Backlist Bulletin #10: Lowly by Alan Felsenthal
I’ve been writing my dreams down a lot lately. They are often banal, so much so that I easily confuse them with old memories. The act of searching for detail within both shares a similar fogginess, and, though incomprehensible, I dwell inside the fogginess anyway. It’s the same experience I often find myself having when confronting something profound but obscured during introspective, meditative thought. What my attention latches onto in those moments is the abstract distance from the comprehension itself to something intensely insightful.
Though immeasurable, it is clear that certain scenarios result in shorter or longer distances from this profundity. When there is no space to discover this kind of thought, like when my mind is distracted or anxious, or if there is no openness to ambiguity within an idea, I feel very far away. However, in the recollection of a dream, specifically of moments in a dream in which I’m engaged with something surreal or wondrous, when I feel able to move freely between associations without worrying about whether I understand each one individually, I feel I am the closest to knowing something very deeply about myself, or humanity in general. Something about the soul. Being able to associate like this allows for more creative, free, adventurous thought, granting the mind access to uncharted territory, or someplace which had previously been obscured.
When I first read Lowly, (UDP, 2017) by Alan Felsenthal, my strongest association was with the act of associating itself. The movement in Lowly’s language is what drew me to turn each new page as I read. I couldn’t help but feel the experience as dreamlike. The way each poem guided me through its own logic and made me feel okay with whatever I happened to take from it reminded me of how it felt to move through a dream, where images may shift at a moments notice, where realities are interchangeable, even simultaneous, but somehow maintain enough logic so that a dreamer will continue to engage it.
For example, in the first nine lines of “The Mind’s Eloquent Hotel,” I’m presented with many images, flowing into one another in unexpected ways.
So I was told I sound like an 80-year-old.
Through my pen a curtained sea urchin
of Egypt reproduced the same hour
a tree blossomed on the Mediterranean shore.
In the olive tree a bird I invented stares
at anything not a worm as if the ocean.
My middle ear is melancholy and
some twink told me I’m sex negative
for not caring about some starlet. (56)
The speaker is told something about themselves, and henceforth I’m moved through a pen, towards Egypt, a bird on an olive tree on its Mediterranean shore, and then back inside the speaker’s middle ear. A thought occurs, an image occurs, and further thoughts return abruptly, disrupting the imagery in what feels like the middle of a sentence: “…a bird I invented stares / at anything not a worm as if the ocean.” I’m inclined to trust the path dug out through the verse because each thought unravels uniquely, and when one suddenly stops, the momentum of the poem pushes me onward, each time submerging me inside a new but equally compelling image.
These moments are intensified by the language of Lowly’s poems, which is marked by a fantastic attention to its own materiality. Take the start of the poem “Ensue:”
Regret cures desire
for immortality. I blink, the eye
amulet can’t.
If reliefs can, relieve.
I can’t relive
that week of funerals. Horizontal
tree, leaf urn, release my friend. (30)
An emotionally crushing stanza, but I’m guided through it as if on the river of a dream. It’s a strange experience to feel gently held while gliding across such a sad set of words. While one often forgets a dream upon waking, there is usually the awareness of something forgotten, and the speaker in “Ensue” feels they must lose even that to move on through grief.
The pacing of sonic arcs within the poem’s words (big rounded R-led vowel shapes throughout, “E’s” and “I’s” linked both visually and aurally) allow Felsenthal to expose the reader to fragmented pieces of imagery without resulting in abjection, the text’s materiality acting as a through line, something safe to hold onto. The word “leaf” in the last line of this stanza gestures back toward “relief,” the emotion as well as the type of sculpture, the word etymologically originating from the Latin relevare, “to raise, lighten.” These gestures are scattered plentifully, allowing the mind to ambiently replace subsequent words with similar ones just read, confront any potential new meaning, and have that meaning transform one’s previous interpretations. This process compounds as the poem introduces new similar words, and through this, a more holistic understanding is developed.
When researching Felsenthal’s writing, I came across an audio interview with him by Michael Silverblatt via his KCRW show Bookworm. Early in the interview, Felsenthal says of writing poetry:
“Sometimes the subject of the poem is more sacred than the poem, but by writing about it I can be in some relation to something larger than myself…the unknown, the untouchable, something immaterial like the soul.”
Silverblatt later brings up Felsenthal’s poem “The Problem with Rhyme,” and they return their conversation to the “unknown,” the thing mystics and quest-goers would search for, and which poets in poetry workshops have oft been forbidden to write about. After describing the focus of the poem, the confusion in understanding rhymes across languages, Silverblatt says “We start to understand that the unknowable occurs in language just as a matter of everyday conversation.”
I asked if she confused
the words I used
with other words she knew.
this lapse expanded
with each utterance
the time it takes for what
one means to make pure
sense to the other. (17)
This spoke to what I had already been thinking around. The soul seems to be somewhere in the confusion, the obscurity of understanding, as in the example above. In a poem like “Ensue,” the same lapse of understanding that occurs between words across languages is present within the visual tongue twister of Felsenthal’s word choice. In addition to developing the poem’s sonic buoyancy, collecting words together like relief, relieve, relive, release, etc. works to lengthen the distance from the eyes to the brain, slowing the parsing of language to attempt correct distinction between word meanings, and at the same time, shorting the distance between the associations between the words: seeing the word “relieve” and thinking “relive,” and vice versa. It makes possible those moments that one might face in a dream that they can’t quite understand. In my dream I find myself in a place I can identify as my childhood home, even though it looks nothing like said home. Things are blurred and clear at once, like knowing that something is forgotten, but not knowing what. These types of instances are what I think most about after waking and recalling my dreams, and they feel precisely like the poems in Lowly.
— Raphael Schnee
Lowly is available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here), through our Partner Bookstores (here), and from Small Press Distribution (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse from Wednesday, May 26 through Friday, May 28, 2021 are 50% off—use discount code ENSUE at checkout.
The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.
