I have been thinking about how to talk and write about Mary Jo Bang’s new book, The Bride of E, for quite some time. It is one of those books that I immediately took to, but had a hard time articulating how it was doing its work on me. Which is exactly the indication I look for to see whether or not I want to spend time on a book—whether or not I want to absorb or articulate its properties.

The Bride of E is an abecedarian engaging in existential questions in a post-post-modern context. If you are thinking that this is the territory of what is supposed to be oxymoronic (how can you go through post-modernism without negating the game of existentialism?) you are correct. And you’ve already tapped into the nature of the book’s difficulty and delight: the audacity of taking a box cutter to that Pandora’s box.

Further, the poem titles alone snag me: “ABC Plus E: Cosmic Aloneness Is the Bride of Existence.” Cool. Funny. And how damnably true. And then there is “B Is for Beckett,” which reads, in its entirety, “There is so little to say.” To which I reply: yes and exactly. What I appreciate here is the taking up the childhood pedagogical play of attaching figures to letters in the alphabet, and how very wickedly different “B Is for Beckett” is to the usual “B is for ball.” Here Bang re-instruct us in the attachments of association, gives us an adult existential primer, gives us a little glimpse of the way her own mind associates, toggling the “for” from “stands for” to “is for” into a dedication: this poem, this B, is for Beckett. A whole page, one sentence, just for him. Further, the phrase “There is so little to say,” alone on the page as a poem, is so very Beckett. The phrase might have been said by Beckett, but is also an optimistic (perhaps) response to the end of Ohio, Impromptu, which finishes: “There is nothing left to tell.”

Here, the subtle difference between “telling” and “saying.” “Telling” connotes a relationship with a listener; “saying” has undertones of personal reservoir. Here, the tremendous difference between there being “so little” to say, and there being “nothing left” to tell. Because of Beckett’s work, we have a little to say—not nothing. We have followed his direction, have gone on when we couldn’t and so, by his lead, he has, in some small part, delivered us from nothing. Yes, “B” is for Beckett—we should dedicate a whole alphabet to him, or at least a cheer. Give me a “B” give me an “E.” Give me a “C-K-E”—a “double T.”

In addition to my attraction to the book itself, there is the book’s circumstance driving me to write, although more than a little part of me is inclined to agree with Ray when he proposes that “the books which you consider [good] are likely to make the case for their arguments and preoccupations via the poems they contain more effectively than can your prosaic assessment of them.” However, this particular book follows Bang’s award-winning book Elegy—a book that charts the year of grief following the death of her adult son. With immediately accessible subject matter and a pared-down range of language, Elegy is more typically lyric in a New Critical sort of way. Elegy has many fans, as it should, but the overwhelmingly positive reception of Elegy has made me anxious about its younger sister. Much of The Bride of E resists the clean lines of the New Critic’s lyric and, so, it will likely receive less attention than Elegy. Which is, I suppose, OK, except for the fact that there is so much here to be missed.

Additionally troubling, this allotment of attention seems to have much to do—even over 100 years after such wild poetic energy as Tender Buttons was released on the reading public—with what the average poetry reader (which means the average poetry writer) seems able to read. Or, maybe readers can “read” books like The Bride of E, but we still don’t have a way to usefully talk about them and, so, tend to wax apophatic. This fact (among other things) makes me bristle at reception such as the following from a review on The Bride of E: “But perhaps most of all, remembering the power and focus of Elegy, with its amazing ability to connect with readers and provide clarity to anguish, we may be disappointed by the occasional solipsism and obfuscation of these lines, resulting in a sense that this volume, an accomplishment in its own right, may appear premature and incomplete when seen in the poet’s oeuvre.” Asking for “more” is not a problem: what is a problem is expecting the values of one text from another without explaining why such expectation is apt.

Let’s look at another poem, titled “And as in Alice”:

Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because
She’s only a metaphor for childhood
And a poem is a metaphor already
So we’d only have a metaphor

Inside a metaphor. Do you see?
They all nod. They see. Except for the girl
With her head in the rabbit hole. From this vantage,
Her bum looks like the flattened backside

Of a black-and-white panda. She actually has one
In the crook of her arm.
Of course, its’ stuffed and not living.
Who would dare hold a real bear so near the outer ear?

She’s wondering what possible harm might come to her
If she fell all the way down the dark she’s looking through.
Would strange creatures sing songs
Where odd syllables came to a sibilant end at the end.

Perhaps the sounds would be a form of light hissing.
Like when a walrus blows air
Through two fractured front teeth. Perhaps it would
Take the form of a snake. But if a snake, it would need a tree.

Could she grown one from seed? Could one make a cat?
Make it sit on a branch and fade away again
The moment you told it that the rude noise it was hearing was rational thought
With an axe beating on the forest door.

As I wonder if meta-poetic gestures, such as the Alice moment at the beginning of the poem, are what the reviewer considers “solipsistic,” I am first caught by the charm of Alice speaking to me through the poem, and then notice the sadness that Alice’s refusal has evoked in me. For readers who know Bang’s work, Alice’s refusal to be in the poem will resonate as betrayal. A familiar figure in previous books, Alice was there for us when Bang took on the problem of representation in The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, Bang’s fourth book of ekphrastic poetry. Alice even appeared in Elegy. Now, when we expect her to be here (for, other pop culture figures such as Cher, Mickey Mouse, Jackie O, Freud, etc) make appearances in The Bride of E)—she refuses to show. What does she mean she “cannot be in the poem?” How dare she. We knew she was a metaphor all along, but one that we loved and that previously refused to neglect us. What do we do when even our broken images refuse to appear? At the same time, I appreciate the irony of my response: by saying she won’t be in the poem, Alice puts in an appearance. Bang is so very sly this way, offering us an imaginative moment, and then pulling the rug out from underneath, provoking questions like what does it mean for something (someone?) such as Alice to be present?

In many of these poems Bang dramatizes what we already know from so much theory: the emptying of the sign of its meaning. We know intellectually that figures such as Alice have been over-used, but it is still surprising to find a writer who is able to convey what that loss means—how it feels to be abandoned even by one’s own used-up images and to what extent they can still be of use. To address, imaginatively, the question of what we do without them? “What is there to think?” asks characters in other poems from the book. “How shall we live,” “what shall we do?”

In many ways, the girl with her head in the rabbit hole can be seen as a mock-up of the poet who “goes on” nevertheless and assumes Alice’s story, even without her. Written in the form of “perhaps,” the rabbit-hole girl narrates her possibilities along the same storyline as Wonderland’s, speaking to the power of narrative to guide us—for better or worse—even when its images have worn out its imprint is present.

