John Latta was amused to see me “thrashing about, trying to place Kathleen Fraser.” He seems not to want to see me struggling with discrete categories forced into coupling, even if that’s the title of Fraser’s new book. Latta, who I believe was part of the Cornell scene around Baxter Hathaway once upon a time, has some interesting things to say about Fraser’s work as well as making an argument of sorts against scenes – really against community as such. The isolato is such an American stance, but so 19^th century. All the great isolato figures of the 20^th century (Pound, Olson, Kerouac) were actually obsessed with community.

 

Kathleen herself wrote to correct a few dates (she & Jack Marshall got to NYC in ’59), add some nuances (they were friends with Joe Ceravolo, among others) & wants me most of all to underscore the importance of Susan Gevirtz in the project of HOW(ever). Duly noted!

 

I spent the last couple of days thinking about Fraser’s new book, Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling, thinking in particular of all the ways in which that title strikes me as being remarkably literal. At one point, reading through it, I thought that the different projects might be viewed as proposing open versus closed conceptions of their forms – four that are largely prose, two largely in verse. But then, rereading, I decided that wasn’t it at all, but rather that all six are open in the sense of being open-ended, permeable, but using different conceptions of what that might mean. Then I thought to myself that the book might be read “narratively” as evolving from the series that most offers a glimpse of closure, the prose works of “Champs (fields) & between,” toward the most open-ended, the progressive erasures of “AD notebooks,” addressing the losses & disappearances that accompany Alzheimer’s. But then I thought to myself that “Soft pages,” a prose journal, and the one-act play “Celeste & Sirius” are in their own  ways at least as open-ended as “AD notebooks,” perhaps more so. And, in spite of its title, the mostly verse poems in “from Fiamma’s sketchbook,” which appears after the verse play & before “AD notebooks,” offer perhaps the strongest hints of closure in the entire book. I could really imagine John Latta having fun at my thrashing around here!

 

It did occur to me, tho, that possibly Fraser’s book title might have it backwards, that what we have here, seriously, are coupling categories forced into discreteness. Now part of what is going on, from my perspective, however topsy-turvy, is that these works, like any writing project, confront the question of openness along two separate axes.

 

First: openness to the world itself, daily life, referentiality something like the invocation of real names, which are always received differently by different people & which, of almost all words, are those whose meanings erode the most rapidly. What does it mean to dedicate a work to Joan Mitchell, who has been dead for a dozen years? Or Eva Hesse, gone even longer? For the most part, Fraser avoids the use of names within her texts themselves, often preferring pronouns, sometimes gendered (he & she), but often not (you is the key figure in “from Fiamma’s sketchbook”).

 

Second: the openness of poetic form, which varies from piece to piece. The very use of “from” in the title of a sequence, especially one characterized as being from a sketchbook, suggests something excerpted from a whole, yet the individual pieces are distinct & elegantly composed. Here, to drive the point home, is the first poem in “from Fiamma’s sketchbook,” “Hotel Classic”:

 

The interior stress of a leaf was forming its own never version

when the hotel came under renovation. Steps led downward

to a drawing of trees, at least in the early draft pinned to his light box.

The architect described in his notes what he thought they wanted,

the clients equal to stargazers or foreign diplomats and wives of

officials from Milano, and he felt that something could happen

on the stairs, an event or motion, as if to rush towards

that noise of the entire tree in stress.

 

The linebreaks are so muted as to border on prose – but in fact are not, as both that early break on the next-to-last line and two later poems in the sequence make evident – and the tone itself seems deliberately muted, perhaps oddly so coming from a sketchbook that belonged apparently to someone whose name translates as Flame. The scramble of phonemes that renders stress very nearly an acronym for trees is by no means coincidental here – Fraser reiterates the st sound in Steps & stargazer. Yet what is the action being depicted here? An architect’s note & his feelings: something could happen, not did, and not happening now.

 

Writing quietly is perhaps the surest test of the mature poet – poets under the age of 40 find it virtually impossible & more than a few older ones (e.g., moi) never do learn quite how to achieve this. It requires trusting in the ear & intelligence of your audience, and in your own abilities to make the most subtle shifts perceptible. Fraser makes it seem so very simple that I’m completely jealous of her talents here. Here is one of the three prose poems “from Fiamma’s sketchbook,” this one given as a title the name of the first female Impressionist painter, “Berthe Morisot”

 

Not white. Not the actual resemblance of anything “white” or “pink” nor its absence, either. Not wayward nor bottled, containing foam from any excess

 

observed from triangular pouches rising beneath the ungovernable.

 

He does not want what he thinks she wants which is to be assembled from brief measurements of her era’s preference, dictated in messages of convincing urgency arriving almost daily.

 

Wide puddles of crushed linseed with turpentine added to thin the tobacco-scented canvas falling from each side of her.

 

“What is natural?” he asks her – but really is asking all of nature, or what he thinks of as all of nature.

 

That final qualification – “what he thinks of as” – is a marvelous moment, identifying in its way just as all the negative definitions in the first paragraph (which, we note, occurs across what I might characterize as two prose stanzas) attempt to arrive at something solely by clearing out what it is not. This piece lets us feel all the differentials of language at work & they hover over differentials not only in desire (“what he thinks she wants”) but in time (“her era’s preference”), the material universe (“turpentine added to thin the tobacco-scented canvas”) & representation (“Not… Not… Not….”).

 

Triangular Pouches Rising Beneath the Ungovernable might be read (as I read it) as a parallel to the book’s title, even if maybe more so in my reversed mode. That’s why, I think, that line hovers out there like that, the way poems might be just such triangular pouches, our own lives that rich mess of underlying chaos we hear of only through the mediating remove of our senses. Fraser’s work demonstrates just how much can be gained by learning how fully to pay attention.