Kent Shaw's Blog, page 4

“Althea,” by Molly Ledbetter

What would life would be like if you were in the middle of a Grateful Dead song. Or you were moving a lot, and you suddenly realized there’s a lot of life that passed, and you’ve been moving so much you may or may not have noticed that. And you’re doing an art of moving, and you know that would be hard to master, because moving has a lot of moving parts to it.

And in Molly Ledbetter’s poem, “Althea,” the moving quality of the parts, and the poet’s sometimes desire to put them together, and sometimes ambivalence about what it means to put things together, and sometimes “Fuck it. It’s all together!” attitude is exactly what makes the poem so moving. And I mean “moving” like it affects me emotionally. And I mean “moving” like how the poem’s form just keep urging Ledbetter’s sentiment along. Which leaves the poem extremely open-ended about how to read it. When the poet sees the line from a Grateful Dead song, “this too shall pass,” and all the reasons why she would see that line where she saw it come to bear on what she thinks of it, she’s abashed. Is it saying the most obvious thing so it’s the most annoying thing ever? Is saying the obvious thing with genuine concern too simple? Or is saying the obvious thing speaking a truth she knows others will hear because that obvious thing has fit into their own life at the right time?

If it feels like everything in Ledbetter’s poem is like one of those labyrinths you find on the floor of a cathedral, and walking it is supposed to put you in a meditative state, you’re getting close to how I read her poem. But then think of that labyrinth and how it might relate to a tie-dye t-shirt you find at a Grateful Dead concert, and how meaningful that t-shirt would be for a Deadhead. I don’t think Ledbetter is a Deadhead. I think the Grateful Dead has a meaningfulness to the poem that takes Ledbetter out of her own head about what she might usually think about the Grateful Dead. So, ultimately, it’s confusing about which of the stances she’s taking to her own poem, and how anyone should read the poem based on her poetic stance? Does the poem exist in a sentimental light? Ironically? Does its placement in an issue of Annulet elevate how someone reads it? Does its single prose line lineation complicate that elevated view?

I think the poem only slightly gestures to the larger topic at hand. Something seems to have happened to the poet’s brother. Something tragic. That the poem can’t entirely lay hold of. Kind of like how the poem looks at the Grateful Dead from many different angles. I suspect the brother had some connection to the band. Which is only meaningful because of the poet’s complicated feelings to them. But all these ways the poem surrounds a subject, and is engrossed in what it might mean for the poet to be thinking about a subject, kind of avoiding it, and kind of finding true-to-life moments, that is what would be the “healer of wounds” for this poem, if I had to explain what I think is happening in the title. But what I really appreciate is that the poem exists and thinks without needing to make a point about why it would exist. But it needs to exist for me. And that, to me, is what makes the poem so tragic. Or capable of expressing tragedy in a “naked” light. Though the artfulness of the poem crafts that nakedness into something that feels more “nude” to the moment.

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“The New World,” by Kelly Schirmann

There is a movement to prose paragraphs when they appear in poetry books. Something separate from the “prose poem,” which is structured to look like a paragraph, because the materials, being part of a surreal vision or a dream, just won’t settle into regular verse. It needs to feel like the poet felt it, happening all at once. The feeling is chaos, with the poem mainly concerned with whatever the play run between nonsense and sense. But the prose paragraph, especially as it’s used in Kelly Schirmann’s book, The New World, has other methods. I would say her paragraphs are like excerpts from an ongoing lyric essay, especially in the way an ongoing sensibility moves from one paragraph to the next. A prosody focused on transition. That capitalizes on the page-turn. And takes advantage of the tension that arises from the topic-sentence expectations a reader brings, where they expect any one paragraph to sum up what it’s saying, but also the portion-of-a-whole that most readers would expect a paragraph to be part of. Like the paragraph isn’t supposed to tell the whole story, but conduct a reader carefully through one.

I would argue, the prose paragraph is a central device for Schirmann’s book. Not only because the first section is a personal essay written in straightforward prose, and the title section of the book, “The New World,” is written in prose paragraphs, with one paragraph per page. But because the sections that follow all occupy a mental space that feels similar to the space those paragraphs occupied. Where the paragraphs provide an occasional view into the poet’s ongoing life. She’s moved to California with her partner, and she’s marveling at what can be new, she’s marveling at waiting to find something new in her artistic practice, and she’s even marveling at what happens as the new settles into pattern, invigorating what she’d sensed was new, while also signaling it might not be as new anymore.

It’s these layers interconnected by a circuitous logic that I would call Schirmann’s real success. How her paragraphs don’t need to spend time establishing a world, they speak from a world that they’ve trained their reader to assume already exists in each poem. Though, for me, it begs the question about what a paragraph, which is traditionally an organizational device, is doing for a poem? I’ve long appreciated Lynn Keller’s comment in Thinking Poetry, where she explains what women have folded into American poetry since Kathleen Fraser and Lyn Hejinian. When women poets from that time pushed for a consideration of subjectivity in writing as it’s understood by women versus by the men who had dominated Language Poetry up to that point. For Keller, this position in the late 1970s, early 1980s initiates a long tradition of women’s poetry that “transgresses the limits of intelligibility.” Of course, this means something very different in the work of Fraser and Hejinian versus Schirmann’s The New World. But allowing perforation to serve as a transitional mechanism moving the reader from one paragraph to the next, and how this movement invites a consideration of the poet’s larger world concerns amid these brief glimpses into that world, this could at least be read as an overlap between Hejinian and Schirmann, or it at least places her as one of many inheritors of this tradition.

