Rebecca Wolff, Slight Return

 

experiment in voice and character #3

 

and that’s a feeling you can only have alone

and that’s a feeling you can only have alone

 

 

and that’s a feeling you can only have alone

 

I’m going home to see my Jesus

That boy is dead and gone.

The latest from Hudson, New York poet, fiction writer, editor and FENCE magazine/Fence Books/The Constant Critic founder Rebecca Wolff is the poetry collection Slight Return (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2022). The author of four previous collections of poetry—Manderley (University of Illinois Press, 2001), Figment (W.W. Norton, 2004), The King (W.W. Norton, 2009) [see my review of such here] and One Morning—. (Wave Books, 2015) [see my review of such here]—she is also the author of “one novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose,” Wolff’s Slight Return suggests a cheeky reference to a potential “return,” possibly to writing itself, after having stepped back from spearheading the journal she founded back in 1998. Or, as she writes, to open the poem “Corrective: A Companion”: “The demands of art / upon my art [.]” Wolff is a sly commentator, so the possibility is simultaneously there and potentially not, perhaps entirely speculative through my own reading of her slant first-person narratives. Either way, the title poem, set to close the second of her six numbered sections, speaks of personal renewal and the possibility of renewed growth: “But / I have been given the opportunity to begin again / to start over, moving forwards // bereft, stripped bare, bereaved, the old // personality wasn’t working and nothing meant anything anymore [.]” A bit further on, she offers: “I’m going to have to look for something else / to give my life meaning // to give meaning to my life; as for continuing, one must // or is it possible to decide to continue no matter what, vessel?”

Wolff’s is a staggered, halted lyric, set entirely within the present moment, and propelled by fits and starts and meditative exposition. There is such a sense of pause and pacing, line and line-break, along with her examination of attempting to reorient both the self and the writing through the writing; reworking a foundation, and keeping to small: the short phrase and the deft turn, quick and precise. “And how I wield a cliché,” she writes, near the opening of “Peak Experience,” “tells you a lot about a person // appetite for husbands/ other women’s husbands // I can see other women’s husbands // a mile away. This one’s a grown man. // He can like my shit on Instagram.” Keeping to small to rebuild, slowly, surely and certainly. Where was she before, I might wonder, that her poems speak to such a transition, especially one that sits with such discomfort, steely-eyed and headstrong?

The two-page poem “Ant Life,” set near the end of the collection, is a master study in pacing, held and held and pivot, turn, as she writes: “A host // inviolate keeps / that beast in the castle / who hides // his yonder / ugliness // politely. When I have need // dig in / drink deep.” The poem steps, pauses, turns and steps in stunning ways, demanding the eye take note of a rhythm etched in Wolff’s unique lyric stone. This is a powerful and subtle collection, always holding back a bit, to keep the line from breaking entirely apart. There are ways in which this collection exists as an announcement of itself, writing through and about change from the inside; of an attempt to write through a new series of perspectives, and ways of building, searching and rebuilding. “I need to get home,” she writes, to close the poem “Hallowe’en,” “lie down, close my eyes. When I try to see / myself with love through someone who loves me’s eyes / it makes me weep. So lit, / unchained and undead.” Or, as the final half of the poem “rock heart” writes:

as with this forge Emily Dickinson spoke of there is no
    distinction to be made here

between the literal and the symbolic, it’s all one all the time
    all one here now in your head and mine

you took my heart I’ll never stop saying it
it’s on your property with you

Rebecca Wolff, One Morning—.

One thing I’m not doing in my poems: reporting

on anything that really happened.

When I say I’m from New York, Glaswegians say, “Oh, I love Woody Allen.” They cannot construe how large a state can be. I just happen to actually be from Manhattan. (“The Ungovernable”)

Albany, New York poet, editor and publisher Rebecca Wolff’s fourth poetry collection is One Morning—. (Wave Books, 2015), following her collections Manderley (University of Illinois Press, 2001), Figment (W.W. Norton, 2004) and The King (W.W. Norton, 2009). There seems something more open, and less constrained, in the poems of this collection—something to do with the breath—compared to the poems in her prior collection, a collection of poems on becoming and being a mother. Perhaps “constrained” isn’t the right word—but there is certainly something about the poems in this collection that is more open somehow, in the movement of line and breath. There is something less formal and more conversational, yet no less meticulously formed. As the poem “Palisades” opens: “Interred in region // nothing super global in this locale // where I live, where I / bought – // what would I tell you about it if I could?”

Structured in six untitled sections, the poems in One Morning—. are engaged with structures and politics, and governing bodies and power (both real and perceived), delighting in odd flashes of wry humour combined with a lack of patience for nonsense. Her poems sever and subvert, shift and carve through the lyric without missing a beat or a step, composed without a wasted word or gesture. As she writes in the poem “Fronting”: “And I trust people // to make good choices / so I don’t have to impale them // on the tines of my pitchfork.”

Irony is the salt of life

(I’d trade it in for gold)

Portaging takes a lot of time

and that’s how we are made

A morning’s worth of contretemps

Japan has bigger tides

In sharing one finds extra peace

and this is what I’ll say:

“Oh, boil the cabbage down, girls”

I’m on my way to work

At work I’ll find my head’s in use

More mountainsides en route

In view the smallest leaf, you know

measured by a glyph

your daughter’s face

my daughter’s face

I really mean my daughter’s face.

