There Exists Now a Book — the air in an empty gallery

1.

There exists now a book of poems, published in 2011 by a small press I admire, that I doubt you have read. Enter it: you have entered a deserted gallery and, look, because there’s no one inside, and what a relief to be in from the street, the rain, leaves already dry before they fall, it takes a while to see there are no artworks either. Does the curator mean for us to squint at the ordinary walls — such subtle brushwork! — and reflect on these exposed wires? Has the exhibition been delayed, its unimaginable works langouring in customs or misplaced in a freight yard among containers of Doritos and deep-sea radios?

2.

No, you are meant to notice the air in the empty gallery, and even if the author intended something else, the chief effect of this book, which, yes, is notable for its departure from the poet’s eariler works, which have been notable for their profligacy and engagement with contemporary poetics that burst the glass of the lava lamp and show the substance inside is gelatinous confetti, is similar: it foregrounds an atmosphere, a space you are reminded you are in, distinctly, by variations in optical configuration and exquisite attention to design (the slightest touch leaves a fingerprint on the cover, the lighest peek ruffles the trim — it’s a flower the first whiff of wilts, but so much is in that scent). So, while you may not be able to say what these poems are about, or with certainty even which uncertainities they emphasize, which uncertain sun makes the shadows that seem its substance, you constantly know you are being a Reader of Poetry. Feel your posture adjust, feel this book in contrast to the newspapers or popular novels around you. The ride is beginning, the loudspeaker says. You are on the ride still, it continues to tell you.

3.

Oh, sure, one could say the attentive drift of this recent book’s language makes a reader participate (politically, somehow?) in the sense it makes, or, like, question our presumptions about sense, or enjoy the openness of unrefereed reference, or have the sensation of cooking in someone else’s kitchen, where none of the seasonings are labeled so you sniff them and gauge, connecting to them (is it rosemary?) anew, and you feel the poem freed from structure and become pure form — but those are also consequences of atmosphere, less about what one reads than a frame of mind one can decide to read it in, a space one decides to move in with particular motions. In a dark room, you move differently — but that’s an effect of the room on you, not a characteristic of the room itself. If the eye blinks when (as this poet could have written) “a seam of milk” appears under the door, it’s an accomplishment of the obscurity around it, less about seeing something than abruptly being able to see anything distinctly.

4.

Yes. This book makes me wonder about perspective (was the author sometimes stoned? sad? tired? do I enjoy imagining the singular and artistic life he must lead, in which these words make poignant sense? do I wish to lead a similar life and perhaps see him at a cultural event? what kinds of shirts does he wear? was he reading philosophy? does he like leather jackets? do his girlfriends?). You can drift with it or against it, try to see it as a particular way of seeing or just look at it and see nothing, but you feel its drift, and its demand that you stand in relation to it. And it’s a quick read: easy as a glide on a porch swing. You can sometimes feel the porch swing makes you closer to the horizon, though you know it doesn’t really.

5.

At the end, or in the middle, it could hardly matter, go ahead, step outside, leave the gallery — what impression has this book’s atmosphere left on you? Well, nothing specific you could easily apply elsewhere, ideas or thoughts, technical insight, just an experience of art, let’s say, of a space artfully made, that has conjured and affirmed that art can be solid and encompassing as the whir of an air conditioner (“deafening,” we say, because we hear only it), that we can loll in it, can distinguish we are in it and distinguish ourselves by it, so the street (even if you are in New York or Paris) feels more like the New York and Paris you imagined growing up in a local mall, back when they might as well have been the same city, for how far they were from your city.

6.

This recent book exists, and wasn’t there a time when the plain fact of a skinny volume of verse was enough? It asserted a brazen delicacy you could live by, that made the whites of your sad eyes worth more and, by its relative extremity, offered an alternative that seemed more palpable because more mysterious, a foreign food more exotic for how its packaging obscured the contents. See the stare in this unglamorous author photo, its mussed pose over the list of all the cities the author has lived in, labeled like a fleet of U-Hauls with interesting twigs left in their emptied hulls. Feel the echoes that are your own eyes.

7.

Well, one critic could say, the effect may be exotically opening, but this emperor has no clothes — can’t any art alienate and relocate like this but also do much more, also offering memorable meaning, coherence that retains and enhances complexity, providing potential heights and heightenings not just of the senses (as they strain to perceive, through manufactured fogs, fogs which become the entire view, so you don’t even need to wear your glasses) but of sensibility, civilization, the self, situated in and seen through an atmosphere, not just an oxygen bar’s ruse? And, well, this writer does publish a lot; perhaps he’s given us the dehydrated mix, here. Where are the hints of narrative he has before held the faintest distillations together by? Or is this a series that uses the absorptive delays of a serial work to forever forestall, forecasting toward an ever-receding final realization that, through its rote brinksmanship, shimmers to maintain a brink?

8.

Ah, but then again, look at the effects of wind on the emperor’s chest hair, so you feel the breeze more on your own face, and notice it differently trembling through a birdhouse, through the cry a bird gives. The lungs expand with air that is not their own and then goes.

9.

I feel in this book most the significance of, say, an average couch on which one speaks with a new lover, language growing increasingly disjointed and private as you become exhausted but do not wish to leave, and every additional phrase has sense that matters less because speech itself, your mouth, the other’s tongue, matters more, not a message but a gesture of making a message, a vehicle of conveyance, which becomes a physical act of love because of how you both lean in, and then at dawn when it seems speech has broken apart at a new limit, dispersed into movement and air, you find yourself driving toward a lake you understand must be near because together you smell the trees.

10.

The poems’ titles are beautiful. Bold as banners in a street the parade cannot find. Like nametags on abandoned shirts. I’d love a whole book of such titles. Single lines announcing starkly as a thin black lamp in a flagrantly brightening room. Your pupil changes in response. And that’s something you see. And you could see anything after as extending from it.