Though I would also comment that this space is well-trafficked in this current moment of American poetry. Just a few books I’ve personally been excited to read for their poetic tooling of the prose paragraph are Andrea Rexilius‘s New Organism, C. Violet Eaton’s Some Habits, Valerie Hsiung‘s To Love an Artist, Donna Stonecipher’s Transaction Histories, and Dawn Lundy Martin’s Discipline. Each carries the prose paragraph in different ways, but could be related to the others’ methods. The books most directly comparable to Schirmann’s are Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water and Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book. In particular, both these books stage the paragraph as a unit that momentarily records something of note, which any individual poem can casually pick up, then put back down with a mild resolution that feels local to the paragraph, but still doesn’t resolve the book’s larger consideration. Importantly, this occasional method allows the poet to relate something new without needing to contextualize it with the larger work. These books feel close to a journal, but something much more satisfying then an actual journal.

With Schirmann, Yanyi, and Buffam, the book teaches the reader what each of these prose paragraphs will attempt. Or, in that Montaigne way, “try.” They will try to make the one event described in the paragraph relevant to everything that has already been said. They will try to remain coherent, but they also trust the reader to understand everything they say in the paragraph feels coherent to the composition, and the reader should appreciate that quality.

If it’s not clear, most of my reading in Schirmann is thinking about this poetic device. At least the way reading a series of sonnets makes you think less and less about the formal mechanisms of a sonnet sequence. There’s just so much content. Of course, there are differences between the sonnet and the paragraph. But the pace of reading, a uniformity in timing for each page, an inconspicuous role for the form, how the sonnet’s reiteration seems to make it less pertinent to the reading, and, finally, a sense that passion drives the series of pieces to something that’s not really resolvable, giving the sense the sequence will go on as long as the poet has the stamina to make it go on, these similarities significantly overlap the two forms. It’s this ongoing quality that leads me to read Schirmann’s “The Dreams” and “Apples” sections of The New World as extensions of that prose paragraph style, extending its influence past “The New World” section. Or at least a middle ground between the sonnet sequence and the prose paragraph.

“The New World,” an individual poem appearing in the book’s “The Dreams” section, starts differently. It should be read as a dream, for one thing. So, while “The New World arrived / when we were unconscious” might fit with that axiom about what people most desire only comes when they least expect it (when it’s like they’re “unconscious” to what they most desire), it’s also describing a situation where “The New World” could be considered a dream figure that appears while someone is sleeping. They might not be watching, but that New World is going to lay “on top of the Old World / like vellum paper.” And in this arrangement of world(s), the people, as “institutions,” will comply by signing things.

Everything is in general agreement. People, organizations as people, worlds just doing what needs to be done. The poem doesn’t explain why anyone would be signing things. They just feel “compelled” to. Which, in light of the book’s larger concerns, could be how artistic purpose feels once everything fits into place. New world, new life. At least in the sense where the poet has spent durations of time waiting for a new world to meet her where she is in this new place. The sweep of the few stanzas describing the New World on top of the Old World feels like that sweep of artistic purpose.

There were many new documents
we felt compelled to sign

There was still fresh juice
though we regarded it skeptically

The New World shined
brighter / and was

Red became a color
for the first time in decades

Heat came from humans
who were just pure energy

Food grew faster
and more anonymously

What I am drawn to in the poem comes after this, though. What happens “eventually.” When “a newer world” starts appearing in images that no one had been attending to. Because it speaks to the poet’s awareness of disappointment, while also wondering aloud why she would be disappointed. What does it mean for the new world if a newer world is so soon to take its place? It’s a lingering disappointment, something that feels intrinsic to the culture, but it doesn’t seem the poet understands why it’s there. In particular, she sees how newness on its own is something people pursue, and they have many reasons to pursue it, or they don’t even know why they are chasing it, it just feels like something to do. And is that what had left the poet unsettled?

There was a feeling permeating
all of us / a sleepy memory
of having moved beyond
the moment of choice-making

The newness that she refers to later as “an adjacent performance // Long and slow / Still” is part of her new world that feels even newer than her new world. And I can’t help but read an underlying anxiety, where the poet wonders if the new world she’d perceived should really have been seen in light of the Old World she’d seen laid on top of by a New one, or if it were just a function of the world, which likes to feed newness to people all the time. And what would that do to the poet’s artistic practice. She’d been so patient throughout the book, waiting for newness to invigorate her art.

It’s part of that imposter syndrome many artists are familiar with. The tenuousness of a creative practice. The fear that what feels right and good at any moment might just be artistic delusion. Can feeling “Heat came from humans / who were just pure energy” be deflated so quickly to “how quiet it got then,” when the poet is just watching new things while she cleans?

