Lissa Wolsak

Squeezed Light—Collected Poems 1994-2005

Station Hill Press

2010

258 pages

Softcover

$21.95

There are eight specific pieces in Squeezed Light, the much anticipated collection from Lissa Wolsak, and yet the pieces also read like chapters of an overall statement of poetics.  Argument is solidly and strangely, because of breakage, flowing throughout:  you are not who you think you are, and you are also who you think you are not.  This is one refraction among several.  Another rupture is within the words themselves, or trans-word.  There is a tumbling run of exquisite compounding at times (“camel-father,” “lobby-fodder”) and compression of unfamiliar associations and quick divergences, recalling Celan’s dark shards.  But where Celan investigated the origins of words and often spliced findings together—which Wolsak also does — there is not the same sense of sure-footing as in Celan, as remarkable as that statement seems.  Wolsak’s work hums in a “kinematic non-locality”—she doesn’t trust the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our memories, about the birth sites of language.  From Pen Chants:

we livers of

buried spectrums

obelisk after obelisk

            here pediatric dibs, here

           

            the crypto-gain

As one reads toward the more current work, this interest is paired with considerable attention to irregular line breaks (“h-and”) and perhaps a slightly less dense syntax.  Pacing symbols, delay stations—a two-dot and three-dot ellipsis, quasi-tab breaks, and a kind of raised stop or closely kerned bullet—occur throughout.  These symbols seem meant to slow the eye, but the serious musicality of the work also invites the sense of a spoken intention, of cues.

The voice is assured in an Uncertain; gentle, disgusted, airy; trans-religio-politico; appreciative, displacing, unsettling; unbelievably lyrical.  At times, one feels one is dealing with a prophet sprung from the innards of language, of the stuff of the cosmos, and then soon enough Roy Orbison calls from a bush.  That is to say that while she is obviously interested in what might be cravenly called the mystical, she is aware of the wants of the world.  Layered in this realm is an acute journalistic ability to sound out Human psychological ineptitudes toward an epistemological Ur:

will of nations, how much

iconic depravity in play

on paths unknown to any vulture

an algebraically intractable corpse-vine

bore us on

matchless

monuments to ascending vanity

in superposition just

enough death-rouge

holographically at hand how

then. . .ought each of

the said things intrude upon us now?

being scient is of

minute moment

loom-shuttles still

 

In her first book, included here, The Garcia Family Co-Mercy, the disruption between words—by space breaks or by syntactical drop-offs—sometimes gives one the sense of a text erased, especially on page 46, but it most certainly isn’t.  Yet, that sense is still there.  It attracts that reading, while not being it.  These confluences of disnarrations, spokeless time, increase the lighting on each individual word or part of a word.  Prefixes, infixes, suffixes.  Stutter dust.

Readers searching for “aboutness” will be spun like Sufi Dervishes.  There are “scenes,” flickering ancient images, almost metallurgical distillates, from the irreal and timeless, with animals abounding:  quail, wrens, swifts, bison, ostrich.  These “scenes” are part of an overall rhetorical structure—of a distrust of the narratives in images (“occurent    symbol-covers”).  They float around in the poems, pseudo-consumed by bitten-off abstractions, signaling semiotic indeterminacy.  As she mentions in an interview that concludes the book, she chooses “to activate consciousness, and to keep a loose hold on the smoky.”  In fact, the interview and her essay on living and poetics, An Heuristic Prolusion, may offer the key beginnings for the new reader, as well as the helpful introduction to her work by the publishers of Station Hill Press, George Quasha and Charles Stein.

A short work, “My Dear Brother Marat,” is directed to Marat, who acts as a Muse and yet one to asynchronously challenge to keep with his “humiliated mystical life.”  Wolsak carves out this world in a way to situate her own philosophical discussions.  Some may think Marat is a feint, a useful illusion, a helpful aide in shoe-horning in one’s declamations, but this cynicism does not touch the loving urgency for which the piece is arguing.  As everywhere in the book, she is aghast at surface worlds and their egregiously confident explanations:  “Cleverness passes as insight when realistic tendencies become dominant.”  These consistently clear messages to the reader are not intolerant upbraidings but caring calls to wake-up from the untroubled slumber of our stories.

Plato’s cave figures to Kant’s a priori to Heidegger’s Being to Lacan’s Real—these are just some of the “spaces” that are the intersecting stations, the “entangled states,” from which Wolsak and her work derives/arrives and sees.  It is near here where there is situated an abyss, a divinity, a sacred well of unconsciousness.  From a section of her A Defence of Being—Second Ana:

Concerning things we

have mentioned

from the beginning

the ulterior mouth of the

word

was pressed against

celestial gnaw

all

along, the beam starts as a

featureless clump

The birth of the word is of a piece in transcendence with the being—linguistic expression and otherness.  This is a poetry of poetics thought through to its bases, its assumptions, and where these logically/illogically lead.  This is no small task.  This is a high wire act—of mind in spirit, the “being” initiated, interrogated, in co-mercy, which we learn is a kind of harmlessness.  In the interview, she says:  “We corner language no more than love.”

Love is, really, the underlying structural agent to the entire book.  It is a friendly but fierce love—serious, insistent, dramatic, and aural as all get out.  And while she says “time  as prosthesis” in The Garcia Family Co-Mercy, as ever undoing settlements of locating, we are made aware again of the activity of Being in the writing, which doesn’t ask for a readership of supplicants but transfers energy to enact the agency within each of us.  It’s pedagogical in this sense, but she doesn’t have answers for which one is looking, nor could she.  “I spoke my mysteries.”