Boris by the Sea wears its materiality on its sleeve. By materiality, I mean phenomenology. By phenomenology, I mean phenomenologies. For Boris, our Everyman Agonist, checks off phenomenology as typology, tripping through the architectural (“He said to his right foot, Build yourself. And it did.”); the archeological (“He simply had no faith in the past.”); that involving particle physics (“It does a minute in 60 seconds.”); the philosophical and the psychological, as if there’s any difference (“Some day, he thought, I will die of this thirst and then what.”), the scientific per se (“It got dark. It used to be light.”); à la Merleau-Ponty (“Boris imagined a world in which everything was real.”); the Hegelian (“Is there anything real about Boris? Better to wonder, is there anything abstract about Boris?”); the Heideggerian (“And the thingness around us circles like crows as magpies.”); and, of course, that of more generic old men—”There was a there that was there, a real there there, and some folks were there, and you could basically have a drink there, if you were already there. He was there.”

And then there are some other characters less there than Boris, most notably Ivan, the Woman, and the Author. Ivan meaning John, but then again, not John but “John,” for like Kings of England, there were many significant Ivans strewn throughout Russian and otherwise Slavic history, some terrible, some just not so hot. Boris’s Ivan being of the loucher variety, the one that will bust in and bust up a writing, the one that refuses to keep out of the picture: “Ivan, standing erect in the doorway.” Meanwhile, he’s also the one who refuses to stay in focus:

In vain! cried Ivan, wherever Ivan went.

And so the story goes out with Ivan’s container and into a taxonomy of reverberations.

Meanwhile, the Author, who would wrestle with the subjective in that authorial way, struggles to understand what is happening with Boris, that is to say he would like to have a plan for understanding. Like some people have plans, and like authors keep plots. (Never noticing that the two primary functions of a plot are conspiratorial in the first instance and funereal in the second.) To wit: Author writes a “Note on If one is to write a children’s book” (instructions on writing that only advise as to illustrations, in which it is considered advisable to avoid any direct representation at all, particularly as to human because “Things are materialized thoughts,” and thoughts, as you know, like humans, run towards the conjunctive, which is another way to say the subjunctive, which is to say contrary to the current state of things. Current as in the sea. Meanwhile the Author later (“meanwhile” meaning “at the same time” meaning later in this sense—we are, after all, dealing with sentential structures in which things will follow other things) realizes “I can see it now. / Boris is angry,” angry, it seems, because “she can be next to him and nothing can be happening.” So while the Author wrestles with the seen and unseen and the sordid problems of representation, meanwhile, Boris remains indicative, which is at least known.* And that which is known may be the case, or may not be the case, but if it is not the case, it is known to not be the case, and, thus, it is the case that it is known. (“The author reflected upon this thought.”)

It is perhaps noteworthy that the indicative differs from the subjunctive in the third person singular of any verb in the present tense. And it is moreover the case that Boris is in the perpetual present tense. As who among us is not? (“In fact there was nothing to keep him from opening it. Nothing but the imagined threat of what he imagined might step out once he did it.”)

Meanwhile, there is also Woman* (“the least known”). Woman being the Lacanian upper case which does not exist, which cannot exist, that is to say, in any case, and so Boris’s Woman does not exist, as at least not for Boris, at least not in what’s colloquially called the here and now, anyhow. (“To Boris, she was neither rain nor shine. She was fake as wooden sheep, false as snowflakes, fraudulent as kitten sneezes.”) Now, meaning later. Meaning that it is only Boris that makes anything real (“Is there anything real about Boris?”), for if we’ve lost the subjective, it’s really just our own that’s gone missing, or turned up dead by the side of the road, having made that terrible mistake of picking up that nice young man, or turning down that well-lit street, of doing something, that is, or going somewhere, that was, that is to say, conjunctive, i.e., engaging in something changing versus something that simply goes on. Like the sea Boris lives by. (“Better to wonder, is there anything abstract about Boris?”)

The sea is, as you know, the Real, that excess that is neither Symbolic nor Imaginary, or rather hasn’t yet been slotted as Symbolic or Imaginary. Like the soft area between your toes, and how one might truly feel about Flaming Hot Cheetos. Well, you know it now. Though feel free to disagree, like Boris. He is phenomenological, but he is not a phenomenologist. That would involve enabling conditions, and Boris is low on those.

How old are we, really?

How close are we, really?

Boris by the Sea is a small square book with a lot of air, like one of Matisse’s window paintings; in all this extrusion, there is a concrete sense of something not there—not something that was and now isn’t, but something that purposefully is not. The space around any sculpture, for example. The way that things not said in a poem become the contours of that poem.

There is nothing particular about Boris.

He’s particular to nothing.

It is by happy determinism that Yankelevich is also the translator of Daniil Kharms (Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, Ardis (2007)). Kharms’ 1934 short prose piece, “On Phenomena and Existences #1,” recounts an anecdote about a great artist who, upon examining a rooster, determines that the rooster does not exist. The great artist’s friend laughs, pointing out that he can see the rooster “quite clearly. And the great artist then lowered his head and sat down, right where he was standing, on a heap of bricks. THAT’S ALL.” In keeping with the spirit of a heap of bricks upon which one might sit, in the Introduction to Today I Wrote Nothing, Kharms is quoted from his 1937 diary: “I am interested only in nonsense; only in that which has no practical meaning. Life interests me only in its most absurd manifestations.” Boris is likewise an absurd manifestation, but no more so than anything else, once you look at it, for I think I shall never see a thing as silly as a tree. That is to say, no more so than the wooden chair upon which Boris sits, then burns; no more so than chair, who, by virtue of being burnt “seemed also strangely satisfied, as though it had finally fulfilled its true purpose. And Boris had helped it do so.”*

There are no punctums but periods in Boris by the Sea. In this sense, Boris is his own history. And, by happy coincidence, I am watching (as we speak) A History of Britain: The Complete Collection: Vol. 1 and I do so wish it were so, that history flowed like DVDs, like chapters strung along like birds on wires that used to be used to telephone. History punctuated with the occasional exclamation point, like any ordinary war or a breakout peace, but mostly just featherhooked with commas, lightly flung. A history of Britain, like the seriality of Boris, is a belief in time as phenomenology, which, of course, makes it Real as the sea in which we drown like dogs, though meanwhile, that is to say later, we paddle.

Boris had an idea. Then he sat down and wept.

Just as Boris* makes me believe in the way that dark furniture does, in the way that people who believe sit on many substances without the need for further support.
________________________________________
Just as * makes one drop one’s eyes to the end, for further clarification. Just as one would wish for further clarification.


77. Holding Hands

I’ve been trying to look through the sun

at something under the sun or within the sun

(here are the sunny days: 280 a year!), been trying to measure the sun –

taste the sun. But I cannot

break into the sun.

Looking through the sun: the very definition of dangerous futility. The first problem, the obvious problem, is that the sun, gazed upon, blinds all who view it. The second, more sublime problem is that the sun also provides the means by which it can be seen. If you want to see the sun, you must dim it, but if you dim it, you cannot see.

Julie Carr’s inclusion of this paradox—one that tempts all children and against which we warn them—metaphorically predicts one of the book’s anxieties, the efforts to inform children of the risk of violence while also shielding them from it. It also suggests that one way to consider 100 Notes on Violence is to believe that here is a book whose author knows it must fail. Yet she persists, not in the hope that it will succeed, but in the knowledge that the thing she is attempting cannot be done; “success” at such an effort is categorically inapt. The effort is the achievement.

