For many years, I’ve been interested in the scope of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poems. Their attention to limits. Their expansion beyond limits, but in this way where acknowledging how limits exist is the life of the poem. Both inside and outside of that limit. For instance, her book, Nest, is about the concept of nests. Or the concept of home if it were a nest. Or to merely observe the activity of nesting. Or to feel your home shaping itself around you. A nest like it was an idea of an idea occupying that idea, then stretching the idea, then reconfiguring it so you see it again. And the magic of Berssenbrugge? She always makes me see her idea at the center of the idea and the full context of an idea being at the center. Like if the word “again” were illuminated from inside.
Approaching a new book by Berssenbrugge, I’m always thinking, “So what’s the idea?” Which doesn’t mean a book of poems needs that central idea as a vehicle. Berssenbrugge’s long career is filled as much with its consistent inquiry into what it might mean to have an idea as it is to wonder what a poem thinking about ideas looks like. The difference between Empathy and its wily stanzas circling and cinching close the idea of empathy versus Nest or Four-Year-Old Girl and their consideration of the poetic line as assertion or half assertion waiting for what the next assertion might say. I would say A Treatise on Stars is interested in an idea. And in modes of intuitive thinking exercised through the poetic line. “What is the universe?” The book asks. How can someone understand the extent of an infinite concept like space if it has no discernible extent to it? What are the implications of living among an infinite universe? What spaces exist in outer space?
And while I would say, no matter the subject, Berssenbrugge always accomplishes a level of complexity that surprises me as a reader, I feel like the universe is already a complex subject. And so I’m surprised I would be surprised that poems about the universe heighten my sense about how complicated the universe is. Of course, it’s complicated. Of course, it’s already beyond my comprehension. But, like with Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, I make the mistake of thinking I have a grasp on what the universe is. I shouldn’t delude myself. I can’t comprehend what is literally infinite.
Morton’s focal concept in Hyperobjects is the anthropocene, which addresses humans’ long-term fascination with nature, assigning a limitlessness to what nature is capable of, or how humans are always thinking nature will renew itself. But there’s been a shift into the anthropocene. Which means that along with hitting the limits of nature, humans aren’t facing the fact that all the ways they’ve interacted with nature have fundamentally changed what nature is. And even as I state that here and acknolwedge it as fact, Morton argues I can’t possibly comprehend the scope of the anthropocene. Let alone the damage it is causing and will cause the planet. That’s the hyperobject.
And that’s my position for reading Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars. The universe is a hyperobject. Which doesn’t seem all that revelatory. I could argue that in Berssenbrugge’s book, Empathy, she makes empathy into a hyperobject. It could be argued the process of poetic complication tends towards hyperobjects. Reading Carl Phillip’s The Tether expands my understanding of betrayal and love. Reading Kelly Schirmann’s book The New World expands my understanding of withdrawing from the modern world. The hyperobjects are everywhere for reading poems! But when I read A Treatise on Stars mindful of Morton’s hyperobject I find the poetry is working with a subject matter that doesn’t need poetic complication. Since when did the universe need poetry to be complicated? And why does my deluded view of the universe, based mainly on elementary school classes that pointed to outer space and identified it as the universe, feel confounded by Berssenbrugge articulating all the ways outer space exists, or starlight travels. And yet, reading her book, I can feel my understanding of the universe expand.
I can feel, in fact, what it’s like to know what a hyperobject is with some certainty. A Treatise looks first at the night sky as an enormity. And it’s how she fills in that enormity so that the poems have that expansiveness, like her other work, but the poems are also unequal to that expansiveness. How is anyone supposed to write a poem about outer space? Or starlight? There is so much that people don’t know, and yet there is so much that these physical objects or facts mean to people’s lives.
