Sometimes a new book, or a book by a new poet, raises all kinds of interesting questions. Even when it’s not a book, but a pack of cards in a translucent envelope.

 

From Aeschylus to Eugene O’Neill, the Eumenides, better known as the Furies, & Lavinia are characters that have turned up again & again. In Michael Cross’s lime green chap envelope from Oakland’s Soft Press, in    felt   treeling, stanzas, sections or poems occur under the names lavinia & eumenides as though they were speaking. It’s a device that evokes H.D., so it instantly got my attention.

 

A second device carried it even further. Cross physically marks the caesura in each line with a slash (/), creating a subtler version of the disruptive typography that cleaves the seen from the heard than, say, Alice Notley’s use of scare quotes throughout her 1996 The Descent of Alette, but still functions in that same general terrain. Thus, the first card of text in my stack, under the heading of “lavinia,” reads

 

I still / my hologram

and sheen skin / my caustic

shining / I am miniature

in sun / covered in little

bulbs / a moment

on this bed / of leaves

we are outside / the warmed dark

inside my thighs / is warmth

 

One of the things the slash does for/to me as a reader is to accentuate the connection of the latter portion of line A with the first segment of line B. Thus at some level my mind hears the text something more like this:

 

I still

my hologram and sheen skin

my caustic shining

I am miniature in sun

covered in little bulbs

a moment on this bed

of leaves we are outside

the warmed dark inside my thighs

is warmth

 

Or possibly with each segment as its own set:

 

I still

my hologram

and sheen skin

my caustic

shining

I am miniature

in sun

covered in little

bulbs

a moment

on this bed

of leaves

we are outside

the warmed dark

inside my thighs

is warmth

 

Prosodically at least, it’s a very different poem depending on how you interpret the impact of these marks. This last version is almost Creeley-esque in its enjambments whereas, in the second version,” a unit like “the warmed dark inside my thighs” runs fairly smoothly.

 

Yet it is clear that the first version, the one on the card itself, is the version Cross intends/intended. So what does it mean to set up some many visual (if not also aural) barriers in the text?

 

One trend in poetry that has followed the evolution of free verse has been, at least in English (at least in American English), a general shortening of the line.  Part of this is the caesurae starting to blend in with the linebreak, their various effects conjoining & becoming more supple. You see it first in Zukofsky & others of his generation who often would read their works aloud pausing at the end of every second line (whereas Williams’ readings, like Marianne Moore’s, never reflected any audible correlation to his linebreaks at all). Creeley really marks the sense of the line break determining all else more than anyone, even Olson who was more doctrinaire (and whose poems often sound as tho they’re picking up momentum as the lines get shorter & shorter – his longest lines are often at the very beginning of the text). Duncan, as I’ve noted before, had a period circa 1970 in which he would literally count (in a whisper half to himself) to three between each line!?! Now there are all manner of interesting effects within poems that previously would have been focused on the caesura, but which – as in our third alternative above – tend to be more modular, so that every linebreak can equally glide into the one above or below as well as working as an instant of pausing.

 

Conversely, I can’t think of any new formalist who is “doing something interesting” with caesurae. Maybe that’s my general lack of reading of the new formalists, but it might also be new formalism’s general disinterest in (gasp!) form. Cross clearly is doing something interesting here. Kasey Mohammad, who reviewed in   felt   treeling first, calls it “the question of syntactic instability,” but that’s not how I read it. Multiplicity is more like it.

 

I should note that there are 12 cards in Cross’ set, eight of which have two such sets or poems. Whenever they are paired, eumenides speaks first, lavinia after & the sections appear one atop the other on the card, literally paired. There are, I believe, only two lines in the entire work that do not carry slashes, one from each “speaker.” A number, however, appear to be “half-lines,” with a slash either at the beginning or end – &, when at the beginning, invariably starting well to the right of the margin. Mohammad terms the slash a “virgule,” as it would be if it appeared in a phrase such as either/or, but I don’t this being how the mark operates here, so will stick the more generic slash. After rejecting more pomo alternatives, e.g. wound, barrier, wall, spike.

 

Since at least Michael Waltuch first published Robert Grenier’s “box,” Sentences in 1978, the question of sequence is a critical issue whenever cards are used, literally unbinding any fixed order of the text. Yet at least in the deck – if you can call 12 cards a deck, it’s really closer to what you got in a package of baseball cards when I was a kid, or what you might find today I suppose in a pack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards – that I have, with two “single-speaker” cards at the front (livinia, followed by eumenides) & two again at the very end, with the order reversed, I don’t sense that same random playfulness here. &, in fact, I’ve taken care to keep the cards in order.

 

Cross runs the New Brutalism reading series in Oakland, but, it’s worth noting, I don’t sense anything at all “brutalist” about these texts. If anything, these works reflect a return to a sense of exactness that my own age cohort somehow let slip through our fingers. This precision radiates from every aspect of the publication & I’m glad to see it.