A flourish:
You tip the question back to a
period
of
anesthesia when the emblematic horn
returns
overflowing with numerals.
Another, from the same poem:
A simplest sheet of blue
rain whose
nature consists in blocking other referents
will spread
and enter into production of meaning:
a
solitary dark figure at work on his desire
to see.
Only in a
writing this abstract might one today actually deploy a phrase such as
“solitary dark figure” & not have it clank around in the poem as a cliché.
Here, by virtue of style itself, that aspect of this ancient trope becomes an
element of the writing, like a neo-noir film carefully deploying smoke &
shadow.
Passages like this often
strike me as revealing the scope of a phrase-centric poetics strategy, a mode
of contemporary writing to which I myself am much attracted. A sentence such as
the first one above builds connotative schema through cognitive blending
to arrive at a result that is suggestive without being either reductive or
vague. The second sentence – there are two others in between this pair –
performs the same literary task but frames it now more clearly within a schema
of linguistics & semiotics. The second sentence leads directly to a long
& luxurious final one:
To tumble, these polygons, defer
closure,
beneath them, a smooth multiplication
table
extends into floor and scrambles
this
particular narrative we hastily assemble
to be
done with watching, eyes closed
to the
slow mechanisms that fool us into pressing together
the
nervous slant of packaged goods, xeroxed weather.
On the one hand, I take
absolute pleasure in a sentence such as this, simply to follow the shuttle of
its back-&-forth movement. I note also how both polygons & multiplication / table tie back to the
earlier numerals.
On the other, I sense (&
struggle with, or perhaps against) a containment or limit here. The constraint
lies precisely in the conjunction between the two domains of language &
photography, with all of the multiple angles on reference & referentiality
they imply. Every one of the five poems in “Disappearing Series,” the first
section of
Who in 2003 has not yet seen
a poem that takes on these ideas? My problem is not in Tysh’s
execution – she is as smart a poet as exists today, with a wicked sense of
humor – the title of this book is a good example. But do we need another series
of poems that take two broad tropes, language invariably being one of them,
revealing to us all the ways in which they intersect? I’m not persuaded.
The result is that, to my
eye, these poems clash with Tysh’s own innovative
impulses in writing. That is to say that they seem to me curiously closed set
pieces, impeccably written, by a poet who wants to break out into much bolder
terrain.
But this is just the opening
sequence of Tysh’s new book – I wouldn’t suggest
necessarily that what’s true for “Disappearing Series” applies to Continuity Girl as a whole. Once I’ve
read more of the book, I’ll report back & let you know.
Ж Ж Ж
Sometime around