At one hundred and forty pages, One Morning—. has considerable weight, and the poems are incredibly sharp. There is something curious about the way Wolff utilizes “confession,” such as the poem/section “The Curious Life / and Mysterious Death / of Peter J. Perry.” She utilizes personal information to explore a series of interrogations, and even acknowledgments, to incredible degree, even as the fact of the information being factual as hers, or anyone elses (there is the suggestion that the narrator is related to Peter J. Perry, for example), becoming entirely beside the point. Her poems confess, and yet, remain private; what she gives away is far more valuable and far less tangible to track than whether or not a particular morsel of information really happened, and in the ways in which she informs. She is pointedly skilled at knowing exactly how and what to impart, and the reasons why, allowing her poems an intimacy that is deeply felt, without the distraction of the extraneous.

feeling it at the gas pump

fumes unchained

– I will report you –

squad car drove up

my tailpipe

called my friend

in

to see what he could do for us. (“Mad as Hell/Not Going to Take It”)

FENCE magazine #28

In any other dungeon, I’d try

pirate and native, landlord and tenant,

anything but this—

master and servant’s too Depeche Mode.

That’s easy, the eighties’ garishness.

Let’s be Gorean instead,

feudalism’s kink—

my tyrant, the castle’s outlaw

in your sword-grown sovereignty.

I’ll carry the homestone, polish the filigree.

I enjoy my womanly things.

In the glebe where I sow the land

I’ll harvest your name from the wind.

I accept these parameters.

You’ve kept me famished for weeks. (Angelo Nikolopoulos, “OBSCENELY YOURS”)

Recently, FENCE #28 (winter 2013-14) appeared in my mailbox from just south of the border. One of my favourite American literary journals (and, increasingly, American literary publishers), I’ve found something interesting in pretty much every issue of the biannual FENCE I’ve seen over the past half-decade or so (someday I’ll manage to even get my hands on some back issues). Edited by American poet Rebecca Wolff, as well as an extensive editorial team, this issue also includes Rick Moody as a guest-fiction editor, selecting a small section of short fiction, and even a short “staff fiction” section, which is pretty engaging. Given their editorial mandate of not considering the work of those published in each issue for two following years, I like very much that the journal is forced to be more open, publishing work by a number of writers I’ve not yet had the pleasure of being aware of. This issue, for example, includes new works by Cement Pond, L.L.C., Betsy Andrews, Amanda Goldblatt, Broc Russell, Matt Reeck, Melissa Broder, Kent Leatham, Zachary Lazar and Carol LaHines. Of the work in the new issue, it’s hard not to be immediate struck and charmed by Dorothy Albertini’s short “FOR WORMS” (in the “staff fiction” section), a piece that could easily work as a prose-poem as well. Her story opens:

Found at the train tracks. A worm of indescribable length. We had a feeling he would be lost if we took him with us, so we left him there, though it was the train tracks, which seemed dangerous. At least loud. But what were we to do? We have learned so many lessons about disruption. We were sure that this, for once, was the only thing, the right thing, the good thing, to do.

Another highlight of the issue is Raphael Rubinstein’s “THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBOARD.” An obvious nod (for those few who might not know) to the Wallace Stevens poem, there have been dozens, if not hundreds of poems composed since that play with the idea (including Stephanie Bolster, and even Robert Kroetsch, who wrote of a lemon), there is something about the Rubenstein poem that manages to make the idea fresh, despite the onslaught of similar pieces. Rubinstein’s poem includes:

III

A letter erased, purloined,

but insistently legible;

the “monosyllabic word meaning esse,”

which I (don’t) write here

on my very own lackboard.

IV

man + woman = 1

man + woman + blackboard = 1

man + woman + blackboard + poem = 13

V

I do not know which to prefer,

the beauty of transgression

or the beauty of quietude,

the screech of chalk writing

or just after.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is how the “other” section (after sections “poems” and “fiction”) have been entirely that, running the gamut from straight essays to interviews to features from conferences and almost anything else you can pretty much think of. One of the first issues I read included a magnificent interview with American poet Alice Notley, and it open the presumption that the journal would feature equivalently meaty interviews in every issue (which it doesn’t). Despite the quality and breadth of the work each issue I’ve seen includes, is it wrong for me to be even slightly disappointed?

“YOU CANNOT LIGHT A GHOST ON FIRE”

Eliot the burning house

addresses ash, snorts its

recrudescence: two boughs

collapse in, ignite “the trunk”

his fire / pal fire / not my

fire. on my eyes the irony

of sweat—in the dream

i have i walk seven me’s

through him. at his heart

there is a choice: burn

now or forever eventually.

i give in two to those dooms

and one to the third of sub

text. two to his eyes, one

mouth, one nose. for an

hour i sell myself to him

i watch films of myself

dying—i hope one day

his god will talk to me

through him, his fire

his hungry mouth, each doe

i feed like a holy sponge.

he will say: wake up, and

finally i will not. (Lou Lamanna)