Marjorie Welish
Word Group
Coffee House Press
2004
111 pages
Softcover, $15



Marjorie Welish’s disciplined exploration of her mind—how it relates, relays, and imagines information—continues in her new book, Word Group. Her concerns are the structures, the apparatuses, the indexes, the frames we use when we speak or think in language. There is a wilderness that Welish unlocks by so doing, as her narrators utter something but then are also involved with the structure of the utterance. And both at once. Hers is a poetry of notations, scrambles, readjustments of meaning—she reconfigures in parentheticals, for instance, a line about Faust in her poem, "Seated Recklessly". The initial mention is:

(Faust sits restlessly at his desk, in his armchairs)

This line becomes, variously:

(At his desk, his arms, Faust)

and

(At his desk, Faust sits in his arms)

and

(Desk, minus Faust)


There are others as well. Apart from the strange plural, armchairs, this notation, as if stage directions, structures the piece, which is a very typical framing device in Welish’s poems in general. One word or phrase will recur, sometimes twisted, between sections of writing. In "Textile 2," the word "because" occurs seven times—six of these times it starts on the left-hand margin. The feeling one has when these gestures occur is often a haunting, an echoing, a remembering, if barely so, of a thread of thought. And this is what makes her poems so daring, I think, as she relies on typically minor details, asides, or a string of asides, to create the boundaries of a poem. Yet the feeling is not of irritating tedium, but of a cadenced distinguishing between things, between words, and due to this the slipperiness of meanings enters in.

There are shades of Gertrude Stein here (even her famous dog who knows her halfway shows up), with wit and displacements of meanings and the same ability to be nearly opaque while being somewhat conversational. She is as likely to say, "Okay, okay, okay" as she is to begin a poem ("Word Object") like this:

Assigning probabilities to fluid
surfaces or spectacular approximations
in a departed polis

For me, the poems are working at their finest when she not only attempts to dislodge basic narrative ploys of causality ("Causality in lyric is trying") by assembling thoughts, descriptions of thought, and destabilizing images and rhetorics, but when she is also destabilizing the very categorical frames that many take comfort in. "When is a portrait not a portrait?" for instance. Or perhaps in the partial title of her previous book, The Annotated "Here".

Welish relates in an interview in Jubilat magazine that she was taken to a museum lecture on art when very young, because her mother enjoyed this type of event. One can see this early training (perhaps forgotten) in a critical vocabulary and a critical framing flowering in her own work. Later in the interview, she relates that she sees herself as "a lapsed structuralist, or the structuralist with a wish to relativize, to keep as problematic the notion of structure rather than to arrive at a solitary solution that keeps poetry and criticism cognitively distinct." There are other poets who are interested in these same issues—Charles Bernstein comes to mind—but the additional element of the painter in Welish brings about a complex perspective or intuition, as if she were dabbing sounds and fraying remarks, emptiness and philosophical guessing, in her poems. Here’s the last part of "Textile 12":


which?

In recent years he has researched the interval

which?

In recent years he has researched the inconvenience

a path formatted across hot water.

There cannot be hot water formatted symptomatically,

she said, like fumes.


*

Welish’s work feels like the textual equivalent of fumes, of drifting particularities, of the sense of origin but not the thing itself, of movement and slight shifts that cause tremors. Reverberation, pausing, reconsideration, remembering, as if plucking a string infrequently. Being in time and space, literally, with the future haunting the past, a carriage going by, some daily nonsense, a porch with two different shades of yellow. These are what her words conjure for me today, "for instance".

Rosmarie Waldrop
Love, Like Pronouns
Omnidawn
2003
120 pages
Softcover, $12.95




Rosmarie Waldrop’s Love, Like Pronouns
endlessly questions language
("our language
seduces us

then goes to sleep with a dry mouth")

existence
("detected a fold in
what’s called reality and where
at any rate we’re not")
certainty
("Nothing is" or "you walk into abandoned/reasons")
love
("My love for you seems to flow (like traffic?) under my skin. I want it to break through the pores and touch you. Inflict wounds so small you don’t know what’s killing you.")

though they don’t, for me, seek to interrogate
common logics as much
as to offer
others

enter and enter and enter and enter and enter
Rosmarie Waldrop

With death ever p/resenting
("The depth of a river is measured in drowned bodies.")

who knows that amid the "Sad, so sad, apples in autumn"

"in spite of changes in landownership
each day
begins in the body"


And it is the body that is so much on display in Waldrop’s work—its physicality, its need for warmth, for touch, for disagreement, for humor, for walking and talking, etc. It is her ability to conjoin her interest in the physical/physiological and philosophical abstraction that makes her poetry feel "whole" to me … that the entire body is embraced. The poems express eroticism, for instance, by movements, and flexible mental activities by articulation, creating a comfortable environment by their candid openness.