The Bride of E comes to us from the ends of things—from a position that well-knows the death of god, the death of the author, and the death of the conventional lyric subject. As such, this “end” is no more personal to Bang as a poet as it is to her contemporary, American readers. The work of course reflects her image reservoirs and gestures, but it does not have the autobiographical focus that Elegy (and elegies in general) demand. The book is much more about the way we still can make use of worn-out images and phrases to ask existential questions of the post-postmodern world.

***

As I am thinking through Bang’s book and my reaction to its work, I have also been considering the question of the review, addressed in such different ways by Ray and Vanessa’s recent contributions. Do I feel it is my job, as reviewer, to rectify the fact that many readers will wish The Bride of E to be a different sort of book than it is—that (to repeat myself—but I can never get over it) over 100 years after Stein we have a hard time reading work that angles out at the edges, that shows up the opacity of language even while it makes use of its transparent properties?

Further, to my mind, reviewers have almost always done a rather mediocre job with Bang’s work. Positive reviews consist mostly of quotation, as if the work can’t be unfolded. Negative review-moments (and there really aren’t many) seem to object to the work on the basis that it does not cleanly fit into a poetic camp. And I suspect that, like much work that has been sloppily handled, this is because experimentally engaged reviewers won’t know what to do with her work’s deployment of personae, imagery, chiseled poetic form—and reviewers engaged with the New Critical lyric will persist in wanting all of her work to be Elegy. Reviewers like categories, and Bang is bad at staying in them.

***

In his 2003 review of work by Mary Jo Bang, Michael Collier, and Stanley Plumly, David Biespiel quotes a passage from Bang’s third book, Downward Extremity of the Isle of Swans, and proceeds with the following critique:

This is the hyperventilated opening of “It’s Winter in the Eye, and Like Ophelia.” It is certainly quirky if quirky means turning nouns into verbs, inverting syntax, or referring to the vision of only one eye. But the relentless drive toward oddity quickly wears thin (though oddity is what constitutes these poem’s originality.) Bang’s approach is to plunge through abrupt cacophonous bursts of language…Much of the time Bang’s crazed vision luxuriates in giddy extremes and frivolous, cheery spiels—cheery because they’re oblivious to life. Control is what’s lacking, and its’ too bad…After three books Mary Jo Bang shows an extraordinary, if uneven, talent in poems that are imbued with a sever but flippant charm.

The review then proceeds with a paragraph beginning: “But at the other side of Bang’s inconsistency are exceptional strokes…” and the review ends with phrases of praise such as “extraordinarily good, irreverent deadpan.” In employing both positive and negative evaluation the review comes across as being objective about the book and does not explicitly lay bare the reviewer’s ethics and aesthetics. However, even through the guise of impartiality, the reviewer’s orientations are easy to read into (as likely are mine)—one can tell by tone that speakers in poems ought not to be “oblivious to life,” that “control” is an unquestionably positive value, and that “originality” is a premium divine that ought not to rest on nouning the verb, inverting syntax, and other such forays into the material of language.

It is interesting to compare such values with Stephen Burt’s 1998 review, published in The Boston Review, of Susan Wheeler’s Smokes, which unveils the attributes of the “Elliptical Poets,” and praises the very sort of gesture Biespiel undercuts:

Elliptical poets try to manifest a person-who speaks the poem and reflects the poet-while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves. They are post-avant-gardist, or post-”postmodern”: they have read (most of them) Stein’s heirs, and the “language writers,” and have chosen to do otherwise. Elliptical poems shift drastically between low (or slangy) and high (or naively “poetic”) diction. Some are lists of phrases beginning “I am an X, I am a Y.” Ellipticism’s favorite established poets are Dickinson, Berryman, Ashbery, and/or Auden; Wheeler draws on all four. The poets tell almost-stories, or almost-obscured ones. They are sardonic, angered, defensively difficult, or desperate; they want to entertain as thoroughly as, but not to resemble, television.

This review is relevant not only in showing the differing responses attached to the same kind of gesture, but because Bang is classed by Burt as one of the “Ellipticals.” What can be said of Wheeler can more or less be said of her work. Furthermore, I offer this juxtaposition because Burt’s review differs from Biespiel’s not only in valuing what Biespiel sees as a symptom of what is wrong with poetry, but also differs in the use of making evaluative claims. Biespeil’s work serves to show the ways in which Bang’s book fails to meet a New Critical aesthetic (although he does not say so in so many words, this is the subtext) and to suggest ways in which writers such as Bang could amend their ways. Burt’s review serves to carve a new space for work that does not fit into old categories.

Burt’s review of Wheeler’s work is a landmark piece, for it is here that Burt coins the Elliptical “school” of poetry—a “movement” that had a fairly good run of attention: an essay and special issue or two of American Letters and Commentary devoted to the “school,” lively debates between poets and poetry students about how to “be elliptical,” discussions of what constitutes a movement and what doesn’t. Whether or not you “believed” in the movement, you had to notice that nearly all of these poets were absorbed into the discussions that became anthologies such as The American Hybrid and Lyric Postmodernism. We might call this moment of anthologizing the Ellipticals’ heyday before the movement died, more than a little, when, in a 2009 issue of The Boston Review Burt announced that “The New Thing” had succeeded Ellipticism. Ellipticism is now old news and we are on to the poets of the New Thing who

observe scenes and people (not only, but also, themselves) with a self-subordinating concision, so much so that the term “minimalism” comes up in discussions of their work, though the false analogies to earlier movements can make the term misleading. The poets of the New Thing eschew sarcasm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for interpretations to fit.

Biespiel’s review was published in The Sewanee Review, Burt’s in The Boston Review. For many readers, this is all that needs to be said. These readers know that The Swanee Review is/was the seat of the New Critics, who created and solidified the notion of the circumscribed lyric utterance. The ideal lyric is one whose speaker is without history or context—one whose edges are neatly chiseled off, object polished. These readers know that The Boston Review believes in the importance of debates about the political, invests in shaking up notions of identity, voice, and the activist power of art. Such values necessarily throw into question the ideal of the perfected lyric object.

In many respects my rendition this small slice of review-literary-history reads as a bad imitation of Bolano’sThe Savage Detectives. What do I hope to achieve by taking you down this memory lane of reviews and movements? I certainly don’t want to devalue the idea of the review (or the work of Biespiel and Burt), but to remember that any given review is in service of many different things—often including, but not exclusive to, the book. To quote Ray: It is what it is. Except when it’s not.

The Gray Notebook did not originate as a book of poetry. Rather, it was, literally, a gray notebook that Russian avant-garde writer, Alexander Vvedensky, kept from 1932-1933.

At 17 pages long (excluding the endpapers, a “Translator’s Note,” and the colophon which brings the published version to 24 numbered pages), the Ugly Duckling Presse edition presents the entirety of Vvedensky’s notebook. Like the original, the UDP version has a gray cover—hence its name. The original was found with two loose pages of prose: one piece addresses “Stomach grumblings during the confession of love” and the other the terror of “Contracting syphilis, amputation of the leg, extraction of the tooth.” The UDP version includes two loose prose pieces as inserts and they have the feeling of “authenticity” for they are typeset, errors included, in Myriad (typewriter font) on dove-gray paper of a different stock than the rest of the book.