The-New-World-NOTESDownload

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“Central Oregon,” by Patty Nash

I have to admit, I read Patty Nash‘s “Central Oregon” while I was reading Laynie Browne’s book, Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists, so I was attuned to lists. I was aware that a list doesn’t just have to be items, but it can be playing with items. Like in Browne’s book, where the items are sometimes tasks, and sometimes just observations, and sometimes reflections, but they all take place in a day. Or there’s this sense that each of the poems is a single day’s accumulation of items arranged so they feel like a poem about doing stuff, or what it means that someone would be reading a list thinking the poet should be doing something, and maybe she is. Maybe she’s not.

But that’s not the list for Nash. And if you’re like me, this is exciting news. Not that there haven’t been plenty of list poems that do fun and interesting things with items. Or sequences. And I’ve enjoyed them, or been curious, or skeptical. There are lots of ways to be critical. Nash’s list is a little bit like a population of Central Oregon. What you can find there. Her great-grandfather was from there. Her grandfather who may or may not be “legitimately” born from her great-grandfather. Owls. A truly majestic manmade dam. Some might say a poem like this contains multitudes. Lists the multitudes. And that’s one of the significant parts of it. That the list is establishing a poetics of place, and the place is where Nash’s family is from. Which makes it something much bigger.

Like when Eleni Sikelianos wrote that giant The California Poem, and she was from California, and the encyclopedic nature of the work feels like a statement about how large the idea of finitude can really be (meaning finitude might always be smaller than infinity, but there are lots of things short of infinity that would fit into a finite count of objects). And it also feels like a statement about sentimental attachment, and how it amplifies what it means to look at the place where you’re from, and to see your family in all these places, even family that you don’t even know.

So, then, Nash’s list and its aesthetic explores and exploits sentiments and physical facts together. Birds of prey. And realty. And the nature of realtors who have a passion for what they’re selling you. What if I imprinted upon all these listed items a sequentiality? Like they all happened in this order. One thing happened, then the next thing. Which is, of course, what this list implies. Or at least certain moments seem to follow from the moments before. But, overall, the sense of causal movement that might be used to connect one item to the next isn’t really explained. Meaning, the poem isn’t going to just slip into that style of reading.

Nash lets the presumption of sequentiality do a lot for the poem, though. And she takes liberty, then, with levels of discontinuity. I like the effect. It contrasts so much with the lists in Browne’s book, too. Where Browne’s lists involve a day, a day’s set of “todo” items kind of, or what it feels like to keep a list of todo’s for a day, so the poem is a list of impressions those tasks put on the poet. And what I appreciate is how both Nash and Browne play with these kinds of expectations!

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“When is the comet coming…?” by Rushing Pittman

I’m not sure how familiar people are with that Stephen Crane poem (In the Desert) where the poet meets this creature in the desert. And it’s holding its heart “in his hands.” And it’s eating it. “It’s bitter.” The creature tells the poet. But bitterness isn’t the tone Crane is going for. This moment is tragic. And very real. And life is assuredly filled with bitterness. And it’s possible to register a poem’s complexity via that bitterness. But what Crane does is amplify what it feels like living a bitter existence, by showing the poet and the “creature” he’s come across as self-aware of what bitterness does.

And I know that’s not the exact setting or situation Rushing Pittman operates from in his poem, “When is the comet coming…?“. But it’s the poet’s heart jumping into his mouth at first. And it’s the poet spitting that heart out “into the dirt” that makes me think of Stephen Crane.

Though there are other ways I could let Crane accompany my reading of this poem. The matter-of-fact story both poems take account of. “Once I saw a field of sleeping horses.” Says Pittman. And later, “Once I wanted to become a thin line.” Or later still, “Once I kept the iron on.” Pittman’s gesture to the storyteller, that distanced self curating the events from a life that might help make sense of the wily facts life is full of, even as those events never had any intention of coming together to make sense. But, as the story pieces them together, they’re not nonsense. And it’s something in the storyteller’s personality, his certainty, that gathers the poem into this very pleasurable authority. “See how I’m doing this?” The storyteller assures us.

And with Pittman, he is actively balancing between chaos and cohesive narrative. It might not always be easy to see one statement leading to the next. But, at the same time, every line is its own statement. And something there is that doesn’t love a single sentence occupying a single line. All that authority patted right into place. And set beside the next line that will occupy its own sentence. Though I don’t think this sequence of lineated sentences are telling a story. Or they’re about a story contingent on the reader’s faith that all these statements must have something in common. Or they’re in this similar circumstance. What I read as a failed romance. And the poet is so trapped in it. He’s not happy he trapped himself. And yet, there is no choice but for him to be trapped.

