Kent Shaw's Blog, page 3

“Let Us Mark This Day,” by Sarah Wolfson

I remember in 2008, this poem by Linnea Ogden. “Contact.” Written like it was the poetry that lies beneath legal documentation. Like it was sounding out legalese, writing a poetic consideration of legal discourse. Maybe the “contact” of the title directs readers to think what happens when two kinds of language are put into contact with one another. In Ogden’s poem, the stanza begins with a piece of language that feels like it’s been lifted from a legal agreement or official correspondence between lawyers. For instance, these italicized stanza openings mention “appeal” or “the party who,” before, then, shifting to the poetry. The poem perhaps proposing where the legal statement was headed. Like there’s a point to the legalese, but when you can only hear a portion of it, it feels more like one of those sentences that will carry a reader’s attention, piling on qualifications, and digressions, leading you somewhere, but you have no idea when you’ll get there. Enter the poem. The genre that is all too happy to drift along with language. A poetic mind is adept at the drift, like it can openly embrace the ambiguity of a statement like: “The rule is to keep quiet if possible, / tempered if not.” (a quote from Ogden’s poem) In this situation, I wonder which is better at navigating the dense garden of indeterminacy. The poem? The legal document?

Maybe I propose a strange correlation between Ogden’s piece and Sarah Wolfson’s poem, “Let Us Mark This Day.” (from Oversound 9). I read both poems for the hint at and embrace of overt rhetorical purpose. Like the poems are a way to wonder about situating a poem by reading it rhetorically. In Wolfson’s case, it aligns with the poem’s title. “Let Us Mark This Day.” Let us commemorate it. Let us build a verbal monument to honour the day, and to honor honour with its elevated u. It makes a difference!

Especially in a poem that would like to poetically appreciate as much of the world as it possibly can. I’m reading Jorie Graham’s Overlord right now, which feels more like a poet reaching to read the world for all its details at once, and recognizing there are limits to the details that can finally assemble together into a poem. Wolfson’s “Let Us Mark This Day” marks a similar limitation. Yes, you can honour the nuthatch that you’ve seen in the yard. And you can honour the sensation of “too many songbirds” in the yard. You can even honour more abstract sensibilities, like the millions of years ago when lust was born.

Maybe you’re catching on to Wolfson’s intent. The spirit of honouring is an accelerating spirit. A quickening. There may be an initial speed that captures the single detail (like the nuthatch) and expresses what it’s worth. But it’s hard to keep with just that initial speed. Because honouring anything can feel like crescendo and a river’s current accelerating past certain parts of the river bank. Honouring is pleasant. Happy and reverent. It’s grave, but also eager to look at reality and love reality.

And in Wolfson’s poem it starts to get out of hand. Yes, giving honour to lust, from millions of years ago is one sign. But there are other signs that Wolfson’s honouring has started losing its fixed of rhetorical purpose.

We engage the work of the rototiller, honest in
its churnings and we acknowledge that power, like manure
does not spread evenly. We don’t condone. We’re done.
We drown in our thoughts. Please, which thought is right?

Wolfson, get ahold of your poem! It’s like when you try using a rototiller, and however “honest” its machinery, it feels like it has its own “honest” mind. And that’s what a poem about honouring can feel like. A rhetoric or honoring that keeps loving its own intention. Adoring its own intention. Totally explosiving the intention and making the language, in its closure, feel like falling debris.

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from Townies, by Emiliano Gomez

I feel like there are always questions someone should be asked after they’ve said they’re from somewhere. Something more than just, “Where’s that?” When I was in the Navy, people would ask where I was from, and I would say, “Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.” And they would always think I was saying something stupid, because where else would Oklahoma City exist. But I liked the joke in it. The idea that something about this centralized city would be the quintessential expression of what “Oklahoma” means. Though it isn’t. And that’s kind of the dilemma to saying you’re from anywhere. It means something to you, but it means nothing to anyone who’s not from there. “You see this and this and this” is one approach Emiliano Gomez takes in these selections from Townies. Where the this you see is “tracks.” Or you see mountains. There are these men there. They’re sad. The men see all these tracks around them, and the poem implies the men know what the tracks mean. But as readers, who are from outside the town where the “Townies” in the poem live, should we know what the tracks mean?

It makes me think of the geometry of a circle. The line drawing the circle’s boundaries, and how, reading the circumference line, we’re supposed to see everything inside the line as the circle. Geometry makes it so thorough and complete. Behold: a circle! And there don’t seem to be any questions about why the line had to go where it did. And what happens when the area of a circle is more than just space. What if the space is occupied by people? They’re a population. What if the circle demarcated a town, with the men living inside it, and the “kind of sad men love” encompassing the town, like there were tonal qualities of the town.

