“A poem to forget one line after another,” by Andrew Dally

Reading through the latest issue of FENCE, Dally’s poem stands out. I like repetition, and how various a repetition-note can play out in a poem. This issue featured five of Dally’s poems, and in the others, his repetition serves as a kind of shift, where the poem moves from one frame of thinking to the next. In “Less than three repeating,” for instance, the “three-word bandname” shifts the poem from perfume-scented email (fun!) to pheromones in the natural world (what turns out to be fun!). In “A Poem to forget one line after the next,” all the repeating piles on top of each other, like they were collapsed cardboard boxes stacked and maybe rotting a little bit in the rain, as all these repeating lines mark a way of looking at a place, but not like crisp, clean lines observing the place, more like getting a familiar look of a familiar place, like one of those old Rand McNally maps that was paged through so often the pages have a grime that’s kind of gross and kind of comforting. And I don’t know if I would feel the same about this poem by Dally if I encountered it singly, without the other poems for context. The collection of poems shows the repetition for him operates in many lights.