Dream
Canary
Welcome to the hard edges
the curvier tough
of geranium lengths and tubes
a world figurative in prim
the beginning of earth
its equivalent arrow
or something
masters of evenings in hats
like rocks
Selected as part of the National Poetry Series by Ange Mlinko is Santa Cruz, California poet
Juliana Leslie’s second trade poetry collection, Green Is for World (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2012), a
follow-up to her More Radiant Signal
(Chicago IL: Letter Machine Editions, 2010). Throughout the collection, Leslie
continues her fascination with colour, with tight lyrics and the occasional
prose poem, and an articulation of the boiled-down essence of abstract things,
mapping the less-explained. As she writes in the piece “Poem with Moveable
Parts”: “democracy sends its flowers / into space / and space waits / to be
covered gently / by paper.” According to some of the press clippings that come
with the book, this collection corresponded with the beginnings of her study
into the long poem. The blog of the Poetry Foundation, Harriet, reposted an article on Leslie from the UC Humanities Forum at UCSC, that includes: “In 2010 Lettermachine published Leslie’s 83-page More Radiant Signal, a collection of
poems she worked on from 2001-2007. The poems in Green were completed in 2008-2011, the years she began her study of
the long poem. For Leslie, the divide between a critical study of a poem and
the way it can influence her creative work is blurry.” As Leslie includes in
her “Author Statement”:
In the process of
writing the longer works, I relied on source texts such as William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, and Norman O. Brown’s Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. These
texts describe and witness in various ways how the process of writing in a
lyric mode is difficult without acknowledging the modes of historical
consciousness and understanding that emerge in the twentieth century. As a
result of studying the long poem for my dissertation research, I have also
found it impossible not to write poetry without acknowledging these
transformations. As a result, the technique I used to capture these tensions
and pressures was collage, which is probably most notable in “The Age of
Parts.” While the rhetorical effects of collage usually produce contradictions
and juxtapositions across lines and convey instability and collapse, I am also
interested in collage as a kind of visionary or metamorphic medium. The
modernist practice of collage at its inception registered the contradictory
status of knowledge and the emergent status of poetry as a way of relating to
and understanding how the world is put together. I use this technique to speak
back to a world that seems to be persistently in ruins and an effort to show
how these ruins are generative and enabling.
Leslie’s poems have a lovely, meditative edge slipped in, composing poems that meander with
purpose, and a narrative “I” that floats in and out of authority. Sometimes the
“I” is as an anchor, and other times, simply a point in the centre for the poem
to swirl around. There are some intriguing moments, including her repetition of
the word “shipwreck” a couple of times throughout, or her centre that shifts
(as in the poem “Something about Finches”) into “An X in the center laughing.” Green Is for World does include some longer sequences, including “That Obscure
Coincidence of Feeling,” “Margaret Fuller,” “My Name Is Helen” and “The Age of
Parts,” that opens:
There were deeper colors
more flexible wool
I chorused beneath
I begged each zipper
in each Virginia
I said
I am sorry
No one smiles in a diver’s throat
No one looks out from the inside
and asks, am I calling
Is this the place
a pilot beacons?
My good intentions rain
in buckets from a dome
*
The shift from
smaller, individual poems into the occasional sequence is an interesting one,
and one that could easily have come with an increased confidence as much as her
dissertation research into the long poem. The intricate smallness of her poems don’t
necessarily shift, but in sequences, the smallness increases, allowing moments
to lengthen, and small moments to become smaller, and more formed, allowing the
sequence to hold into a shape far more complex than her previous structures had
allowed.
One of the finest
poems in the collection has to be the sequence “Margaret Fuller,” ostensibly a
poem on Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli otherwise known as “Margaret Fuller” (1810-1850),
an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the
American transcendentalism movement. Apart from the pure pleasure of language,
sound and movement through the ten-part sequence, the poem is a highlight simply
for the way Leslie incorporates ideas and abstracts as opposed to pure biographical
facts, as so many other poems on historical figures insist upon. If nothing
else in the entire work, Leslie should be applauded for such a magnificent
poem. The first section reads:
I am that stranger
walking through
kitchen dust and pots
Please pledge your vivid
and your terse
your bold and nervous
humble acts and propositions
You may call me a woman
of modest steam in her time
I am printed matter
I am almost a sonnet
and hitherto defended
