Of all of writing’s illusive qualities, none invokes more magic – at least in the sense of requiring a leap of imagination that transcends all immediate physical evidence – than does depiction. It was a dark and stormy night. You looked into my eyes. Inside his vest, the bomb exploded, shrapnel, blood, bone and flesh spewing about the plaza. The apple rested on the table, next to the wooden mallard. All of the homilies put forth by various library and publishing trade groups as to the ability of literature to “transport the reader” to new & unimagined places are predicated upon this capacity of language not merely to refer to a world of objects, but to do so in a manner that is socially internalized (learned behavior) as an equivalent for the process & experience of sight.

If sight would be language’s privileged sense, it has also been a dimension hotly disputed. It was Zukofsky’s thesis in Bottom: On Shakespeare that the Bard of Avon was responsible for the deep cultural linkage between the two:

Writing after Shakespeare few remembered: eyes involve a void; eyes also avoid the abstruse beyond their focus. Today the literary theologian reads Shakespeare and oversees his own spruce theology. There is also the latest derivative verbalism after Shakespeare’s savage characters – forgetting while it curses others’ intellect, in behalf of eyes, that the curse has become the feigning eye of the black dog intellect. Clotens and Calibans, Shakespeare’s tragic theme that love should see flows around their words and shows them all the more their sightless tune which does not find its rests so as to draw breath or sequence.

Note that “rests” is plural.

Today, there exists one literature on the gaze, that penetrating look that entangles desire with power, another on the spectacle, on all the roles of reification. & from Stein onward, a new literature of opacity, of the immanence of the signifier, has offered an alternative vision.*

“Starred Together” is a three paragraph prose poem by Jena Osman that looks intently at the process of looking & the concomitant phenomena of perspective & point of view. The position it stakes out is unique & worth examining. That it stakes out a position is itself noteworthy. Osman, as with her Chain co-founder Juliana Spahr, is a writer intensely concerned with a poetry that has a critical function & edge, the sort of text most likely to bring out snarling from “black dog intellect” intent on saving poetry for the feigned purity of uncritical emotion.

But it is the role of the person that is in fact at stake. The poem telegraphs the core of its concerns in a terrifically condensed first sentence: “A glance hits an object or person and pins it down like a star.” This sentence itself could be taken as a model for the poem, as so many of the larger text’s devices and strategies are employed simultaneously here. The most obvious is a Brechtian device that I want to be especially careful in discussing, as it’s just the sort of thing that a “dog intellect” would be most apt to misconstrue, perhaps even willfully. Let’s call this device depersonification. The agent or noun phrase that is the literal subject of this sentence, “A glance,” has been removed from any human (or otherwise sentient) context, abstracted precisely so that it can be examined as a process without our being distracted in the most literal sense by some charming (or not) foible-ridden setting, the person. The implicit question – who glances? – is not answered because it is exactly not the point. The verb, or rather the first verb, is notable for its implicit violence – “hits.” Now one finds the person tucked into the conjunction that is the object of the sentence: “an object or person.” It is no accident which item comes first in that pairing. After the conjunction comes the send verb phrase, “pins it down,” one that will invoke butterfly collecting for some readers, wrestling for some and target practice for others. The final analogy, however, is completely unpredictable given what has come before: “like a star.”

Like a star. Incongruous as the phrase is in the context of the first sentence, it returns us to both the title and to the Cecilia Vicuña epigraph:

A constellation of darkness
another of light

A gesture to be completed
by light

Light is what enables sight to be embodied. In this poem, Osman will use the stars as light, as constellations, as mapping tool and as repository of human narrative. She will write, near the very end of “Starred Together,” “When you look at a constellation, you draw the points together with your own lines.” But the problem of the poem is that, as the second sentence states, “The actual moves.” Between these two poles, Osman brings in other tropes: cinema, homelessness. The poem constantly constructs the possibility of seeing only to undercut via another perspective already inherent in what has been laid out.

The result is a remarkable text, remarkable in part for its sheer density – Osman can get more complexity into two pages than most poets get into 20. Reading it, I find two aspects that push my own thinking further than it has previously gone. First is a concept for which Osman makes claims:

The narrative drive is what clings to the actual moves; the narrative drive persists through the fragmentation in which seeing occurs.

