I sometimes imagine
the writing of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge as being painterly, not because she lives
with Richard Tuttle, but because her projects feel as tho they’re invented or constructed
series complete in themselves, rather the way a solo exhibition at a major
gallery would be, and that I sense she takes a long time between projects so
that each will be visibly, palpably differentiated. Her sense of “project” thus
seems very different from what I expect from writing or music, & that’s one of the values I take from her work.
I
don’t know if Kathleen & Mei-mei were ever in a situation where they were
able to influence one another on any level beyond reading each other’s work – what
they pay attention to seems entirely different – but I do know that Fraser has
also long been a poet who takes the visual arts very seriously.* Several of her
books have either been collaborations with visual artists, such as Sam Francis
or Mary Ann Hayden, or have included illustrations. The first sequence in Discrete Categories is dedicated “for
Joan Mitchell, ferocity,” another “for Eva Hesse,
further,” while a third carries an epigram from SF Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker on the subject of Willem
DeKooning’s Alzheimer’s Disease.
From
project to project, tho, Fraser has a great deal of range. The works here go
from some well defined & carefully crafted series, both in prose &
verse, to notebook pages that by their very nature are far more open-ended to
an extremely brief one-act play.
In “Champs (fields) & between,” Fraser
uses a most interesting coda effect with each of the six prose poems in the
series, interesting precisely because of the way it sets up a second effect in
the fourth poem. It’s the kind of detail that lets you see the poet thinking,
structuring the work in front of her, the sort of thing that always fascinates
me when I see in poetry.
Below each
of the numbered, mostly single paragraph (indeed, mostly single sentence)
poems, separated solely by space and a large dot at the left margin, Fraser
reiterates a phrase or two from the text above. Thus the very first poem:
It was raining heavily and
snowing farther up the road and she left for the appointment, both ahead of and
behind her expectation, in spite of the visual impression of crashing cars and
SUVs, swerving bodies in pain on the 6 o’clock news, again a swerving laid out
to any random viewer, in this case herself a cinematic event to which she would
gradually attach herself as she drove forward and slowly shifted gears through
the lengthening
•
any random viewer, in this case
As a piece
in itself, the first paragraph is a marvelous instance
of a depiction told gently through a constantly changing perspective. That last
word reverberates with its double meaning here – lengthening is exactly what
this run-on sentence is doing. But it is the perspective of a viewer that gets
called out in the coda, the randomness accentuated while its specificity is
insisted upon. The coda reminds me of Benjamin’s
distinction between a title – which names an entire work – and a caption –
which highlights something specific within – this coda functions clearly as a
caption. By itself, that would be enough to warrant its use in these works, but
Fraser transforms our sense of perspective all over again with the third &
fourth sections. The third is quite brief, but it is also the first one in
which the lengthier main section is more than one sentence:
The air came down like rice. It
scattered through unevenness and uneventfulness.
•
came down unevenness
This coda
by itself is worth noting, calling out as it does the elements that I suspect
would be the ones most likely to be overlooked given the curiosity of the image
& conscious clatter of distinction that occurs as the mind attempts to
distinguish unevenness from uneventfulness. None of which prepares
us for the opening of the project’s fourth piece, where the two sentence have
now lengthened out into two “paragraphs,” if that is what you would call these
long run-on sentences:
The air came down in its teacup
shape of Japanese porcelain . . . .
Fraser has
just set up our expectation that these coda will be backwards-referential,
almost a variant of anaphor. But now it functions almost as a fulcrum as the
mind sways into this new long sentence without letting go of that core verb
phrase.
The
physical sensation that accompanies this shift in perspective for a reader is
as close to vertigo as I can get in a poem – it’s great just to feel the mind
going through this process of focus-refocus as it reestablishes its
equilibrium.
*
One might divide the world of writers into those who do & those who don’t.
Peter Schjeldahl once asked me, only slightly tongue in cheek, “