This interpretation rests on the corollary belief that Carr’s subject—violence—prohibits any full accounting. Violence corrupts the distinction between abstraction and practice, and even if we define it so loosely as to claim that violence is simply a category of human behavior, we’ve still done a kind of violence to our use of the term. Via adjectival and adverbial attribution, we’ve left very little that cannot be the subject or agent of violence. Like light or time, violence has become so much a referential familiar that we all know what it is, though we cannot quite articulate what it is we know.

The danger here, of course, is that the combination of great frequency and a lack of explicit meaning render violence a kind of social wallpaper; we notice it less as a feature than as a rhetorical surface against which we can project matching claims. How often do we refer to someone as having a violent outburst, as if one’s outburst could be calm; if we measure the violence of the outburst with the performance of violent acts, what does it mean to say the temper itself was violent, relative to what it predicts?

And yet as anyone who has been the object of violence can tell you, this gets things exactly backwards. The experience of violence is of an interruption of a previously granted norm, an exception, a breach. It distorts by clarification, by bringing what is violent and what is not into sharp relief: the sun, set against a sky its illumination blackens.

While it may seem as if these two apprehensions of violence are exclusive, it’s the degree to which they collaborate that makes Carr’s task apparently unrealizable. To speak of a culture of violence is to define violence as ambient, when its very essence is its particularity. On the other hand, it would be foolish to deny the profound saturation of both conceptual and material violence that characterizes our shared history and our daily experiences.

So what we end up with, perversely, is a condition whereby the abnormal distinguishes itself by virtue of its near-ubiquity. How to think about such a thing? As soon as you establish terms with which to think about it, the subject disappears, leaving evidence of its wake. The wake and the evidence, in fact, become the only aspects of violence stable enough to consider. Sometimes we gauge a property by its opposite, but the opposite of violence is simply the absence of violence, which is an impoverished and astringent definition of peace.

Carr is sharply aware of these problems, and indeed sometimes addresses them directly:

64. From General to Specific

First, the premise: When people feel their freedoms encroached upon, they will hurt whoever seems to be encroaching. Upon.

For instance, when there is too much laundry, the clothes seem to be eating me. My arms and my hands are not my own, I cannot move from the spot. In this moment I begin to grow hot. And once, twice, more times, I lifted my hand to hit, I threw the phone, a book, a shoe.

But, some argue, there is no real and unbreachable boundary between people. When we finally recognize the absence of boundaries, we will, in fact, no longer hurt one another, because to do so would hurt ourselves, they say.

Quite the opposite seems to be true. A lack of boundaries means I can do just exactly what I want to you. Just as Stephen cut a grid into his arm, I can cut one into yours. I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.

If it is profitable to burn/kiss my own hand/your hand, how do I measure this profit?

In the last two sections of this note, Carr interrupts the relatively straightforward logic the title promises to include examples and referents that don’t bear any direct relationship to the terms of the premise itself. Her refutations discount the theoretical by shifting terms to the personal, a transference doubled by the embedding within that personal customized symbols (Stephen, the burns, the first person quotes from Dostoevsky) which act as contrary evidence only within her hermetic imaginary. This suits her method, for the 100 notes do not culminate in philosophical argument; rather, as the book progresses, Carr increasingly draws upon the content of prior notes to complicate the effect of the later ones, making reductive argument impossible.

For instance, Stephen first appears in Note 42, titled “Two Narrative Poems.” The poet speaks of the aforementioned grid-shaped scar, which as a younger woman she found compelling and attractive, but then mentions that Stephen has also been raped by his uncle, a fact the disclosure of which is complicated both in the story itself and in the poem’s reproduction of it: “This I forgot to say. Various ways of writing that.”

The second of the two narratives describes the poet, now fully adult, meeting with an undergraduate (close to the age of the poet in the first narrative) whose hands are scarred with fresh burn marks. Their subsequent conversation, then, must occur “over the burns. Above the burns.” As with the struggle to see through or under or within the sun, this emphasis on position and perspective indicates Carr’s acknowledgment that a direct approach would elide important aspects of how violence operates. All approaches are prepositional: you can draw various vectors around, but you can never get in, so a direct assessment would be a false one. She could have used fragments to reduce this truism to fairly predictable compositions: fragments (because a true unity is illusory), which together create a mosaic, whose approximation of unity forces multiple considerations of its components. Carr also knows that this method will work better with a more tightly defined violence:

23

The idea to write a book “about” violence. “What kind?” “The close-up kind.”

Because I cannot write the words “school shooting” into the little search box.

Later I hear that whatever you write into the little search box will somewhere

be recorded as data in order to better sell you.

What does the person searching school shootings want to buy?

I keyed “guns” instead, but I don’t want to buy a gun.

I could buy a gun.

This technique—one of distracted elaboration on aspects of preceding lines, each of which substantially changes the register and the mood—is useful as far as it goes, but the ease with which its complexity is achieved undermines the diagnostic discomfort Carr rightly hopes to create. So rather than simply rely on the logical consequence of the fragmentary, she seeks to complicate the process by abstracting from each fragment phrases, symbols and rhetorical eddies, which she then re-inserts into subsequent notes in ways that compromise their tonal integrity. By the book’s conclusion, then, the discrete parts have been sewn together, though Carr makes certain that integrity, too, disconcerts. Parts A and B of 92 are conventionally suggestive, but B then becomes something else, summoned by but not elucidating of what precedes it. 93 and 94 only further this.

92.

Mother and Daughter 3

A.

“If mother love is, as some bioevolutionary and developmental psychologists

as well as some cultural feminists believe, a natural,’ or at least expectable,

womanly script, what does it mean for women for whom scarcity and death

has made that love frantic?” (Scheper-Hughes)

B.

The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) lists Colorado as third in the

U.S. for deaths from child abuse.

In 2006, 40,000 child abuse cases were investigated in Colorado. Of those, 8,700 were confirmed.

In all, 24 children died of abuse and neglect.

Launced

“secure in

(Research: to about seeking)

(Every researcher a predator)

safe and permanent families.”

93.

Of men: Walked through the dark: jogger behind me: “overcoat of clay”

(Dickinson)

Of gravity: And if I were to release my hold.

Of mirrors: The enigma of looking into one’s eyes as if the eyes of

another: the “sudden appearance of the unavailable.” (Nancy)

Of insanity: “The rhythmic range of words fills me with horror” (Roubaud)

94.

Of home: Majesty and Amber

Of the sun: I cannot break into it, its daily resurrection, daily assault.

If a reader is familiar with the preceding 91 notes, these potentially cryptic fragments (what does “launced” mean? How does Dickinson function here?) recall their original, less scattered contexts, but this satisfaction shouldn’t be mistaken for argumentative clarity. Carr isn’t making assertions; the more tightly she weaves the lattice of her sources and structures, the less that basket can hold, which is, I think, as close as she’s willing to come to having a point. Anything that tapers to sharpness—sharpness of intent, sharpness of interpretation—approaches singularity, which Carr rejects. And a point, of course, can also be a weapon.

