Jane Huffman, Public Abstract

 

I had a bout
Of vertigo
Inside my chest

A clocking
From within

Was bested
By the worst
Of me again

As if my body
Shook off
All its walls

And doors

And reeled
The outside in (“[I had a bout]”)

I’d been curious for a while about University of Denver doctoral student and poet Jane Huffman’s debut full-length poetry collection, Public Abstract (Philadelphia PA: The American Poetry Review, 2023), a collection of razer-sharp lyrics that experiment with form, and ride across a complicated, ongoing grief. “My body through / The world,” she writes, as part of the poem “[I’ve failed already],” “Like a particle / Of sand // That moves / Forever toward // The sphere / Where it began [.]” She writes of her brother’s addiction as a death that occurs not all at once but in inches, miles, leagues; something ongoing, and her grief as well. “I’ve mourned my living / brother many years.” she writes, to open the second poem of the sequence “Three Odes,” “This is the heavy / table of my work. I lug / the heavy table / of my work around / all day so I am never rid / of it. I am never rid / of it – the work / that carries me like I’m / a tired child sleeping / in its arms. I sleep in / my brother’s arms.” She writes of her brother, and of her own unspecified challenges with illness, “a bout / Of something / Undefined,” she writes, as part of “[I had a bout],” “Another rattle / In the lung [.]” Composing odes, sestinas, fragments, haibun, variations, sonnets and further revisions, providing an absolute and delicate sharpness and ease that make her lines that much more remarkable, quietly emblazed across each page. As her poem “Six Revisions” opens:

The doctor holds my chest against the discus, listens like the fish
below the ice listens to the fisherman. “Medicine,” he says, “is
not an exact science.”

He listens like the ice fisherman listens to the fish. I breathe into
a nebulizer and think about translation – inexact art. A fine,
particulate mist.

The collection as a whole circles moments such as these, offering an argument of lyric form and structure as a scaffolding to sharpen lyric thought. In certain ways, these poems circle, even outline, this particular sense of loss so completely as to form that absence into shape. Referencing Huffman’s poem, “Three Odes,” as part of her introduction, Dana Levin writes that:

            Huffman’s variation on the duplex, a form invented by poet Jericho Brown, comprises the second section of this poem and ends, “My brother’s / death is long, and heavy / as a year. I’ve mourned / my living brother all my life.” Such declarations of naked feeling are rare in this collection; when they appear, they break the heart, and one can feel a why and wage in Huffman’s obsessive focus on form: it (s)mothers pain, the source from which he book’s formal feelings come.

It is interesting, Levin’s simultaneous suggestion of smothering and mothering pain, where I would think Huffman’s formal elements allow such pain a direction, even a purpose; allow the pain a structure, without which it might otherwise flail about. Whether or not this is splitting hairs, or reiterating, I’ll leave up to you. Or, as Huffman’s poem, “Coda,” offers, brilliantly:

Form implies the opposite of form:
a globule, a formlessness, a letting go.
(Like fear implies the opposite of fear:
relief, approximation of the human
form built in packing snow.)

And yet, the opposite of form (relief
from form) implies the opposite relief:
from formlessness. Packing snow
made globular when thrown is blown
back to the ether of the whole: like grief.