It would hopefully lend the town some further vaguenesses. Is the sadness a consistent tone across the town, like a circle that’s been shaded a consistently cold shade of blue? If sadness lends the men a “blackhole-esque” quality, is that sadness only exaggerated when the men look towards the “tracks” that mark the edge of this town? And when they’re looking further to the orchards, and the sierra mountains, are there more feelings? Does it matter about the more or less of feelings for the sake of this poem?

Which is just what “trying” might look like in a poem titled “Townies.” And it’s this trying, what it means to try, how the poem “tries” over the five different sections published by Mercury Firs using English and Spanish, that makes the try less about identifying where this town is. The “tries” here is in that “essayer” spirit of trying, like Michel de Montaigne, who would “try” describing what was supposed to be easily describable, but then turned more complex, or his trying to describe it overcomplicated it. What really is a liar? What’s idleness? And somewhere in that space of trying and complication lies Gomez’s rhythm to trying in these five sections of “Townies.” A rhythm that can get lost as it identifies the edges of town, what constitutes an edge, and how that edge might offer clarity or vagueness. A rhythm to trying that is about trying again with a new section, a new language for that section, what might be closer or looser translations as it shifts from English to Spanish to English again.

And where it ultimately stands for me is how repeating the town’s existing “tracks” and “orchards” and “mountains” at the edge makes it feel like the town has a closed circuit to it. Like how you might use the first section to draw this town as a circle using light pencil strokes, because the edges are vague, then with the next section you’d draw another circle on top of that one, with those same light pencil strokes, and that next circle would approximate the first. Then you just keep doing that with each of the five sections here in Mercury Firs, so the “circle” formed by these five lighter versions is even more pronounced, even if each of the line is only committing to a vague sense of a line. Like a community that is avidly connected to what it means being in this community. And multiplying that out.

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“Split the Lark,” by Angelo Mao

There could be an argument that Angelo Mao’s poem, “Split the Lark,” is just a play on nothing. The openly ironic game where a poem toys with nothing. It pretends nothing is nothing, and when it shows that to be true, then it turns the poem to ask why are there all these ways to talk about nothing. And if you look past the poem you’ll see the poet literally turning away from the page, showing their poetic calf muscle, and posing with pouty lips while they take a selfie. The caption: “Did I really do that?” Of course you did it you nasty poet-beast! Or I’ll admit that was me last time I brought “nothing” into a poem, I was imagining myself in that selfie pose. It felt good at the time. To poetically churn through nothing. To channel my inner Larry Levis, who was the true sentimentalist for nothing.

And, in a way, that’s where Mao starts his poem, “Split the Lark” (published in Oversound 9). With the grand litany of because’s to set the terms for this poetic inquiry. There is the concept of the “nonexistent” (or nothing) and the city that demands forms of something whether it exists or not, and then the poet with his sentimental nod to the creature, the “Little bird” set on the poet’s knee. It feels like a grand gesture signaling a poem that would propose an explanation for this nothing after presenting these points of consideration, “because” that’s what prompted the poem in the first place.

What I appreciate in Mao’s poem is how it mounts this expectation for explanation. How explanation also calls back to the poem’s namesake written by Emily Dickinson. Where she proposes to “Split the Lark — and you’ll find the Music.” It revolves around the troubling notion that by cutting a bird open you can access its full volume of song. That Dickinsonian gesture that can sometimes resort to violence as a means for locating the precious, then love that preciousness for existing in the world. A “Gush after Gush, reserved for you.” What can only be a “Gush” of blood!

Mao’s poem directs the reader to a similarly troubling consideration. But in his case it’s a name “stitched” somewhere in this little bird’s body. Which I read as some biology that would distinguish one bird from another. And I’m not a biologist, but I’m sure there are categorical traits that would nail down every bird’s name. What, then, is Mao looking for? What “name”? The poem conducts a scalpel-like analysis that takes readers

Past beak, past the vacuum cleaner
hose-like trachea
past voicebox,
past lungs
and past openings
of dead-end bone

Mao tours the reader past many biological traits of the bird. But it’s not some abstracted presentation of knowledge. While the poet describes these things, he is also draining the body of its blood. He is witnessing the body’s gradual lifelessness. Descending through the different names of organs he could imagine the blood draining from. Thinking of the bird’s white blood cell response to intruders. A response that doesn’t account for names. There’s no pausing in the bird to take account of each cell intruding when the bird was alive.