While the UDP book is not a facsimile edition, it gives the sensation of being so throughout. The soft covers of the book are sewn with a rough machine-stitch, the endpapers of the book are graphed composition notebook paper, there is no title page, and the book is 6 by 7 inches—notebook sized. The poems, translated by Matvei Yankelevich into English, are not presented with the Russian originals and the book designers have used an innocuous sans-serif font (Caslon), which feels both slightly “early-twentieth century” and personal. If you squints your tactile and mental eye, suspending disbelief, it is fairly easy to pretend you are holding the actual artifact in your hands. As such, UDP offers what is as close to a piece of this history as we can likely get. The book, part of UDP’s Eastern European Poetry series can be purchased for $10.00 ($8.00 direct from the press).

What does the possibility of possessing such faux-historical artifacts say about our present moment and its relationship to the past? Is this book an indication that we feel the past is something we can possesses, in artifact form—a sort of poetic-chic that I can display on my bookcase with all of my other beautiful Ugly Duckling Presse books? Does the fact that when I hold the book in my hands I feel as if I were holding a little bit of history account for my immediate and physical attachment to the book? These questions show my unease with the object, but I must confess to being obsessed with it anyways.

Such questions are particularly to the point, here, for much of the book’s immediate resonance hinges on its historical context. Vvedensky’s biography and the circumstances by which he came to write his book* are in many ways why we, in the 21st century, care to have access to the thing. In addition, the historical circumstances of the book inform the great length to which Ugly Duckling Presse has gone to in creating the book’s unique physical body—to give us the feel of the thing as it must have been in the writer’s hands.

Born in St Petersburg in 1904, Vvedensky studied art and poetry under the Russian Futurists in Leningrad during the early 1920s. Along with Daniil Kharms he founded the avant-garde group OBERIU (Union of Real Art)—practitioners of absurdist literature, performance, and children’s literature. In 1931 Vvedensky found himself imprisoned for anti-Soviet activity and was detained, along with Kharms, until 1932. After his release from prison he lived in Kharkow and died—or was killed (the “Translator’s Note” at the back of the book provides this suggestive “or”)—in 1941 during the evacuation of the Ukraine. His poetry was not published in Russian until glasnost and the majority of his writing has been lost. Writing that we do have, we have because it was stored in a suitcase Kharms had given, in 1941, to a friend for safekeeping.

What does it mean that I can—and very much want to—possess a book that encourages me to pretend that I own such a piece of history, so personally and socially resonant? In some ways the impulse feels a bit like logging on to ebay to bid on a piece of the Berlin Wall that you are pretty sure, because it is so cheap, is not legitimate. But it would look really cool mounted on the living room wall and so you want it anyways. A conversation piece, to be sure, and who can afford the real thing? Besides, in a time when the hyperreal status of Disneyland and virtual reality is nearly passé, what would it mean for such a thing to be “real” anyways?

After entertaining such thoughts I underwent a guilty shudder over my American capitalist tendency towards possession and tucked the book into my book bag muttering something along the lines of “well, its not just the packaging…I mean, the language in this book is just gorgeous.” And it is. The book opens with a poem beginning: “Above the dark good sea/ the boundless air rushed here and there,/ it flew like a blue falcon,/ silently swallowing night’s poison.” The book includes a philosophical-poetic dialogue, a meditation upon the inadequacy of language to engage with the reality of time (“Our human logic and our language do not in any way correspond to time, neither in its elementary, nor it its complex understanding. Our logic and our language skid along the surface of time”). Meditations on verbs (“They are like swords and rifles piled together.”), objects, animals, nature. But, if I have to be honest, as much as the language intensifies my desire to possess the book, my feeling for the object goes beyond its sentences and phrases.

**

Such puzzles of desire and possession rarely settle with a shrug and a sigh. Long after I dismissed my attachment to the book as pure capitalist impulse I continued to carry The Gray Notebook around with me. At great misfortune to my back I soon added Harvard University Press’s 1088-page edition of The Arcades Project to the books tucked into my book bag and one day, by chance or good fortune, the following passage of Convolute N reopened the questions I had about the resonance of Ugly Duckling’s edition of Vvedensky’s book. Benjamin writes:

It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal one, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent” (Benjamin 2002: 262).

While Benjamin does not give an analytical account of what exactly constitutes the dialectical image, he insists upon its centrality to the methodology of The Arcades Project. From his writings we know that the dialectical image is not a literal image, but emerges in language. And it is not simply a linguistic representation of the moment that the past meets the present, but, instead, renders a dimension of reality recognizable to the reader/viewer in a moment of language. Furthermore, if we follow this line of thought, we might say that the dialectical image is necessarily made of quotation—made of historical material itself. And we might say that the power of such a methodology is to lift language from one context to another, allowing us to see it—to relate to it—anew.

***

The Gray Notebook doesn’t employ direct quotation, but there is traction here. UDP’s publication of the book imbues the book with the power of a shift in context akin to the shift in context created by Benjamin’s method of excerpt and quotation. In a way, we can see UDP’s publication of a near-facsimile book as a “quotation” of the original, transported from its unique, initial historical context into our mailboxes, book bags, libraries and homes.*

In an essay titled, “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image,” Eli Friedlander parses the shift Benjamin creates in the following way: As Benjamin’s quotations move language from their original context to the context of the project, the text is raised from a relation to reality by means of language, to the plane of language itself. Furthermore, “whatever truth can be wrested from [the] material…emerge[s] not from the correspondence of factual content and independently given reality, but from the relationships formed between the ways of meaning.”* As such, the dialectical image—the relationship between present and past—is not made, but is revealed through the shifting of historical material from original context to quote.*

Applying this logic to the shift Vvedensky’s work undergoes when it is taken from one-of-a-kind-notebook to UDP’s mass-produced-near-facsimile, we arrive at the following: the “truth” that we get from the UDP book is not simply a product of the ways in which Vvedensky’s notebook jottings correspond to his lived, historical moment. Rather, “truth” emerges from the relationship between Vvedensky’s original, singular notebook and the “quotation”—the mass-produced-near-facsimile—that UPD has produced. As such, the UDP rendition of the book is actually a far cry from my initial analogy of part of the Berlin Wall up for sale on ebay. The body UDP has given the book is not merely a fancy extra, but is a necessary vehicle for the revelation of the relationship between the past and our present.

