Like Jules Boykoff, Kaia Sand is a D.C. poet whose work can be found in Antennae 4 who also appeared last February in the Social Mark conference in Philadelphia, where her works were among the most polished & her reading one of the most successful. Here, her work consists of “Cognitive Dissonance,” a sequence of eight interlocking short prose works, each with its own title. “I Don’t Know the Names of the Weapons” is the second in the series:

 

If only we could dematerialize, be an aura for a while. The lingerie saleswoman says you should never tape your giftwraps. If I tell you the contents of my day I feel like I’m balancing a checkbook. Here be dragons. But I can name some weapons like our doing as our undoing.”

 

Other than the allusion to Walter Benjamin (& just possibly Lucy Lippard) in that first sentence, everything a reader needs in this passage is to be found here. If there is a narrative or schematic frame behind the five sentences, it’s not apparent. Yet the syntax proceeds as though a continuous thread were being woven. The language poses a world of lost chances (If only…), unpleasant choices (If I tell you), as mundane as a department store, as epic as a fable, ending on a double bind. This little work is tight, terrifying, brilliant all at once.

 

“Culpability Over Cocktails” is the seventh piece in the sequence:

 

The tea is overdue. The question oversteeped. The remedy overstated. Howling is happenstance. Grandmother is gorgeous.

 

Here is my palm to read said the dying man. Why don’t you test your prescience? Here is the daily news. Let me give you a hand.

 

This latter section is heavily preconditioned through the prior occurrence of Grandmother as a narrative figure – the only one really named in the sequence – as well as by the term Let, a command posing as a request, the first word in both the third & fourth prose poems. Indeed, the palm & hand fit neatly, almost too neatly, into the “Let me tell you the story of my body” theme that runs through these pieces. Finally, the predicates of the first three sentences are so neatly shuffled: The A is C. The B is A. The C is B.

 

If my experience of the first piece quoted above is one of a glimpse of the infinite difficulty & horror of contemporary existence, my experience of the latter is in sharp contrast almost claustrophobic, not thematically, but formally. It bespeaks a desire in the post-avant artwork to arrive at a closed form. The ninth section is different, maybe, but to my eye no less problematic*

 

This is, I think, one of the most difficult problems post-avant works have to confront. On the one hand, it is impossible not to notice just how brilliant Sand is & can be in her writing. On the other, she chooses to give us a well-wrought urn precisely where I would value more, far more, the ragged edges of her pushing this brilliance further into the world, using it as a tool of investigation rather than aesthetics.

 

This is a hesitation I have had at times over the years over the work of other poets – Michael Palmer at times, John Ashbery, Chris McCreary, & some of the ellipticists (especially of the New York rather than Providence variety). One might trace it back, I suppose, to Wallace Stevens & to a love of a lush & gorgeous surface rather than the angularities & fragments one gets, say, with Pound’s collage technique or the Williams of Spring & All.

 

Ironically, fragmentation is exactly the issue here. In addition to the title “Cognitive Dissonance,” the series starts with an epigram from Kristin Prevallet:

 

She fainted at the sight of so many fragments, for she thought her mind was frazzled. Luckily, it was just the world, crumbling around her.

 

Sand dates the poem – October 2001 – but even without that, the relationship of the series to the attacks on New York & the Pentagon would unmistakable. On one dimension, one senses the author’s despair & grief, almost a vertigo without limit. On the other, the form of this series struggles mightily to contain it. What I haven’t figured out here – I’m not sure that it is decidable, at least not without knowing much more about Sand’s poetry & how it thinks & moves – is how much that containment is itself the struggle – indeed, the content – of the work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* How long will it take a reader to recognize that the “digits” the narrative voice declares it will “speak in” is a series of three phone numbers? Unless one takes that middle one – 9 1 1 – to be a date. The first number is the White House comment line, the last New York City directory information.