All Signs
pointed to the same
confusion. On the second Monday the third person persevered. Tiny toes like
exclamation points, daffodils, or doubts. While the mistress of ceremonies
sobbed off the opportunity to introduce her own death. Chanting, mutinous, the
girls in our hearts danced on pins & needles, stalking expired goals.
Souled like dreaming dogs: backwards sever, forward fever. Naysayers said
their. Bed-layers lied. Mixed wintry standards dropped precipitously on the
embryonic future poking its head from the earth’s gut, while the spicy amongst
us inverted our convolutions to the nth
degree. Out-rhymed, intellect ceded the probabilistic navigation to instinct
& its moody henchmen. Lolling yet again on shaky ground, the middle
deliquesced to flab & folded.
As I published one of the poems from this manuscript in the “Tuesday poem” series at dusie, I was curious to see how
the full-length collection, New York City poet Susan Lewis’s latest, ZOOM (Washington DC: The Word Works,
2018), would turn out. Winner of the Washington Prize, and her tenth title and fourth full-length
poetry title to date, ZOOM is
constructed as a suite of stand-alone prose poem squares organized in three
sections, titled in reverse numerical order: “3rd,” “2nd”
and “1st.” Through fifty-six single-stanza poems, the title seems to
suggest the speed of her lyric, as each poem is produced in a sweeping,
stream-of-consciousness rush. Her poems each exist as a singular, ongoing
thought, contained in the lyric until it runs out of breath (I would be curious
to hear how she might read such aloud), but cohere as a unit through their
structural and tonal echoes, some of which I found a bit too similar, at times. Still,
the poems in ZOOM explore anxiety
around contemporary conditions, from a crumbling infrastructure, political
hackery and climate collapse, and the speed at which everything seems to be
closing in on a potential end. In a recent interview around the collection for The Friday Influence, conducted by José Angel Araguz, she responds:
The origins of this collection go back to my
years-long interest in the prose poem, combined with another interest of mine,
which happened to develop at the same time: in poetry as play – which is not,
in my mind, inconsistent with addressing dark or serious concerns. One of the
things I find interesting is how much play the prose poem allows! I’m drawn to
the paradox of this form: poetry that is not lineated, that is, does not advertise
itself as poetry. I love the tension this holds – the demand that the reader
look beyond the obvious, and engage with what might make poetry be poetry. (A
question I think is more important than any particular answer one might
suggest). Writing prose poems has only deepened my love for the form: the
concentrated punch of a discrete bloc of words floating in a white page; the
implication that substantial things come in small packages; the impression
these blocs give, of density and compression; the focused attention they ask of
the reader.
However, I did not set out, ab initio, to write a book-length
project, or suite. It was interesting: after writing some number of what I
thought of as free-standing poems, their common concerns started to become
apparent, and began guiding the development and features of the rest of the
poems in the book. Some of these preoccupations are packed into the title, with
its nod towards film technique, as well as velocity. Organized around the
substantive and aesthetic potency of point of view, the poems in Zoom borrow from film technique to
‘zoom in’ from the objective/long shot/third person, to the medium shot/second
person, to the subjective/close up/first person. All engage the ramifications
of subjectivity via bricolage, parataxis, polysemy, and compression. I think of
the collection as adding up to a kind of status report for our moment in this
world, in which the frame narrows along with the point of view, from the global
to the local to the individual. Especially concerned with the need for, and
failure of, empathy and decency, as well as with how we perceive and
communicate, these poems also amount to a progress report on the state of
language itself. The consensus among these poems is that we’re zooming – if not
to our doom, than to the brink, where we might still be able to stop ourselves
from irreparably despoiling our psyches and our planet.