Herein resides the power of UDP’s version of the book. This power resides in relationship and contrast. Note the vast distance between the circumstances surrounding the original and the circumstances surrounding the beautiful copy that we can hold in our hands. Imagine: a one-of-a-kind original notebook that—made in the image of its maker who suffered the fate of so many artists of his time—was shoved into a suitcase and almost did not survive. Contrast this with the freedom and wealth of small-press publishing in contemporary America that can create such a thing as a beautiful near-facsimile (flash to the AWP bookfair here). The distance between the two is dizzying, demanding that we ask: to what purpose can we put our current wealth? Three cheers go up for the editors of presses such as UDP, who have given work, like Vvedensky’s, back to the world. The fact that such a work must be re-given, and that we are at a point in time where a publisher might (with, admittedly, great effort) do so, speaks precisely to the relationship we hold with the past.

Further: the power of the book resides in what the UDP version, despite the wealth that it embodies, cannot achieve. Vvedensky, a poet of apophasis, would appreciate this, for parallel to the way in which he shows us that language cannot embody the reality of time, near-quotation can never hold the aura of an original. So much is lost in translation from Russian to English. So much is lost in translation from the imperfection of the hand to Caslon’s machine perfection. So much is lost in the fact that this poet—imprisoned for his work and forbidden to publish poetry after his release—will never know that his notebook has been translated into English and disseminated, as The Gray Notebook, to unexpected places, such as rural Pennsylvania, where I sit and read. The power resides in such loss, of knowing that what you clutch onto for dear life is a near-facsimile. What truth in this.

__________
* For a biographical sketch and an insightful overview of Vvedensky’s context and work, see Thomas Epstein’s essay in The New Arcadia Review.
* This shift is interesting in relation to Conceptual Writing such as Goldsmith’s Day, which relies on just such a shift to do its work. Perhaps UDP creates a variation on this theme, providing us with a model of editor-as-author of the conceptual aspect of a text.
* Friedlander, Eli. “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image.” boundary 2 35:3 (2008).

Michel de Certeau dedicates his multi-disciplinary work of theory, The Practice of Everyday Life, to “the ordinary man. The common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets”—and then launches into an assessment of the place and circumstances of everyday man’s everyday being. De Certeau finds that our contemporary condition has made it nearly impossible to access a non-mediated experience of the everyday, and his project results in an attempt to pry into spaces that have been colonized.

One of the most radical aspects of this assessment of post-modernity is to take as subject not large, institutional systems (of justice, economy, libido, art, science, etc) but the everyday, a space we might have thought to be so insignificant and boring as to plod along under the radar of representation. Among these assessments, de Certeau includes a critique of what it is to write the everyday and to write within the everyday. At one time the blank page served as sacred space for writing the self and the world. In this once-upon-a-time, the page,

a space of its own delimits a place of production for the subject…a place where the ambiguities of the world have been exorcised…In front of his blank page, every child is already put in the position of the industrialist, the urban planner, or the Cartesian philosopher—the position of having to manage a space that is his own and distinct from all the others and in which he can exercise his own will.

Not so, any longer. Such world-and self-making in the modern world is no longer possible, for writing has become “a principle of the social hierarchization that formerly privileged the middle class and now privileges the technocrat. It functions as the law of an educational system organized by the dominant class.” To face the page is to necessarily re-entrench the dominant norms, and so the fundamental problem becomes how we might write without perpetuating such systems.

If to write is to be or, is, at least, to articulate the nature of being, this problem becomes voluminous. In no other genre is this as apparent as in autobiography. To write a life is to construct a life, or to articulate the how of what has been lived. The problem becomes: how might autobiography be written without templating established narrative?

This is the question Lisa Robertson addresses with R’s Boat, which sets the book among other recent grapplings with the genre, such as Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation. In an interview with Sina Queyras posted on harriet, Robertson calls the project a non-self-referential biography mined from over 60 of her own notebooks and arranged into the 6 poems that span the book’s 81 pages. Setting her focus on the peripheral, the unattended to, the everyday, Robertson writes of “Scripted dissent/Citizen-nerves/ Violet stems of thistles/ Cement buildings unlit/ Odours of hallways” (“On the Mechanics of Rousseau’s Thought”). Literally using the writing of a life as material, the book purposefully contrasts with the autobiographical tradition we attribute to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who shadows the book in epigraph, and title—the title of the volume, of one of the poems (the above quoted-from “Of Mechanics in Rousseau’s Thought/”), and of a chapbook (Rousseau’s Boat) which consists of 2 of the 6 poems and was published by Nomados).*

According to Rousseau, and to the tradition of autobiography that is his legacy, to write autobiography is to narrate the plot, based on feelings, of one’s life. “I felt before I thought,” his Confessions confess. Through temporal succession, he has taught us, the self comes to be—necessitating the primacy of plot and resulting in an investment in framing life in terms of cause and effect. Written as Rousseau would have it, I am who I am because of X or Y experience, which folds nicely, later, into Freud, while standing in sharp contrast to Stein (that other genius of autobiography): “I am who I am because my little dog knows me.” Further, following Rousseau, we find ourselves insisting that the plot of our lives inheres in the events themselves, rather than admitting plot to be a constructive device. That Robertson turns the conventions of autobiography on their head is everywhere apparent: just compare the two titles. For Rousseau autobiography is synonymous with confession. For Robertson, life-writing is a skiff set adrift at times purposefully, and at times meandering, out to sea.

As such, Robertson engages the materials of life without building them into a narrative that imbues them with supra-resonant meaning. The difficulty of this task can be seen in the tradition of the still life, a form that has staked its tradition on the ability of everyday objects to embody grand scales of meaning. The banketje (banquet pieces), the ontbijtjes (breakfast pieces), the bodegón (pantry or tavern pieces), the flowers, the food, the cutlery, the game—all expressive of a message, such as the (ever-favorite) brevity of life—vanitas. Regard the symbolic elements of this bodegón by the 17th century Spanish painter, Francisco de Zurbarán:

Even work done with the contemporary everyday object in mind, such as the still life, below, from a series called “Selected Contemporary Monuments” by Vajra Spook, soak everyday objects in extra-ordinary splendor, using such splendor to fold, ironically, back in on itself.

To represent—on canvas, digital print, or page—lifts the everyday out of its context, rendering it different than it otherwise would have been. But how to catch this moment of consideration in that sweet spot just before observation turns the moment into what it is not? Regard the following from “Utopia/”:

What I found beautiful slid between.

We die and become architecture.

The season called November addresses speech to us.

The crows are still cutting the sky in half with their freckling eastward wake.

The quiet revolutions of loneliness are a politics.

Some of us love its common and accidental beauty.

I take the spatial problem of heaven seriously.

I look up from my style.

How do people work and sleep?

From this passage we can see that Robertson’s technique is not to eschew the metaphysical resonances of autobiography (here we have statements of beauty and politics), or personal assertion, both philosophical and emotional (“I take,” “I look,” “I found”), or the autobiography’s penchant for placing things on a time line (“The season called November addresses speech to us”). These foundations of autobiography, and of a life, are all here. Robertson refuses, however, the conventions of autobiography that asks its writers to give these elements a plot of context, a delineation of cause and effect, a narrative of definitive meaning.

