Their division into tribes. Their worship of
Jehovah. Their notion of a theocracy. Their belief in the ministration of
angels. Their language and dialects. Their manner of counting time. Their prophets
and high priests. Their festivals, fasts, and religious rites. Their daily
sacrifice. Their ablutions and anointings. Their laws of uncleanness. Their abstinence
from unclean things. Their marriages, divorces, and punishments of adultery. Their
several punishments. Their cities of refuge. Their purification and preparatory
ceremonies. Their ornaments. Their manner of curing the sick. Their burial of
their dead. Their mourning for their dead. Their raising seed to a deceased
brother. Their change of names adapted to their circumstances and times. Their own
traditions.
I’m
late to the game, but fascinated by Renee Angle’s hybrid debut, WoO (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), a
book that moves through the legacy, myths and half-truths of Joseph Smith, founder
of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. Combining blends of the outer
edges of the prose poem, Angle’s WoO writes
and overwrites histories, stories and mythologies, opening the first paragraph
of the book’s “PREFACE” with:
I am the bastard great-great-great grandchild
of Joseph Smith, in search of a textline, not a bloodline. I affirm the manner
in which durability and transience are imposed upon the world of objects. My dedication
is no longer comprised of belief, redemption, conversation, fact. I dream of
becoming anonymous, the ELECTRIC LIBRARY set past and future.
The
book blends facts and fiction, prose and poem in such a way that it does emerge
as an entirely separate animal, composing a composition on composing a book on,
around and through Joseph Smith, and the difficult line that often exists
between science and faith: “What happens when you hand your relics over to
science, and, what if science doesn’t want your saints?”
In an interview with Angle on Under a Warm Green Linden (posted July 21, 2016), interviewer Christopher Nelson begins
with the acknowledgment that the title is “an abbreviation of Werke ohne Opuszahl, which you explain
is ‘used to denote musical compositions surviving only as fragments.’”
Nelson: Because Joseph Smith,
the founder of the Mormon church, is central to WoO, reading it as a seduction—a kind of persuasion—was meaningful
for me. But we will talk more about Joseph Smith later.
One of the things I love about WoO is its formal variety, how many
different shapes the poems and prose take on the page. There’s prose poetry,
rhyming couplets, a question-and-answer motif, and these lovely little “box
poems,” where the text is a two-inch square. What were your intentions in
presenting your ideas in so many varieties, and how did you know which forms to
use for any given part?
Angle: A lot of WoO is collage work, so some of the
forms suggested themselves because of the methods I was using to generate them.
The rhyming couplets, for example, are found pieces that I collaged together
using a rhyme scheme as a constraint. To choose the texts for WoO, I looked at books that scholars
think Joseph Smith had in his library or books he read over the course of his
life. All of the little box poems were translations that I made using a Hebrew
grammar primer Joseph Smith used to learn Hebrew to read The Bible. And some of the poems were generated as my own
meditations on certain subjects, and those take a looser, prose-poem form.
I am very interested in formal range, as a
device. I’m reminded of seeing a retrospective of Gerhard Richter when I was in
graduate school. His work was very meaningful for me, and I was struck by these
abstract expressionist paintings that he paired with photorealistic portraits
of his daughter and others. So I had that in mind as something that I was
aiming for.
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