What always fascinates me about Lesle Lewis’s poems are their iteration. Like the poem is this activity we’re in the middle of with the poet. I’m in the moment with her as I read any given line, like her composition and my reading were simultaneous. Then the line ends, and I’m floating above the moment as she repositions the poem for the next line. It’s similar to how I read John Ashbery’s poems, letting that Ashbery-poet lull me into his assertive nature. Then he carries that assertion on to the next statement. And the poem’s momentum ties those two assertions together by the mere fact of the poet’s confidence about his train of thought.
Something similar happens for me with Lewis’s work, especially this poem, “From ‘Long Life’” (from FENCE 40). But the assertions are of an entirely different nature. She’s not going to put me in the middle of a day and then look expectantly towards a sunset—a sunset that will arrive way too soon. So the poem will end in a darkness that shrouds my relationship with, say, the Ashbery-poet, along with the whole prospect of knowing anything fully. Lewis’s poem might not be so avid on the world occupying a given day-as-construct, but her poems still occupy a world of her making. Her tone indicates I should be concerned with what she’s concerned with. And in honor of Lyn Hejinian, in that often-quoted essay, “The Rejection of Closure,” where Lewis’s world might have begun, and where the poem took up to start talking about that world, it feels arbitrary. It could start or end anywhere. But it also feels like the poet has selected especially resonant moments to usher me into that world. It’s one of the many underlying contradictions I find in Hejinian’s essay, and it’s always been useful for my writing, because I don’t think Hejinian’s essay is meant to serve as a how-to. More a have you noticed there are boring poems that predictably do this thing with closure. And how about there be poems that don’t need to do that thing.
But even a poem that’s going to let go of closure still has to start somewhere. And the writer is going to choose that somewhere. And, yes, as I believe Hejinian’s essay argues, how the reader might author that start in their own imagination need not fit precisely with how the poet authored that moment. There is still a beginning. And there is an ending.
And in Lewis’s poems both ending and beginning are fashioned as dictations of a life (likely the poet’s, but not necessarily). It could be read as a series of unusual situations the poet is responding to. It could be signals of what life has in store for people, or for religion, or for some other concern that has a natural significance. “Does saying so simply satisfy the desire to say it?” says the poem. And I’m not entirely sure what to attach all this to, but I can assuredly feel significance in the poem’s language. And the significance isn’t just a rhetorical effect. The poem draws a personally familiar context around it.
And that’s the iteration I mentioned at the beginning of this post. The lines of the poem keep generating more significance, where your “arms are cream,” or you’re holding those “artificial flowers of a chocolate night.” And I can place all these in some unusually arranged constellation existing around the poet, a day the poet occupies, but I’m not sure why I should. And that tenuousness that is both contradicted by the poem’s certainty (it’s assured of its cohesion) and the first-person speaker, but the pieces’ tenuous relationship is what brings me pleasure reading the work.