by
Jefferson Hansen
In
the poem “found on page 78” Kasimor explicitly mentions story:
found on page 78
the story has
a toothache when
they looked at the corners
finding bruises
blue
escapes
a name wandering
skeleton
covered with skin
The story is “found” on a
seemingly random page in a magazine or book, probably in regard to a
photograph. This is one of the few places where Kasimor addresses what she’s up
to, and even here it is elliptical. For her, stories happen everywhere, are
tied together with loose, but exact, strings in the complexity of experience.
We don’t know precisely what is going on; bits of insight and guess are as far
as we can go. These poems hover in the moments before provisional discernment,
before a pattern can be identified or an insight had. They hover in ambiguity,
but not ambivalence. They are sure footed, well crafted, even exacting. They
have a sheen. So Kasimor writes of the unfinished, the raw, the prior to in,
paradoxically, careful and fully formed language.
In
this she is similar to William Carlos Williams, with one crucial difference. In
a poem such as “The Red Wheelbarrow” Williams gives us both an abstract
statement—“so much depends/upon”—and a patterned series of images—wheelbarrow,
rain water, chickens—that form and comment on a definite scene. While the implications of the poem are vast,
we have a clear sense of where we are, and we have directions for abstracting
an interpretation of it.
Kasimor
inhabits a place in consciousness at a more primal level than that in “The Red
Wheelbarrow.” (I am making a simple distinction, not a claim for quality or
value.) She implies in “found on page 78” that so much happens on page 78
without explicitly telling us. She lets her attentions show what matters to
her, but she rarely, if ever, offers something like a unifying abstraction. It
is very difficult to tell what this or any of her poems is about. Indeed, they seem to be
about their own visual enactment, the etching of moments into form on the page.
It is as if stories and meanings inhabit all places, as if we are almost
overwhelmed by what to make of it, that we can only make something of the
small, the unfinished, the pregnant. All
we have are small moments, and the making of these particulars into an
abstraction is, to a degree, a violence to their multiplicity and
particularity. Moments, and the inherent drama within them, do not disclose
their secrets, but only flints and specks, the sense that something profound
and meaningful is at stake, but exactly what is beyond our ability to
comprehend.
The
buried narratives occur because to Williams’ “so much depends/upon” Kasimor
responds with, “Oh, yes, and so much also depends upon this and this and that
and that, too.” Experience is replete with meaning, story, and drama, and
Kasimor celebrates this complexity in poetry that moves and breathes into and
with the layers and multiples and ambiguities of language:
another Pattern
rules the
other
and secret
Escapes The
mind
making itself
up But the mess
lost a chicken (59)
up But the mess
lost a chicken (59)
Here, the relationship between the
particular—“a chicken”—and the abstract—“Pattern,” “mind”—is not even hinted
at. Kasimor places the abstract and concrete on the same level. They are both,
after all, moments of attention, places where the mind perches for a time,
before moving on.
Lorine
Niedecker and Barbara Guest are important poets for Kasimor. She says so in an
afterword to her 2008 collection silk
string arias (BlazeVox). Both these poets make a similar move on Williams
as does Kasimor. All three poets write from a more primal place than does
Williams in “The Red Wheelbarrow.” But Kasimor moves even further back than
either Guest or Niedecker, into a terrain that risks falling into a mere list
of words and particulars. (See “organic fairy tale” on page 66.) But I’m
willing to go with her, up to the very point of incomprehensibility, because
of the formal process she creates. Indeed, it is visual form that lends
coherence to this poetry. In conversation, Kasimor emphasized to me that her
poems are not scores for reading, but visual traces that mark the movement of a
mind through a field of meanings.
Especially
innovative is Kasimor’s use of spacing and capitalization. Some poems, such as
the one quoted above, use intralineal spaces to separate words—and sometimes
even letters. She believes that such spacing, on a visual level, creates
alternate meanings, i.e. two words placed next to each other mean differently
than the same two words placed apart. She does similar things with
capitalization:
SOIL’S
blood in the wheat & corn
Lying
in uneven RowS
dangles A reproduction painted LARGE (15)
dangles A reproduction painted LARGE (15)
The capital letters are not
intended to encourage sonic emphasis. Rather, they mark the materiality of
language, a place where the reader is forced to slow down, to ponder, to make
something of what is made on the page. While Kasimor hardly adheres to the
notion that every reader is free to make whatever she wants of her poetry, she
clearly uses language’s materiality to invite openings and movement for readers
that can be highly idiosyncratic. At her most extreme, the visual experiments approach
the incomprehensible:
a
m ongsh ado w liv e sand cr acke dfe e tli ke
mu
don t hi stilt in gear tho f ho l ywa tersha (46)
In the three poems like this, in
which Kasimor leaves the buried narratives behind in favor of sheer language
play, Kasimor puts spaces between the letters of single words and often
collapses the space between words. The quotation above, spaced conventionally,
reads “among shadow lives and cracked feet like mud on this tilt in gear th of
holy water shapes.” Kasimor makes us work for this, and once we get there she
offers no easy conclusion. Indeed, these poems are about the experience of
working through the reordering of language.
And
this gets at the heart of Kasimor’s process.
This is a poetry of profound and celebratory skepticism. If language
can’t add up to legitimate insight and abstraction, what can it do? It can hint
and veer, touch on and then glance away, build and then diminish. We live amid
meanings, flecks and flints of insight, and possibility. And we can be witty.
For instance, “found on page 78” celebrates our silliness, the way we are such
small beings reaching for grandiosity, for identifying the “so much” that
“depends.” And it sees the humor in how a photograph, most likely, on a
nondescript page can send us reeling into wonder, a wonder that is not singular
but multiple, full of starts and stops, perchings and flights, ending where it
begins but so much richer for the process, the means of getting it down. Her
faith, it seems to me, is not in the finding out, but in the unfurling care of
process, of celebrating the wit and accidents that are the warp and woof of
human life.
The
book ends “pigeons relax/when nothing is personal” (67). This is neither
personification nor surrealism, though it contains a bit of both. Rather, it is
constructivism, the making of something new amid the meanings we live among. It
is akin to Wallace Stevens’ belief in the power of imagination. The difference
is that Kasimor never directly addresses an entity as vast as imagination. I
don’t think it’s in her to do so. She is too focused on the unacknowledged
world to legislate it into anything other than its many, many dramas. It is
appropriate that she end here, in a witty line that celebrates the way we make
in language and in life. Our constructs are tentative, emerging, dissolving—and
that is okay.
__________________________
Kasimor will be reading from this book on Thursday, November 6 in Minneapolis. See this Facebook page for more information.
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