Carrie Oeding, If I Could Give You a Line

It is so easy. A manwalks through a field and makes a line. What else could be made with no hands? Song.I’m becoming all hands, reaching so hard. I’m grabbing every instrument I canfind to keep them occupied. What sound am I making? It’s hard to think throughmy own orchestra. Would you please hold this note? One of these instruments? Whatdo you hear? Is this your hand? It takes a little letting go, I guess. And noweverything seems difficult and loud.

A man walks through afield and makes a line. I am blowing a horn to make a path that still. I amjust sitting next to your table at my table. I’m talking too loudly about howgood the food is. (“THE MAKING OF THINGS”)

I’mstruck by the poems in If I Could Give You a Line (Akron OH: TheUniversity of Akron Press, 2023), the first I’ve seen but the second collectionby Rhode Island poet Carrie Oeding, following Our List of Solutions (42Miles Press, 2011). If I Could Give You a Line is a collection of poemsborne out of a landscape, set as a book of cartography that seeks meaningthrough placement and mapmaking, examined through sentences. “A man walksthrough a field and makes a line.” the sequence “THE MAKING OF THINGS” begins, ‘’Itis made of nothing but breath, // legs, the willingness of soft grasses. The failureof pencils. // The success of pencils. The phrases that failed you, // but youstill have a body. // It is a field of wheat and blindfolded children.” I’mamazed at how Oeding composes moments through which her poems transcendthemselves, such as the “blue, blue, blue” offering of the short poem “I KEPT AVOICE IN MY PEACOCK,” the first half of which reads: “It said it wasn’t apeacock. It was a map. / It said it was meant to be read. I read my peacock /and got lost. Peacocks don’t roam. I got lost on very little. / I wanted more,so I left my voice. I didn’t have any / plumage, so I shouted blue, blue, blue,and hoped someone would notice / I was doing all of this without a voice. I hopedsomeone would notice.” Her poems are composed as extended sentences, stretched-outthoughts that accumulate into lyric prose via deceptively-straightforwardnarratives. “I forget the line is simple,” she writes, further along the extendedsequence “THE MAKING OF THINGS,” “but then remember the line is simple.”