Jim Leftwich engages
farnessity, wordslabs by Randee Silv
(dancing girl press
& studio, 2018)
In the context of this book, "wordslab" means prose
poem. Perhaps it is a slightly self-deprecating neologism used to create a
little distance between these prose poems, and the vast history of the form.
The prose poem itself is a somewhat slippery and amorphous construct,
instructively malleable, erratically endemic to a wide spectrum of contexts and
lineages. If we look, briefly and subjectively, at an aggregate of possible
histories, we can identify as prose poems some of the works of Peter Ganick,
Aase Berg, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Thomas Lowe Taylor, Leslie Scalapino,
John Crouse, Russell Edson, Carolyn Forche, John High, Charles Simic,
Friederike Mayrocker, Rosemarie Waldrop, Michael Peters, Robert Bly, Gertrude
Stein, Cesar Vallejo, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Aloysius Bertrand,
William Blake and the translators of the King James Bible. We have no choice
but to read the poems in farnessity as a continuation of this subjectively
mythologized lineage.
The first word in the book, the title of the first
"wordslab" is "Overall" -- an entirely impossible
introduction to this or anything else, "taking everything into
account" as a starting point. What can this first word be asking us to
think? It can only be admonishing us to remember everything as we pass through
the book, as if there will be a test at the end, administered to us by
ourselves. Having pondered for a moment the title of the first poem, we now
proceed to the first sentence: "They said he had reached a dead-end."
What are we to make of this, as our entry into this book? Perhaps
"they" refers to all who have written prose poems before this one.
Perhaps "he" refers to any writer, he or she, who is considering
writing prose poems today. Perhaps "they" refers to readers past, all
of them, and "he" refers to the present reader. Maybe they are
warning us: don't go down there, to the dark end of the street, it's more
dangerous than you think. But we know better, and will ignore them.
The second poem is the title cut, "farnessity"
("necessity at a distance" is my associational guess at its
denotation). "Volcanic pillars eroding from multiple attacks can't always
be neglected." Denotations are of
no assistance here. Stability of syntax discourages sense. "Unusable =
Inventiveness."
Poem 4, "Example" -- "He said he was an instrument
at the juncture before nothing made any sense." Do we really want to
translate this into another English sentence? "He" is in this case
the writer/reader as reader/writer, of a world -- an environment, a setting, a
stage, an ecology -- and only metaphorically of a book. Experiential =
instrumental. Processing, filtering, ruminating, pondering... constructing,
destructing, deconstructing, instructing, obstructing, restructing (struct,
from struere, build, pile up) = deprogramming, where programming refers to
socialization and assimilation in submission to a dominant culture.
Poem 5, "Nextness" -- the hinge of the book, where a
reader might find itself, of a sudden, at
book, with little or nothing between the reader and the read. Next to, skin
against page, barely a breath to pass between them. Lines like these are fed as
in osmosis from the page through the skin into the bloodstream in the body:
"Knowingly destined to change only slight,
she / like
them, stark, firm / takes just seconds in the
elevator.
That is the first sentence is this nextness. The next sentence
is this: "Earsplitting thunder scrambles parched systems stashed into
discolored heaps, pushing and pulling more than can be blotted." We can
imagine it being translated, as an "imitation" from English to
English, to: "Volcanic pillars eroding from multiple attacks can't always
be neglected." (Here is John Dryden, who does not approve of
"imitation" as translation, describing it in 1680: "I take
imitation of an author, in their sense, to be an endeavour of a later poet to
write like one who has written before him, on the same subject; that is, not to
translate his words, or to be confined to his sense, but only to set him as a
pattern, and to write, as he supposes that author would have done, had he lived
in our age, and in our country.")
Yesterday I sent Randee an email to thank her for sending her
book:
Jim Leftwich
6:52 PM (23 hours ago)
Hi Randee
I got your book yesterday and am reading it
now. There are within it, here and there, passages -- sentences -- of a pure
disturbing wonder. I have been reading the first two sentences of
"Nextness" over and over. The denotations of the words recede just
slightly into a distance. We are left with a kind of shop talk, which I
absolutely love. The sentences are talking to their readers as if those readers
are automatically and immediately also writers.
That is indeed how it works, but it takes a
little while to get there.
Your writing is an extremely enjoyable way of
getting there.
"Violent, violet, it doesn't seem to
matter." But -- in order to have reached that sentence, which is about the
choice of whether or not to type an 'n' (that decision is the sense, the
meaning, of the sentence), and then to end it with a period, is to have decided
in favor of the overwhelming excess of meanings in which we as humans are
immersed. It has to have mattered, immensely and in every minutia, as a
sentence, written one letter at a time, or else it could not have been written
at all.
Thank you for sending this book.
02.19.2018
*****
Jim Leftwich
is a poet who lives in Roanoke, Virginia. Recent publications include
Volumes 1 , 2 & 3 of Rascible &
Kempt (Luna Bisonte 2016, 2017, edited by John M. and C. Mehrl
Bennett), Tres tresss trisss trieesss tril trilssss: Transmutations of
César Vallejo (Luna Bisonte, 2018) and Sound Rituals,
collaborative poems by jim leftwich & billy bob beamer (mOnocle-Lash,
2018, edited by Olchar Lindsann).
