in 3 sections: Vertical Effort in White, Incantation, and Figures of Memory
VEW:
I like the way this piece moves across the page; italics and quotations used frequently, suggesting multiple voices; they/you relation
"you there
somber"
on the median line, they seek their bodies; "you make gestures of
approach or withdrawal" it is not in your power
to delete the outline
so she seems, like Bergvall, interested in tackling artifice and code in a way that really visibly links "content" with "form"-- not in your power to delete the outline but everything must be? is rendered in language, in a code, in hers vertical:
the law of succession the blankness of symbols
vertebral distance turned
pale and broke this kind of logic
so she asserts that this spatial play, the use of white space is some way to interrupt the code
she abstracts the object; she deflects the gesture that
catches in the gap between, faced with food and its names in
the extreme; a greed for offerings, words of sacrifice
"thus proffered, the telluric image, a disparity"
"she engendered her son in stubborn silence or generating
a stylistic figure" and a memory likely to come undone at
the slightest change of a vowel, an abstraction of origins; her
face reflected the homonym of an earlier loss the cues
this archaic episode carries consequence
the abstract is connected to-- defines-- experience; memory is reforged when language is lost or changed (but what about images-- not sure if the point holds); language is used almost reverently, 'words for sacrifice' paving the way for the next section, Incantation
quickly, my favorite part of this poem:
nevertheless she recalled fabrics, scents,
chains--there where the night birds broadcast
their cries dangerous to ignore:
how they exacerbate the place
(gorgeous)
Incantation:
actually more of an engendering; something is being birthed, feels like text
She
impregnates my face
...On every side strokes appear, whence a voice approaching incantation.
Three outlines and a pallid erudition. She gives birth in the
lineage of chance; premonition of data: night annihilates
objects o an incantatory solitude, thinned by sleep
"this excitement of the first days"
...I dressed this unprecedented wound in its last stage. The
night was gasping and its fruits even to oblivion. A sketch on
the bosom, this color cast anew on the earth: heat suddenly
in the margins. Repetition of absences
"this complicity
to the point of injury"
what 'happens' in these poems seems to be both a deliberate creation and a product of chance-- informed by data but trying to break the coding, the system.
FM:
this poem is much sparser-- lots more white space. Again involving a relationship, this time him/her/them
the term specifies movement
...they spring up
...confined at the boundary
outside implied a prohibition
the notch scans
the same alliteration
...from the liquid element the myth sprang up
"mouth open beyond the bruises"
subjected to this elucidation
their word
alternative
"sleep
where the censor menaces"
not sure about the 'liquid element'-- mercury? or the liquid among the 4 elements, water?-- but again, this poem does its work inside a 'boundary', always aware of the boundary, not even escaped in sleep; but growth and movement happens nonetheless and words determine creation and reality itself
I'm unsure of the title-- A Geometry-- it seems less about relationships between things and more about creation/control and language... but perhaps it refers more to the limits, confines, only so many things are possible in geometry...?
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