Primitive Press is a funny name for a publishing venture that would print a book such as Kristin Prevallet’s Lead, Glass and Poppy (LGP). The one-time co-editor of Apex of the M & author of the notorious “Why Poetry Criticism Sucks” is very possibly the least primitive poet around these days. In the ten years since I first became aware of her work – seeing it literally for the first time in the O•blēk 12 New Coast anthology – Prevallet has produced a substantial body of work, to date gathered mostly in a series of small chapbooks. Lead, Glass and Poppy is one such volume. Emulation Etudes, from Phylum Press, is another. Why there isn’t a large volume from Wesleyan or Penguin or FSG is the real mystery here.

 

LGP signals its complexity instantly when the text starts on the left-hand page – something publishers do only when they absolutely must, less they be taken for rank amateurs at design & production. There is, thus, an absolute necessity – the same holds true for Wanders, the Nomados Press production of a collaborative series co-authored by Robin Blaser (always on the left hand page) & Meredith Quartermain (always on the right). With LGP, it is because the poetic text on the left-hand page is commented upon, sometimes obliquely, by more prosoid journalistic comments that run down the right. These aren’t footnotes – in fact, the commentary to the right itself has endnotes (numbered, in contrast with the asterisked title line on the title page), providing sources. In short, the poetic text – the theoretical center of this work – is functionally surrounded by at least two layers of commentary, not unlike the Larry Eigner poem situated in his correspondence to Raddle Moon in what I called a palimpsest of meta-thinking the other day.

 

Poetic metacommentary of this sort has been around at the least since Eliot footnoted The Waste Land – I suspect you could trace the contextual impulse back at least to Lyrical Ballads if you tried. Eliot it was instantly parodied by Louis Zukofsky’s “Poem beginning ‘The’,” although one suspects, looking at LZ’s subsequent career, that his parody was mixed with a serious dose of envy that somebody had gotten to this idea first. Pound’s use of polyvocality & Olson’s extensions thereof can be seen as parallel impulses – it turns up even in such places as Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery, in which the footnotes present a detailed history of a period of American poetry, or in Fred Jameson’s Marxism and Form, which has only one footnote & that about footnotes.

 

This is the dark underbelly of ”first thought, best thought” – sort of “first thought, myriad second thoughts” – a wool-gathering web of digressions lies at the heart of such classic tales as Tristram Shandy or The Saragossa Manuscript & Prevallet indulges a little in the verticality of the impulse herself, using endnotes to reference sources that might as easily have been incorporated into the running comments along the right hand column.

 

Which, of course, raises the question why? One interpretation – the one I’m drawn to – is that the texts on the right, which also look like a poem, merely in a different font & with the numbers of the footnotes as a curious ornament at the end of every stanza, can likewise be read as a mode of journalistic poetry. In fact, I tend to read the poem on the left as a single eight page poem, while the commentary on the right – in a different font – comes across to me as a series of ten shorter poems. This would also explain why the left-sided text is biased to the right margin right up until the final page/stanza, which is printed centered on a page with no facing commentary.

 

Here, to give a flavor of the text, is the left-hand page 9, which also just happens to be in the exact center of the book, so that actual staples poke through between it & the comments to the right:

 

The spine in the book is a crease in time

and we’re lowly waverers

between the cracks

of what might seem to be

unreachable but true

(because printed)

for certain, and spreading

 

through the tracks buried over

where have you been

when needing you stuck

here where the dawn

and the day that meets it

can’t get it on enough to say:

 

“Here is a house.

There is another’s home.

At the corner is an arsenal.

Pick this one up and explode, here.”

 

A number of the right-hand commentaries refer to the Order of the Solar Temple cult, 74 of whose members committed group suicide in Canada, France & Switzerland, as does the text facing the one above, which appears on page 10:

 

France-2  television

broadcast what it said was

a taped telephone conversation

between two disciples shortly before they

died in Switzerland in 1994. They chat about

a program which says the sun is half-way

through its life.

“But in any case it’s been organized,

we’re going to Jupiter.”

