Julie Carr, UNDERSCORE

 

Sentences I’ve often said

The unmanifested face was my mother’s and I kissed it.
She was very near phobic so we kept things quiet.

With a pencil in my mouth I wrote on my tongue: loved, unloved.

I am hypocritically awake.

The latest from Denver poet Julie Carr is the collection UNDERSCORE (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2024), following a whole slew of titles, including Mead: An Epithalamion (University of Georgia Press, 2004), Equivocal (Alice James Books, 2007), 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2010; Omnidawn, 2023), Sarah-Of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House Press, 2010), Rag (Omnidawn, 2014) [see my review of such here], Think Tank (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2015) [see my review of such here], Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Real Life: An Installation (Oakland CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2018) [see my review of such here]. As the colophon offers on the collection, the collection “is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tender-at-times erotic at other times bitter—these poems explore the passions of friendship and love for the living and the dead.”

The poems hold both the tension of the pandemic-era lockdowns and an outreach, composing poems for an array of friends and friendships, including two important friends and mentors who died during the first year of Covid-19 pandemic lockdown: American dancer Nancy Stark Smith (1952-2020) and poet Jean Valentine (1934-2020), to whom the collection is dedicated. As the opening poem, “Was the world,” ends: “Cruising and wordless in its // breadth breaching river’s dusk // from out of the past of the // hills, it heads down // into dust, for and of it.” Underscored by a series of movements and music, Carr’s title emerges from Nancy Stark Smith’s “long-form dance improvisational structure,” one that has been “evolving since 1990 and is practiced all over the globe.” From Smith’s own website:

The Underscore is a vehicle for incorporating Contact Improvisation into a broader arena of improvisational dance practice; for developing greater ease dancing in spherical space—alone and with others; and for integrating kinesthetic and compositional concerns while improvising. It allows for a full spectrum of energetic and physical expressions, embodying a range of forms and changing states. Its practice is familiar yet unpredictable.

The practice—usually 3 to 4 hours in length—progresses through a broad range of dynamic states, including long periods of very small, private, and quiet internal activity and other times of higher energy and interactive dancing.

Held to that pandemic-era as a kind of lyric portrait of the author’s attentions during that period, the poems in UNDERSCORE are made up of a myriad of precise lyric threads, sharp and supple as glass; straight lines and statements, whether direct or indirect, that strike, sleek and overlap. “Out-gutted and cried-out,” her poem “100 days” begins, “I left the house for food. // I would, I thought, walk the alley / with a phone strapped to my forehead like a lamp. // To cough, to soak a pillow, to take it, to yearn for the hand of a mother, / not your mother, not anyone’s, an un-mother, an unknowable un-hand of an / un-mother to no one.” Carr composes birthday poems, letters and collaborative calls-and-response (including one I was part of, which resulted in a collaborative chapbook; her poems subsequently reworked for the sake of this current collection). UNDERSCORE works through revisions, declarations, dedications, contemplations and scraps, all held in pristine, rhythmic harmony. From the extended lyric “17 letters for Lisa at the start [3.12.20 – 4.30.20],” a poem that suggests a reference to her friend, the Austin, Texas-based poet Lisa Olstein, with whom she composed the collaborative call-and-response non-fiction collection, Climate (Essay Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]:

Because you need to rest, I speak to you where you cannot hear me. The kids are
curled or flat open: new and newish leaves. The pathogens in the house, the yeast.

There’s a structural echo here reminiscent of the carved lines of Equivocal (which, until this current collection, had been the collection of Carr’s I felt the deepest kinship with or connection to), a concordance and weave of lines and lyrics, held together as a kind of pastiche. “She said it’s not done with you yet. I agreed,” she writes, to open the prose poem “It,” “but had no way to approach it, to find out what it wanted from me that it had not yet got.” The poems in UNDERSCORE offer a halt, a halt, a hush; a carved, sharp sequence of accumulating lines set across an incredible rhythm and pacing that propels, pivots and swings, such as the poem “Apples,” dedicated “for Patti Siedman (1944-2022),” that includes:

I would not allow her to leave me is a confused object.

Like a dinner plate in a bookshelf, or a glass of coiled guitar strings.

I keep saying five, but there were six.

For how do we count the faces of the dead?