Carr’s reluctance to editorialize, her general unwillingness to represent quotidian violence without due deference to complexity and texture of the daily lives in which it occurs, is both astute and admirable. And the form she’s chosen (borrowed partially from C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining, a debt Carr frankly acknowledges, as she does all her sources) serves this rectitude. But there’s also a risk to it, which isn’t that 100 Notes on Violence might deny readers the satisfaction of didactic purity. The danger is that while Carr reflects the way violence warps and shatters efforts to contain it, she also isolates violence from the very arena of the commonplace she wishes to place it in, because she cannot guess as to how violence originates in persons the equivalent of those who receive it.

Stephen’s elliptical and elusive articulation of the violence he’s received (and done to himself) finds a persuasive poetic analogue here, but the same can’t be said for Stephen’s uncle. We don’t know, and Carr doesn’t suggest, that the uncle is any way equivalent to people who have endured violence as opposed to inflicting it. Likewise, when Carr writes of the malice and emotional abuse her own mother visited upon her (in the harm it causes, Carr uses this as a poignant counterpoint to the more graphic violence she has faced), we meet the mother as a figure of profound curiosity, but one who remains opaque.

Carr certainly isn’t required to imagine the inhabitation of behaviors she finds appalling, the throwing of phones and shoes notwithstanding. The confusion between incomprehension, reluctance and refusal when confronted with violence could very well further the meditation she wants to make. But as long as the agents of violence remain mysterious, violence itself becomes opaque, and that opacity in turns creates a strange placidity, an evenhandedness that sometimes undermines the conditions that violence can provoke. If violence is both regular and irregular, an examination of it might likewise allow various registers, and not just multiple types of evidence.

While the sun cannot be seen through, it is not exactly opaque; if one could see past the blaze, the substance would reveal itself not as substance but agitated gas, flares and loops and roiling cataracts of light: an effect, not an object. Yet even if Carr’s silence about the common origins of common violence (a paradox she manifests beautifully) is like Perseus gazing into his mirrored shield to approach Medusa indirectly only to find himself struck to stone by his own reflection, his own intent, her necessary failure is clearly chosen and bravely made. She’s looked at the sun, and still sees.

Johnson was talking about Milton, but it’s not Milton who makes this passage readable more than two hundred years later. It’s that Johnson knew something about starving and being cast aside. I don’t mean to invoke the test of time at the expense of the right now of reading. I’m simply saying: all a reader can do is take every poet seriously.

I take Cornelius Eady’s poetry most seriously when he puts it forward as autobiography, as in the prose poems about his father’s death and his mother’s subsequent difficulty demonstrating that her common law marriage entitles her to the house they lived in. It makes me uneasy—what’s the reader, a poverty tourist? a guilt-tripper?—but these are accomplished poems, where the unbearable tension makes him work every angle he can find. In “Motherless Children,” for example, Eady recounts a visit to the Office of Social Services:

What did I say or do? Who knows, but I do know this look she’s giving me, after telling me that there’s no place for my mother’s well-being in their guidelines, that as far as they’re concerned, she isn’t even legally a part of my family. I know this look. This woman wants to observe a screamer, a ripper, she wants her dreams of a babbling monkey to rise.

You’re reading that right. He calls himself a babbling monkey, then projects the insult onto the clockwatcher, then hands the experience over to the reader, list price twelve dollars in 1995. He’s selling a performance of contained rage, and it’s worth every penny. Some readers will assume the speaker of this poem is on their side. Some other readers will want to know whether he thinks they give him “this look.” Still other readers will have enough experience of “this look” to know if he bends the truth even slightly. He holds his tongue.

I get uneasy when I connect this retailing of his mother’s potential homelessness with his newer poems about the difficulties of maintaining a vacation house. But then, Eady has always been all business. In one of the earliest poems in his new and selected, Hardheaded Weather, Eady repeats the slogan: “NO MORE POETRY FOR POETS.” Another early poem has as its refrain: “Money for reading poems.” In “Hawker,” he describes getting ready for work:

I put on dog’s teeth,
An Afro
With a silver switchblade
Just
Peeking from the top.
Then the loincloth.
I oil my body.
I walk to a street corner
And sell poems
From a paper bag.

He’s aware from the very beginning of both the stereotype threat he faces as a black poet, as well as the connection between risking his persona and writing his own reward. The implications of that won’t emerge clearly in his work until his fourth book, but even at the beginning he shows a flair for closing lines: “The idiot smiles at the man’s girlfriend / And the unfortunate woman / Smiles back.” And there’s this, from a poem written in 1981, before word processors blunted the physicality of the words cut and paste:

And you,
Watching me
Cut and paste, you
Can’t tell
If you’re
In or
Out, if
You should
Worry
Or laugh.

Worry.

With Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the Academy of American Poet’s Lamont Prize, the cartoonish quality acknowledged in the title of his first collection, Kartunes, is mostly gone. He replaces the jokey exaggerations with effectively erotic ones, many about women’s legs, as in the poem that closes, “The same thing that draws us together / has ruined all these dresses.” It’s in these poems that the narratives start to come back to family, which is to say, to money and home. The poem that introduces his father as a character, “The Good Look,” is the poem that introduces the subject of packing up and leaving for good. It’s a level up moment, and Eady knows it:

My father
Stops at that portal,
And, though totally mistaken,
Takes a hard look at his house.

Everything the words so long were ever
Meant to imply
Is in this look,
A look that, when shown to me later,

Secondhand,
As part of a story with a
Happy ending,

Nevertheless
Raises the ante.

From here on, nearly every line has a confrontation, an unexpected combination, or some other evidence that nothing is ever easy. Poetry is not only melodramatic non-fiction broken into strong-stressed lines, but it does include it. I have no reason to doubt these hard stories are true. For that matter, I don’t know whether Eady is drawn to this material because he can write it perfectly, or because he knows that it will sell. Both, I hope.

In the nine fine sentences of “Almost Grown,” he gets to the core of his sister’s repetitions of their father’s behavior, and the rage it creates in his father: “He will never try this hard again to tell anyone how much he loves them. With his belt, my father tries to tell my sister what he knows a man is capable of, but all he does is tell her fortune.” Or when, visiting his father in the hospital, he responds to the order to look for some cash left lying in the room by saying to himself, “I see just what I expect: tongue depressors, baby oil, the diabetic candy he sniffed and left by the side of the road. If there was any cash there, it is long gone, a secret boon for some nurse or orderly, a justifiable tax for a hard-ass patient.”

He moralizes as much as these quotes suggest, but he’s secure enough with his point of view to let others speak. When he talks about his own actions, he mentions what he imagines other people will think. He makes a good case why. In “The Grin,” he quotes two lines from a plainclothes cop who stops him hurrying through the airport in Norfolk, Virginia: “Will you cooperate?” and “See you soon.” Despite Eady’s apparent one-to-one identity with the narrator of these poems, it’s possible to read him as constantly holding his tongue. He may be.

He actually uses the phrase “I hold my tongue” twice in “Lucky House,” the new to go with the selected. If you told me two years ago I’d admire a book about buying a vacation house, I’d have been surprised. But house is a key word to understanding Eady, or any American. In the selected part of the book, Eady tells his father that “The house has gone down,” and later, he sits in a car “watching my sister’s house.” In a poem from Autobiography of a Jukebox not included here, his mother’s giving up on her collard-and-tomatoes victory garden prompts these lines:

You can’t have nothing, she tells us,
Is the motto of our neighborhood,
These modest houses
That won’t give an inch.