“So Venus is out? I think we’ll first

go to Venus.”

“We’ll see. I don’t give a damn.

The main thing is to go where we have to go.”8

 

Footnote 8, located on an unnumbered page to the chapbook’s rear, merely sites “Untitled, Reuters, March 21, 1996.”

 

This is a deliberately unsettling, de-centered performance, executed superbly.* There is a somber wit at work that sees the connection between the perpetually self-deconstructing text – a crease in time, literally at the point of the book’s spine – to the delusional belief of cult members that they can hitch a ride on the next comet out of here if they but “drop the body” at the right moment. The text on the right, if we can talk about it as a complete poem, is extraordinarily sad, regardless of the ridiculousness of the surreptitiously taped conversation. As a work in its own right, its bleakness is unrelieved. Set into the larger ensemble that is LGP, however, it is contained, framed rather as one detail amid the slow-motion holocaust that is contemporary life.

 

Which is why, ultimately, so much depends on the final page, a left-sided text now centered, in the tone of a rhetorical response to all that has come before:

 

Rise up holy, in corsets arched

to the sun-struck heavens

 

This curious invocation leads into a long & complex image that slides finally into what can be read – at least on one level – as a final admonition

 

            to stay still

for awhile longer.

 

It’s a complex & ambivalent (multivalent, in fact) moment at the end of a complex & at least equally ambi-/multi- valent text.

 

LGP is contextualized even further in that the elements mentioned in the title – lead, glass, and poppy, a curious trio – are those used by Anselm Kiefer in his Angel of History sculpture** at the National Gallery in Washington, as well as in several other of his pieces from that same period. Beyond the footnoted title, Prevallet brings neither the sculpture nor the sculpture fully into play in the piece & barely references Kiefer’s source, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Rather, they seem to sit peripherally around the text, rather than either illuminating  or being illuminated by it. In this sense, they’re only one step closer than the image on the cover of the chapbook, a medieval study of the motion of sunspots, or the frontispiece image, a giant sphere hovering over Paris. This I think is an inherent risk in attempting to incorporate so many different elements into what is, after all, a seven page poem loaded with superstructure.

 

Emulation Etudes is ostensibly a simpler book, just four poems, each written to some degree “in the manner of” a master – Dodie Bellamy; Robert Creeley & Francesco Clemente; Samuel Beckett; & Wallace Stevens. Roped together in this fashion, what invariably is foregrounded is how much each can be read as a fundamentally philosophical writer*** The very same forces of “destruction, fire, abandonment, loss” that Prevallet characterizes Kiefer’s “canvas fields” as “burnt with the dark colors of,” show again, from “Hideous bedroom combustion,” in “Love Poem, Untitled (after Dodie Bellamy)” – one of the most self-consciously unattractive sexual metaphors ever – to the description of

 

           my mother

dead, carried

out of the house wrapped

in a sheet

 

in “Rises (after Robert Creeley and Francesco Clemente),” to the absolute stasis & disconnection between the man & woman figured in the story “after Samuel Beckett” to, in the final poem, the metaphor of a wig, cancer’s anointed fashion accessory,

 

               propped atop a building.

With its windows covered,

the birds cannot wake up.

 

Kristin Prevallet is one poet unafraid to look at the dark side. One result, the main one for me, is that all her poetry provokes me, makes me think, leaves me wandering lost in contemplation, reassessing her world & mine, not so terribly unlike Jennifer Moxley. In that sense, these aren’t “likeable” or “fun” poems – they’re trying to go so very much further than that – which I suspect means that Prevallet’s audience is one that will be built up over time by individuals who make an effort. If poetry is, as Charles Bernstein has suggested, the active function of philosophy, Kristin Prevallet is one of the deepest, clearest thinkers we have.

 

 

 

 

* With the lone notable exception of misspelling Kiefer’s surname twice.

 

** Gerhard Richter’s review of this portion of Kiefer’s career is worth reading. You will find it starting on page 5 of the PDF file.

 

*** One might make the same claim for Clemente’s painting.