One of the positive aspects of the use of a standard set of questions in Lance Phillips’ Here Comes Everybody interview blog is that everyone responds to the same inputs, and some of these replies tend to surprise. Stephanie Strickland gives some great responses to the questions of (a) what is something “non-literary” that she reads that may surprise her colleagues and (b) how important is philosophy to her writing, to which she answers “Not as important as mathematics or poetry.” All the adrenalin receptors in my brain picked up at that remark. And it made me realize that I needed to rethink my presumptions about Stephanie Strickland and her poetry.

 

I had an impression of Strickland that must have been 15 years old at least as a typical School of Quietude poet, apt to appear in Prairie Schooner, likely to publish books with university presses, etc. Amidst the several thousand actually existing poets now at work, I had tucked her in my backbrain into the middle of a fairly large stack that must have a sign on it indicating “No Need to Read.” Wrong!

 

Strickland must have always been interested in mathematics, tho nothing I’d ever read before had indicated that. But sometime in the post-1990 timeframe, this interest began to manifest itself in poetry that could not only appear on the web, but which might exploit its features directly. Usually, I think of web-enabled work as coming out of an aesthetic that includes Oulipo, the writing of Jackson Mac Low & just possibly an historic interest in Fluxus & zaum beyond that. Not your standard Prairie Schooner material.

 

But when I looked at the examples of her writing linked to the Here Comes Everybody piece, it didn’t look much like Prairie Schooner either. This is from my favorite sequence of her work directly accessible on the web, from the second issue of the online zine Drunken Boat. The work is number 19 of Strickland’s series entitled “WaveSon.net”:

 

and that it tilts. The thought
of such knowledge, hard to gain,
how to keep, we have lost,
except for the Rabbis who copy the Talmud,

 

who know by G[ ]d no scintilla
must change, not by unconscious slips,
not "corrected" by sages, not in 26,000 years—
me, I take what I get

 

from the Navy’s lunar Web Page,
but I should go to Tarot: 52 weeks, 4 season
suites of 13 (moon-months, 14 x 2 days) [364] are not
enough: "a year and a day," [365] will (nearly)

 

fit the sun in, that’s the Joker,
and in the Leap, fourth
Year, a year-and-a-day and another

 

You will of course have caught the pun sonnet in the title, just as you will have duly noted that this poem has 15 lines. The discourse continues as if with no interruption at “WaveSon.net 20”:

 

day, then the long counts begin. After one-hundred
and twenty-eight
years, the need to take a day out—
as the osprey pulls a salmon from the sea

 

or the knave steals a tart. Penelope, star
undoer, keeps 128 suitors
at bay, while her husband cycles.
At Arthur’s table, 128 Knights.

 

26,000 years
for the pole to "precess," to draw its circle
in the sky and return to the star
where it started out, while the Zodiac belt

 

slips backward through its signs.
2000 years ago we came
to the Age of Fishes, rising horizon at the vernal

 

What I want to note here is that Strickland’s language is always absolutely precise – something I never associate with the School of Quietude – and that her sense of the line is quirky & alive, again not something for which the SoQ is famous. If anything, the work this most reminds me of is Jackson Mac Low’s Light Poems, in that it manages to simultaneously do a dozen interesting things in what seems on the surface to be a fairly straightforward discourse.

 

This work also to my ear passes the Blake test with great ease. Like Christian Bök, but not – for example – the English versions I’ve seen of the writing of Young-Hae Chang (to whose website Strickland directs our attention), Strickland’s poems are inherently interesting as writing, regardless of how they might be realized on the web. Chang’s work is interesting in the way that writing in the art of Barbara Krueger or Jenny Holzer is interesting, which has everything to do with its context & little if anything to do with the writing per se. Not so Strickland.

 

Strickland’s work is sufficiently interesting to make me wonder – and I know I’m not the person who could answer this – if it is possible to arrive at interesting web-enabled poetry without at some point going through that interest in Oulipo, zaum, Fluxus & the rest. Maybe Strickland is even the poet who proves that, I’m not sure. But now I realize I’m going to have to go back & read the work with more attention. She’s earned it.