In the earlier poems, when you start to root for him, he smiles and backs away. These new poems feel closer and warmer:

Under the bedroom
floor

There is
a long
rumble,
a small
explosion
every 20 minutes
called a furnace.

An early Eady poem praises William Carlos Williams’s inventions while looking sideways at his failure to appreciate jazz. Neither the prosody nor the pacing of the revelation in these short lines come near Williams for intensity, but what does that matter when “the John Birch Society / Has adopted our section of the highway.”

The selections here are fine, and could have been finer. The previously uncollected poems delay the appearance of his major work, for example, and he’s underweight in material from his best books. While he includes more than half the poems from You Don’t Miss Your Water, an almost-perfect perfect-bound chapbook of short prose pieces, the only plausible excuse for not including all of it is that it’s still in print and selling. He includes less than a quarter of the poems from The Autobiography of a Jukebox, a full collection of poems about musicians, performance-friendly accounts of racially fraught confrontations, and short prose pieces about his family after his father’s death. It looks at first like You Still Don’t Miss Your Water. It’s actually Eady’s most substantial book, second only to the present volume as an introduction to his work. (If you like Hardheaded Weather, find Autobiography next.) The poems he chooses from Brutal Imagination are all from the title sequence, spoken in the voice of the imaginary black man accused by a white woman (Susan Smith) of her own crime—driving her car into a lake and drowning her children. The intensity of the situation comes through, and the poems are okay, but it’s far from his best work, and not an ideal close to the book.

That ideal close would be Eady’s contribution to the subgenre of poems, begun by Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” that argue into being a space for black writers in historically-white college classrooms. In “Why Do So Few Blacks Study Creative Writing?” he grapples with what to tell a young woman student who wants to know “if all music / Begins equal, why this poem of hers / Needed a passport, a glossary, // A disclaimer.” The rhetorical question he asks himself is exactly the conflict he bravely takes on with each new poem:

Really, what
Can I say? That if she chooses
To remain here the term
Neighborhood will always have
A foreign stress, that there
Will always be the moment

The small, hard details
Of your life will be made
To circle their wagons?

Bin Ramke’s Theory of Mind, comprised of poems from his nine previous collections, as well as new work, is a record of the mind longing to know itself, and the poet making art of this longing. As a collected, the reader can catch a bird’s eye view of the evolution of Ramke’s thought over three decades of writing, the slow progression into the stylistic features that now define his work (fragmentation, intertextuality, dense repetition). The “theory of mind” that the book offers is thus dynamic, a picture of a mind in motion. That so many of these poems are marked by references to ancient and contemporary philosophical thought (and I use the word philosophical in a slightly Pythagorian way—that is to say, inclusive of physics, mathematics, literature, and any other aspect of human existence that can come under intellectual study) suggests that Ramke’s approach to knowing the mind is one that looks outward as much as inward.

Theory of Mind begins with a collection of new poems entitled Anomalies of Water, and then jumps back in time to The Difference Between Night and Day (for which he won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1978) and progresses forward in time to his more recent work. The little space allocated to Ramke’s earlier work (a few pages for each of his first five books) may short-shrift poems that are, in their own right, quite lovely. For example, a poem from The Difference Between Night and Day:

…We love because
it grows late and the tomatoes
are ripening. A morning glory
climbs one stake, mingles with
green and pink-striped fruit: tomorrow
we will look at what’s been done.

Certainly I would die for you:
that is the easy part, like falling
from grace or off a log.

(from “Martyrdom: A Love Poem”)

Yes, these lines are perhaps more conventionally lyrical than Ramke’s later poems, yet there is something satisfying about the intuitive balance of the lines, the subtle assonance of “late” and “tomatoes” which the poet picks up again in the word “stake,” or the soft “o” of “morning glory.” The poem’s final maneuver of undercutting the familiar language of “falling /from grace” with humor (“or off a log”) shows a quick wit and the kind of language play that we have come to expect from Ramke’s work. It may be easy, as a poet, to either disavow one’s early work, or else to cling to it like a former high-school quarterback reliving his glory days. I think, in the case of Ramke’s poetry, one should do neither, but as we do with our children, accept their differences and assess their success according to somewhat individualized criteria. This is all to say, simply, that on a global level, I think the book would have benefited from a more balanced treatment of Ramke’s oeuvre.

As we move through these collections, perhaps beginning with Wake (1999) but most certainly with Airs, Waters, Places (2001), we begin to see some characteristic features of Ramke’s poems—particularly what I will call musical and semantic causality. Consider, for example, the following lines from “The Naming of Shadows and Colors” (from Matter):

Me, I like them all, all colors, shading
into each other, you know, the spectrum,
a spectacle of itself, oh like a ghost. Specter,
inspector Ball provides the names…

We see here how spectrum becomes spectacle, which becomes specter, which becomes inspector (each word derived from the Latin specere, meaning “to look”). In Anomalies of Water, we witness a similar pattern, as “a place/a placement, a kind of depositing—deposit as in precipitate—/a life a precipitate of events and attitudes and biology” (“Was It Fallen It Was a Floating World”). A reader feels as if she is witnessing a game of semantic dominoes, as one word falls into the next, and so on and so forth. Or perhaps a more precise analogy would be that of Theseus following Ariadne’s thread to find his way out of the labyrinth, where the thread is etymological, and the labyrinth is thought. The fact that we do not find our way out of the labyrinth (which I suppose would imply “no thought,” the cessation of discursion, or at least the termination of a particular thread) but simply into different terrain is indicative of Ramke’s broader tendencies, which are to keep the reader in a state of extended journey, and even as a poem ends one has the feeling of simply pausing to catch his or her breath before taking up the road once again.

Among the themes that consistently arise in Ramke’s work are memory, the physical world, and what we construct (art and otherwise) from that world:

I could make that world clouds
of wax and a sky of honey and flora
and fauna of wings and
bees do love me and are honey for me
and make babies of wax which come to life come
home and immortal as the hive the
swarm which is a cloud stinging.

(from “What Did You Make the Clouds Out Of?”)

Here, in tumbling, associative language, Ramke foregrounds the “poet as maker,” a maker who is beloved by his creation (“bees do love me/and are honey for me”). And yet, the final image of the poem is one of hurt—the cloud of the initial creation is now a thing of violence. One can extrapolate this movement from love to hurt into an analogy of the age-old question,  how could the creator of a world make a world so violent? Poem after poem in this collection focuses on the presence and function of pain, violence, and grief, but not without a wistful longing for a trauma-less world: “a silence of happiness the forests of my childhood are/ stories, songs silenced by/my own poor memory” (“Possible World Semantics”). If the possible world we live in is beset by misery, perhaps there is a possible world that is not, that offers us the “silence of happiness.” One doesn’t feel hope in these poems as much as longing, which perhaps is proto-hope, that which cannot quite imagine something better but desires it anyhow.

