Density is a nebulous quality in a poem, as it can be also in painting. Some visual works feel light, airy, ready to drift away while others feel weighted & worked. One of the reasons that de Kooning’s last works proved so controversial, painted as they were as he met the onslaught of Alzheimer’s, was because those canvases differed so materially from his “mature” style in just this way. Certainly the values in those works are different than from his dense, intense assaults on women in the 1950s & ‘60s, but my own sense is that these last works are marvelous in their own right. Indeed, I think they would have been greeted wholeheartedly as such had they been painted by an artist with any other name.

 

Density in painting, tho, feels relatively easy to describe verbally. Much of it has to with the uses of white space, with the artist’s relationship to the canvas. It is, I think, far harder to articulate what constitutes this quality in a poem. If I look at four books that I’ve been reading recently, what I notice first is that all four make use of relatively short forms, but that two of them feel dense while the other two do not. The two that do – Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed & Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Nest – are both by women, while the two that do not – John Godfrey’s Private Lemonade & William Corbett’s Return Receipt – are by men. Not a statistically significant sampling, but enough of a distinction to make me stop and ponder.

 

It’s not a question of words per line or the amount of white space that is taken up – Armantrout’s pages seem more spare than those of either Godfrey or Corbett, yet a passage such as

 

In the shorter version,

tentacled
stomach swallows stomach.

In the long dream,
I’m with Aaron,

visiting his future,
helping him make choices.

 

can hardly be characterized as whatever we imagine the inverse of dense to be – light, airy, ethereal, etc. Yet this isn’t the feigned depth psychology we’re so bored with from surrealism either. Rather, the two sentences pose framing schema – the back story of the text, so to speak – that reach into the world in complex, divergent ways. One can envision the stomach here as self-consuming artifact & yet here is a mother invoking the concept of tentacles as she depicts the dream life of her relationship to her son. One might envision the two sentences as equivalents, one being the short version, the other the long. And yet and yet . . . none of these readings is in any way mandatory.

 

Instead, what I sense here is that both Godfrey & Corbett are interested in are effects that occur very close to the surface of the writing. Godfrey often is at the edge of abstraction & Corbett literally is writing notes to a reader whom he knows doesn’t really know him – there’s none of the shorthand one might expect from old friends. Thus the poems in Return Receipt strive for a communication that is at once quite personal & yet never private. On the one hand, this is almost the opposite of confessionalism & yet, on the other, Corbett really is telling King things about himself that the visual artist can’t otherwise know.

 

I almost wrote that, of the four poets at hand, Corbett’s poems were the closest in spirit to the kind of informalism – as distinct from Personism – of Frank O’Hara, yet Godfrey’s were the most painterly. As a construct of surface effects, that is certainly the case, and yet Berssenbrugge’s poems proceed more apparently with the kind of cognitive process one so often associates with the visual arts. Each individual poem in Nest is definitely a project – every possible element of the poem is constructed from the ground up. The only really consistent elements, what you might identify as style, throughout the fifteen works gathered in this 71-page book are a long line that Berssenbrugge breaks as tho it were prose & her signature attention to specificity. The last three poems in the book all bear the same title, “Safety,” tho each is “about” something entirely different. Yet the three combine to balance perfectly the book’s initial poem, “Permanent Home,” & it is absolutely no accident that the book’s centerpiece, the eighth poem, dedicated to Gayatri Spivak, should also be the title poem. On one level, Berssenbrugge’s book feels as simple as someone sitting down, casually writing in a journal. On another, Nest is an edifice of intellectual construction as complex as any we’ve inherited from Ronald Johnson, say, or from Louis Zukofsky.

 

So there is no single thing we might think of as density any more than this concept can have only one antonym. Instead, I find directions & probabilities, sensibilities really. These four books are terrific to read alongside one another – it’s almost as those they were pointing to the four directions, each balancing the others.