What is a margin? That is one of those questions that, in order to answer it intelligibly, requires a surprisingly wide range of other, related information. Clearly it’s a border of some kind, a horizon, whatever it is that distinguishes that which might occur within from that without. If we speak of the screen as we do of the page, at least in Roman lettering, that the margin is where the print ends, the way land does at the shoreline, we find that there is not one kind, but several. The left & right margins, more often than not, end up hard-edged, straight lines (almost always on the left, often on the right). The bottom likewise tends to a hard edge, albeit one punctuated by those letters – g, j, p, q, y – that curl or jut through an otherwise impenetrable barrier. But the margin above – now that is saturnalia, a cacophony of possibilities, filled with curves & juts, dots & crosses. Now look again more closely to the left – there are really only a few letters that on a left margin forms a hard justified edge – b, k, l, m, n, p, r . All the others are speckled with curves & wedges, all the quirks that keep any individual letter from being a mute █ of ink. Even a justified right-hand margin is likewise deckled by an assortment of nicks & scratches.
So the hardest margin turns out to be the one beneath – it’s violated the fewest times. But is that the margin or the line that is at play here? How do we tell the difference? Isn’t the lower margin simply one line given prominence over (or under) the rest? What is the metaphysical relationship between margin & line?
These are the sort of questions that occur very normally when reading Truong Tran’s Within the Margin, which Apogee Press publisher Alice Jones handed to me my last night in California. I’ve been meaning to read Tran’s work for awhile & have actually been stocking away some of his books waiting to get around to one. Nothing like a 2,500-mile flight with only a Jimmy Fallon movie to set one’s mind to literature – it actually took me considerably less time to read the book than it did Jimmy & Queen Latifah to catch the foxy bank robbers in Taxi. Tran, I should note, is playing with considerably more horsepower too.
It took less time because Within the Margin is the thinnest thick book I’ve ever read. Unpaginated, but probably at minimum 160 pages, Tran’s fourth book of poetry makes any volume of Larry Eigner’s work feel like Dostoevsky. Maybe 80 percent of the pages have on them exactly one long line, running with only the slightest outer margin right up to the edge of the binding. This is the line, The Line, the line, with all of the obsessiveness to such ever evidenced by the early Frank Stella. Those that don’t fall into this model mostly tend to cluster in short open-ended stanzas that themselves do look a good deal like a lot of Larry Eigner’s writing. Throughout, a single expository thread – voice, if you must – muses on the role of lineage, that is, the role of the line & margin as such – this is a light book of heavy theory – but also with relation to family, parenting, siblings, love. There is a secret at the end of it that I’m not going to share here that itself suggests the importance of secrets in just such realms as these.
It might have been easy for Tran as both an ethnic & sexual minority to play all of those notes about marginalization, as visibly implicit as they are in a work of this kind. That he doesn’t suggests, to me at least, just how serious he is in both exploring the entanglements of these different meanings of the same term(s) & in sorting through those entanglements. Indeed, a major theme in the book is theft. Another is the border between dignity & shame. For a text that could legitimately be called easy reading – there are fewer words-per-page than in many a kid’s picture book – Within the Margin has a lot on its plate & (Lets mix metaphors!) doesn’t shy away from diving right in.
If I have any hesitation, it’s this: Tran largely skips past opportunities to also involve the ear – this is very much a work of logopoeia, to use Pound’s model, tinged with a dose of phanopoeia, especially when it involves memory & family (not necessarily two different categories here). Yet the line is, I would argue, a creature as much of sound as it is of sight. It is precisely the pulse of meter that foretells the future of sound in a text, in prose as much as in poetry. Sound sets up expectation that the text can then fulfill, deflect or even bypass. Yet Truong Tran glides past chance after chance to complete the circle, to bring melopoeia in. The result is a work that will not only remind you of the conjunction that poetry shares with philosophy, but also of the weaknesses that a deafened philosophy – especially in the analytic tradition – might bring to the poem itself.