It’s OK. He supposes, to live an unhappy life, trapped. Because it’s part of life, the situation. As the poem moves towards its conclusion, it arranges a litany of entrapments. Look at that mussel, trapped. Look at that moth, trapped and dying. The poet is in all those places with them. He prefers reminding himself of his own position by purposefully prompting his partner to scold him. Or inform him (the iron’s still on!). It’s not entirely clear the differences in entrapment. And whether the poet even feels he sabotages himself by trapping himself. Maybe that’s the subtitle of the poem: “Entrapment: How to double down on feelings about your life.” I would totally reread the poem if that was the title. Then I would go back to this version of the poem with its title and read it. And maybe I would feel trapped between the two. DELICIOUS!

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“the night club,” by Nora Claire Miller

The prose form in Nora Claire Miller’s poem is, for me, the key to its invention, or it’s what exaggerates the invention into the form. Everything is crowded, because prose can often do that to a poem. Make it crowded. Make the images feel more like a bunch of inflatable pool toys you’re trying to store in your living room. And if they were arranged just right, so it feels like, say, a “night club,” with the lighting at that semi-passive-aggressive level, and everyone looking like that version of themselves they imagine they look like looking into a camera, that is exactly where all the THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP!!! comes from in a night club.

That’s the scene I’m walking through in Nora Claire Miller’s poem, “the night club,” published last year in FENCE 40. It’s the prose form that is risky to use. Because there was this time in the early 2000s when many poets used the prose form to write something zany. “Everything’s crowded. How zany is that!” is the feeling I got reading those poems. For instance, Joel Brouwer’s Centuries. So zany. So kind of a similar note throughout. Likely, no one else feels as anxious as I do reading prose poems. But I do! What if it just reduces to the formula? What if the surreal imagery is just mildly zany, or too zany for the poem, or zany image 1 is not sufficiently distanced from zany image 2. And it all tastes bland. Gross!

I find Miller’s poem about as fresh as peanut butter eaten at a job you’re barely grateful to have. And maybe that sounds like the color grey (especially when it’s spelled with an e). But I’ve had a job like that. I worked it sometimes on a Saturday afternoon, and no one else was there. And if I’d found some peanut butter, it would have felt like I was falling in love with peanut butter. I totally get Miller’s image.

And I totally get that crowded feeling trying to connect spoon with peanut butter, and the hazards posed by an elbow. Or any part of you arm. Get out of the way arm! It’s like being in a night club, and everyone in there is a version of you. And look at how Miller’s poem exaggerates its analogical pieces into that prose form! Prose is crowded. Miller’s poem is crowded on so many levels. I just love passing the many people who go to a club, and the poet admits they are all the same people. Maybe it’s more about different versions of “people.” Like when my daughter and I play Minecraft and we meet “traders” or “villagers” coming to the house. All of them with that same eager look on their face. Probably the same look I would have on my face when I’m at a night club, and all the versions of me were crowded into a bathroom. I’m very familiar with me. Miller’s poem is the zany feeling I have meeting all these versions of me at a night club. And familiarity like that feels like eating peanut butter. Or I didn’t realize that until I read it in Miller’s poem. And it’s pretty exciting to recognize something so well in a poem!

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“02.03.16,” by Laynie Browne

I don’t feel entirely qualified to make some grand statement about how Laynie Browne approaches books (like does she always write her books as a project, or are the three books I have read coincidentally project books); however, I can register with some confidence that when one of Browne’s books steps into its project, the relationship between individual poem and book concept or vision provides a notable lens for reading any individual poem. In Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists, Browne uses the poetic list form as method and parody and fractured daily journal over the course of the entire book. The consistency of the form encourages the reader to think of what a list is in their daily lives, what someone thinks while they’re making a list, how lists guide a person to other lists. The work could be considered an interrogation of the list, except “interrogation” feels contrarian, and when I think of the larger project of this book, reading for the interrogation doesn’t feel like a helpful read. Like I don’t hear Browne asking, “What is a list?” More “What can you do with a list?”

And reading for this is pretty much inescapable, given the consistent numbered formatting in each poem, and the sustained project implied by titling each poem after the date when it was presumably written. How should individual poems get read in a book whose project is so conspicuously present? For instance, reading Alice Notley The Descent of Alette, it’s natural to feel absorbed in the story’s forward momentum and its commentary on feminist power structures, and to privilege this reading over a close reading of any single poem. But should you? The book asks its reader. Each poem is similar in length and style. And each poem uses a device that some might consider absorbing to the point of distraction—Notley’s famous “quotations” “around each of” “the fragments.” The poems refuse to be inhaled in pursuit of their story. They intentionally drag the pace of reading. Yes, as an earnest reader, I began reading with the quotation marks. I looked to actively involve myself in the fragment’s shaping of language. But I was also guilty of pursuing the story, and its commentary on the patriarchal epic poem. But I also knew I was doing this at the expense of the poetic line. And it’s this interesting relationship between particular formal move in an individual poem and narrative energy driving the book that summons a tension for Notley’s book. This same macro versus micro tension has an analogy to Browne’s Translation.

