Backlist Bulletin #3: On Poems On
Before you get to Sandra Liu’s poems, you encounter the propulsive force of her language in the dangling preposition of this chapbook’s title: On Poems On what?
One would be hard-pressed to complete that phrase with a localized topic addressed by the poems. Liu’s curious eye roams widely over various unfoldings: mountains move, pools fill with water, human structures break down, hearts pump blood, and sentences take shape.
It’s really the first ‘on’ that disorients our entry into this volume — as if we are not about to encounter the poetry itself, but an analysis of someone else’s poems, somewhere else…a missing subtext. This is not the case; On Poems On appears to be its own urtext. Instead of pointing towards something beneath, the twinned prepositions situate the ‘poems’ in an unbounded set of relations, reaching outward in all directions. The preposition has been put to other uses.
In “Turtle,” Liu draws attention to the invisible connections holding the world together, tracing invisible lines between narrative, ecology, and architecture:
Every building in the city is held together with grout.
A forest is unified by an extended root system underground.
So, invisible lines are like the moments
between the pages when flipping drawings become animation.
Do events have to be part of a story.
How can two events be part of one story and also mean
two distinct stories. She’s disappointed.
(p. 6)
Michael Earl Craig wrote of Liu’s work: “the adjective linguistic comes to mind — or lexical, but never (not ever) wordy…” Lexical: “of or relating to words or the vocabulary of a language as distinguished from its grammar and construction” (from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary). These word-events do not have to be part of a story. In “How the Column Became a Kinked Tower <and vice versa>,” the associative play of the poem turns on the preposition ‘of:’
The skyscraper resembles nothing
less than a bolt of fish.
A bolt?
Of canvas
that’s what the sails were made of.
An unabashed display of design prowess.
<Jab> <Jab>
A tower of power.
(p. 7)
Each time ‘of’ recurs, it forms new attachments, building to a lexicon, rather than a story. As in the title, the preposition charts out relationships, but with an open-ended quality rather than the precision for which we usually use prepositions: on the surface, above water, through the poem, towards an end.
In “Xs,” the movement of the poem cascades forward, on the heels of half-articulated words:
…His is not an interest
In geological accuracy;
He the pedogenesis: all this sand
On her back, he has rendered every grain —
None exceeds 2 millimeters’ coarseness —
Moving — not in that stream of an hourglass —
Clockwise; a building block in his arti
Culation of desert. She is the ce
Lestial body beats at the rhythm
Of maracas gone to the flat steady
Buzz of cicadas; just discerns the move
Ment of the hands, the temporal objects.
Not yet recognizing her humming or
Knowing sound can only be created
With mass she thinks it is the changing spec
trum.
(p. 9)
In the tension and release of this poem, we feel that we’re being pulled through language, tripping over it as we go. The focus is on the “pedogenesis,” or the process of soil formation, rather than accurate knowledge. Instead of dwelling with the objects of the poem, her language follows their movements. Spatial and temporal shifts happen rapidly and unexpectedly, as Liu turns, reverses, and opens up new visual touchstones.
In two instances, the title of the poem rolls into the first line. In the last poem, the title “ha falls” continues “in the snow” (p. 26). About halfway through the book, the title poem appears, answering that second “on” with: “Horseshoes: rules.” (p. 16)
Are these poems on horseshoes and their rules? Is that one attempt at closure for the title phrase? The horseshoe is discussed as a symbol of luck (“Hang convexity up and all the good luck dumps out of a talisman”) and for its practical uses, with consideration for the methods used to attach shoes to hoofs. But this information is presented with an air of indifference: “I don’t know / What the difference is. / I assume there is a difference,” until finally, the interjection:
I mean, what are we talking about here.
Please don’t firstline any stanzas
With a grammatical faux pas (read:
Don’t ever end a sentence on a preposition)
; and what does it refer to, er, mean?
Further, rules will need fleshing out.
(p. 17)
It’s as if the speaker reaches through the poem, breaking the “fourth wall” of the page, relinquishing the pretense that these ideas have connections. What if the words hold their own, not as “part of a story”? She writes the rules she’s already broken, and we’re caught wondering what possible rules could “need fleshing out.”
Towards the end of On Poems On, a first-person narrator materializes. In the poem “I in river,” that figure is imbricated in the landscape, though distinct from it. The polluted river — hurt and hurting the human body — cannot quite merge with it.
Rain without acid, rain
With acid, rain;
Not like river
And i — i without
River, i; i with river,
I in river; river in me
And i am dead and not
Me, still not river.
(p. 24).
—Paige Parsons
The Backlist Bulletin is a weekly column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.