The characteristic that most famously defines Ramke’s work is his distinctive employment of intertextuality, often incorporating long passages of texts woven into these poems in such a way as to suggest they are at least as important as the parts of the poem that the poet himself composed. These referenced texts, in other words, don’t seem to operate in service of the poet’s thought as clarifying or elaborating structures, so much as they feel integral to the composition process itself. “The Naming of Shadows and Colors,” for example, quotes De Rerun Natura (“… semblances and thin shapes of things/are thrown off from this outer surface”), which initiates a series of thoughts about surface, matter, and light:

The sincerity of surface suffices as
dream is a shadow cast by Mind
shading into itself, the little mind
making itself seem large in the hope of frightening
itself into resolution…

The poem, which considers our perception of the material world (incorporating the work of Pliny, mathematician Richard Dedekind, and physicist Philip Ball, among half a dozen others), becomes something of an interdisciplinary conversation between minds—ancient and contemporary—all seeking to explain similar phenomena. Here, the speaker’s claim that the mind can only delude itself into resolution by “frightening itself” begs the questions: what is it the mind seeks to resolve? Why would delusion be necessary to this resolution, or would it in fact be ultimately preventative? It is difficult even to ask these questions, nebulous as they are. The poems, honestly, do not seem to want to clarify the questions, so much as to express the ideas that produce them, and which they produce.

It is my impression that the engine driving these questions is often emotional, as the tenor of these poems seems to tremble on the shore of suffering, as we encounter heart-rending lines like:

We do destroy ourselves daily
And dream it away every night
To watch such shadow-birds fly moonward…

(from “Knowing Better”)

Or:

…the humiliation of symmetry plain and

periodic agony not agony but a ghostly monotony

behind the arras a mother not uncle, standing

breast forward awaiting a blade and a piercing peaceful



as desperation in a phone booth

(from “Lies”)

As Ramke’s poems often evidence a pervasive melancholy, an exploration of alternately acute and diffuse suffering, the texts that these poems grow into and out of become active participants in the machinations of thought and emotion that the speaker wrestles with. Pascal once famously wrote that “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas” (the heart has its reasons that reason doesn’t know), and in Ramke’s poems, the mysteries of emotional life are brought to the fore, with the addendum that the heart may search for explanation of its reasons, or at least resonance with them, in the experience or thinking of others. Furthermore, if we apply “theory of mind” to the way Ramke approaches the integration of external texts, one might say that it is an act of empathy (which involves the assumption of a mind outside of our own)—both the willingness to extend his empathy to others, whose texts he takes up and writes through, and perhaps to seek it even from those who have long since passed.

As I was reading Theory of Mind, I had a recurring vision of a person traveling down a river, hopping from raft to raft, boat to branch, searching for something that would carry him to less turbulent waters, if not to some sandy shore. Each boat or branch was a piece of text, an idea, a series of sounds, which he would rest on for a while, before leaping to the next vessel. Whether or not this is an accurate reflection of the work of the speaker in these poems, I cannot say with certainty, though I began to think about ideas as having, like boats, various degrees of integrity. The ones we travel with we hope are sturdy enough to survive a few storms. Regardless, it is at least clear enough that Ramke considers poetry a safe place to explore and test ideas, both his own and others. I will borrow from Ramke’s own words to say that poetry, like sleep, may be “a place you can dive into water and not drown.”

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?

Disaffection is often affectation, just as lack of affect it is the preferred sentiment of the overly sentimental. In other words, it is dangerous to write smart from the street and from the heart. One runs the risk of falling face first into Rimbaudean cliché, or worse, being applauded by those who don’t know better, and discounted by those who should. For the truth is that, as always, all is true: there are disaffected youth who stay disaffected as they become less youth, and there’s equal parts real pathos and cheap feeling in this, and the cheap pathetic part of real feeling, in that. Andrea Lambert’s poems hit these notes exactly. They are as raw as wheat paste, as sweetly sentimental as the handmade missing persons posters that sprinkle LA streets. Despite the occasional slip into over-stating the lower case, Lambert regularly manages to pull off a soft staccato sneer that skitters off into real unblinking delight. In the very fine “Symptoms,” the epidemiology includes:

Restlessness, difficulty falling asleep.

A sudden, intense interest in parlor tricks and tidying.

Obsessions; avocados—an intense desire for avocados.

I can eat when I’m dead.

A few chunks of memory, some moments of missing, and then, the inevitable what’s left:

The font should be Helvetica.

The sadness of the discontinued font.

The darkness of the discontinued font.

I can eat when I’m dead.

Like her title promises, Lorazepam addresses anxiety by inducing the five effects of a solid benzodiazepine drug: anxiolytic, amnesic, sedative/hypnotic, anticonvulsant and muscle relaxant. So there are funny art-school jokes, like “Grocery List,” a riff on Basquiat, where the fairly fey “Toothpaste (whitening orange zest)” takes the place of smack as a reassuring must-have. Other list poems have the sedating air of Nothing To Do, including the one-word pointless (“Powder” (“Ways to Self-Medicate”)) and the two-word pummeled (“List-making” (“Ways to Procrastinate”)), wedded to the fundamentally addictive (). Lambert is pure LA in many of these moments—smart without seeming so, unsettling as a step back, quietly comfortable in the abyss-adjacent. There is something about consistently good weather that should make you afraid, just a little, of what happens next (“Sell Nick on eBay,” “Get PhD” (“Post-MFA Employment Ideas”)).

Next in text is 720910-2155, the Swedish writer who opts to be known by government ID number rather than Christian or sur-name. This appears to be a bid for anonymity as well as a remark upon the anonymity of the bureaucratic variety (“What is personal about a number?” (“Straight Up”)), but I want it to be something more interesting, for what is less repetitious than a number, less impersonal than a personal ID? And, as 720910-2155 does point out, “It cannot be pronounced, but it can be read.” According to facebook, there is at least one other Vanessa Place, who lives in Dublin, and does not want to be my friend. She is smarter than I am, for she ignores her doppelgänger as I knock, unsmiling, at the door. Similarly unsmiling is 720910-2155, who writes on the pin-head of self-awareness, “Isn’t everybody trying to be a hero?” and self-abnegation, “Somewhere in all these stories there are elements that allow the reader to identify himself with a particular character to understand that the hero is simply somebody else, someone they probably don’t know and never will” (“State of Exception”). The prose pieces penned by 720910-2155 are thickly spread amalgams of theory and acts such as are found in playlets, or snaps as may be taken in anyone’s blue kitchen. 720910-2155 seems very nice, and very conscientious, reading Agamben into daily life as the unexceptional state, and calling out aphoristic dictates (“Go Beyond Conceptualized Thought”) and aesthetic/ethical theorems (“Benefactor/Beneficiary”) with the measured enthusiasm of exercise, regularly taken. When I went to southern Sweden a few years ago, I was surprised at how very much they loved Matisse. But I was there in March, and my surprise was literally cooled to complete understanding. Every place has its arenas where what is simply nature in another place is the breathtakingly artificial in another. And we love these moments of great artificiality because they serve as false and reassuring desublimation: in other words, California’s burnt (sun-and-out) laconicism is happiest when hysterical, just as Sweden wishes it were not so very Swedish.

He wanted to see what life could be like without continuously being reminded of the past. He wondered what his art could look like if he did not have a body of work to build upon. He wanted to see what would happen if the slate were clean.

In the pale and patterned IKEA-land, one wants burnt oranges and marine blues, and Cali bodies that know no boundaries: 720910-2155 and Lambert were made to mirror one another insofar as mirrors both reflect and project whatever light is cast upon them.

If one is to be concerned with the idea of freedom, one must consider one’s own perception of experience. The question is whether or not freedom is truly desirable at all.

