Responses to my reading of Jennifer Moxley’s The Sense Record fell rather evenly into three categories:

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>People who liked my reading & like her work & were glad to see that this was shared

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>People who thought my reading was way off, because I didn’t see her poetry as a mode of deadpan humor

<![if !supportLists]>§         <![endif]>People who agreed with my assessment that her work is serious, but don’t much care for it, at least in part because of its seriousness

Those diverse reactions combined with my own positive response to Pattie McCarthy even as I admit that there are places where her interest in medieval Christian concerns leads her that I can’t (or don’t) follow and with Gary Sullivan’s most revealing comment yesterday that, when he was a mere lad, he used to find Woody Allen, Donald Barthelme or Firesign Theater more funny before he learned what they were riffing on. These diverse experiences all ring what for me is by now a rather old bell, a 1981 Parnassus review in which Peter Schjeldahl effusively praised the poetry of Joe Ceravolo even though “I rarely know what he is talking about.”

All of these items share in common the problem of how one receives and deals with the unfamiliar. Sometimes, as with Sullivan’s laughter at Firesign Theatre, we welcome it. But other times not. My own sense of the responses I’ve heard toward Moxley’s work is that the more skeptical positions sound almost identical to comments I recall hearing a quarter century ago directed at the work of another new poet who was coming forward with an unconventional but distinct sense of style, Leslie Scalapino. Moxley & Scalapino are radically different poets, but their position vis-à-vis the poetry world strikes me as not dissimilar. Each can, simply by their practice, be read as a critique of their generational scene as it is constituted.

Twenty-six years after the publication of The Woman Who Could Read the Minds of Dogs, Leslie Scalapino has demonstrated beyond any doubt the wisdom & power behind strategies that once seemed to many oblique or simply obscure for the sake of obscurity. If Scalapino has required patience on the part of her audience, she has rewarded them (us) for sticking with it handsomely. Her argument, to call it such, is a vision of literature that is virtually panoptic. To catch only a glimpse of it in some ways is just sort of a teaser – it makes greater sense to take as much in as possible, so that the references & key points accumulate.

Moxley’s long sentences & deliberately neutral vocabulary strike me as being as integral to her project as poet as Scalapino’s syntactic angling is to hers. I can see not buying any of it – no reader is going to “get” all poets. I know that I will always find William Bronk torturous and I have yet to figure out, after all these years, why Gustaf Sobin seems important to so many other writers I know. So, in a sense, I find myself thinking of the people who take Moxley seriously, but opt out at that point, as being “better” readers of her than fans who think it’s a spoof.

Let me give an example, a single sentence midway through  the first poem in The Sense Record, “Grain of the Cutaway Insight”:

Long lost friend, with whom I once

      

spoke into the night of books and

left, thinking to myself on my short

walk home of all the things I wanted so

to tell you

            in a poem, I am lonely

           

            in the in-commiserate word,

its small sound remains

            an incipient dis-harmony

sounding through dissembled day’s

            would-be routinization.

This passage moves not in one but two profoundly opposite directions. Up to the word “you,” every single line is enjambed – after it, none are. It is right at that word also that the first step away from the left-hand margin occurs in this sentence, as though the second-person pronoun were a literal hinge to this statement. In fact, it makes great sense to look at this sentence having just such a fulcrum. Before it, in five lines, all cemented to the left margin, we have 33 words, only three of which are even two syllables long. After it, we have 23 words spread out over six lines, 23 long words. Two have five syllables, two others have four. The second half of this sentence only twice returns fully to the margin, each time to register a verb that will carry the next major chain of syntax.

There is a chain of sound as well, following principally through the deployment of vowels, especially “o.” Thus the long “o” in the first half carries both “spoke” and “home” into that terminal “so” – the most important word in the first part of the text, a tone that gets heightened measurably in the concluding portion. The use of “o” becomes far more complex here – the “ou” combinations emerging to carry the thrust of the idea in the final couplet. But Moxley won’t let us not hear that term “lonely,” the section’s melody of “o” sounds challenged by a contrary rain of short “i” combinations, “in” and “is.” That hiss in good part is why “in-commiserate” rather than “incommensurate” is the right word at that moment in the text. One need only note the number of “o” and “o”-combination syllables appear in this sentence compared with, say, those for “a” and “e.”

Yet if one reads this sentence as bald text without hearing its remarkable articulation of vowels, without registering enjambments & end stops, it might prove to be all but invisible as language. It’s a fabulous moment in the history of formal devices & really one of the great aesthetic flourishes in recent poetry – but in the same moment, it’s also a test of the reader & the levels of attention they bring to the poem.