The efficacy of such refusal is significantly indebted to Robertson’s form. In all but the last poem (called “Pallinode”), Robertson employs double-spaced lines with a slightly larger gap for breaks in stanzas. Even simple lines feel saturate, but the overall sensation is one of airiness and space. Regard, for example, the beginning stanza of “The Present”:

You step from the bus into a sequencing tool that is moist and carries the scent of quince

You move among the eight banner-like elements and continue to the edges of either an object or a convention

And in Cascadia also

As in the first line of a nursery rhyme

Against cyclic hum of the heating apparatus

You’re resinous with falsity

By capitalizing the first letter of each line, by employing generous space between lines, and by crafting each line as an autonomous grammatical unit, Robertson is able to free-float each line, a singularity on a field of white. As such, the relations between them feel quite distant. What does moving “among the eight banner-like elements” (aether, air, earth, fire, water, mercury, sulfur, salt?—a nod to the ever-changing configuration of what it means to be fundament?) have to do with “Cascadia” (region, mountain range, plant genus, the dream of a trans-national republic?—another shifting name)? We feel we can only guess at the connections. With no master narrative, there is a sense that any story we might come up with is suggested only in virtue of the fact that the primary nouns of each line have prolific significance—and the lines share a page. This type of connection is not insignificant, but do the moments of a life really play out so unleashed?

However, if we read this stanza as a through-line, as a sentence, over-riding its white space, the relationship between the lines tightens and we see the stanza’s hinges of connection: you step, you move, and in Cascadia also, you are resinous with falsity. To re-say: yes, we are all always ever shifting, but some properties, fortunately or unfortunately, remain the same. A lot happens between these hinges, of course, but by eliding lines and imagining-away the white space, congruent architecture juts through. This kind of formal work enacts the experience of a life. When we are in the daily moment of the line, all that exists is the line. When we stand back, scouring through the notebooks of our days, we see a pattern emerge.

This toggling back and forth between perspectives on perspective is, in many ways, the essence of such a poem. And it gets at the root of writing autobiography that enacts a sort of quantum “intrication” (a favorite word of the poem that even gets featured on its own line), questioning the effect that such acts (of toggling, of writing) have on the life that was, and still is, being lived. Does the “sequencing tool” named in the first line of the above stanza reveal a pattern that is embedded in a life’s essence—or does the act of sequencing itself create the sequence? “The Present/” begins with “you,” transforms to “she” and traverses to “I” and “me.” Can we, to ourselves, be all three? The work of R’s Boat proposes the answer “yes” to all of these questions, leaning steadily in, towards the ever-shifting complexities implied by everyday life.

_______

*Publishing full-length books that include work previously published in chapbook form is, of course, common. However, in this particular case we might see such variations of collecting and publishing the same “story” as part and parcel with the project itself. What better way to jostle the tradition of autobiography than to publish two versions of an autobiography? What better way to foreground the collection and arrangement of the materials of a life than to insist that a life of 2 poems is different than a life of 6, albeit only by an “ousseau” or “obertson,” which, then again, may be all the difference that there is in the world.

Constructed of a dedicatory poem and four sections, the book will entice readers with interest in the kind of structure that allows a book to work on the scale of both the book-length project and the discrete poem-unit. Learner achieves this double function by employing formal elements in consistent patterns, thereby rendering both pattern and variations on pattern, liquid architecture. The language of Mean Free Path flows easily from stanza to stanza, from page to page, and over the printer’s ornament, ∝ (which is the mathematical symbol for “proportional to”), that punctuates the work. As such, each section has the feel of a long poem. At the same time, each page can be neatly taken out of its context and read as an autonomous poem, albeit as a poem with the jagged edges that imply interconnectivity.

The first and third of the book’s four sections use the same form and are both titled “Mean Free Path.” Each page of the “Mean Free Path” sections is occupied by two, nine-line stanzas separated from one another by a block of white space and a printer’s ornament. All lines are left justified and Lerner employs a capital letter at each line’s beginning. Both “Mean Free Path” sections are 18 pages long. Here is an example of a page from the second of these sections:

There must be an easier way to do this
I mean without writing, without echoes
Arising from focusing surfaces, which should
Should have been broken by structures
Hung from the apex in the hope of deflecting
In the hope of hearing the deflection of music
As music. There must be a way to speak
At a canted angle of enabling failures
The little collisions, the path of decay

∝

But before it was used by the blind, it was used
By soldiers who couldn’t light their lamps
Without drawing fire from across the lake
Embossed symbols enable us to read
Our orders silently in total dark
In total war, the front is continuous
Night writing, from which descends
Night-vision green. What if I made you
Hear this with your hands

This page illustrates the form and mode of all of the poems in these sections. Here, each stanza has an independent, yet interrelated arc of consideration: the first stanza reflects on the difficulty of writing—particularly the difficulty of writing elegy. The second stanza reflects upon perception and the act of reading, noting that Braille technology was developed to allow soldiers to read at night without using light. The lines of thought through these individual topics are not direct and clear but are, rather, created out of subtle collisions of each line’s trajectory as it hits the white space at its end.

Key to this feeling of trajectory is the fact that each line in “Mean Free Path” begins with a capital letter, which propels the line like a particle moved along a singular path until it breaks against white space. We read: “There must have been an easier way to do this” and absorb the ambiguity of “easier way” and “this.” The line is open and searching: the “this” is at once the writing of the poem and the experiences of love, mourning, and thought—that is to say the experiences of life—that the speaker moves through. When we push on to the next line, “I mean without writing, without echoes” we get a continuation of the thought (the speaker is still thinking through the idea of an “easier way”) but a continuation that has been slightly jostled by the line’s contact with white space. In its qualification, its stuttering “without,” the line performs its own trajectory of clarifying rather than continuing the “searching” trajectory of the previous line, for the line is autonomous, and yet connected to what has come before. This technique of subtle collision and resetting is most obvious when Lerner employs repetition as in “Arising from focusing surfaces, which should/ Should have been broken by structures” but even in such moments the through-line of syntax smooths these collisions into the contours of a singular voice and thought. These jostlings propose an articulation of subjectivity in which one is constantly interrupted and reset, and yet still maintains the feeling of continuous being and thought.

