JUDITH
ROITMAN Reviews
The End of Something by
Kate Greenstreet
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2017)
Some time
ago I found myself regularly walking by a campus bulletin board on which
someone had posted a Family Circus parody: little Billy looks into his mother’s
open mouth and sees… space, stars, galaxies, the universe. Reading Kate
Greenstreet is a little like that. The surface is plain, unshowy, stripped
down. The cumulative effect is stunning.
For example:
36. before the bright fire
Like Jesus said: “Who can you lie to?”
Meaning,
who’ll believe you.?
My brother knows what he’s doing.
People ask us for directions, but we don’t
live here. We sat on benches twice today.
Steeped in
particulars (Jesus, brother, directions, benches), the particulars are
unconstrained, the poem like a resonant bell whose notes, bouncing off each
other, blend.
The End of Something has 98 poems, each numbered and titled. Also front
matter which includes poems or is it a poem, and end matter ditto, and the
cover has a crawl (like the bottom of your tv screen) which is a poem (and
which may continue on the title page but maybe that is a separate poem/crawl),
which I will present as lines because there isn’t room on the computer screen
for a crawl — imagine the lines below as a crawl with spaces between:
birds in the house
it turned out we could fly if we leaned forward
but we had to die
it turned out we could fly
I’m sleeping with the clock
I don’t want to die yet
wait
sing that one again about the headlights
You can’t
get more direct than that: “we had to die… I don’t want to die yet… wait.”
Also there
are, every 7 poems or so (some are skipped), a page or a few pages of numbered
passages which turn out to be (I was exceptionally slow at realizing this)
notes on the numbered poems. For example, the note on #36 is:
I don’t follow the news. I have to follow something else.
Each set of
notes itself reads as a poem. There are
also some prosy poems, dialogue poems (speakers not named), and three poems
about someone(s) named Mike or Michael. Not just a simple collection of poems
then, the structure is complex.
And there
are photographs. Greenstreet claims (in a video collage with/by her husband, Max Greenstreet) that she does
not consider herself a photographer, but she photographs incessantly, focusing
on one object for a while, then another, a way to know something in a way that
otherwise can’t be known. The cover of The
End of Something presents photographs of a doll, and the front/back matter
presents more of her photographs (including the same doll) as well as fragments
of writing in her handwriting overlayed on the photographs, for example on the
title page: remember landscape? it used
to be everywhere, o,k — did I mention that Greenstreet can be funny? All of
which — the photographs, the handwriting — add more layers. And a diagram in
the middle of the book which I don’t understand
but there it
is.
This is a
beautiful book, carefully made, a collaboration of Greenstreet’s sensibility
and the meticulousness of Janet Holmes’ vision for Ahsahta Press — the matte
cover feels like silk, the pages are smooth and satisfyingly heavy, with broad
margins, and non-standard dimensions — 6.5 x 6 — that make it a pleasure to
hold.
Greenstreet
began as a painter, and we see her painting (verb) in her studio in the video
called Act although we don’t see her
painting (noun) — the camera is slightly behind the easel. (Act comes from her previous book, Young Tambling) We also see her, in Act, putting poems together in her
studio, that is, putting pieces of paper with words on them on a wall, a grid
of poems, arranging and rearranging them, maybe it is poems, maybe parts of
poems, you can’t really tell, and it becomes evident that poetry is to her as
physical an act as painting.
In
interviews, she has cited for inspiration the poet Barbara Guest, the painter
Joan Mitchell, and the painter Agnes Martin. I think Martin is an important
clue. You could describe most Agnes Martin paintings as a bunch of rectangles formed
by a grid colored in various ways but my God how luminous and how subtle — I
tried to photograph an Agnes Martin painting once with my iPhone 6 and it could
not be captured, all you could see was a monumental canvas of ill-defined color,
the barest trace of the barest trace of the compelling actuality. From the
motions Greenstreet makes while painting in Act
one imagines her paintings are more like Mitchell’s, but the poems remind me of
Martin: starting with the most basic, seemingly ordinary elements, joining and
layering them, driven by the relationships among and between, and creating
something deep and alive and amazing. Another similarity: both Greenstreet and
Martin dispense with standard techniques (for example, there are as far as I
can tell no metaphors in Greenstreet’s poetry, scarcely even a simile).
Greenstreet
does not limit herself to the page. You can find audio files of 15 of the poems
at http://theendofsomething.com/.
Her voice is unassuming, direct, unhurried, with ample space/silences in which
phrases can resonate, a reading which allows the poems to fully be themselves,
without distortion. Sine I’m writing for the web, I don’t need to say any more
about her voice, in a few clicks you can hear it yourself. Please do.
She has also
made a number of videos, see https://vimeo.com/kickingwind,
several from this book. While they carry titles of poems from the book, the
videos are necessarily more complex, more layered, and not limited to the poems
of the respective titles. For example, Cardboard
Star has scenes of snow — snow shoveling, snow plow, car driving in snow,
train in snow, children playing in snow, river in snow — and Christmas —
lights, tree, stirring dough for dough ornaments, taking ornaments out, putting
them on a tree. Which are background for the following poems or fragments of
poems from The End of Something: 95. Tiny Ladder, 44. The Reason Why She Enters This Trance, 4. I Am Writing Things In The Dark, 77. Red For Memory (and maybe others as well, I was unable to track
everything, but I tracked what I could so you don’t have to) along with the
notes for #44 (the notes a terrific story of getting high on cocaine with her
mother while making Christmas ornaments — I hope this story is true but the way
the book works is: you don’t know) and finally the poem which gives its title
to the video:
60. cardboard star
I wrote down what I wanted to say
Because nobody will touch it.
Our man fights — it’s his second
language. Before he leaves
he sets up a tiny tree on the table.
She wouldn’t give a reason.
The children did this.
I think she had a very common reason.
Greenstreet is generous, specific, and unpretentious about her process in
interviews. From the collage video: “I don’t really know what books are
about because I don’t really want to write about things… I want something to
come to me from outside. I don’t want to give it to you from me, I want to give
it to you from out there. I would be the go-between.” In an online interview in
Touch the Donkey she describes her
process in detail: “Phrases, sentences,
paragraphs. So you’re looking but also listening. And speaking. Where do these
language fragments come from? ... who knows? They come from anywhere. Words you
woke up with in the middle of the night, old notebooks, what your neighbor told
you on the stairs. You say a phrase out loud and join it to another, then add a
sentence that comes to you in the moment, which reminds you of—but you don’t
want to go there. Although later you might talk with a friend about that memory
and find a chunk of your conversation useable.” And, earlier in the interview,
“You’re not trying to tell a story, you’re trying to find the story.”
Judith Roitman's poetry has most recently appeared in December, Rogue Agent, E.Ratio, The Writing Disorder, Galatea Resurrects, Otoliths, Eleven Eleven, Horse Less Press, Talisman and Yew. Her recent chapbooks include Slackline (Hank’s Loose Gravel Press), Furnace Mountain (Omerta), Ku: a thumb book (Airfoil Press) and Two: ghazals (Horse Less Press). Her book No Face: Selected and New Poems (First Intensity) appeared in 2008; her book The Roswell Project: poems is forthcoming from Theenk Books. She lives in Lawrence Kansas.