Or I feel like the books want me to consider their book-stance (or project-stance) as frame or lens. “Keep your eyes on the book!” the book says in the tone of voice Oz used behind the curtain. And thinking of the book in Browne is an especially productive reading, because of her tendency to go beyond the frame the book might suggest you read it within. Whether it’s the form of elegy in You Envelop Me (like what would express grief, what would be the material to grieve over, what to do with language that is drenched in a mode of grief) or it’s the fairy tale in The Scented Fox (the container of an archetype, how to tease the archetype open), Browne shows herself adept with play, like how to play form away from its forminess. How to induce the reader into a state of play via the language, via the unusual, likely disjunctive, likely taffy-pulled syntax that is available to poetic language, so the reading experience isn’t just about the subject matter of the language. It’s guiding the reader into an affect space, like how some James Turrell pieces can induce light on their audience, like a cloud of light.

That cloud of light is what I like reading as the book’s position on form in these Laynie Browne project books. It’s an environment, but a distinctly colored environment. The environment has “rules,” that will only impose their ruliness when it’s a convenient moment for nodding or insinuating a rule. Form with the cliche Ezra Pound quote about making it new already acting on the stipulative form the book’s using. Like think of how innuendo presses on what someone is saying, but not creepy guy innuendo. More the fun kind when Kate McKinnon says something that’s definitely sexual, but how can it be sexual with that look she has on her face. That’s what rules are for a Laynie Browne book. A visit to Weird Barbie’s house.

I’m not sure, then, if this puts more pressure on reading a single poem, as a reading must include the book’s positions on what it’s doing as a book. I don’t think so. Because Browne’s larger ethos is all about play. The play of the list. All the new parts of a list she makes relevant to a book of poems that will be twining itself around lists. Reading Laynie Browne is fun. Is playful. And disorienting. All of the rules are always and completely up for grabs. And if you get hold of a rule while you’re reading, and you see how it plays out, it feels like genies! Magic! In “02.03.16,” for instance, the role of the todo list is explicitly present. Which is hilarious! Who would be thinking poetic fun in what is often a moment of mundane struggle. “What was I supposed to do again?” Consider the opening lines of “02.03.16”:

Furiously forget yourself, then complete the online forms.Confirm gingerbread meeting, talismans, and tarot with Emily Dickinson.Bring baskets, string, apron and books.Explain how her bodiless white dress, suspended in glass, is a perfect fit.from “02.03.16,” lines 1-4

The instruction in Item 1, to “furiously forget yourself” as you’re completing a task like filling out online forms is a fun stretch of the task list for poetic purposes. Which reorients the more typical task list moves, like the parallel active verb construction. The instruction-to-self sentence structure. But then the poem steps in with a normal poem move—the allusion to Emily Dickinson, including a “bodiless white dress, suspended in glass.” These tasks are artful and practical, with the poem intentionally binding these two impulses together. An entire book of this could have been interesting. And would have posed its own challenge for sustaining the method so it continued to feel poetic, and also task-y.

But Browne’s larger project, I would argue, is uncovering the poetic potential of making any daily list, especially tasks lists for yourself, but this can also be aligned with more general productivity culture, like bullet-journals, daily observations, diary reflections. “How notes are poems and also tasks.” As she comments in “02.03.16.” What is significant is not just about seeing the poetic that exists in the daily task list, but also how the writing process can be shaped with the mind of a task list. What is the writing process that goes into it? What is the associative work when writing one task, only to realize another? Is there a poem in that head space? One of my personal obsessions is the productivity culture, and how eager it is to be facilitated by the internet. A space that is not only aware of the many different ways someone can be productive, but also self-aware that too much attention on discovering new ways of being productive can be unproductive.

And though that might not be where Browne’s book is, its rhetorical take on the list (who the writer of a list is, the solitary audience that is often the primary audience for a list) feels adjacent, possibly analogous. As with many of the process-minded books Browne has published, it’s ultimately a trial of the personal, a method for the personal to manufacture, generate, involve, and pursue language. The verb for that last statement is open. And multifarious. And where the list form might concretely position the poet into a day’s poetic practice, what Browne’s work is is a poet present with language and searching for whatever sense that language might make of the present.

One things that singles “02.03.16” out for a close reading is its self-discussion about what it means to write into a list. Other poems from the book do this. I like, though, the conspicuous task list that opens “02.03.16.” Then, later, the poem thinks about the meaning of making poems like this. What is the project? For this specific poem, the task list (quoted above) had shifted to the poet talking to a neighbor and the presumably returning to think of Emily Dickinson (the “she” in the quote below).

How different she looks when certain words emit their glow.She wore them around her neck, bound them to her thoughts, rested her face in a nest.It’s alright to begin what seems distant, in fact, interrupt yourself now.My goal is to keep switching back and forth between doing and being until I disintegrate.The correct music never discusses your mood.Instead it elevates or deflates.Form continues to morph. At first I translated abbreviations into commentaries, opening an accordion-like discourse.But then what was already there, between the pleats, began demanding a say.from “02.03.16, lines 9-16

One of the great revelations for my own reading practice came for me as a student at University of Houston, when I realized a poetry based on the fragment might be better described as a poetry that reveals itself in association. That the many critics telling me in almost identical words how pivotal it was for T. S. Eliot to write The Waste Land in fragments, how Eliot’s method reflected modern life speeding up, something that could only be felt as a series of fragments, those critics were describing something that may be accurate to the early 20th Century, but “fragments” alone didn’t make poems feel meaningful to me. And the more I’ve read the same argument about “fragments,” the more I find the argument dated and uninteresting. I am interested in the space between fragments, the art of that space, the poet’s associative leap implicitly tying the spaces to a thought or impression. This is where I find a poem’s life. Its playfulness.

