Laynie Browne, Translation of the lilies back into lists

 

1. Can I look with stammering?
2. Do crossed-out items count? (“12.16.15”)
   
   

The latest from American poet, prose writer, teacher and editor Laynie Browne is the curiously-structured Translation of the lilies back into lists (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2022). A prolific writer and editor, author of fourteen collections of poems and four books of fiction—see my review of her poetry title You Envelop Me (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2017) here and my review of I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2012), edited by Browne, Caroline Bergvall, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, here—each of the poems in Browne’s Translation of the lilies back into lists are structured as lists, with titles set as dates. Built as a kind of lyric collage, each poem offers a sentence or thought per numbered line, offering some twenty, thirty or forty in sequence, allowing the accumulation and collage within and through each dated poem to offer a kind of diary.

Dedicated to the late Arkansas poet C.D. Wright (January 6, 1949 – January 12, 2016), the dating of the poems—which run from “12.16.15” sequentially to “05.23.16”—suggest that Browne’s friend and peer died mere weeks into the composition of the collection, something that wouldn’t help but shift the direction of the manuscript. “My inspiration is leaving.” Browne writes, as part “16” of the poem “01.13.16.1,” seeing a potential correlation that might be, on my part, entirely speculative. “I can’t accept it. But I guess if she can / accept it I must also accept it. I sat down in her car covered with garbage.” Hers is a conceptual framework anchored in the lyric, one focused entirely on the moment, on individual pinpoints; composed as a book of questions, openings and musings that refuse closure or conclusion, allowing each line a weight no more or no less than any other. And yet, the ebb and flow of her concrete lines allow for a particular kind of abstract, floating in and out of specific focus, simply moving along as the lyric allows.

12.31.15.2

1. The daily takes too much time.
2. Therefore I propose to waking every second, beginning each moment.
3. The new year is just an excuse for counting.
4. Numbers don’t keep anyone safe.
5. Ideas lurk in symbols and murders occur in figures.
6. The squirrel runs up a tree but we do not accuse him of squirrelishness.
7. Or, thievery or absentmindedness. Where is substance buried?
8. Shall I reply again, to your drawings?
9. I’m leaving habit on a high shelf.
10. Going for a walk in sound.

The adherence to titles-as-dates also link this collection to other poets over the years who have worked the structure of the “day book,” whether Robert Creeley, Jessica Smith [see my review of her latest here], Gil McElroy, Brenda Coultas [see my review of her latest here] or David Helwig. Through Browne, her “day book” exists as a kind of catch-all, where the form and purpose appear to exist as a kind of accumulation over any kind of lyric closure or particular narrative through-line, such as a journal-poem composed across a specific season, experience or travel, for example. “Sometimes I am against progress,” she writes, as part of “01.04.16,” “because I don’t like endings.” The line following, that writes: “Or write too many words, so as to lose my place.” As well, the poems are less sectioned than seemingly grouped, with an original collage by the author along with tag line to introduce each new stretch of date-poems. In many ways, Translation of the lilies back into lists is a long poem composed as a book-length suite, spotlighting the minutae of movement, moments and progress. If all narrative structure, as they say, an artificial construct, than perhaps Browne’s Translation of the lilies back into lists is a lyric closest to actual thinking.

            03.28.16

1.     1 won’t drink the published version of our meeting.

2.     Sublime subjects.

3.     Events in little red book.

4.     I’m solely sunk.

5.     A gallery of no substance, no content.

6.     Yet every glimmering absence remains.

7.     The idea was to become less an obstacle.

8.     Concepts kept me from realism.

9.     Malleable thought, confiscated hands.

10.  Presence is the nearness of breath.

11.  Crystallized light.

12.  I described a lack of manageable alphabets as follows:

13.  Why subsist on letters?

14.  How well can you think any else’s thoughts?