this boat wouldn’t survive
the Kootenai before or after the Libby damn
this boat tries not to
carry tremolite-actinolite from vermiculite mined
by Grace where Cobbler’s great granddaughter clerked
400 dead to date from asbestosis
this boat tries to
contain neither the shotgun nor the story of suicide
nor the non-viable evidence that it was not
murder
the Cobbler’s granddaughter
gone
this boat contains
whatnot and ecological thought all partial and mortal
oh lift
us up up up to soar (“there’s a hole, dear lyre”)
I’m
fascinated by
American poet Lori Anderson Moseman’s assemblage of text and
image, the poetry collection
DARN (Delete press, 2021).
DARN is composed
as a gathering of sentences, phrases and images patched and stitched and sewn
together into a kind of lyric quilt. There are elements here reminiscent of the
work of
Kemptville, Ontario poet Chris Turnbull, utilizing a blend of photograph
and text, although Turnbull’s work is more of a 3-D whole that includes text,
whereas Moseman works very much in the lyric mode, utilizing fragment and
photograph, as well as text, as structural elements of her lyric framework. I am
reminded, instead, of some of the visual stitchwork of
Erín Moure, photographs
of stitched pages, elements of
Toronto poet Kate Siklosi’s visual poems, or
even the collage-effects of the poems of
Susan Howe, the image of one line layering
atop another. Moseman’s work also includes echoes of
Perth, Ontario Phil Hall’s work, attuned to the precision of the physical lyric and the physical object,
offering a particular reverence, with each object and phrase resonating off
each other. “if infinitesimal text,” she writes, as part of the opening
section, “from ‘The Little Man from Nuremberg’ could each us tolerance //// perhaps
we have the tools we need
to
house
Syrians camped // in Jordan
waiting for world powers to broker a temporary peace // not pictured an
Egyptian Copt selling vintage santas on a seashore // flea market in California
to earn money to help refugees in Lebanon [.]” She writes of world events and
local gestures, the impact of each deeply felt upon the other. I like the way
her lyric simultaneously leans into the memoir, the essay and threads of
history, weaving multiple approaches together into a singular, quilted
structure of deeply-felt, and deeply-considered, offerings:
not pictured tattooed neighbor
slamming trashcan lids
“I survived the camps”
not pictured a friend
tribunal’s translator ushering
a shaking woman
out of the war crime
courtroom
the yet-to-be
regurgitated
rape rattling each bone
this is voice this is voice
not the tool that bore
the holes
not the tool that smoothed
the edge
not the thread beings
spun
the need for payment
the thirst under
adornment
The
structure of the book is segmented into sections, the first of which, “DARN,”
includes the extended structures “there’s a hole, dear lyre” and “there’s a
glitch, dear orbit,” and “OH WELL,” made up of the extended sequence “shoot.”
There is such a physicality to her lyric, one that weaves together sewing, text,
photographs and legal text, archives and story-excerpts and even patents. “darners
like pie tins like baskets carry
great distances / buffer zone,” she writes, in a couplet that is set on the
page to read two possible ways: “darners like pie tins like baskets / buffer
zone / carry great distances.” The ebbs and flow of DARN simultaneously
offer multiple ways of thinking, suggesting and being, and no answers, but an
invitation to explore more than one perspective.
Although
this is the first I’ve seen of her work, Moseman is the author of numerous
titles including Cultivating Excess (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1992), Persona
(Swank Books, 2003), Temporary Bunk (Swank Books, 2009), All Steel
(Flim Forum Press, 2012), Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), Light
Each Pause (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) and Y (The Operating System,
2019), as well as a collaboration with artist Karen Pava Randall, Full
Quiver, from Propolis Press. I’m fascinated by the ways in which history,
memoir, the archive and multiple other elements are folded into the lyric of DARN,
incorporating into the larger structure, and even the larger narrative, of the
book. Darn, she titles, playing off both the exclamation of frustration and the
stitching together. Through her lyric quilt, Moseman offers a collection on
what holds us, and what holds us together, and what might save, and even
redeem, us yet.
