Elizabeth Robinson, Excursive

 

On January 1
                                    for Norma Cole

Time is light,

that’s all. Her tongue

a version, a map

version, where star maps

are always off-history whether

translating light

from a far galaxy or a local

starlet. “Oh!”

she said, a figure of herself,

“Yes.” Whereupon the light

threw itself down and pierced

her tongue, where it remained

like a stud, that she licked against

her teeth as she spoke.

The latest from Bay Area poet and editor Elizabeth Robinson [see the recent festschrift I produced on her work here] is Excursive (New York NY: Roof Books, 2023). Excursive follows an array of Robinson’s chapbooks and full-length collections, including blue heron (Center for Literary Publishing, 2013) [see my review of such here], On Ghosts (Solid Objects, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Rumor (Free Verse Editions, Parlor Press, 2018) [see my review of such here]. Subtitled “Essays [Partial & Incomplete],” with addendum “(on Abstraction, Entity, Experience, Impression, Oddity, Utterance, &c.),” the seventy-seven poems in Excursion include titles such as “On Beauty,” “On Depression,” “On Epiphanies,” “On Happiness” and “On Mortality.” Robinson has been playing the form of “On _____” for a while now, threading through multiple of her published full-length collections, allowing the structure as a kind of linked “catch-all” across her poetic. The “On ____” is reminiscent of Anne Carson’s infamous collection Short Talks (London ON: Brick Books, 1992), with each Carson prose poem in the collection titled “Short talk on _____,” but the ongoingness across multiple collections that Robinson employs is comparable to Ontario poet Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days” sequence, one that has extended through the entire length and breadth of his own publishing history across more than three decades. “While the body,” Robinson writes, as part of the extended “On [a theory of] Resolution,” “why, it // remains aligned to its // thirst. You know this. // You deny this. The theory // of resolution is meteorological / and not eternal.”

The poems are also set alphabetically by titled subject, throwing off the collection’s easy narrative or thematic sequence, allowing the collage of her lyric to hold the collection together, akin to a fine tapestry. Throughout, she utilizes her declared subject-title as a kind of jumping-off point into far-flung possibilities: choosing at times the specificity of her declared subject, but refusing to be held or limited by it. “To her who assumes / this identity,” she writes, to close the poem “On Numbness,” “a citizen // befuddled by destination, / it’s not possible / to have arrived here from anywhere, // not possible to assimilate to new fluency.” In many ways, this is a book about the body and how the body reacts, moving from physical to physiological reaction, action and purpose, allowing the echoes of references and sentences to form a coherence that a more straightforward narrative might never allow. “I was a lung,” she writes, to end the poem “On Extinctions,” “a hardening lobe, while // the moving air curved as though an ivory horn // and lay still.” She writes out the body, using her titles as markers, and at times, anchors, providing a weight that occasionally prevents her lyrics from floating away entirely. At times, it seems she works from specifics into a rippling beyond the limitations of how each poem begins, as though the title is the pebble dropped into the pond, and the poem is the rippling effect on the water. She writes the body, and even the betrayal of the body, one that echoes across a prior period of illness, perhaps; and there is almost something of being only able to write of something directly by coming at it from the side. “Time was a tumor in its very own landmass.” she writes, to  begin the poem “On Krakatoa,” “It couldn’t have been more intrepid.”