and Michael Douglas are pulling themselves through the jungle. All that greenery is the rhetorical gestures in Valerie Hsiung’s poems. On one hand, you can confidently state you’re in a rhetorical jungle. You’re moving ahead. On the other hand, where moving ahead is taking you remains unclear.

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“Amanuensis,” by Danika Stegeman

In my recent goodreads review of Anthony Madrid’s Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, I wrote about that moment in poetry workshops where someone comments that the poem could be read as the writer’s ars poetica. And depending on the mood, it can feel like, yeah, thank you for that reasonably dull comment. Or it could be the poem shows substantive interest in its own poemness. Like what about the art of a poem does this particular poem comment on?

Or, as Danika Stegeman’s poem, “Amanuensis,” (from Mercury Firs 4) might inquire: What does it mean when the poet feels herself saying the poem as it comes to her mind, and then having it appear in language? Like is there a relationship between the saying of the poem and the recording of that saying? Should the recording be considered a dictation? Is the poet merely copying down her thoughts? What might be poetically articulated in this shift from poetic impulse to poetic inscription? And how could this be elaborated further if the poet were to personify this inscribing assistant?

“You’ve got a face like lightning.” She tells her, or them, or him, whoever this amanuensis is at the start of the poem. And while the poem is definitely interested in drawing an intense personal connection between the poet and her assistant (”I can feel the lifeforce that inhabits your body.” or “Lux cords checkered and spiraling, joining to your material heart.”), the main challenge or ambition I see pursued in Stegeman is some understanding of what this connection means to the poet via the figure of an opera singer. Or via the song sung by an opera singer. Or via the “objectfeeling” someone feels when in the proximity of art. It’s like the poem is aware of the distance between art and audience, the electric current passed from art to audience, and perhaps, it implies, this is what it feels like when the poetic impulse is captured in language. “I dream a new shape. Some lines read horizontally, others vertically, others diagonally.”

And it’s the poem’s insistent pursuit, its tension, that drives the poem. “I seek the song but never find it.” The poem says. Which feels like a turbulent stasis. That, however stationary, is still eager for movement, and needing to employ the amanuensis to inscribe language. And making more poem with that language.

Of the literary theory that recognizes a distinction between speaking voice and written language, that sees the complexity of translating poetic impulse to poetic language, I would say Paul de Man’s “The Lyric Voice in Contemporary Theory” could serve as the best companion for this poem. Where he argues anyone reading a poetic voice will likely put a face to it. A voice will not simply exist, or seem to emanate from a cloud of abstract subjectivity. For my reading, Stegeman’s poem struggles with what face or what concrete incarnation she can give to that figure making language from her voice. Is it an “assistant” or “amanuensis”? Is there a perfect image that would be equivalent to what this assistant accomplishes putting the poet’s thoughts into language? Is it just complicating the whole poetic feeling further? I hope so! If only to give space and an evolving shape to the devotion felt between these two—the poet and her amanuensis.

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“Ekpyrosis, the Watershed,” by Joe Hall

Ekpyrosis, according to the Internet, is an Ancient Greek term that means “conflagration.” And, according to Google’s number one search result, Plato and the Christian Bible claimed the world would burn during a great apocalypse. It’s important to know this for Joe Hall’s poem, “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” (from Oversound 9), because it’s not entirely clear how to read Apocalypse or conflagration into the poem. In one of my readings, I see Hall in anticipation of the apocalypse. Living in Buffalo, going through the motions of living in a previously industrial city, the poet is waiting for what feels like the inevitability of catastrophe. In another of my readings, I see the poem’s paratactic structure building a conflagration on the page. Like think of the structure of fire, the concatenation of flame on flame, the consistency, the YouTube white-noise video crackling in one of your browser tabs. Or perhaps there’s another reading, where the fire in Hall’s poem has already happened. The ash that appears in the second section, the recurring references to water.

In fact, I’m perfectly happy with these multiple readings, because I don’t think the poem needs to be read for plot. There is a foreboding affect, given the poem’s overt reference to “ekpyrosis” in the title and the final line (sorry if that’s a spoiler). And I would argue the poem toys with plot when in the poem’s second section the “I” remarks on the water streaming from him joining to the waters streaming from “you”, but I don’t find the presence of “I” and “you” as guides towards a series of structured events.

Instead, I find an increasingly dense parataxis dictating the moment. How I should experience the poem’s language in the moment. An experience that feels unrelenting. Here is one of my favorite moments:

if the hospital is the university is the prison is the train
over the Buffalo River running where it is entombed and running
to meet other waters in a gathering
with everything it has been made to take

Or in later sections, where the poem slips into a steady recurrence of phrases initiated by a word like, “as” or “in”:

in the foam exploding
over what it makes the shore, in hit that vocal smooth
over the top of the tablet to say everything is going
good in this transaction, in the colorless candle of dawn,
in the glycerin taking and refracting, in soft rolling away
the peeling apart of color from color in array, in the time
already severed into now, in the way the
task app’s ding presses the sweaty hand into the hypnotic
wheel of the blender

It’s like a gathering and a disassembling at once. Where the actions all are equivalent. But also there is nothing explicit making it cohere. Just the pressures of syntax and rhythm. All these parts of the city or living in the city or being aware of your experience in a city, not that this kind of life can only be lived in a city, but these types of details are what you will likely find in an urban environment. Perhaps I should base Hall’s poetics on awareness and how parataxis gives the poet access to this way of being cognizant of the world.

And maybe that’s why I don’t want to nail down the poem’s occasion. Meaning, I don’t want to assign this poem to “anticipating Apocalypse” or “the mundane as Apocalypse” or “the parataxis of conflagrating fires!!!!” because my primary sensation reading it is a delightful claustrophobia. A crowd of language. A sedimentary rock formation of language pressing me into my reader position. The final section’s recurrent phrase is “clock in/out,” which truly breaks me for its read on work, it’s indeterminate value assigned to time when you’re “on the clock.” Yes, I can see how the poem increasingly edges towards catastrophic imagery, especially the conflated image of a van being built on an assembly line, and in the heated atmosphere of the factory it can anticipate the “sweating sex and children / and laughter in the rivets.” What an ongoingness of style and pace Hall maintains! I can only hope the Apocalypse will be as persistent!

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