Do you remember when every interesting poem was labeled “elliptical,” because it did this thing with juxtaposition or parataxis or dysjunction, and the subject matter or the poem’s voice was just spaced differently. And that made it more interesting. And God bless Stephanie Burt for setting those poems away from the LangPo and Narrative “in-fighting” by naming it something a little ambiguous and a little apt: “elliptical.” But also, God bless, Stephanie Burt, why was it for ten years everyone had to call every poem an “elliptical poem,” like there was no other way to signal how interesting they found the poem?
I don’t know if Kristen Steenbeeke’s poem “Elliptical” wants us to be thinking about Stephanie Burt’s coined term. Especially given the literal ellipses that exist at the end of each line (except the last). But there is something novel in the finality brought by each ellipsis. Like the statement in each line is dampened, just by using an ellipsis. It’s made curt. Or aphoristic. Like it’s farming out one of the ellipsis’s purposes and exploiting it for the poem. Oh, exploitative grammar! Lash this poem into submission!
Having just read Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle, I can’t help noting their similar gestures towards the poetic line. Both this poem by Steenbeeke and many of the poems in Chang’s book present a line that feels independent of the other lines in the poem. Or there’s not really going to be any half-senses read into enjambments, because there are none. And in neither Chang nor Steenbeeke do I feel encouraged to read for associative leaps that might bind poetic lines with an implicit, imaginative logic. At the same time, I don’t read the poems as an arbitrary collection of poetic lines. For Chang, each line seems to radiate from a type of speaker. A poetics of impulsiveness as I try to describe in my goodreads review. For Steenbeeke, I read the lines revolving around a state of mind, whether expressing how it feels or expressing how difficult it is to find the best medium to express it.
And what state of mind is that? I don’t think the poem is prepared to identify anything exactly. It’s like when you feel something, but it’s not entirely clear what you’re feeling. Like maybe you’re feeling anxious, or desperate, or alienated from friends. And you could name this feeling any of those, but what purpose would that serve when the emotion feels wrapped around something unnameable. And you’re more obsessed with its unnameability than compartmentalizing it with a label.
Enter the ellipsis. Occupying a silence at the end of each line. Maybe the silence is a trap. A sound closely aligned with obsession. A statement that feels like an “and” or an “or,” and that lends a magical paratactic quality to the poem. And maybe the “and” or “or” feel precarious when the ellipsis connects to a strange image, like a sign in the grocery store asking you Give to future babies, or the looping music on a DVD’s menu. So even as the poem revolves around what feels like a serious subject, there’s also this consideration of what from contemporary culture might be framed with a little more seriousness, because it can evoke the same state of mind. Like the dry humor stare on a mockumentary or the iPhone notification pulling someone away. Isn’t that kind of like an ellipsis?