And so thinking of the universe as a hyperobject, and A Treatise on Stars a consideration of what it means to expand intuitively on a hyperobject’s inconceivability, where does this go? Where is the meaning? And, as I’ve already mentioned, I find this reach for meaning a normal mechanic to Berssenbrugge’s books. I read it as her ambition as much as it’s her style. Like her expansiveness is expressive of truth, even if it’s not going to lead to truth. Like how Paul de Man or Harold Bloom might boil poems down to their trope-ishness, with the ultimate culmination of those tropes being truth. But then both critics eventually admit that poems are always ready to resist that kind of determination. It’s like there’s so much circuitousness in reading good poems. And so much mobius stripping complicating the circuit.
I don’t know. I just take such pleasure in the feeling I get while reading Berssenbrugge. She’s taking me somewhere. She doesn’t know where. And we’re not even going to arrive there. When Paul de Man reads Baudelaire’s poem, “Correspondance,” in “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” Baudelaire isn’t going to make an explicit statement of truth at the poem’s end. However, he keeps drawing comparisons of one thing to another, and, as de Man argues, these observations should signal to a reader Baudelaire’s intention to make a truth known. But the poem will not tell a truth. And it’s this disconnect between seeming intention to tell the truth and no truth actually told that makes a poem tantalizing to read. Think, then, of the long scientific investigation of the universe, and then of how audacious a book of poetry is to step in like it was going to reveal a truth that had eluded scientists. It’s the disconnect implicit to A Treatise on Stars!
It’s like defining “infinity.” By definition it’s larger than the largest thought I could have, but the definition provides a reasonable working knowledge of the concept. And maybe what Berssenbrugge’s book has done is point out the limits to my working knowledge of the universe. Or maybe I should recognize how inactive my working knowledge is, because I’m not often thinking about the universe. But then reading her poem “Scalar,” I visualize this very far-reaching space, or spaces where space exists, but I had only imagined “space” to exist in that blackness between planets.
Time also enfolds.
Your present state may not relate to what’s past, but to a more fundamental structure, like a pool of widening rings from a stone.
This moment cuts through the physical universe now and seems to hold all of space in itself.
What happens today may be altered by an event in the future, since space consists of ambiguous, foggy regions, where a particle may pass on your last day.
Awareness creates the duration you experience.
from “Scalar”
For me, the moment in this poem that feels so revelatory is the “space consists of ambiguous, foggy regions, where a particle may pass on your last day.” Leading up to this moment in the book, Berssenbrugge has been expanding what people should consider as part of the universe. Starlight. Makes sense. Waves that condense into particles. Have no clue. Too science-y. Holding the hand of someone you love. Hadn’t thought of that. “Describing a bird you see, which I did not see, is part of collective consciousness.” Well, if this “universe” concept is going to be universal, I guess so. And that’s my concession. Meaning, when I read A Treatise on Stars, I find myself conceding to Berssenbrugge constantly. I concede to her logic. And her logic is reforming the universe. And then suddenly something is proposed that surprisingly resonates with me, like “foggy regions” that exist in “space,” and a paricle passing through that space. And all these concessions that I had allowed Berssenbrugge in her elaboration of what the universe is explode with validity.
And yet, I’ve read enough Berssenbrugge to know that validity, that sensation that she might be leading to truth, is going to be a book-length process of truth-accretion that will not land on truth. Especially when the book is about the universe, and she’s going to tie all my previous understandings of “universe” with impressions that range from the emotive to the mystical to the outrageously speculative to the geometry of starlight.
And this is my argument for the hyperobjective in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars. What I thought I knew or could at least pretend I knew about something so vast is expanded upon in her book, and I get to experience my expanding knowledge as a revelation connected to a series of impressionable reveals that were stated throughout the book. It’s like the first time I saw the moon through a telescope, and I could hardly believe there was so much texture to the moon’s geography, and I was seeing that texture in this lens, and why would I have thought there wasn’t texture if the moon is big enough that people could actually walk on the moon! That sweep of realization is what I feel with Berssenbrugge’s book. And it’s through my reading experience that I feel it. And, well, reading is different than looking through a telescope. It involves more time and a different kind of attention. And maybe the corollary argument here involves the activity of reading and how someone would most likely realize the extent of a hyperobject only via reading. And what kind of style or intent is necessary to accomplish that larger knowing that simultaneously confounds and reinforces knowledge as it multiplies out?