Sections two and four of the book, both titled “Doppler Elegies,” employ a form that also advances via collision, but the breakings are louder, more intense and disruptive. In these sections the stanzas are also nine lines long, but some of the lines are indented and all of the lines do not begin with capital letters. Three stanzas share each page and Lerner employs only one line of white space between stanzas. Each “Doppler Elegies” section is eight pages long; each page is topped with the ∝ ornament. Regard the following example of from the first “Doppler Elegies” section:

∝

They are passing quickly, those

houses I wanted to

speak in. Empty sets

Among my friends, there is a fight about

The important questions

cannot arise, so those must be hills

where the famous

winter. I am familiar with the dream

Windmills enlarge

experience, killing birds

but I have already used

dream too often in my book

of relevance. Nothing can be predicated

Along the vanishing coast

tonight. You’ll have to wait until

remnants of small fires

the eye can pull new features from

The stars

eat here. There is a private room

Are you concerned

about foreign energy

In your work, I sense a certain

distance, like a radio left on

Across the water, you can see

the new construction going up

in glass. The electric cars

unmanned

This poem begins with continuity: the sentence traversing the first three lines sets a scene of movement as the speaker passes houses he “wanted to speak in.” But the poem seems to quickly break apart in the line break between the third and fourth line. The phrase “Empty sets” is disrupted not only by the syntax of what follows (“Among my friends, there is a fight about”) but also by the capital letter that begins the next line, “Among.” It is as if the phrase “Among my friends, there is a fight” collided with the remainder of “Empty set’s” sentence, blasting the remainder of the sentence-thought into oblivion.

However, if we travel down to line six of this stanza we find that the sentence beginning “Empty sets” was not irrevocably splintered but, rather, broken to once again resume and be completed with the words “cannot arise, so those must be hills/ where the famous/ winter.” The entire stanza, page, and section moves with this logic of collision and resumption, fragmentation and interweaving. At times the paths of resumption are clear (as in the above example), but at other times fragments are left embedded in their stanzas or doubly serve the meaning of the phrase that they’ve interrupted and the phrase that they have just begun. Throughout these moments of impact Lerner maintains a continuity of voice that proposes a flexible integrity of being that is formed by, and exists through, interruption and collision. Gaps, stutters, and redirections do not interrupt us, they constitute what we are.

The collisions and fragmentations created by the formal techniques of both “Mean Free Path” and “Doppler Elegies” create the feeling that it might be possible to sift through all of Lerner’s phrases to reconstruct an Urtext that moves linearly through his concerns. However, doing so would result in a book with a dramatically different (and weaker) meaning. Rearrangement and fracture are seminal to these meditations’ span from self to other. They allow Lerner to forge a sense of being and thought that moves beyond a facile notion of equation wherein the “personal is the political.” Instead, Lerner forges a bond of “and” and “both” as we find the thought of this continuous-feeling speaker interrupted, reset, and in collision. The attention Lerner directs to love is both personal (Lerner dedicates the book to “Ari” and uses her name throughout, often assuming the tone of intimate conversation) and plural. The attention turned to elegy is both personal (throughout the book Lerner scatters a litany of poets that have recently passed on; furthermore the poet gestures towards loss too close in proximity to name: “I wanted to open/ In a new window/ the eyes of a friend/ by force if necessary”) and political (the book stutters with war). Attention turned to writing is both self-referential (“I planned a work that could describe itself/ Into existence, then back out again”) and panoramic. While these concerns and the phrases Lerner uses to inscribe them would exist in this imagined Urtext, it is the quality of interconnectivity Lerner establishes through repeating formal techniques that forges and seals the book’s argument for the deeply interdependent nature of being.

Happily, our canon is also replete with thinkers who seek not only to reveal the hand of a maker in our world, but to construct worlds themselves. A truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining, of a republic’s best state and of the new island Utopia, better known as the Utopia of Thomas More, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; The Description of the New World, Called the Blazing World of Margaret Cavendish—were all manufactured to shed light on this world and often to critique the philosophers and scientists who believed their art was merely revelatory, rather than constitutive, of how we map into the universe. Elizabeth Marie Young’s debut, the Motherwell-Prize-winning, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, takes up this constitutive tradition, manufacturing little language worlds on every page. I give you “Instructions for Inhabiting a Miniature World” in its entirety so that you may taste its nature:

Somewhere in da Vinci’s notebook lies an earth that can’t be flattened. When you find the fairy you must speak to him, in Latin. Demonstrate your expert knowledge of the forest and your urge to decorate his nook with odd-shaped, dimpled pearls plucked from the rings of widows. He will crinkle his small face. “But I am just a mannikin. I don’t like playing games upon the bridge-too-far.” Then you will disappear into the cool sfumato of his vale and the things inside his leery gaze will twitch their iridescent horns. The inflection of his words will do a dance around the crude gleam of your evening English as it rusts in chunky piles. Amo, amas, amat. Flirtatiously, you’ll try to utter sounds that will explode his world into abstractions. But all you have are nouns and birds torn from the sky by winds so strong they turn the recto into verso: a rabbit’s foot, a lake of blood, a root system that dives below the underbrush to penetrate the forest floor bidding us to join the revels in extended metaphors.

The characteristics of “Instructions” are staples of most of the poems in the book. Throughout we find the prose poem form headed by a long fanciful title; the allusion to past masters (here, da Vinci); the indication of something spoken that never would in actuality be uttered (this poem’s “mannikin” and “bridge-too-far”); the wit and irony (nook decoration); the diction-mix of old and new, high and low, poetical and mundane (the “amo, amas, amat;” the “dimpled pearls;” the “rabbit’s foot”).

While some readers may tire of the repetition of these traits, the reproduction of fundaments is key to the work’s success. A 21st century cosmogony should be replete with multiples that express the tension between individuality and diversity. We facebook daily our individual worlds—but when we peek into each other’s spheres we find them to be both stunningly similar and achingly strange, creating that quintessential 21st century experience of simultaneous alienation and identity.

The repetition also serves to form the book’s particular speaker-authoress. Preferring the pronoun “we” over “I,” and rarely talking of herself, it is remarkable that Young is able to produce a speaker with such distinct personality. Through accumulation, I come to feel very chummy with this enchantress who surely wears a velvet gown, DayGlo sneakers, and a crown of dandelions. Tending to the vibrating quartz and oscillating circuits that power the pocketwatches she has made, set into motion, and very well might smash, she is part watchmaker, part Zen potter bringing us under the spell of her bubble-wand as she whispers to us in Latin.

The worlds of Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize do not make pretense of imitation, which sets Young’s book off from something like Gulliver’s Travels, which, though highly fabricated, centers on allegorical representation dedicated to characters that play out an extended fiction in a satire of our lives. Instead, Young’s poems, hyper-conscious of being language-made, refer most often to the world of texts leaping from the Classical world of Lavina, Narcissus, and Caesar to great storytellers, real and fictitious, such as Scheherazade, Freud, Baudelaire and Joyce.