In a sense, Mao conducts the reader through a scientific accounting of this bird’s life, and it leads to what? That “Gush” from Dickinson’s poem? The place in the blood where song resides. Where the audible part of the word “lark” would exist in this bird, whose bounty was worth such praise for Dickinson? Mao is a scientist, and his poem is going to fill the bird with a Silver flow of formaldehyde. The inert body still doesn’t give the poet access to that name “stitched’ in the bird’s body. Instead, he mutes the “Lute” (another call to Dickinson’s poem) to where the “bone is the color of / fingernails after a hot bath.”

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“3.21.2004,” by Sawako Nakayasu

Please start this close reading with some basic instructions. Not from Sawako Nakayasu. Though it would be a delight to interview Nakayasu and ask how she would like readers to prepare themselves for the pieces in her book, Texture Notes. The instructions are my suggestion, because the book is not so much “poetry” as “notes after poetic impulses.” Notes about synthesizing and correlating, materializing the affective. Rather than book-as-constellation-of-poetic-concerns, I would read this book as series of textual objects that could have been hung in an art gallery. And maybe this is me attempting my own “texture note” on Nakayasu’s book. Instructions available as a flyer beside each piece in the gallery. The walls painted a neutral color with a uniform line of frames along the walls.

My instructions for reading “3.21.2004”:

Be prepared for some “delightful fun.” This is not in quotes, because it’s from Nakayasu’s book. The quotations are intended to put you in mind of the voice you hear saying something like “delightful fun.”Stretch. Like physically stretch, as the poem “3.21.2004” will require some physical activity.Be serious. Which should feel juxtaposed to, in opposition to, and in collaboration with the “delightful fun” that appears in the #1 instruction.Rest assured, I did what this poem told me to. [Says the voice of the gallery’s curator—a person who resembles me, but is not, because the curator worked in collaboration with the Nakayasu who wrote the poem] As in, I took the “you” in the poem to mean me when I was reading it. I was able to press my body onto a friend, who is a conductor (of music). And I admire conductors (on the MBTA), so it wasn’t outside my comfort zone to carry out the tail end of this poem.While you read the poem (attached below) think of it as a literal set of instructions. It’s going to be much better if you hear “you” and think YOU reading. That’s what I did. Though I also imagined “you” as other people who I thought had already done it.

Hopefully, instructions like this help establish a spirit for the poem. Or they hint at the book’s ethos, which deals a lot with the incidental. Like “incidentally,” the poet had a dream about having fallen into a hamburger. Or she did a video, like Ginger Ko in these video pieces at FIVES. Ko’s videos have an “incidental” feel to the poem. Explanatory but not explaining. Like I don’t really need Nakayasu to explain why (in a different “texture note”) a character sketch should be done as quickly as you can. But I would like to see what led her to that understanding. Or it would be interesting if Nakayasu had provided a narration while she walked us up to each of these poems. Like some of CA Conrad’s SOMATIC exercises. Which, however narrative, might be better described as imaginative vibe-setters. “If you find yourself like I did,” goes the spirit of Conrad’s prose intro’s, “you would do well to do this.” I’m being more Kent Shaw in my characterization of these. Sorry. Because I’m not really capable of setting the Conrad “vibes,” which I would characterize as a lot more assertive.

Mostly, my impulse to ask Nakayasu for greater context is the delightful fun I have reading the notes. Like many of Nakayasu’s books, the work lodges you in a middle-of-things feeling. Like her book nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she could be a day of someone coming home from work, but with an infinite attention span. The book will always be incomplete, there will always be the feeling of incompleteness to life. Or her book The Ants, which might not need any explanation for its middle-of-things-ness. Because moving forward doesn’t even feel like an impulse in ant world. It’s biological imperative. It’s existential.

Perhaps you’ve noticed I’ve reached an impasse in writing about these Nakayasu “texture notes.” I’ve written nothing about “3.21.2004” except a series of instructions that barely hint at what the poem is about. Or what the poem is doing. I have, however, indicated the poem wants you to do something. I have offered instructions to help put you in the spirit of what the poet wants you to be doing, or what the poem demonstrates as an activity that would give you access to the texture of “conducting,” or if you were to impersonate the poem and find your own inner conductor, what you might see or feel, and your access to personally interpreting an otherwise pedestrian word like “conductor.” Perhaps you see the “inspirational” qualities when you have literally pressed your body against the body of a music conductor, and you’ve felt the “bodyful of music” (an actual quote from Nakayasu’s “3.21.2004”). And the world looks and feels and has an activity for you now that’s different. That’s partly what the poem is about. This imaginative situation where you could access what it’s like living the life of a creative person. But not just in their act of creation. Also in the “memory of every single morning after” a performance, “the joy from being nourished.”