Her work insists on feeling, to summon Creeley, and it moves outward from this primary world of emotion toward whatever it is engendering: disjunctive humor, seemingly multi-spacial encounters with pronouned others, a great deal of love or especially tenderness, and many other sites and situations.

Waldrop, as in her earlier work, uses the first person "I," which is not the troublesome narrative crutch it sometimes can be, because her "I" is merely another vehicle, a note of character, to show who articulated what. It is not a defensive text in which Waldrop tries to formulate why she can use "I"—she leaves this zone for the more important field of what is actually said, as the "I" is various, as is obvious; it is a given for Waldrop and any reader of her work. For instance, here’s the first section of "In A Flash":


1

There were fragments. I was born.
It was not justified. I
learned: the impenetrability of bodies.
But a penetrating look? To "surge
before." To haggle ill-equipped.
And "that other" opposed to.
Desire. I was calm between my selves.


The intimacy of the writing arises from the feeling that one is looking in on another’s life, though obscurely, through the use of "you" and the "I". The "you" is frequently another, or so it seems, but at other times it felt as if the "I"-narrator was commenting on herself, on her mutual presence as an object.

*

There are eight pieces in Love, Like Pronouns. Five of the pieces are more than twelve pages long. The second shortest piece is the last one, titled "Disaster," and it speaks about current events sometimes sadly, sometimes severely irritated, and both at once. Here is the third section from "Disaster":


3

Image of a hole. Locked into the plural. Where are the villages? Trees? Animals? The people on whom we drop our bombs and afterwards food?

*

Often we must work with holes. In understanding. Often set out without knowing where. Often distrust narratives. Never need struggle over the meaning of death.

*

The distance between collapse and the image of collapse. Has a life of its own. And on an adverb we build war. "Virtually assumed responsibility." Someone has. It’s said.

*

Image on a screen. Image in the cross hairs. Image.

*

With "collateral damage." As abstract as a percentage point.



Waldrop’s dire cynicism, rooted in the truth of capitalism, sees our currently visible wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for what they are: precautionary and reactionary murdering in order to stabilize a fickle stock market that carries this war blood on its goods and services. I was quite pleased that she additionally expressed the try-at-costs attempt by the government to diminish the very physicality of death by hiding out in the abstract, bean-counter term, "collateral damage."

In the Acknowledgements section at the beginning of the book, Waldrop notes major sources used or consulted in writing her book. These books include Thomas S. Hall’s A Source Book in Animal Biology, Peter Brown’s The Body and Society, Angela Carter’s Saints and Strangers, and Sigmund Freud’s The History of an Infantile Neurosis. They are listed in this exact order.

With the ordering of these titles, I could not help but feel an un/intentional, spiraling explanation, moving from the general to the specific, of the book’s interests and the world’s horrible situations:

A Source Book in Animal Biology
The Body and Society
Saints and Strangers
The History of an Infantile Neurosis.

*

Variously, she explains in her poems:

"the world is hidden by significance"

"the body is hidden"

"Disturbed. My body follows
me around."


Undisturbed, she leads us forever inwardly, it seems, toward our selves, our hopes, our mistakes, our intuitive and counter-intuitive impulses, our natural ambiguities:


what had periods of reflection,
to do with it, or commas,
or anyone’s language.
Making me heavy, the long curving roads
a sense of sequence, which
even an old enough story
because I don’t want to get anywhere
inward and awkward
becomes
a formidable power


*

Love, Like Pronouns is an intense collection of collage, powered by the body’s emotions, movements, thoughts, and consequences. Waldrop has written yet another intelligent, gentle book.