I began this book in the fall of 2002. Initially, it was entitled From
Shore to Shore. And it was so named when I traveled to Sage Hill in the
summer of 2005 to work on the manuscript with Nicole Brossard, who gave me the
courage to continue writing it. Winter of 2006, I workshopped the text in
Toronto with Betsy Warland who taught me how to breathe the line. From 2009
until pre-publication in 2012, I shared it with my generous and supportive
editors, Phil Hall, Jaclyn Piudik and Nick Drumbolis. And so this book became Form
of Forms. (“Acknowledgements”)
I’m intrigued by what Toronto writer and designer Mark Goldstein says he learned by Vancouver writer Betsy Warland in
the acknowledgements of his third trade poetry collection, Form of Forms
(Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012): “who taught me how to breathe the line.” The long
poem/book Form of Forms has a generous amount of breath-space, something
that few Canadian poets really understand how to use properly, but for notable
exceptions such as Warland, Sylvia Legris and the late bpNichol. Such an amount
of space to breathe in a poem is a rare quantity, and Goldstein’s poem
understands not only breath, but the space required to hold and release that
same breath.
there
is
a yearning
for that
which is
feared
a feeling
Stretching out into poem-sections—“Creation,”
“Preservation,” “Destruction” and “Quiescence”—Goldstein’s Form of Forms
is highly charged, and the poem composes its own breakdown before attempting to
re-assemble, through both form and content. Mark Goldstein, we learn, is
adopted, and attempting to reconcile exactly what that might mean for who he
is, who he was, and possibly, who he might have been. There are directions
pointed to of attempts to learn, many of which are thwarted through various
agencies, or provide simply not enough information, or the answers he may have
been seeking. Dislocation: the entire collection/poem is built upon it. The
topic of adoption, being the child of adoption and seeking out that empty space
is certainly an emotionally-loaded one, but the work itself is understated,
responding and recording, even sketching out a kind of calm.
start with a lie
“adoption is
natural”
(it goes
without
saying)
a sequence of telling
the simple
child
may believe
everyone
“adopted”
This is Goldstein’s third trade poetry
collection, after the volume After Rilke (BookThug, 2008) and Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (Toronto
ON: BookThug, 2010), and Form of Forms merely reconfirms Goldstein as a
poet of book-length projects. Composing his first trade collection through the
lens of Jack Spicer and Rilke, and his second through the lens of Paul Celan’s Atemwende,
both collections are thematically built, and move through the work of other poets,
both removing the author, and centring the author through a particular kind of
camouflage. In Form of Forms, Goldstein has composed a poem through the
lens of his own doubling, writing against that as-yet-undiscovered part of
himself, making it difficult to hide, but easy enough to distract, or even
self-create. There’s a passage by Jeanette Winterson I seem to be quoting
endlessly lately that seems to apply here as well:
Adopted children are self-invented
because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very
beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently,
like a bomb in the womb.
It’s almost as
though he has been moving further towards a comfort with a particular kind of
grounding through being groundless. As Goldstein wrote in the acknowledgments
of Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath: “One would like to feign accuracy
where there is none […]. In exhausting this hope, we need no longer circle the
poem seeking rest having accepted its groundlessness.” Form of Forms
struggles with the narrator’s sense of self (can we presume the narrator and
the author share word for word all?) but ends up creating that self through the
process. This is Goldstein not only composing his Form of Forms but as a
reformation, after too many questions have not yet been answered. In the end,
for both poem and the sense of the narrator’s self, structure must come from
within, the most heartbreaking and uplifting conclusion Mark Goldstein’s Form
of Form knows only too well.