And the poem is about the coincidence of conductor as material that can carry an electrical impulse and conductor as person guiding an orchestra through a piece of music and conductor as the person attending to the order on a train. What a strange collection of words all existing as a single word! How might you describe the “texture” of that?

And that, dear reader, is what I’ve been trying to capture in the lead-up to reading this single poem, “3.21.2004.” Because this “conductor” situation might feel like fertile ground for generating a series of poems highlighting the coincidence of words with these various meanings. The “want” of Mary Jo Bang’s Apology of Want. The “leaving” of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Marguerite are you grieving over goldengrove’s unleaving?” Nakayasu’s book, and interest in “texture” is actually much stranger. Much “weirder” to use the parlance of one of my favorite poetry podcasts, Index for Continuance. Texture exists as a between. It is a combination of any material deemed poetic or delightful fun or “inspirational” or weird with any other material. Meaning, it confounds a formulaic method, it keeps reaching for a method that could provide a formula, but then the formula slips from its fingers. And that’s the poetic method.

Which could be used as a lens for almost any of the Nakayasu books I’ve read. Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From and its concept of girlhood or even “English-language” poetry. Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2022) and its understanding of a book. Texture Notes could be considered an absurdist experiment, conducted on oneself or a friend, fabricated from circumstances the poem finds at its disposal (or is assigned to be disposaling of). There’s a frame for this book and this poem that is entirely absurd. But it’s not really absurd. Which is, perhaps, the point of most absurdist pieces. Like when Adorno argues that Surrealists weren’t really refusing a set meaning for their writing, only asking that a reader relieve themselves of how they think a poem might discover “meaning.” Maybe you can have fun with meaning!! And meaning-making! I would argue fun is the main reason for the “texture note” poems. So, please, do not reduce your fun-expectation settings by thinking of these as “just absurdist experiments.”

The poems in Texture Notes endeavor to making significant statements. Is the significance intentional? Incidental? Improvisational? OMG. Do you see what’s happening here? 10x fun!! Phenomenology made fun! Which is what Everything can feel like when a poem is ready to do everything! I think? In “3.21.2004,” lexicality leads to texturicality. Words can mean words, or can visit in on words. There’s so much arbitrary operating in words. Take it easy with the words. They’re fragile beings. Does the conductor in front of the symphony know about electricity? Likely, this poem says. Not that that conductor would necessarily call it electricity. Because he’s very busy leading a passionate life, thinking passionate things the morning after he’s given a (presumably) passionate performance. But, music conductor, the nerves form electric signals. The poet is herself a collection of conducting materials especially attuned to the conducting feeling. A simple touch. Like how definitions for a single word touch one another in the dictionary. Separated only by a number. And often the number is trying to superscript itself, so it’s out of the way. But for the word “conductor,” there must be more conducting that’s going on!

3.21.2004-NOTES-PDFDownload

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“Cenotaph: Salt Cedar and Shed,” by Richard Greenfield

I’m not sure what I would identify as the event occasioning Richard Greenfield’s poem, “Cenotaph: Salt Cedar and Shed.” Working from the title, I would set it on the unusual equation of a salt cedar and a cenotaph. Like the poet looks out of his window and there’s a salt cedar that has grown past a shed in his yard, so he describes it as “the salt cedar / wears the shed as a skirt.” If this were the poem’s occasion, I would expect this salt cedar / shed combination to be reconfigured as a cenotaph, or a memorial commemorating someone’s death. And while the poem does this, I don’t read it only as a kind of verbal bricolage, whose purpose is to reveal the cenotaph a reader wouldn’t normally have seen. Like, for instance, another of Greenfield’s poems in this issue of Oversound, “Cenotaph: Dandelion.” There the Dandelion-as-cenotaph serves as kind of poetic riffing device.

“Cenotaph: Salt Cedar and Shed” is a more sustained engagement with death and grieving. What about a person (or a cat) someone might really say they are grieving for? And what, really, is the symbolic language of a cenotaph? Is the cenotaph’s statement static? How, when someone has had the death of a loved one with them for so long, do they occupy grieving and death as time has passed? Death for Greenfield’s poems is like a steadfast presence. His first book, A Carnage in the Love Trees, reckons with the death of his father. His second book, Tracer, titles poems after the names of missile system. What death means, what the living person does with their life after someone’s death, these are questions Greenfield engages with in this poem. Surprisingly, he speaks of it through the death of his cat. Not that a person doesn’t experience loss at a pet’s death, but that compared to his own father’s death, or his friend’s father dying, it would seem the least affective to engage the poem with. And yet, it’s where the poet wonders aloud about what exactly he’s missing about the cat. “I am no closer / to her habits on the yardlife, or curled / into catness.” And, even further, does the poem recognizing this distance between himself and his dead cat serve as an “anti-transcendental” realization?