Om man bryr sig om frihetstanken så är man tvungen att ta i akt ens egen uppfattning om det man upplever. Frågan är om frihet egentligen alls är önskvärd.

In the introduction, J.S. Davis notes that the concept for the project was criticized for its particular geographic selection, and for the notion of geographic selection itself. There also appeared to have been the occasion for some well-intended lecture on the need not to lionize any one geography. In short, I think someone argued that some other locale, that is to say, some locale that was more Other, would be better as an object for cultural engagement, that is to say, would provide more of an object lesson (“object” should, by rights, be capitalized). This is a stupid critique. Geography is history, as we all now know, and just as it is very important not to forget that Haiti has a history of the U.S. Marines landing to save the calamitous day and then forgetting to leave, so too is it important to be reminded of the palpable souls of less (to the post-colonial mind) exotic locales. Indigenous is as indigenous does, and we all want something. Want as in lack. We as in the gluttonous us. At a recent poetry conference in Oslo, I was told that a leading Swedish journal on art and philosophy had decided to publish only in English because there were simply not enough Swedish speakers to justify the native text. To see how art is, how culture is, how youth will wear down even as it is retread and prolonged past the point of bloom, it is also important to look at the poor us of the wealthier world. Not to pity its thick-waisted hungers or its fait d’ennui, but to understand that, Malmø to Echo Park, we hope to hope, and that in that, we hang by the same well-licked thread.


The underlying philosophy of these poems recalls Spinoza’s assertion that “above all things it is profitable to men to…unite themselves to one another by bonds which make them as one man,” and proceeds from Keelan’s keen observation that the self is “such a small arc in the tapestry.” Thus, there is a genuine humility of thought in this book, an imperative not to let our suffering alienate us from a world that needs our attention. In fact, the book’s first poem presents the reader with a reminder of one loss we would, in fact, all experience—the loss of the planet. The earth, in this poem, is reduced to “a ball you could hold in your hand,” while an unspecified speaker ambivalently remarks, “I died I guess free.” This line shrugs its shoulders so hard that the reader is compelled to ask what it means to be free, and if it is a state or action that can ever be qualified with a mitigating “I guess.” The resonances of this strong first poem are global, ecological, and underscore the fact that Keelan’s interests are indeed ethical as well as aesthetic or philosophical, which is born out in prior collections like Utopic (Alice James Books, 2002) and The Devotion Field (Alice James Books, 2004).

In the eight-part series “Everybody’s Autobiography,” that constitutes the middle of the book, Keelan gives historical context to the life and death of her father, beginning with a painful and intimate description of “fire men and paramedics,/ the coroner from Chicago smoking on the porch, and the captain saying/ would you like to pray?” She then proceeds to recount the beginning of her father’s life, offering a broad historical context to the moment he “fell into this world from a woman’s body,” citing Lenin, Coolidge, and Miss America 1924. Keelan applies the lesson that one should “distrust/ distinctions that separated the simple subject from/ the compound subject,” as she weaves the birth of her father into the history of the Southern Pacific railroad, the deaths of eight farmers, and finally the rising power of the oil industry, which culminates in 3,000 dead on September 11th, which occurred just a few months after the death of her father. These poems offer a remarkable vision of the collective and the individual existing within, without, and alongside one another.

Just as “Everybody’s Autobiography” directs the reader’s attention to the events surrounding the birth of her father, in her poems “Little Elegy (Eros)” and “Little Elegy (Eve),” Keelan expands her vision of connectedness to one that includes the startling beauty of birth as a corrective for violence. After wryly recounting women wielding the word “cunt,” she writes:

No heart, no bone

No sister enemies

No source or power

In the middle of me

Though sometimes, something true

Which is agape

The tenderness and vulnerability implied in these final two lines is the kind of surprising, deeply moving moment that marks the series of elegies at the beginning of the book. The Greek agape, which we understand to mean an unconditional, parental love, doubles as the English “agape,” the opening of the woman in birth, the opening that births love where so many have imposed violence. Elsewhere, Keelan’s observation of violence against women feels more outraged:

The world says she wants it
She says she wants it—
All to disappear
But she’s on her knees
She’s on her knees in a series
Of billboards…
(“The Sister Worlds (Antigone)”)

Here, Keelan draws attention to the commodification and degradation of the female body; when she refers to motherhood later in the poem (as a disembodied speaker asks, “Are you my mother?”), it is not affirming or corrective to violence, but rather leaves the reader with a feeling of being haunted by nightmarish experience of violence and loss.

On the whole, however, these poems treat death not as an end in itself but as a way of understanding the whole tapestry of human experience, the vast and worthy question of what it means to be alive through a meditation on death. In one of the book’s most unique turns of thought, the speaker positions herself subtly as moving from subject to object, first person to third person, the natural abandonment of “I” that occurs in death. In the book’s final poem, she writes:

So you can see me   As you see her

As I give up me   For generations   To prepare by

(“Rabbits”)

As the first person (me) becomes the third person (her), Keelan reminds us of the natural passing of the subject, the “I,” into object when a person dies (and importantly, one that has consequences for future generations—again, recalling the ethical dimension of existence). It is an interesting thought experiment, to imagine this passing of “me” into “her,” and one advised by Petrarch when he claims “constant meditation upon our own mortality” is necessary in the pursuit of happiness. Of course, happiness does not seem the goal of the speaker (though one poem intelligently observes that “women of my generation don’t say joy/ Playing with (t)he (i)r happiness”—in such a way as to suggest that the inability to say joy is itself worth mourning) so much as to ask, if the self is implied in the other, if our human experience is, on some level, deeply communal, what does that mean for death? If “self” is not totally discrete, and likewise “other,” then can death be as absolute as it sometimes seems?

In Missing Her, Keelan gives the reader occasion to consider these questions and to reflect on what recognition of humanity as a “Whole” might ethically demand of the small selves that constitute it. In a world that is increasingly isolated (communicating more and more at a virtual remove), yet increasingly interconnected via the same technology that removes us, I deeply admire work that insists on the importance—perhaps to our survival as a species—of actively remembering the Whole of which we are a part, allowing that to guide us toward meaningful action (as action without reflection is likely to perpetuate violence—and reflection without action has no capacity to intervene). Whatever the myriad roles a book of poems might assume, to encourage critical reflection on the ideas that help us move away from a selfish destruction of a planet, as well as the oppression and degradation of its people, is a worthy endeavor. One may find oneself attracted to or repulsed by a certain aesthetic—fragmentation or traditional forms, abstract language or pop-culture references and concrete language—but while we may have different aesthetic preferences, there are books that, for the quality of their thought and the urgency of their observations, make themselves worthy of our attention. Claudia Keelan’s Missing Her is one such book.

This book performs one of my favorite miracles, a classic because it’s a repeater, a novelty that never fades: it demonstrates that the impossible (poetry) is also inevitable (poems). Though it seems as if the latter must inevitably result from the former, this isn’t quite true; the relationship between them is more of a reversal. Abstract expectations of what poetry should be are both proven and invalidated by actual poems, which are composed of lack as much as surfeit. Here, the agent of this haphazard divine comes in a slightly disheveled persona of Graham Foust, who is (in the poem “My Graham Foust”) a presence declared by absences, a shirt stitched from holes:

Gone’s the bite of you he spit. Gone’s
his vague sense of what’s to be done.
Gone’s the dream that likely scraped at him
for more and more and more and gone’s his walk.