Though more winged than grounded, these worlds are no less well made than their narrative counterparts and prove, if proof is needed, that there are other ways to weave a world than by narrative threading. Poem connects to poem by similarity of prose poem form, and not only does the form act as a steady container of sentences, but much of the rhythm throughout is iambic with a delicate lacing of various intensities of rhyme. These patterns are evident in “Instructions for Inhabiting a Miniature World,” but I’ll treat you to more text. Take “Imagining the Diacritics of the Next Great Death”:

The orphic owl’s out of earshot and, in hindsight, we agree—that errant flickr was a feather, an eclipsed facsimile. The nimble art of deer-hoofed children fetchingly bedecked in purple trim, their pleasure zones igniting without anarchy. We are glum as islanders awash in beauty while sand creeps in like an overdose and deer eat from our hands. Coins and cups and cinderblocks accumulate upon our desks (they once belonged to pirates.) So how can we resist this protoplasm fringed with saffron when the fetid facts caress our mercury through retrograde? Those awe-struck balls of flesh survived the saga, safe as shipwrecks, spreading good news to the ghosts. Uploaded in our consciousness, the afterimages compute the power of the pendant while a slow tornado sprawls its deadpan furthermost and emits one last hurrah. If these walls were more than grey they could explain it all, perhaps, while we stand on the burning deck hoping our sobs won’t sink the ship.

The first sentence provides an object lesson in the easy iambic scansion of much of the book’s rhythm:

The or|phic o|wl’s out| of ear|shot and,| in hind|sight, we| agree|—that err|ant flick|r was| a feath|er, an| eclipsed | facsim|ile.

To track only two of the interlaced sounds, the /i/ sound, hi-lighted in the first two sentence endings of “facsimile” and “anarchy,” thereby making the first two sentences echo a couplet. In addition the sound patterns through agree, facsimile, fetchingly, anarchy, creeps, beauty, eat, we, and mercury. The /e/ patterns through bedecked, desks, fetid, flesh, shipwrecks, deck.

Not only is such echoing of formal lineage—within the body of prose poetry—a delightful device, this blend of old and new texture and rhythm acts as microcosm for the intertextual and hybrid impulses of the book as a whole. In addition, the fact that the poems are not all entirely iambic, and make many imperfect diversions, is also echoed at the formal organization of the entire book. A glance at the table of contents reveals the fact that the poems are organized as an abecedarian—except for one anomaly near the center of the book. “Empty Space is Vast Inside the Cells of Human Wit” comes erroneously between “The Day Your Tattooed Ship Capsized Inside my Tattooed Ear” and “The Graphics Smear and Raw Transcendence Spreads Its Ugly Jaws.” You have to admire the iambic cadence of the titles and feel that with such pattern, error cannot be accidental. Or can it, knowing the clinamen swerves of the universe? Perhaps the book works in imitation after all.

Regardless, by incorporating the desire for the perfection of the traditional iamb, along with imperfection and mistake, this book admits to its own constructedness. As such, Young takes a marked stance among and against a lineage of cosmological treatments many of which propose that—rather than having a hand in creating systems through description— they actually expose the “true” bones of natural, social, and psychological and spiritual systems. These systems, so the story goes, are so well-ordered that they cannot help but imply a maker.

While exhibiting the hallmark revelry and jouissance we expect from work inflected with such post-modernity, the book is not uncritical of this stance and what it might achieve. Moments such as “And still they lurched and dragged their rickety old model up the mountain where they leapt off into the huge distance waving feathers pulled from caps that had dropped below the treeline” (“Among the Seekers of Ether”) comment directly on the efficacy of our “rickety” old models. Catch the irony of “leapt off into the huge distance:” isn’t one supposed to test the model with, for example, a monkey at the helm rather than jumping into the beater to have a go at it oneself? Moments such as: “How lucky we are to be but suicidal flirts in a texture so far-reaching it drowns the hovercraft in its own pretentious thrill strung out on crystal meth and delicate beading. Bemoan your lost vacation days, high-voltage quadrupeds!” (“As the Evening Primrose Crimps the Skyline’s Opulent Toilette”) couldn’t have a sharper bite.

Such critique and careful making render this book an apt response to any thinker who is still skeptical of the efficacy of a book that takes its own construction and the fact of language as its content. Lest skepticism still stand, we might direct ourselves to the Western tradition’s source text for all making: “And God said ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light.” Hasn’t cosmology always been a language thing?

The luscious province of prose poetry excels at muddling this distinction and applying the vertical, dancing logic of poetry to the horizontal logic of prose. Instead of rendering Valéry’s distinctions obsolete, his analogies can help us think through how and why prose poems that manage to create traction do so successfully. In particular, creating a tension between horizontal, narrative elements and vertical, lyric elements proves to be a particularly successful tactic for book-length projects rendered exclusively in the prose poem form, for such books hinge on sustained horizontal action while dazzling us with vertical plunges and flurries.

2009 was a fabulous year for such book-length, all-prose-poem projects, giving us the likes of Donna Stonecipher’s The Cosmopolitan, G. C. Waldrep’s Archicembalo, Mary Ruefle’s The Most of It, Cyrus Console’s Brief Under Water, Elizabeth Marie Young’s Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, and Lisa Olstein’s Lost Alphabet. Olstein’s book, under review here, particularly entices the reader interested in a poetry that dances and walks at the same time, for she grounds the book solidly in a vivid fictional framework while plunging and darting with the alacrity of the moths that constitute the book’s central subject and metaphor.

The Horizontal

Plot
“I’m working with a family of flower feeders,” we are informed by the nameless narrator, a naturalist who has come to a rustic village in order to study moths. The action of the book revolves around this study as the narrator collects, breeds, and observes specimens in all stages of life. In addition to the moths, the book includes the narrator’s relation to the villagers around her, and her relationship with a mysterious man named Ilya who arrives on page 13 with the mysterious sentence “My friend Ilya says you have no friend Ilya, says you have to envy the whole life” and remains an active force throughout Lost Alphabet. As such, the plot aims at the driving theme of the book: a question of proximity and the kinds of investigation proper to knowledge.

Setting
The entirety of the book takes place in the lepidopterist’s hut and the surrounding nameless village. We learn the village by pieces as the narrator moves us through the poems: here we are told of a stable, there a horse, elsewhere that the villagers keep miniature gardens in their homes. The villagers are “horse people” and although the speaker remains a stranger, she becomes integrated enough into their community to visit a healer for help with debilitating headaches, and for traders to bring specimens to her hut. She begins to take up local habits such as “sew[ing] with horsehair made fine by running it through the teeth” as the villagers do, coming to know this foreign culture by inhabiting it.

Setting the poems in a single, distinct physical location creates a sustained landscape along which the poems accrete. In addition, the stability of the setting allows Olstein to show a passage of time as we move into the heart of winter and then, at the end of the book, hear the first cracking of spring. As such, the poems stretch along the natural arc of a season and finish with an atmosphere of rain, instead of snow, as the narrator acknowledges the impending departure of the moths she has cultivated.