And just to continue the line of inquiry I started this reading with: Is this the poem’s occasion, then? Does this paradox of “poetry understanding death” result in the poem’s underlying complexit? The paradox consisting of poem-giving-space-for-the-poet-to-think-through-a-tragedy contradicting the fact that that space makes him see the the tragedy in a less significant light. It seems possible.

Though what I admire in Greenfield’s poem is how much more it endeavors to address. Like the symbolic language of a cenotaph existing on what the poem identifies as a “grief-plane.” Perhaps grieving and knowing of death and the implications of death could be compared to a salt cedar which has overgrown the dimensions of a backyard shed. Does the beginning of the poem offer this singular visual as a poetic image? Or a poetic symbol? And what distinguishes one from the other? I don’t have a definitive answer for anyone interested in a hard line that might differentiate symbol from image. I do feel the white plastic trash bag appearing in the salt cedar’s branch inclines me to read it more symbolically. Which, for me, means I’m more inclined to think of the tree as stand-in for a word. If I were reading it as an image, it would exist in tacit meaningfulness.

What I appreciate, though, is how Greenfield inhabits the poem with multiple purpose pulling at one another. The surprising recognition of this salt cedar as a cenotaph asserting something about actual death the reader wasn’t likely expecting. And then the poet recognizing for the reader how death can make someone unsure of how to respond. It’s like the salt cedar occupies this space between settled memorial (like a cenotaph) and spectacle (for the image of a salt cedar wearing a shed like a skirt).

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“Late Shift,” by Amy Woolard

What I admire in Amy Woolard’s poem, “Late Shift” is the construction of lateness, especially as you’re looking back from a later moment in life, or feeling like you might have been too late to really appreciate the life you were experiencing at that time. Young adulthood is strange, because it’s easy to reflect on how foolishly serious I was about it (something I read this poem speaking to), but also how much of young adulthood defines the person I’ve eventually become (something else I see in this poem). It’s like Amy Woolard celebrates her nostalgia for this past life, wondering how much of it lingers in her present life and how much she can see she left behind.

Maybe this distinction shouldn’t be read as an either/or situation. And maybe Woolard intentionally muddles the either/or quality memories can have for someone. For me, this complicated arrangement appears most in the poem’s transitions. For instance, when she moves from the micro-vignette of the poet kissing the line-cook to an assertion about her past fitting with her present.

…the obscene puckered red of maraschino, the wrecked
Line cook in the walk-in. His chilled kiss. How it tastes like a future

Eviction. Thieves in the temple of our bodies. Years later I will
Still feel most at home when I eat standing up.

On one hand, this moment in the poem describes a reckless romance the poet had with this line cook. It’s something to remember a bit more realistically than she would have framed it at that time. And the transition starting with “Years later” could easily allow for the poet to reflect back on what this memory of romance means to her, but it doesn’t. I think the poet has moved on to something more general, how she realizes how meaningful it was to stand while eating. The transition puts me in mind of Deborah Landau’s work. I’ve always been fascinated by her shift from phrase to phrase. The sensuous assertions that I hear with each transition. In “Late Shift,” from Woolard, I would say the sentence has similar velvet openings and velvet conclusions. And as you move to the next sentence, you experience what I might call a reorientation, or a reconsideration of what life was when the poet worked a “late shift,” and how that was has an ambiguous relationship with what is currently for the poet.

Like these memories operate inside her like a sentence would. With one sentence leading to the next, the strange cohesion that resembles how memories string together. But in Woolard’s case, it’s not clear what role those memories should have in the poet’s present life. Are they shameful? Is it like the image she uses: “in my lungs still nests the fur of every animal I / ever kept”? Or is it that the sum total of these memories will be the fierce and sleek snow leopard “the gods will have [her] cough up” from all that fur?

I think the complicated relationship between the poet and her memories is best illustrated in her consideration of Bruegel’s Icarus. The poem observes the painting’s inconspicuousness in portraying the fall. Where you might not even look if you hadn’t known you were supposed to. But also the poem observes how ready an analogy Icarus represents—a life eager for light, especially a “light // To love [the poet] back,” and also a life told so often in stories, it feels easy to just start the story over from the beginning.

What Woolard’s poem might most value from her past young adulthood is its fluidity, the loves separated from each other “like cupping a yolk between the cracked half // Shells.” It’s a tender poem, kind to the poet’s past. Nostalgic for it, and also reckoning with the full scope of having lived through it and since it.

