I don’t feel entirely qualified to make some grand statement about how Laynie Browne approaches books (like does she always write her books as a project, or are the three books I have read coincidentally project books); however, I can register with some confidence that when one of Browne’s books steps into its project, the relationship between individual poem and book concept or vision provides a notable lens for reading any individual poem. In Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists, Browne uses the poetic list form as method and parody and fractured daily journal over the course of the entire book. The consistency of the form encourages the reader to think of what a list is in their daily lives, what someone thinks while they’re making a list, how lists guide a person to other lists. The work could be considered an interrogation of the list, except “interrogation” feels contrarian, and when I think of the larger project of this book, reading for the interrogation doesn’t feel like a helpful read. Like I don’t hear Browne asking, “What is a list?” More “What can you do with a list?”
And reading for this is pretty much inescapable, given the consistent numbered formatting in each poem, and the sustained project implied by titling each poem after the date when it was presumably written. How should individual poems get read in a book whose project is so conspicuously present? For instance, reading Alice Notley The Descent of Alette, it’s natural to feel absorbed in the story’s forward momentum and its commentary on feminist power structures, and to privilege this reading over a close reading of any single poem. But should you? The book asks its reader. Each poem is similar in length and style. And each poem uses a device that some might consider absorbing to the point of distraction—Notley’s famous “quotations” “around each of” “the fragments.” The poems refuse to be inhaled in pursuit of their story. They intentionally drag the pace of reading. Yes, as an earnest reader, I began reading with the quotation marks. I looked to actively involve myself in the fragment’s shaping of language. But I was also guilty of pursuing the story, and its commentary on the patriarchal epic poem. But I also knew I was doing this at the expense of the poetic line. And it’s this interesting relationship between particular formal move in an individual poem and narrative energy driving the book that summons a tension for Notley’s book. This same macro versus micro tension has an analogy to Browne’s Translation.
Or I feel like the books want me to consider their book-stance (or project-stance) as frame or lens. “Keep your eyes on the book!” the book says in the tone of voice Oz used behind the curtain. And thinking of the book in Browne is an especially productive reading, because of her tendency to go beyond the frame the book might suggest you read it within. Whether it’s the form of elegy in You Envelop Me (like what would express grief, what would be the material to grieve over, what to do with language that is drenched in a mode of grief) or it’s the fairy tale in The Scented Fox (the container of an archetype, how to tease the archetype open), Browne shows herself adept with play, like how to play form away from its forminess. How to induce the reader into a state of play via the language, via the unusual, likely disjunctive, likely taffy-pulled syntax that is available to poetic language, so the reading experience isn’t just about the subject matter of the language. It’s guiding the reader into an affect space, like how some James Turrell pieces can induce light on their audience, like a cloud of light.
That cloud of light is what I like reading as the book’s position on form in these Laynie Browne project books. It’s an environment, but a distinctly colored environment. The environment has “rules,” that will only impose their ruliness when it’s a convenient moment for nodding or insinuating a rule. Form with the cliche Ezra Pound quote about making it new already acting on the stipulative form the book’s using. Like think of how innuendo presses on what someone is saying, but not creepy guy innuendo. More the fun kind when Kate McKinnon says something that’s definitely sexual, but how can it be sexual with that look she has on her face. That’s what rules are for a Laynie Browne book. A visit to Weird Barbie’s house.
I’m not sure, then, if this puts more pressure on reading a single poem, as a reading must include the book’s positions on what it’s doing as a book. I don’t think so. Because Browne’s larger ethos is all about play. The play of the list. All the new parts of a list she makes relevant to a book of poems that will be twining itself around lists. Reading Laynie Browne is fun. Is playful. And disorienting. All of the rules are always and completely up for grabs. And if you get hold of a rule while you’re reading, and you see how it plays out, it feels like genies! Magic! In “02.03.16,” for instance, the role of the todo list is explicitly present. Which is hilarious! Who would be thinking poetic fun in what is often a moment of mundane struggle. “What was I supposed to do again?” Consider the opening lines of “02.03.16”:
from “02.03.16,” lines 1-4
- Furiously forget yourself, then complete the online forms.
- Confirm gingerbread meeting, talismans, and tarot with Emily Dickinson.
- Bring baskets, string, apron and books.
- Explain how her bodiless white dress, suspended in glass, is a perfect fit.