The narrative drive is a concept that invokes psychology, but not one that I personally recognize from that field. If accorded the status of a drive, narrative in this sense of joining elements together to create coherence is much more  (or perhaps much deeper) than the parsimony principle of cognitive linguistics. Is it eros, the death wish, some combination? I’m not certain, but the way Osman puts the concept out there in this poem makes me want to mull it over in more depth than I have done before.

The second aspect is Osman’s strategy, implicit but clear enough even in the first sentence of the work, of deliberately avoiding any personification of the text. The word “I” never occurs, replaced most often by “you” and occasionally “we.” In fact, the only instance in the text in which we do “hear” the narrator function self-reflexively, it’s in both quotation marks and French: “’Voyeur? – C’est Moi!’”

Here Osman is working through the problem of sight, the gaze and that mutual penetration that is recognition, but recognition in the Althusserian sense of ideology**. That last sentence I quoted about “drawing the points with your own lines,”***  leads directly to the end of the poem:

But when someone catches your eye in a direct grip, there are no more stars. You might shake your hands at the sky as the light crashes in, we’re pinning you down. You might shake your head to clear it, then step inside.   

“Starred Together” refuses to escape the problem of Others. It’s a testament to Osman’s integrity, that the poem doesn’t evade the problem. Nor does it offer us a way out, easy or otherwise. “Inside” is exactly not a solution. The word “Together” in the title is not there by accident.

I suspect that Osman’s intellectual integrity on this question of the person is part of what creeps out Seattle Times reviewer Richard Wakefield. Characterizing “Starred Together” as “a belabored amalgam of clichéd ideas and limp prose,” Wakefield quotes the first four sentences of the poem, including “While sitting in the box, images from a window are stolen from the street.” He comments:

She doesn't, apparently, have the taste to delete an excruciating line like that last one: What is "sitting in the box"? Her grammar seems to say it is "images," but how can they be "stolen from the street" WHILE "sitting in the box"?

Osman’s poem is hardly “limp prose,” though Wakefield’s phallic trope is worth noting. Working through the problems of representation within ontology could only be seen as “clichéd ideas” to someone for whom the idea itself is off limits. In addition, the objectification of interiority (housing, rooms, theaters, “the box” – Osman seems to omit only Plato’s cave) is hardly the readerly conundrum that Wakefield pretends it to be. The idea that Wakefield cannot understand how images can be “stolen from the street” – let alone recognize how delightful its play on scale is – suggests that he will find “The perversion of your own observation,” the reference to voyeurism, & “the corruption of your own detached look” later in the poem equally opaque.

It is true that “Starred Together” may confound the willfully illiterate reader, so there is a perverse poetic justice in Wakefield selecting it to demonstrate “why there are so few poems here … (in The Best American Poetry, 2002) that are even readable.” The poem is focused right on the problems of taking responsibility for the pragmatics of reference. Blaming the poems displays Wakefield’s position well enough.

Part of me wants to take Wakefield to task for such critical malpractice. But another part would love to understand what it must mean to live inside a worldview that could come to these conclusions, finding complexity more or less the way the Amish do electricity, as though it were something unintelligible & threatening.  To claim that such work is unreadable is to concede that you cannot read it. Some of the contributors of the writers in this “unreadable” collection include Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, Diane Di Prima, Ted Enslin, Elaine Equi, Clayton Eshleman, Ben Friedlander, Gene Frumkin, Forrest Gander & Peter Gizzi, just to pick from the top of its alphabet.+ So what is Wakefield saying? If you take him at his word, here is a professor of literature who also is the poetry reviewer for a major American daily newspaper who proclaims in print his own inability to read. His sad situation invokes the very issues that Osman’s poem addresses.

* My own essay, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” in The New Sentence can be read as a contribution to the history of this debate.

** Tho Shakespeare might call it love.

*** I can imagine another reading of this work in which I would push much harder on the idea of one’s “own lines,” given my own sense of how helpless most of us prove to be in the context of our socio-historical positioning.

+ Truth in advertising: I’m also a contributor.