a new measure (poetry report)

  “Foreign Object Damage,” a poem about an eighth of the way through  Failures of the Poets , begins: “We are not driven to belief by sadness, / but to sadness by belief.” Rather than belief offering consolation for sadness (redemption), the sadness comes simply because you believe. While these lines may be read religiously, the way I heard them was worldly in nature. If you didn’t believe in the world  being  something other than it is, you wouldn’t be sad.    The world Robinson describes in “Foreign Object Damage” is a world “of coffee cups, zip drives, // & too many fighter jets.” Lest that diagnosis be read as indication of a particular stance about consumption, technology, and war, the poem immediately changes course, with Robinson writing: “Or not enough fighter / jets,” at which point he confesses that    it’s become so hard   to tell: to tell anything anymore is a grave & heavy program.    Rather than sadness borne o...

Fecund is composed of two sections/long poems: “Hysterical Pregnancy,” which originally appeared in chapbook form, and “Fecund,” a long poem with forty sections set off by bold faced, upper case Roman numerals. There’s one line in the book with 8 words, but otherwise the lines are exceedingly spare (1-5 words), leaving a sea of breathing white space on each page.   These short lines and spacious pages bespeak a tendency in current left margin-justified, broken line poetry of reformulating the line as a stanza made of several short lines:   to walk public ground   see a middle name   cut in stone mothering cementation   Ebbitt’s lines are cosmetically minimal, as though “cut in stone,” cemented. In actuality, though, the lines have a roving quality that, in my reading, ushers you on to the next piece quickly. Rather than feeling overly-crafted and tight, these short lines instead feel unfinished (uncemented) and open, liable for mo...

While reading  Cahoots ,   I was also reading  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland .  In the Introduction to the edition of  Alice  I have, Hugh Naughton distinguishes  Alice  readers who “simply wish to enjoy the story as a story, and rebuff all efforts to interpret it” from readers who feel the work’s nonsense warrants interpretation.  “Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”    The latter readers feel, Naughton writes, “that it is meaning and not meaninglessness which makes Carroll’s nonsense expressive.” Therefore, the nonsense that characterizes Carroll’s work may be read as the characteristic element of the story, driving it forward enjoyably (if meaninglessly), without pressure to be interpreted. On the other hand, nonsense is the work of something meaningful, deeper, that could be interpreted.    “The first thing I’ve got to do,” said Alice to herself...

Gustaf Sobin closes  Breaths’ Burials  stating    whatever utters,  utters nothing, really. and makes of that  nothing —lyric— its  only  measure.   These lines state an indifference towards the personal identity of whatever utters, as well as a hesitancy about  attaching any meaning   to the words said. Whatever utters, utters nothing; what the poem’s words do is give shape (a measure) to nothingness as it passes through.    Throughout  Breaths’ Burials , Sobin (the utterer) does not so much “open himself” or “submit language” to the invisible drift as insouciantly or impersonally frame it in the sounds and letters it happens as, here and now. In “Fourteen Irises for J.L.,” he writes: Just like the poem, which “makes of that / nothing … its / only / measure,” irises arrest an otherwise invisible drift in a “frozen frame.” These irises, like the words, herald no meaning beyond just being there. Irises, words—they are,...

I came across  Stroke by Stroke  in the wake of reading The Wilds of Poetry , an anthology assembled by David Hinton, a poet and translator of Chinese poetry. In the introduction, he calls attention to writing’s pictographic origin, which ideograms maintained but alphabetic languages abandoned.  Whereas pictographic language “manifest[s] a direct connection to the empirical world,” alphabetic abstraction connects letters to speech sounds, resulting in “words that have an arbitrary relationship to the things they name.” This explains a whole cosmology for Hinton, whereby “consciousness as open and integral to natural process [as in Taoism] was replaced by an immaterial soul ontologically separate from and outside of material reality.” Instead of consciousness being the same as everything else, it is the Ego’s, a detached and reflexive entity that is not the same as the things it thinks about. Alphabetic writing, which “arbitrarily relat[es]” to the things it names, ac...