Gone’s his crass commiseration. Gone’s
his lack of gauze and ice. Gone’s
his tiny fountain. And gone
is his glutinous light

Gone’s his want-to-need basis. Gone’s his happy
plastic stain. Gone’s his glass wolf, his lazy sperm,
his pack of exactness. Gone’s his played-through lack
of played-through games of pain.

Liberation by abdication: well, okay then. He can’t go on, he’ll go on. The speaker memorializes the ingredients and strategies by which the poem we’re reading won’t be made, though of course without this litany there’s no poem at all. While this poem doesn’t fully represent the style of A Mouth in California (most of the poems are a bit more ad hoc, though Foust does thrown in the occasional sonnet or the like) it does contain something of a mission statement; a missing statement better describes his method and spirit. That “pack of exactness” could easily refer to the precision, or the tonal unity, required by the kinds of poems Foust is disinclined to write. And to often sly effect, this disinclination often masquerades as incapacity. Many of Foust’s poems suggest their more pristine alternatives; it’s as if they are being spoken by a man who is struggling to recite a poem he’s memorized, but cannot perfectly recall. Into the lacunae rush approximations, summaries, tatters of popular song, gluey rhymes, ill-fitting aphorisms, and often the relaxed rhetorical annotations of a speaker perfectly comfortable making editorial comments on his own perpetually collapsing project.

The irony here, of course, is that this jumble should—both in terms of tone and form—result in chaos, and yet Foust’s poems maintain a weird, wobbly integrity: he’s managed to set a failing ship on a recursive journey, so that he can sail it, sink it, and narrate its pending submergence all at the same time. If the effort’s initially jarring, by the book’s end I was fairly convinced that Foust’s ramshackle structures might be some of the most stable shelters around.

One of the ways to achieve something like this elegant clumsiness is to explicitly turn the poems inside out, but the danger of that strategy is that it preserves the mastery of the speaker, and thus risks a toxic cleverness: see, it’s the poem that’s faulty, but I, the poet, remain unsullied by those deficiencies; its failures announce my success. To his credit, Foust avoids this trap, usually via the application of tiny syntactical choices that destabilize the very possibility of masterful authorship. Tiny things, really, but they make a difference: in this stanza from “The Sun Also Fizzles” consider the lines

I’ve come covered in arena dust,
my mouth’s a sleeve’s end,
meatless.

and those that immediately follow:

I’ve come somewhat up,
and I’m here to lick
the static from the ground.

The parallel structure here certainly prepares the reader for “I’ve come somewhat up, / I’m here to lick / the static from the ground” but that wee little conjunction changes everything, shifts the stanza from obscure grandiosity to the self-parodying bombast of stadium rock. The “and” transforms the gnomic to the comic—I cannot help but hear Jon Bon Jovi intone those lines, though to be fair the modest anglophiliac “somewhat” sets up the joke quite nicely as well.

Some of the poems are so loose, in fact, that they seem more like preambles or postscripts to poems that don’t exist. Take, for example, the truly wonderful “Poem with Fear, As Half-Awakened,” which I want to take the liberty of quoting in its entirety:

See, I might return—the car’s gassed,
the map flat and likely accurate—
to where I’m clear to me to you.
This’d be autumn, let’s say, like late
October, mid-November. By then
the road’ll be choked with leaves
and other ruins, the trees with wind
and smoke and dark (or not).
I’ll make records of these facts,
these other shores. My song’ll be a nail
and yours, a mouthful of mirror.
Seconds before we sing, I’ll be reading
that wading pool’s dismal little slaps
to mean trouble. You’ll punch an animal,
any animal; I’ll touch a small bell;
the moon’ll turn everything lurid.
But what good is said moon
if neither song’ll fit the room?
Come with platitudes, love,
come whatever doesn’t move.

This is a plan for a poem that achieves more than could its execution, and what I mean by “loose” isn’t just the preponderance of contractions usually found in hasty conversation, though the word “moon’ll” alone gladdened my heart. Looseness here refers to a spirit in which almost anything might do, and often does; it’s the exact tonal opposite of the poem that insists these words, in this order, are hard-won and therefore explicitly suited for appreciation that brooks no interruption.

Thus, it intrigues me that some of Foust’s poems are exceptionally tight: for instance, see how in a poem like “Their Early Twenties” the moon recurs quite differently.

Another thirst begun, they had their beer
in cans, in bags; their hands, their feet
in frigid sand; their eardrums—make that
their headaches—sewn with ocean.
They’d never seen a moon so willful,
so scissory, never heard the dark water
rearrange so clumsily.

Despite nods to a more cavalier composition—”they’d” and “scissory”—the maker of this poem is far more resolutely the commander of the act than is the reckless engineer of “Poem with Fear.” That “sewn with ocean” doesn’t abide interference, even from itself.

While I appreciate both poems, the correspondent risk is that once I grow accustomed to the self-limiting scatter of poems like “Poem with Fear,” I grow proportionately suspicious of those poems that strike me as less artful in their disguised artfulness, so that paradoxically the more authoritative Foust becomes, the less I trust him. These from the latter category include good poems, but they don’t operate the way they would in a book less concerned with futility. A poem like “Morality and Temporal Sequence,” which after its one-word sentence of an introductory gambit (“Funny.”) follows swiftly and cleanly to its logical conclusion, creates greater unease than what occurs a few pages later. “Poem for Jack Spicer” begins with a set of pleas for reassurance that are both funny and impossible to gratify:

The more I pull it all to pixels
the more to sleep the radio goes,
right? And to be dead would be to be
modern?

This functions much the way “Funny.” does, by securing a resolutely insecure position at the start, but whereas “Morality” never again reminds us of its logical contingency, very nearly every floating balloon of a “poetical” claim in “Poem for Jack Spicer” comes with its own needle to assist requisite puncturing. Thus, the lines “Its poem’s shape’s itself, / and its waves come off as contagious” are preceded by the sublimely goofy observation that “This ocean, I just assumed it would / look bigger.” Likewise, tucked between “It’s not a thicket if I can’t get / me and whoever else into it—” and “We’re al limited by the plumb line, / that imperative that collapses / in the direction of egg and ash” occurs the salvific “let’s call what I’m on a moon of hurt.” Absent moments like these, the persona Foust has created actually does seem to lapse into perfect recall of the poem in question, and while the results are sometimes impressive in their own right, they leave me wondering where went the dude whose trustworthiness depended upon evidence of his instability. His presence is always an interruption, but familiar with the staccato rhythm of interruption, his absence is even more unnerving.

I don’t know how Foust could avoid this kind of tension, and there’s a way of reading the book that reconciles it to the effect the emblematic poems generate (even if it doesn’t, and can’t, resolve that tension). If I read the book entire as macrocosmic of the technique employed in the poems that best balance “success” and “failure” then I can see how those poems more discrete, more possessed of seamless ease, act as do the lines in individual poems that Foust often strives to undermine as soon as he erects them. But this way of reading works less well for the book than it does for single poems, because Foust seems preoccupied (rightly, smartly, I think) with our ambiguous desire for the pleasures once assumed the province of the lone poem. As many others have noted, the pendulum has begun to swing away from poetry operative wholly at the level of the book, a move that itself marked a certain generational disenchantment with poems as bite-sized universes resplendent with guaranteed but perhaps cheap and certainly suspect pleasures and meanings. Foust knows we can’t go back, even if we wanted to—but many of “us” (a term I invoke with the necessary shudder, as if I were summoning a Lovecraftian anti-god, a divinity plural, singular and unquestionably grotesque) do, and many “us” never left. For those who did, however, Foust offers a way forward, half-stride and half-stumble.  I don’t think he knows where he’s going, but I wouldn’t want to follow him if he did.

