If Rodrigo Toscano & Maxine Chernoff have both produced volumes that are really chapbooks posing, through the miracle of book design, as more fleshed-out projects in perfect binding, Eleni Sikelianos’ The Lover’s Numbers, which appeared in the “by subscription only” Seeing Books Series in 1998, reverses the process, offering 66 poems that would surely to well over 100 pages were it printed in the same type & leading as either of these other volumes, but which instead comes forward as a crowded – there are virtually no borders at either top or bottom of the pages – in nine-point type.
Like Chernoff, Sikelianos’ approach is the palimpsest around a central topic – the theme throughout is her relationship with her husband. The topic here, by definition, is both meatier (in every sense of the word) and less bookish (or, for that matter, political) than either Chernoff or Toscano. The work that results is erotic, arousing, optimistic, happy – this book is going to appeal to a very different kind of reader. Here is “# 63”
si vis me flere
– Horace
If you want to see me flower
vis-à-vis your hot diminuitive hand
my heliocentric little parliament of bees
then ellipse the bees as bees are
so perplexed when expressed in more abstract
terms & deaf
to the contiguity/stroke invention
if you want to see me flower parlay, name
the lacteal season in your mouth who’s dumb-housed now – Tell your ten fingers how far down to go – Below
– Believe
& see how my hymn of her lies unmustered, distant (hymen)
& see how my lingua-clots uncloud
o erudite little ambush
if you want to see me flower
Then whistle. Then whistle.
That largest line is printed with its “break” flush left (“fingers” is the first word of the second line in the book), a strategy halfway between poem & prose that I’ve seen lately on the part of a number of younger poets. The first few times I saw that, I thought the typesetter didn’t understand the function of a hanging indent. This obviously would not apply to Seeing Eye impresario Guy Bennett. So now I realize that it’s intentional – the nature of the poetic line itself is changing.
I’ve noted before the one of Sikelianos’ great strengths as a poet is her intuitive grasp of the line. Hardly anyone since Olson & Irby has used so complex a line with so much grace. The Lover’s Numbers is just one more demonstration of her sometimes breath-taking (note pun) capability here:
alba, luster-white, I grasp & train after
lust I err ever depeopling a night
’s somnambulance with wicked
umbrage caught in what’s about ‘I am
what I yam’ ‘who I was at what I am’
animus-rushed against the racing
rushes
dear one
With a topic that is both indeterminate & limitless, Sikelianos is hardly bound by just what is here. I don’t frankly get the gist of her subtitle, “Crimson Coat (Trilogy),” but nothing I read here tells me that this sequence couldn’t extend indefinitely, through all of love’s stages over the course of a life. Even if this project doesn’t, it would be great to see this book available again & in a format equal to its subject’s heft.
