Jane Huffman, Public Abstract

 

I had a bout
Of vertigo
Inside my chest

A clocking
From within

Was bested
By the worst
Of me again

As if my body
Shook off
All its walls

And doors

And reeled
The outside in (“[I had about]”)

I’dbeen curious for a while about University of Denver doctoral student and poet Jane Huffman’s debut full-length poetry collection, Public Abstract (PhiladelphiaPA: The American Poetry Review, 2023), a collection of razer-sharp lyrics that experimentwith form, and ride across a complicated, ongoing grief. “My body through / Theworld,” she writes, as part of the poem “[I’ve failed already],” “Like aparticle / Of sand // That moves / Forever toward // The sphere / Where itbegan [.]” She writes of her brother’s addiction as a death that occurs not allat once but in inches, miles, leagues; something ongoing, and her grief aswell. “I’ve mourned my living / brother many years.” she writes, to open thesecond poem of the sequence “Three Odes,” “This is the heavy / table of mywork. I lug / the heavy table / of my work around / all day so I am never rid /of it. I am never rid / of it – the work / that carries me like I’m / a tired childsleeping / in its arms. I sleep in / my brother’s arms.” She writes of herbrother, and of her own unspecified challenges with illness, “a bout / Ofsomething / Undefined,” she writes, as part of “[I had a bout],” “Anotherrattle / In the lung [.]” Composing odes, sestinas, fragments, haibun,variations, sonnets and further revisions, providing an absolute and delicatesharpness and ease that make her lines that much more remarkable, quietly emblazedacross each page. As her poem “Six Revisions” opens:

The doctor holds my chestagainst the discus, listens like the fish
below the ice listens tothe fisherman. “Medicine,” he says, “is
not an exact science.”

He listens like the ice fisherman listens to the fish. I breathe into
a nebulizer and thinkabout translation – inexact art. A fine,
particulate mist.

Thecollection as a whole circles moments such as these, offering an argument oflyric form and structure as a scaffolding to sharpen lyric thought. In certainways, these poems circle, even outline, this particular sense of loss socompletely as to form that absence into shape. Referencing Huffman’s poem, “ThreeOdes,” as part of her introduction, Dana Levin writes that:

            Huffman’s variation on the duplex, a form invented bypoet Jericho Brown, comprises the second section of this poem and ends, “Mybrother’s / death is long, and heavy / as a year. I’ve mourned / my livingbrother all my life.” Such declarations of naked feeling are rare in thiscollection; when they appear, they break the heart, and one can feel a why andwage in Huffman’s obsessive focus on form: it (s)mothers pain, the source fromwhich he book’s formal feelings come.

Itis interesting, Levin’s simultaneous suggestion of smothering and motheringpain, where I would think Huffman’s formal elements allow such pain a direction,even a purpose; allow the pain a structure, without which it might otherwiseflail about. Whether or not this is splitting hairs, or reiterating, I’ll leaveup to you. Or, as Huffman’s poem, “Coda,” offers, brilliantly:

Form implies the oppositeof form:
a globule, aformlessness, a letting go.
(Like fear implies theopposite of fear:
relief, approximation ofthe human
form built in packingsnow.)

And yet, the opposite ofform (relief
from form) implies theopposite relief:
from formlessness. Packing snow
made globular when thrownis blown
back to the ether of thewhole: like grief.