THOM DONOVAN Reviews
Scaffolding by Eléna Rivera
(Princeton
University Press, 2017)
In the vast majority of poetry books, we encounter poems
stripped of their scaffolding. Which is to say, the incredible labor that has
gone into the writing—drafting, redrafting, editing, revising; not to mention
reading, research, and living—has been removed and made invisible. An evidence
of labor withdraws, leaving only the poem as artifact. In Eléna Rivera’s third
full-length collection of poetry, Scaffolding,
the poet offers a corrective to this trend by revealing (and reveling) in
poetry’s living labor. Using dates, strike-throughs, and the indication of
“versions” in her titling, the reader becomes privy to a poetic process synched
with a process of life, which is to say, working, seeing, breathing,
conversing, remembering, imbibing, and loving. My favorite among the poems are
the “versions,” which offer variations on the same poem, distinguished only by
dates. The poems are similar enough that we almost see them as ‘takes’—as in
filmmaking or studio production. Interestingly, neither poem seems to be
‘better’ than the other. That one comes after the other does not imply
‘progress’. Rather, the poems are merely different—and all the more pleasing
for being offered in succession, unfaithful copies of one another without
original. Yet, there is something else that is unusual about this book in terms
of how it transgresses and challenges the norms of the ‘poetry book’. And this
involves Scaffolding’s take on the
sonnet, since all the poems in the book consist of 14 lines. While the poems
assume the conventions of the form—they are often “epideictic,” to quote the
Renaissance scholar Joel Fineman, inasmuch as they not only offer praise, but
are about praise—they also challenge
the sonnet tradition through a kind of amplification and displacement of this
aboutness. Here, in Rivera’s poems, we have an insistent sense of the speaker’s
distribution through and dispersal by a set of perceptions, sensations, and
textual encounters. And it is through these distributions and dispersals that
we realize the subject, too, is in fact scaffolded by those with whom they
enter into contact. Like George Oppen before her, Rivera is an ethicist who
wishes to reveal a phenomenology of relation—with things, with other beings,
with people, and with a (real and imagined) locale. Scaffolding gets at the ground under our feet—a ground constituted
not by being itself but by being-in-relation.
It shows not just what stands, but that upon which it rests, the inextricable
and at times reversible relations shared between ourselves and other
beings—within the field of the poem and the world. Remaining in perpetual
motion through Rivera’s careful attention to lineation with sparing uses of
punctuation and spacing, we experience the world not as a static entity but an
evolving series of particulars inviting our participation as well as our
inculcation—a sense that we are responsible for the world’s making. Writing
through a reduced vocabulary, however an expansive prosody, we hear the “self”
largely as a construction of sound, stress, and idiom. Much in the way we make
our way through the urban spaces they describe (the principal one being that of
Morningside Heights, Manhattan), we read the poems reiteratively and
ergodically. To tread and retread their pathways is to encounter the world with
ever- refreshed attention and insight.
From Scaffolding by Eléna Rivera
OCT. 3rd (VERSION 2,
REVISED N.D.)
From Scaffolding by Eléna Rivera
OCT. 3rd (VERSION 1)
surface ellipses … a kind of tropism …
it always depends on the
definition—
Fragaria “wild strawberry” noun and root
and perhaps, more and more, torn
by lack of time
for ecstasy—we are tempted (you
see this
everywhere, hear of its little
importance)
point to poetry, the place where
the parts are!
(instead of living the
parenthetical)
(instead of this race toward
emptiness, this race
that masks our insignificance,
our “false fruit”)
(judgment too repeatedly wears us
out our
seeds, I heard “What do you
expect at your age”)
(the early stages of
metamorphosis)
she bit into the soft sweet red
fruit and missed
Surface tension, growth … a kind
of tropism …
the early stages of metamorphosis
depend on the body and
definition—
Fragaria “wild strawberry” noun and root—
Remind the young girl tempted by
ecstasy
that fantasy is a fragrance,
shame clings to
the changes of the body—blood
running down
and pee pushed her to the
parenthetical—
That weighing in, comparing size
shape, the change
How games put forward the
questions of “better”
and fruit when bruised by too
much judgment retreats
“What do you expect at your
age”—early stage—
then came to poetry, the place
where parts are
is a soft sweet red fruit
that I missed and miss
*****
Thom
Donovan is the author of numerous books including Withdrawn (Compline, 2017), The Hole (Displaced
Press, 2012) and Withdrawn: a
Discourse (Shifter, 2016). He co-edits and publishes ON Contemporary Practice.
He is also the editor of Occupy Poetics (Essay
Press, 2015); To Look At The
Sea Is To Become What One Is: an Etel Adnan Reader (with
Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, 2014), Supple Science:
a Robert Kocik Primer (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary
Practice, 2013), and Wild Horses Of Fire.
He is currently an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang
College of Liberal Arts.