And what makes Browne’s poem so interesting to me is each numbered item as a “fragment,” and the surprising associative leap from one numbered item to the next. What Browne observes here as “an accordion-like discourse.” Because a numbered list is valued more for its practical organization than its constellated idea. And yet, under Browne’s poetic pressure, the constellated idea is uncovered, and pursued. Sometimes in the book, numbering the lines feels almost superficial, like it was mere affect rather than itemization. It acts more like an exaggerated enjambment, as when the poem moves from item 15’s “accordion” to “16. But then what was already there, between the pleats, began demanding a say.”

It’s that macro book-as-lens and micro list-item-as-more-than-single-item that I find fascinating. Like the conceptual vehicle is interesting as machine and the machine’s mechanics. A list or the list operating as a “translation” (as proposed by the book’s title). A list that could be poetically enjambed. A list where the list maker interrupts herself (”in fact, interrupt yourself now”). The poetic list has always proven a fun form for unsettling free verse’s default (or it feels default-ish) continuity. And in Browne’s book it feels like she’s encouraging me to uncover the ambiguities in the list form that have yet to be tapped. And I am participating with her while she mines the form for more fun readings. Or points me in those directions. It’s a poetic ethos I appreciate.

For anyone interested in seeing the poem, and a more particular close reading of that poem, I attach a pdf below.

02.03.16-NOTESDownload

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“As You Came from the Holy Land,” by John Ashbery

I’ve been thinking about the role of temporality in poetry. How time might appear in a poem. And the surprising ways that time might be made to matter. Its conspicuousness. To my mind, it always feels natural to think of time in, say, a Frank O’Hara poem. Lunch Poems even by its title, signaling a shortage of time, a realization that any given time will end, and a poem that can capture how time can feel dear so the reader also feels it an understands. Of course, I’m not sure I would read every poem in that book thinking about the temporal, as I think many of O’Hara’s poems don’t point as insistently at time or the day. However, considering the lineage of reading for temporality in a poem, and the significant position O’Hara represents, foregrounding O’Hara’s poetic positioning of time, their conscious of time, it’s a helpful starting point.

Especially for thinking about the other ways time can appear. O’Hara’s time is poignant. Ashbery’s poems, on the other hand, lay time flat, or they insist on what it feels like when you consider the flattest times. Which has its own kind of poignancy. But why? Or why, “reader” (Ashbery might implicitly inquire), wouldn’t you think that that time would be poignant? So often, I read Ashbery for his account of a given day, or what feels like it could have all happened in a day, the potential that that day might give, the special way someone can occupy the morning of that day. It can feel like a mountain. Like optimism for whatever optimism is thinking about. Like when Michael Snediker turns his focus to optimism in the introduction to Queer Optimism, and there’s not a clear definition for optimism, but it is clear optimism exists past the easy cynical takedown of it. I like how Snediker frames optimism as a feeling, a stance towards the present. And in an Ashbery poem, I would say he strikes a tonal balance bewteen this kind of genuine optimism set directly against a reasonable cynicism. Because however promising the morning might feel, there are many ways Ashbery’s poems never do anything with it. It is a state of mind. It is an is for the poet’s morning. And then, later in the poem, when evening comes on, it is the is they could have done something with but they didn’t.

Like in “Grand Galop,” which I would describe as a series of moments that are so content with their uneventfulness. And their factness. It’s a fact they are facts. And they happen every moment. In Oregon. Outside a house anywhere in the United States. In the Arizona desert. And we can continue this list of location types, Ashbery says. That sustained performance of listing is assuredly part of the poem. The temporal for “Grand Galop,” is in making a list, pausing for each item in the list, observing that the list item could only be included because it took time to be observed, and the poet wants to occupy all those times, and all the times when he did nothing to “advance” past them.

It is interesting, then, to contrast the ambiguous point-of-view account in “Grand Galop” (where there’s a “we” and a generalized “you” and a set of observations that could be heard in the first-person singular or third-person), with the clear interrogative in “As You Came from the Holy Land.” As in, the “you” of “Holy Land” feels like someone the poet is directing his commentary to.

how could this be
the magic solution to what you are in now
whatever has held you motionless
like this so long through the dark season

lines 8-11, “As You Came From the Holy Land”

Ashbery’s “As You Came from the Holy Land” has an interest in “you,” like the poet can see a difference in “you” since they came from Western New York. And whatever mood they’re seeing in “you,” it’s like all the notes that could be felt in a day’s mild sadnesses, with the “late-August air” and a “turning away from the late afternoon glare / as though it too could be wished away.” And the poet’s attitude towards the “you” registers as a tone on its own. But, then, the “you” feels like an actual figure. They’re a someone, but more the sense they are someone specific to the poet not the poem, because they lack an identity. I read waiting to learn something more about this person, but it doesn’t come up. Instead, it’s these pools of mild sadnesses the poet is sharing with that someone without that someone being entirely present for the poem. The result is a mood the poet can impose upon what feels like a specific, other person.