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Simulating the Reality: A Review of Gabriel Dozal’s The Border Simulator

I would say the key to understanding The Border Simulator is to consider everything anyone can do a simulation. Drinking a Coke, for instance, could be a simulation of refreshment. Eating Cheetos. Buying a baseball cap could be a simulation of playing a sport. Like naming someone “Primitivo,” just because they want to cross the border. Is it the right name? I don’t know! Would you choose “Primitivo” for the simulation because there is something “primitive” to moving over a landscape? Would you choose the masculine over the feminine of “primitive,” because you first wanted to test the simulation on a man? Or you default to masculinity? Or you were thinking of how many more US Customs agents are men, and you didn’t want chauvinism included in the simulation?

Maybe questioning could be considered a form of simulation. And how different Gabriel Dozal’s book would be if each poem’s simulation was as tentative or inquisitive as a paragraph that asks so many questions. But that’s not his book. For Dozal, simulation is a means to infinite possibilities! Consider the simple difference between writing simulation versus the word “simulation” in quotes. Which is the simulation? The one hiding in quotes? Or is it the one prancing around without even a modest gesture to punctuation. Maybe it feels precarious to point Dozal’s central trope of simulation in so many directions. And that’s exactly my point. For Dozal, poetic simulating is like a style. It permeates the poetry. It eviscerates the poetry. It’s the verbose machine blooming out into poetry to look back at itself and mock that anyone ever looked at it as a poem. His sentences might appear like signposts, like they’re going to reveal the point to a story, or construct a fictional world. Because they want to lure you into certainty. Which might be one of the points of a simulation. For instance, the recurring figure of the “crosser” from “Working for Customs Is Like Building a Cathedral.” There is the reality of the crosser, and the surreality of writing a poem about the crosser, but couched in what is likely the reality experienced by someone crossing the border.

And the ordinary experience is waiting in line
at the bridge to get back into El Paso.
We alter the crosser to unfold the crosser
and unfolded we can see their creases and angles
and appreciate them in their full expressions.
The song “Expressway to Your Skull” is played all day
when Primitivo is detained in my vernacular hut.
You are a guest of mine and I’m the host. (l. 15-22)

The reality of the crosser would be the person waiting in line to get back to El Paso. The surreality would be how easy it is for a poem to reshape the crosser into a cubist rendering that could be unfolded like origami. And the poem’s velocity in crafting a commentary from the surreal. Please understand, if Dozal sees an opening so he can recast a situation into artful multiplication, he’ll take it. Which makes sense if the border is merely a simulation, or totally a simulation, or can only be described in terms that reveal its simulation. Or that seems to be the primary impetus in Dozal’s poems. To complicate the people who cross the border by both playing into the stereotype and exploding the stereotype, all in the same poem. Primitivo can stand in for what feels like the symbolic importance of crossing the US-Mexico border. And Primitivo can be the straw person Customs has devised for dehumanizing the people who cross the border. And in the midst of these two readings for Primitivo, Dozal wants to make clear the distinct motives each person would have for crossing the border.

And the big question is whether The Border Simulator should be read more for its argument or for its mockery that any argument can be made. If the book is going to describe a border as some kinetic stasis whose primary interest is kinesis, does that make these poems performance? How they can keep things moving. Keep talking about “crossers,” and the crossers become an erratic, oops, I mean ineradicable problem (slips of the tongue being another of Dozal’s playful ways to unsettle sense). And, then, by raising substantial questions in the midst of that performance, pointedly topical questions about the border, does calling it a simulation at that point make Dozal’s book more argument? Like how the fiction of the border was highlighted by Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands? Yes. Yes to what? You might ask. And that’s the impasse between performance and political rhetoric in The Border Simulator. Is the book critical of the bureaucratic machine of the border? Yes. Does the border come across as a self-contradicting argument that has no point but can’t escape its poignant existence to each of the people crossing? Yes. In “Customs Resurrected You, Primi, Because They Need More of You to Make the Border Exist,” Dozal plays this line between politics and performance:

They’d show a video of you crossing.
It looked so much like you it must have been you.
But now they need you to cross
and you have passed to the afterafterlife
and risen again and have crossed the desert
and you guess you’re in simulation now,
unable to dissimulate only creating dollar signs and your buddies
can only say four words: work Mylar blank x.
The x is important because it can mean no,
it can mean here, it can mean meet me,
it can mean peligro, it can mean the spot,
it can mean intercourse, it can mean interzone,
it can mean simulation, it can mean reality (l. 4-16)

Dozal’s book explicitly confronts the situation at the border by describing the aggressive stance of Customs officials, pointing to Customs’s inability to see people as anything but types of people (”crossers”) rather than individuals. At the same time, Dozal uses poetic listing and extended variation like they were playground equipment he’s repurposing to feel like nonsense. How else are you supposed to make sense of a border? X marks a spot in the above quote. And there’s a way the poem’s forward momentum makes it feel like the X will land on that meaning. And then the poem reminds you how many things X can relate to, like X calls attention to something. Or X can mean “danger” (peligro). And then X starts to branch out everywhere, until it signals all of “reality.”

