The other day I characterized Jena Osman as one of the disruptive influences in contemporary poetry because her work forces one to rethink the entire project of the poem from the ground up. In this, she shares a completeness of vision with a handful of other writers – Jennifer Moxley, Lee Ann Brown, Christian Bök, Lisa Jarnot, Barrett Watten and a small list of others. That these writers don’t demonstrate any consensus as to what that vision might be is to be expected, but what all of them do share is precisely that visionary completeness. Which is why, I suspect, all of them are even more fascinating to reread than they are to read. Only when you immerse yourself in their work do all of the connections manifest in their absolute brilliance.

 

Osman’s An Essay in Asterisks is definitely a case in point. It is only after reading the long final poem, “Memory Error Theater” that the discourse on memory in the book’s opening work, the relatively short title poem, completely opens up. The text of this first piece alternates between two discourses, one presented in a “normal” font, the second in ALL CAPS BOLDFACE (and in a stencil font that I don’ t think will reproduce here). The impact is startling, both visually & aurally. Here are its opening sentences:

 

On the problem of the not-there. REACHING INTO THE BOX AND TAKE OUT THE BAG. If we place all stock in the space where words are missing, there is greater possibility of emotional range. Because memory is often like that as well. LOCKING THE BOX AND PUTTING THE BAG OVER SHOULDER. You fill in the blank (the hollow of what you can’t remember) with a picture. First there are a series of images that you can’t shake, as if you were there and it was a significant part of your childhood: a burning car, the crux of a tree, a desert scene and walking through the branches. Also a bright kitchen in the sun. WALKING OUT THE DOOR AND INTO THE STREET WITHOUT LOOKING. These must have been part of your life. Yet later you learn that they were just images from a film. Perhaps at a certain age it is difficult for a child to discern the boundaries between what is real and what is not. RUNNING DOWN THE STREET WITH A SMALL CART.

 

These are common enough details – indeed, I have a very strong one of my own watching a car burning in the desert in eastern Nevada back in 1974 & anyone who has roamed around the American outback of the Southwest will have seen more than a little evidence of what bored teenagers do to abandoned vehicles there. It’s an image (or memory) that by itself has no “real” content, yet like an unhappy incident it keeps turning up in this book, marking – in this sense Osman’s analysis is spot on – precisely the locus of an enormous emotional concentration, a free-floating correlative that has nothing objective about it. Indeed, one can very quickly begin to read this passage as being “about” or explicating those blank spaces we saw the other day in a phrase like “lif e s ent ence.” The “problem of the not-there” leads perfectly into such issues as editing, censorship & translation, the use of visual graphics.

 

There is almost no page in this book that doesn’t illuminate every other page in somewhat similar fashion. The result – it’s 85 pages in manuscript – is remarkable, simultaneously amazingly complex & stunningly clear, not simply that Osman can hold all these different ideas & relations in her mind as she writes, but that she can make it possible for us, poor distracted readers that we invariably are, to do likewise. The feel of it all is both Brechtian & remarkably generous (&, yes, those are concepts very much at odds with one another, historically). The memory theater that is invoked in the final poem is that of Giulio Camillo Delminio (1479-1544), whose model for theater was one for memory also – the audience stood at the center of the stage & looked outward. It simultaneously can be read as everything from a daffy bit of medieval utopian thought to a direct antecedent to all Brechtian & post-Brechtian modes of radical theater to even the model for the database collections implicit in computing today that leads toward the hive mind of the internet. Osman’s own project feels at least this ambitious. That’s a feeling that I trust completely.

 

Yet Osman also writes with a concision that would make George Oppen envious. But, unlike many poets with such dedication to economy (Creeley, Ronald Johnson, Zukofsky), Osman is not primarily (or even secondarily) a poet of & for the ear. Rather, like the Oppen of Of Being Numerous, this a poetry for the mind that understands exactly how sensuous intellection can be. If it makes you dizzy as a reader, it’s because of just how far & deeply this vision enables one to see.