But there’s really no point to reading, or owning, Credit, except the purely consumptive point of reading or owning Credit. It is worth noting in this regard that according to Timmons, three copies have sold to date. Therefore, Credit, unlike most books, remains valuable only to the degree it remains unread and unowned. Its worth decreases with the number of copies sold, and, by the same token, its means of production, generally considered the most democratic model of publication/distribution, is a way of maintaining the book’s status as rarified commodity. There’s no print run of a thousand, bleating softly in their boxes, there’s not even a hundred cellophaned copies waiting patiently to be passed on to those with time and money on their hands.

To manufacture Credit, Timmons scanned the documents, redacting them the old-fashioned way via black marker. Mistakes in the OCR are left intact. This is a sloppy conceptualism, one content to remain, in some senses half-baked. Not conceptually, but materially. Less pristine fetish object, more object of conspicuous consumption, and one that is manifestly about the pure fetishization of conspicuous consumption. And so Credit is a conceptual success by virtue of its excess.

Conceptual writing has been defined by Kenneth Goldsmith as writing in which “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.” Craig Dworkin wrote that the test of this writing is “no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise.” To these definitions, Robert Fitterman and I have added that conceptualism is a response to textual excess, and that conceptual writing is necessarily allegorical writing. In a 2004 essay, Hal Foster described archival (visual) art works as allegorical in both the sense of being melancholic and incomplete, and in the “strict” literary sense of “featur[ing] a subject astray in an ‘underworld’ of enigmatic signs that test her.” Timmons, whose book is arguably more art object than text object, is also overtly caught up in a play of excessive signs: he is credit worthy and a credit risk. His credit limit merits extension. He is over his credit limit. He has good credit. He does not want to hurt his credit. What is his credit history? What will his credit look like later? The allegory here is present-tensed and bloated and gleefully incomplete. Unlike Benjamin’s allegory of ruin, there is no ancestral epistemological whole to miss or mist over. Unlike Foster’s interpretation of archival art, there’s no sadness in the slinging of sign, for signs, as we all know, exist only to be slung. The allegory in conceptualism takes as given that signs sign, but cannot sign off. Not fully, anyway. Here, the question of signing becomes moreover acute as it is the act of signing that signals acceptance of an offer of credit, and creates the status of debtor. The signature, according to Agamben, is that which effects what it expresses. The signature serves as voucher for the sign: it (ac)credits the sign with signification. And this is how ontologies are made.

For just as a voucher is an act of credit, so is vouching. Timmons collected thirty blurbs for the book, including blurbs from Craig Dworkin, Rodrigo Toscano, and me. I did not read the book, look at a manuscript or pdf, or have any textual interaction beyond Timmons explaining the project in an email solicitation. It was the concept of Credit that I blurbed, just as it was the idea of Vanessa Place that was wanted for the blurb. My surplus value attested to the surplus value promised by the project. Similarly, most of the blurbs, mine included, suffered from their own lexical excess in the form of puns, digressions, over-use of exclamation points, plagiarisms, and other linguistic wallowings. This was in part due to playing with the idea of the project, and in part inspired by the excess latent in the topic. The credit given Credit was given in the sense of an inscription, like a film credit, like signing-off while signing-on. We did not credit Credit, but credited its credit. So that all parts of the apparatus of this book project allegorize the project of the book: blurbs are not blurbs, but are as integral to the book’s existence as its spine. More so, for the book exists more as a thing talked about than as a thing in-itself.

I have written before about the radical mimesis in much conceptual work, and this is almost that. Timmons pulls the punch a bit via his redactions, which were a by-product of the postering notion. An attempt at public privacy. As is, the erasures can be read (as Timmons would have you read them) as hiding the salient “juicy bits”: relative to the plus side of the ledger, the numbers are sexy, i.e., points of concentrated interest. How much is someone potentially worth? As interest-generator, that is. More interesting to me is that what Timmons suggests through his redactions is the manifestation of lack. Not in the more obvious way of individuation being less salient to corporate finance than numbers or of individuation being more interesting to fiscal failure than numbers, or even the surface discourse here about the public versus the private, and how our private parts have become financial, i.e., that the black bar no longer hides the phallus in an pornography but is the phallus in an economy. But in the way that the fact of a redaction suggests a hidden knowledge that may be recouped—which Timmons overtly concedes, having provided this knowledge in the appendices. This puts Credit as a piece framed in the Lacanian discourse of the hysteric: the subject, its truth forever hidden from itself, suppresses the fact of its desire as it asks the master, “what do you want from me?” But in this, the hysteric reveals the master’s lack of knowledge, for the shifting answers of the master betray the fact that the master does not know: more credit, less credit, payment, payment deferred. The dialectical movement of the book is in this way complete. It has to be, for capitalism itself is famously built on a dialectic. But the difference is the gap, the missing bits and the too-many pieces. For dialectics have become fundamentally undialectical: there is no synthesis per se, no Kantian reason d’être nor Heideggerian über-ergo but rather a freezing of the dialectical movement itself. This is the shipwreck of Mallarmé, a shipwreck necessarily bottled on the page. Stuck in the suck of its ebbs and flows.

I have gone through these interpretive machinations in part to explain Credit, in part because I suspect the reading of this kind of work differs from the reading of most poetry. I’ve not quoted from the book because there’s no line I’m interested in, no text I care to contextualize. Or rather, it’s all contextualization, and nothing but. In conversation, Timmons has described  the language in Credit as “fascinating,” and it may well be. The point is, I don’t care. I don’t care about the particulars of the language used in offers made by banks too big to fail or how deep my neighbor sits in the hole. As fond as I might be of Mathew Timmons, or as much as I might relish his suffering, he is no more the subject of credit than he is its author. Certain kinds of conceptual works exist in a perceptual bubble. You can’t engage with them, not directly, for any attempt to engage directly sucks you onto the abyss of textual excess. (The abyss, as I’ve also said before, is now a mountain. Benjamin and Nietzsche stared into the chasm and decried the lack. We, punier still, look up at piles of the stuff.) What they do is instigate by their instantiation, not by the content of their content. Unlike most writing, they are lesser containers of any particular epiphany or exegesis. In this sense, Credit occupies the position of a conceptual art object, existing as a point of origin rather than terminus. And while many may argue that the best writing does just that, this is not the best writing. This is the fact of something that has been stated. As in a credit statement. As in a statement of arrears. It does not matter what the content of these statements are because they are essentially and merely speech acts, so to speak. They trigger status and attendant discourse. Some of these kinds of work, while seeming narcissistic (such as Goldsmith’s Soliloquy) or banal (such as Robert Fitterman’s Sprawl) or the sort of art mocked in post-war New Yorker cartoons as the kind my kid could make, serve and defeat the primarily altruistic purpose of creating more texts, such as this one. For that matter, Timmons has not seen a color copy of his book. He doesn’t know what it looks like. But he does know what it does.

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.