For my reading, Dozal’s book is an exaggeration on the slippery slope method of argument. Yes, it’s a logical fallacy, and, yes, the national discussion about borders feels like a many-armed fallacy. So that reading The Border Simulator feels more like Postcommodity’s art piece “Repellent Fence,” where a series of balloons are perched like they’re surveilling the border. Because there is so much conversation looking “directly” at the border. And what exactly are we looking at, say the balloons. And the art makes a point, but it’s not searching for what point to make. It’s political protest with the caveat that it’s art. Which gets into much larger arguments about what art can effectively say about politics if the audience around art generally shares similar political positions. I admire Dozal’s slipperiness. Its commitment to slippage. I had seen his work in magazines leading up to this book. And what I admire is how much of the book amplifies its slippery position. In all the reading I’ve presented in this review, I haven’t even touched its Spanish translations on the right-facing pages. I don’t know Spanish enough to comment on the translations. But I can say the presence of Spanish, the poems’ page-facing-page presence, speaks even louder to who is and who should be conducting a conversation about “border policy” in the US. Though, as Dozal’s book is also saying, who is the one with the facts, and what does those facts even matter if their simulation is indistinguishable from mere “facts.”

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“Elliptical,” by Kristen Steenbeeke

Do you remember when every interesting poem was labeled “elliptical,” because it did this thing with juxtaposition or parataxis or dysjunction, and the subject matter or the poem’s voice was just spaced differently. And that made it more interesting. And God bless Stephanie Burt for setting those poems away from the LangPo and Narrative “in-fighting” by naming it something a little ambiguous and a little apt: “elliptical.” But also, God bless, Stephanie Burt, why was it for ten years everyone had to call every poem an “elliptical poem,” like there was no other way to signal how interesting they found the poem?

I don’t know if Kristen Steenbeeke’s poem “Elliptical” wants us to be thinking about Stephanie Burt’s coined term. Especially given the literal ellipses that exist at the end of each line (except the last). But there is something novel in the finality brought by each ellipsis. Like the statement in each line is dampened, just by using an ellipsis. It’s made curt. Or aphoristic. Like it’s farming out one of the ellipsis’s purposes and exploiting it for the poem. Oh, exploitative grammar! Lash this poem into submission!

Having just read Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle, I can’t help noting their similar gestures towards the poetic line. Both this poem by Steenbeeke and many of the poems in Chang’s book present a line that feels independent of the other lines in the poem. Or there’s not really going to be any half-senses read into enjambments, because there are none. And in neither Chang nor Steenbeeke do I feel encouraged to read for associative leaps that might bind poetic lines with an implicit, imaginative logic. At the same time, I don’t read the poems as an arbitrary collection of poetic lines. For Chang, each line seems to radiate from a type of speaker. A poetics of impulsiveness as I try to describe in my goodreads review. For Steenbeeke, I read the lines revolving around a state of mind, whether expressing how it feels or expressing how difficult it is to find the best medium to express it.

And what state of mind is that? I don’t think the poem is prepared to identify anything exactly. It’s like when you feel something, but it’s not entirely clear what you’re feeling. Like maybe you’re feeling anxious, or desperate, or alienated from friends. And you could name this feeling any of those, but what purpose would that serve when the emotion feels wrapped around something unnameable. And you’re more obsessed with its unnameability than compartmentalizing it with a label.

Enter the ellipsis. Occupying a silence at the end of each line. Maybe the silence is a trap. A sound closely aligned with obsession. A statement that feels like an “and” or an “or,” and that lends a magical paratactic quality to the poem. And maybe the “and” or “or” feel precarious when the ellipsis connects to a strange image, like a sign in the grocery store asking you Give to future babies, or the looping music on a DVD’s menu. So even as the poem revolves around what feels like a serious subject, there’s also this consideration of what from contemporary culture might be framed with a little more seriousness, because it can evoke the same state of mind. Like the dry humor stare on a mockumentary or the iPhone notification pulling someone away. Isn’t that kind of like an ellipsis?