it is the end of any season

you reading there so accurately
sitting not wanting to be disturbed
as you came from that holy land
what other signs of earth’s dependency were upon you
what fixed sign at the crossroads
what lethargy in the avenues
where all is said in a whisper

lines 15-22, “As You Came From the Holy Land”

In these lines, it would seem the poem’s addressee is more substantively present, as “you are reading there so accurately, / sitting not wanting to be disturbed.” And I think, then, I can see the “you” withdrawn from conversation but within sight of the poet, so where is this space shared between poet and “you”? How does the space define the rhetorical situation that would include these two? And what I’m really interested in is how this poem stages an incremental expansion on what makes “Holy Land” complicated in contrast to “Grand Galop.” Just having a more figurally realized “you” can define a space, and imply an interpersonal tension in that space. And even as “Holy Land,” in its second half, moves into a similarly ambiguous point of view as “Grand Galop,” there is this difference in the opening.

And I guess I just like sinking into the finer grain of a book like Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Which I often read in this single poetic mode, especially given that this mode is part of the book’s longer poems. “As You Came From the Holy Land” frames this “you” and the poet through the poet’s interest in what might have happened to this person in western New York. And it’s this interest felt at a certain time of day in a certain domestic space that makes a temporal reading so helpful. Where an O’Hara daily poem might position a moment like this for some surprising quality to it, Ashbery’s is more how moments like this could be something more, and then the day goes on and points the poet to other things that could be something more. What “you” might be thinking doesn’t need to be clarified, though it would be interesting if it was. But the same could be said of “that thing of monstrous interest / … happening in the sky” that appears in the penultimate stanza. Maybe whatever that thing was would be so interesting it would take over the poem’s focus. But Ashbery denies any further clarity for it. That, I would argue, is what the interpersonal is with this “you.” And it’s what marks the rhythms of any day. These moments of interest arising, then falling away.

Some Notes

Just for further consideration of the poem, I’m including the inline comments I made for thinking further into the work.

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“debt ritual: sediment,” by Katie Naughton

What I first notice in Katie Naughton’s poem, “debt ritual: sediment” (from FENCE 40) is its movement from line to line. What feels like watching a video of industrial machinery shifting an item to its next station. Each line, a shift. The next line, a shift. Not something severe, though. Something that’s assertive and muted. Like a Ca-shunk rather than a Ca-CHUNK. Both the poems in this issue have a similar sense of movement one line to the next.

And it’s only on my closer read did I realize how variable the shifting line break is throughout the poem. In the opening, line breaks enforce edged associative shifts. The line break marks a new sensibility of the line before.

the pipe filled solid with sediment
what one hundred years is:
erosion and accretion
a domestic geology

from “debt ritual: sediment,” lines 1-4

Here, each line could be compared to a geological layer, as the poem suggests with, “sediment” and “domestic geology.” And however layers’ relationships can be described in geology, it informs the method of associative leap in Naughton’s poem. The punctuation, for instance, suggested in the line break at “what one hundred years is:” A colon that could encourage listing “erosion and accretion” as what one hundred years consists of. Or just an open-ended signal for what follows serving as definition. And maybe both uses I’ve described here feel similar enough. I would also argue, though, that each of these opening lines transitions to the next line in a way similar to the line ending with a colon. Meaning, I could imagine a colon following “sediment” from line 1 Or “accretion” in line 3. And how that marks the language is what I’m meaning by the end of each line marking a shift or edge for the poem.

That feeling at the line break, that edge, is the feeling throughout the poem. Surprisingly, it’s not the poem’s only mechanics.

what comes off of one surface
is carried and deposited
on another the wash
of winter o dark and howling
time built up on shores
mountainous in grains

from “debt ritual: sediment,” lines 6-11

Not until that last line starting with “mountainous” does the poem return to those edge-oriented line breaks. When I pull this quote form the poem, it’s easy to see how present enjambment is in the poem. And when I read this portion independent of the opening, I don’t feel like there’s a pause, or a Ca-shunk in between the lines.

However, it’s the poem’s shift back and forth between more noticeable line breaks and enjambed ones that leaves the impression the poem is mainly about these transitions. And leads me to think of a geological poetics that hovers over this poem. Where form and subject interrelate by line, where sedimental layers are part of the subject and vehicle for thinking more about the subject. It’s an abandoned home. It appears to be merging back into the landscape. Its presence in this landscape could be felt sinking into it, like the ground had incorporated it within itself.