The instruction in Item 1, to “furiously forget yourself” as you’re completing a task like filling out online forms is a fun stretch of the task list for poetic purposes. Which reorients the more typical task list moves, like the parallel active verb construction. The instruction-to-self sentence structure. But then the poem steps in with a normal poem move—the allusion to Emily Dickinson, including a “bodiless white dress, suspended in glass.” These tasks are artful and practical, with the poem intentionally binding these two impulses together. An entire book of this could have been interesting. And would have posed its own challenge for sustaining the method so it continued to feel poetic, and also task-y.
But Browne’s larger project, I would argue, is uncovering the poetic potential of making any daily list, especially tasks lists for yourself, but this can also be aligned with more general productivity culture, like bullet-journals, daily observations, diary reflections. “How notes are poems and also tasks.” As she comments in “02.03.16.” What is significant is not just about seeing the poetic that exists in the daily task list, but also how the writing process can be shaped with the mind of a task list. What is the writing process that goes into it? What is the associative work when writing one task, only to realize another? Is there a poem in that head space? One of my personal obsessions is the productivity culture, and how eager it is to be facilitated by the internet. A space that is not only aware of the many different ways someone can be productive, but also self-aware that too much attention on discovering new ways of being productive can be unproductive.
And though that might not be where Browne’s book is, its rhetorical take on the list (who the writer of a list is, the solitary audience that is often the primary audience for a list) feels adjacent, possibly analogous. As with many of the process-minded books Browne has published, it’s ultimately a trial of the personal, a method for the personal to manufacture, generate, involve, and pursue language. The verb for that last statement is open. And multifarious. And where the list form might concretely position the poet into a day’s poetic practice, what Browne’s work is is a poet present with language and searching for whatever sense that language might make of the present.
One things that singles “02.03.16” out for a close reading is its self-discussion about what it means to write into a list. Other poems from the book do this. I like, though, the conspicuous task list that opens “02.03.16.” Then, later, the poem thinks about the meaning of making poems like this. What is the project? For this specific poem, the task list (quoted above) had shifted to the poet talking to a neighbor and the presumably returning to think of Emily Dickinson (the “she” in the quote below).
from “02.03.16, lines 9-16
- How different she looks when certain words emit their glow.
- She wore them around her neck, bound them to her thoughts, rested her face in a nest.
- It’s alright to begin what seems distant, in fact, interrupt yourself now.
- My goal is to keep switching back and forth between doing and being until I disintegrate.
- The correct music never discusses your mood.
- Instead it elevates or deflates.
- Form continues to morph. At first I translated abbreviations into commentaries, opening an accordion-like discourse.
- But then what was already there, between the pleats, began demanding a say.
One of the great revelations for my own reading practice came for me as a student at University of Houston, when I realized a poetry based on the fragment might be better described as a poetry that reveals itself in association. That the many critics telling me in almost identical words how pivotal it was for T. S. Eliot to write The Waste Land in fragments, how Eliot’s method reflected modern life speeding up, something that could only be felt as a series of fragments, those critics were describing something that may be accurate to the early 20th Century, but “fragments” alone didn’t make poems feel meaningful to me. And the more I’ve read the same argument about “fragments,” the more I find the argument dated and uninteresting. I am interested in the space between fragments, the art of that space, the poet’s associative leap implicitly tying the spaces to a thought or impression. This is where I find a poem’s life. Its playfulness.
And what makes Browne’s poem so interesting to me is each numbered item as a “fragment,” and the surprising associative leap from one numbered item to the next. What Browne observes here as “an accordion-like discourse.” Because a numbered list is valued more for its practical organization than its constellated idea. And yet, under Browne’s poetic pressure, the constellated idea is uncovered, and pursued. Sometimes in the book, numbering the lines feels almost superficial, like it was mere affect rather than itemization. It acts more like an exaggerated enjambment, as when the poem moves from item 15’s “accordion” to “16. But then what was already there, between the pleats, began demanding a say.”
It’s that macro book-as-lens and micro list-item-as-more-than-single-item that I find fascinating. Like the conceptual vehicle is interesting as machine and the machine’s mechanics. A list or the list operating as a “translation” (as proposed by the book’s title). A list that could be poetically enjambed. A list where the list maker interrupts herself (”in fact, interrupt yourself now”). The poetic list has always proven a fun form for unsettling free verse’s default (or it feels default-ish) continuity. And in Browne’s book it feels like she’s encouraging me to uncover the ambiguities in the list form that have yet to be tapped. And I am participating with her while she mines the form for more fun readings. Or points me in those directions. It’s a poetic ethos I appreciate.
For anyone interested in seeing the poem, and a more particular close reading of that poem, I attach a pdf below.