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“Logical Argument,” by Lisa Lewis

“It happened” is the first thing you need to know reading Lisa Lewis’s poem, “Logical Argument” (from Annulet 6) What happened? It’s not clear. And it’s not even clear if “it” was the “logical argument” that’s standing at the top of the poem. Maybe “it” is something that happened, and now, following the “logical argument” this is the state of affairs described in the poem. And though there is part of me that wants to cast the consequential “it” as a domestic disagreement, especially given the poem’s use of “we” in the opening that separates out to a “you” and “I” later, I find I’m more inclined to a reading that pins the poet and her partner inside the house. Where “it” is an argument between the household and the people who have some problem with what the couple does to their house. The brick of the walkway. The cars in the driveway gasping after a long rain.

What exactly is the conflict, then? And how can the poem put forward a logical reaction to this logical argument they are combatting? I would like to think the poem’s form has an especially strong argument for not making any of this clear. Is it something about planting the wrong trees? Was it something someone overheard while they were walking by? Conflict can be sharpened by specifics. This poem, however, has left left all the specifics packed inside the “it” of the opening. And the result is a stew of many disagreements over many years, and all of them refusing to be resolved.

Like how each line of the poem feels so intent to dwell on whatever assumptions led to the conflict some time in the past and were borne out of it. And now everyone just keeps talking about it. The heavy influence of whatever occurred complemented by the heavy knowledge that everyone still remembers what happened. It’s a poetics of the domestic spaces where they absorb what people are thinking and feeling. Both the people inside the house, and those outside. A home lets things like this linger. The line, “we want to be able to look back and make out the walls,” and the mystery of what those walls would represent. The walls preserving the home’s intimacy? The walls to keep people out? The walls that mark the existence of a house, and the protection a house should afford those living inside.

What I appreciate most of all is the role of nature in the poem. In particular, the trees that appears towards the end. For the poet, the trees are like a benevolence. A kindness that will “talk to the clay and bitter elms,” that will “send roots to the bottom no matter how deep.” Even holding a hammock at a protective height. I admire the specific roles the tree is supposed to inhabit. But I think what I really enjoy is how the ambiguous and surreal actions the trees take amplify all the ambiguity that had come before. Like the poem isn’t going to be reaching for resolution to the mystery, it’s not going to hint at what might have been the original “logical argument” or “it” that had appeared at the opening to the poem. The poem is going to overcomplicate everything. The poem won’t settle down. Where so much of the poem felt defensive, the poet trapped in her house, a precarious stance to whatever this “it” that happened in the past was, that’s not going to be where the poem rests. It will opt for the supernatural of the natural world!

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“Summer,” by Celeste Pepitone-Nahas

What can anyone say is contained in containers? In a plastic bag? In the image of a man who’s merely identified as a “composer”? In America? Like the whole country of America should be looked at as just a container. Like a backyard with statues in it. But if that’s the image associated with America, it doesn’t amount to an oversimplification. There’s something complicated about a backyard filled with statues. Even as there’s something kind of summarizing what a space for statues really stands for. What contains and what’s contained isn’t an easy formula for “Summer” (found in Annulet 6) Like how gathering any set of circumstances, or various impressions will ultimately start to feel arbitrary. But there’s an art to making a bunch of arbitrary pieces fit together.

Which is one thing this poem is challenging itself to. Because what do you do with so many different characters, and details. What do you mean if you’re going to spell it “Americka” and “America” and “Amerika”? Making “America” something arbitrary. Yes, I said it. Or what if readers were encouraged to think of America in an arbitrary light. How would history look? How would looking at an individual look in light of history, in light of their personal history?

I would argue that Pepitone-Nahas uses ideas like “museum,” a backyard statue garden called “Americka,” and then the later mention of “America” as a way to identify a context for the poem without explicitly elaborating on that context. Maybe this reading feels like a bit of a stretch. Or it simply feels vague. Which I think the poet would, in fact, encourage me to. It’s like the poem’s quick image:

The photo of this tree
diminishes what swaying
leaves recall.

Where the photo containing the image of a tree has one thing to say, and it estimates but doesn’t entirely express what the leaves attached to the tree, how they’re “swaying” in the wind, would know about the tree. Meaning, there is a difference between knowing of something (what’s contained) and knowing something (what’s experienced). The poem, with each stanza centering on a single impression, all parts of that stanza contributing to its single impression, amounts to nine impressions for the poem. And the poem isn’t too concerned that it articulates what makes all the stanzas fit together. But they do feel like they fit together. How “one beloved” and “one who loves” might touch on the poet’s relationship to the “composer,” who was in Iowa. And the meaning of a place called “Americka” somewhere inside the poet’s European town complementing the memory of the composer. Is an impression something that can be constituted? Like it were a hardened, concrete shape? Or are impressions porously interacting with the other impressions surrounding them?

Pepitone-Nahas’s poem has that looseness that lets me think like a reader finding the poem’s alignment. Encouraging me to think it might be there. Or at least searching for it will be one of the benefits to reading the poem.

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