And ultimately, it’s this formal support that further illuminates Naughton’s consideration of circumstances as they emerge in this desolate landscape. That intersection, perhaps like the relationship from one geological layer to the next. The human piping, the build-up of sediment, and the entire geological history that exists both in the domestic space, faced with this pipe bulging with material, and then the earth. And the entire poem only exists because there has been a build-up like this. Like bricks that were once crisp with text and texture worn down to just be the bricks, the light absorbed by bricks, “made and unmade,” which is kind of the story of everything, with the extended irony that the unmade part is inevitably a component of what’s made.

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“Fools,” by Franklin K. R. Cline

There are so many benefits to a title that’s brief in its statement. Is Franklin K. R. Cline saying, “Fools,” in a movie tone of voice. Like when Felonius Gru talks about something his minions did wrong, even with the best of intentions, and he says, “Fools.” Or is the grocery store where this poem takes place a box full of fools, including the poet, who’s going to be thinking about his cat’s dietary tastes, using the language of a consumer, on one hand (a fancy looking salmon dinner, my dear?) and then the language that would better suit her (a dinner flavored like the hair on your back, my dear?).

And, you know, it’s America. So there’s also the kind of fool who’s wearing a t-shirt telling the world God must hate America because there are gay people in it. And it’s this juxtaposition, the common “fool” that might be present in both poet and t-shirt wearer, while also accounting for the violence registered in the t-shirt that the wearer might or might not fully own up to. In America, we don’t know but we pretend to know, or we’re just so certain we’d like to know what our purchases are doing for us, how what they say about us is something we’d like to think is certainly true, to a degree. The poet and what informs his cat food choices says something about him. The t-shirt wearer, too?

Maybe just “guesswork” should be the degree that certainty really exists, though. Like “I guess” in that way we say “I know” in conversation, but with some tentativeness to it. Cline is doing that. Cline is that tone of voice in your head. That knows how much an idiot the guy is for wearing a t-shirt to make “a political statement,” but then realizes that everyone is an idiot for doing anything. “just / like me i am god-flavored another one // of the drooling fools waiting in line.” Buying “salmon-flavored” cat food. How would his cat even know the difference, a fool would finally ask himself. And, though the poet doesn’t push too hard at this, how would this t-shirt wearer have any idea about God’s views on America? Or God’s abilities to create an America in God’s image if what was eventually made was a country filled with boxes of fools.

There are so many other great poems in this issue of FENCE!

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“From ‘Long Life,'” by Lesle Lewis

What always fascinates me about Lesle Lewis’s poems are their iteration. Like the poem is this activity we’re in the middle of with the poet. I’m in the moment with her as I read any given line, like her composition and my reading were simultaneous. Then the line ends, and I’m floating above the moment as she repositions the poem for the next line. It’s similar to how I read John Ashbery’s poems, letting that Ashbery-poet lull me into his assertive nature. Then he carries that assertion on to the next statement. And the poem’s momentum ties those two assertions together by the mere fact of the poet’s confidence about his train of thought.

Something similar happens for me with Lewis’s work, especially this poem, “From ‘Long Life'” (from FENCE 40). But the assertions are of an entirely different nature. She’s not going to put me in the middle of a day and then look expectantly towards a sunset—a sunset that will arrive way too soon. So the poem will end in a darkness that shrouds my relationship with, say, the Ashbery-poet, along with the whole prospect of knowing anything fully. Lewis’s poem might not be so avid on the world occupying a given day-as-construct, but her poems still occupy a world of her making. Her tone indicates I should be concerned with what she’s concerned with. And in honor of Lyn Hejinian, in that often-quoted essay, “The Rejection of Closure,” where Lewis’s world might have begun, and where the poem took up to start talking about that world, it feels arbitrary. It could start or end anywhere. But it also feels like the poet has selected especially resonant moments to usher me into that world. It’s one of the many underlying contradictions I find in Hejinian’s essay, and it’s always been useful for my writing, because I don’t think Hejinian’s essay is meant to serve as a how-to. More a have you noticed there are boring poems that predictably do this thing with closure. And how about there be poems that don’t need to do that thing.

But even a poem that’s going to let go of closure still has to start somewhere. And the writer is going to choose that somewhere. And, yes, as I believe Hejinian’s essay argues, how the reader might author that start in their own imagination need not fit precisely with how the poet authored that moment. There is still a beginning. And there is an ending.

And in Lewis’s poems both ending and beginning are fashioned as dictations of a life (likely the poet’s, but not necessarily). It could be read as a series of unusual situations the poet is responding to. It could be signals of what life has in store for people, or for religion, or for some other concern that has a natural significance. “Does saying so simply satisfy the desire to say it?” says the poem. And I’m not entirely sure what to attach all this to, but I can assuredly feel significance in the poem’s language. And the significance isn’t just a rhetorical effect. The poem draws a personally familiar context around it.

And that’s the iteration I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The lines of the poem keep generating more significance, where your “arms are cream,” or you’re holding those “artificial flowers of a chocolate night.” And I can place all these in some unusually arranged constellation existing around the poet, a day the poet occupies, but I’m not sure why I should. And that tenuousness that is both contradicted by the poem’s certainty (it’s assured of its cohesion) and the first-person speaker, but the pieces’ tenuous relationship is what brings me pleasure reading the work.

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