Narrator
In addition to creating a vivid, sense-based setting, Olstein absorbs us into her narrative by creating a continuous and captivating narrator that delivers her experiences to us in epistolary tones. The work oscillates from poems that have the feel of the recordings of a naturalists’ journal where the narrator writes observations of her specimens such as “Nocturnals hatched in morning wander all day over leaves and branches that as soon as darkness falls they devour”—and a diary where she reveals intimate thoughts such as “Some mornings I’m filled with longing, with sadness that has no cause.” By the end of the book we know many things about our lepidopterist narrator: she misses her horses, she suffers from debilitating headaches, she is not afraid to utter such honest statements of self-awareness as, “In wanting to show the best of myself, I reveal only a fraction.” Through such a rendering of character Olstein asks her readers to fall into the imagined reality that constitutes the continuous dream of fiction.

The Vertical

Plot (A Doubling Back)
Along with serving as the center of the book’s fictive plot, we are also invited to read the narrator’s pursuit of knowledge about her moths as a metaphor for a pursuit of poetry. In fact, the whole book, beginning with its title—Lost Alphabet—can be read as an allegory for the making of poetry and the cultivation of a poetic sensibility. For example, take the poem titled “[the heart is always behind the fingers]“:

Each specimen is brought into position with the stroke of a small feather. This to keep the powders undisturbed, each color in its place. Nevertheless, I am clumsy. Today I made the mistake of attempting to scrape from a lappet’s forewing what appeared to be a murky residue before realizing it was the wing itself. Possible camouflage markings for a swamp life.

If I substitute poetry-writing terms for moth-investigating terms we arrive at the following:

Each poem is brought into revision with the stroke of a fountain pen. This to keep the rhythm undisturbed, each image in its place. Nevertheless, I am clumsy. Today I made the mistake of attempting to scrape from language what appeared to be connotation before realizing it was the poem itself. Possible double-meaning.

Obviously this substitution takes vast liberties with the text, but the original poem articulates a process of making-while-discovering-what-is-already-before-one that rings so true to a phenomenological poetics that I cannot resist the impulse to equate the investigation of moths with that of poetry. As additional invitation, the book is peppered throughout with such sentiments as “Am I meant simply to observe, to record?” and “How will I know when this work is done?” which stretch towards this equation. The larger point, however, is that Olstien’s work manages the lyric combination of precision and airiness that rewards a reader’s invention, imagination, and participation.

Setting (A Doubling Back)
Olstein’s creation of a fictive place sustains our imagined experience. However, the notion of location can also be turned literal. We can think of setting as such elements as the actual physical format of the poems on their page and the relationship between each poem and the title that hovers above it.

While prose poems obviously have a different shape than lineated or open field poems, these poems still have visual contour. Olstein justifies her right and left margins and the poems are all roughly the same length, which implies a unit of measure to the experience that might be equated with meter. Also, titles have unique formatting: they are set in lower case, they are placed in brackets, and they are right justified. In addition, the relation of title phrase to poem is not descriptive, but, rather, associative. For example, the poem “[a lesson in liberty]” goes thusly:

And then Ilya storms and then Ilya is sullen. Then Ilya wants it wordlessly forgiven and I do. What have we become to each other that accounts for this? In the village the men are changing houses; the women are staying put. It is some kind of anniversary. I ask what is commemorated. Ilya says your face is ugly tonight, turn the page.

Considering the connection between the notion of “[a lesson in liberty]” and the narrative that follows becomes a practice in interpretation and questioning. Is the idea of a “lesson” ironic: the speaker gives Ilya liberty by forgiving him and is rewarded by a mean remark? Is the lesson that any attachment entails a curtailing of liberty because attachment—becoming something particular to another—entails accountability? Or is the title an allusion to the liberty of the moth who does not have to bother with such human things?

By attaching associative rather than descriptive titles to her poems, Olstein gives her readers the room to perform the “dance” (if you will indulge the metaphor) of interpretation and association, asking us not to be satisfied with resting in the horizontal line that leads from poem to poem.

Narrator (A Doubling Back)
As much as Olstein pulls me into the world of her naturalist narrator, I am all along aware that I am not “only” reading a book about studying moths. Rather, the narrator’s discoveries are as much, if not more, about the nature and requirements of knowledge in and of itself. As such, the book performs an action very specific to the vertical province of poetry: it uses a particular instance to get at larger, more abstract propositions. For example, in the poem titled “[the immovable moves]” we are given an articulation of the fragmented nature of looking and knowing:

I have learned to peer at specimens through a small crack at the center of my fist. It’s a habit herders use for distance: vision is concentrated, the crude tunnel brings into focus whatever small expanse lies on the other side, something in the narrowing magnifies what remains. At the table, my hand tires of clenching, my left eye of closing, my right of its squint, but the effect: a blurred carpet of wing becomes a careful weave of eyelashes colored, curved, exquisitely laid. It is a lens for looking at fractions; I’m unable to bring even a whole antenna or eye into view. The result is kaleidoscopic: I see one sharp fragment after another break clean before me, piece it to the others in my mind’s eye.

This poem reveals at least three important propositions about knowledge. First, notice that in apprehending her subject the speaker employs a technique that she has learned from the village’s herders. This shows that the speaker has put her scientific training on hold to embrace the modes of apprehension used by the native villagers. Employing the herders’ method for looking into distance is obviously a far cry from the use of a microscope. This invites us to entertain the notion that methods of looking and accumulating knowledge are tied to context. Second, notice that vision, here, is transformative rather than observational: a wing becomes “a careful weave of eyelashes.” This contrasts articulations of rational, scientific investigation and implies that metaphor might yield as much (or more) knowledge as the isolation of observation. Third, the passage proposes that vision—and, thus, knowledge—is always piecemeal. We can never apprehend the whole of what is before us and must always take a creative role in the world we inhabit. This notion resonates across the book, for each prose poem offers us a moment of particular apprehension. If we come to a sense of the whole we do so in exactly the way the speaker describes: by piecing together what we learn, poem by poem.

By doubling back and pointing out the ways in which Olstein imbues plot, setting, and narrator with the verticality of the lyric I do not intend to diminish the horizontal aspects of the text, or to imply that Lost Alphabet is unique in its use of both forces. As Michel Delville delineates in The American Prose Poem, any work must embrace at least a small amount of each movement. And, as Valéry asserts, such a mixture is necessary to both poetry and to living: “if the logician could never be other than a logician, he would not, and could not, be a logician; and if the poet were never anything but a poet, without the slightest hope of being able to reason abstractly, he would leave no poetic traces behind him. I believe in all sincerity that if each man were not able to live a number of other lives besides his own, he would not be able to live his own life.” By creating a vivid continuous dream that invites us to rotate within its elements, Olstein gives readers the opportunity to absorb themselves in her lepidopterist’s world while practicing the crafts of looking and piecemeal making that will serve them in their own.