Polyverse
Lee Ann Brown
publisher: Sun & Moon, 1999
isbn: 1-55713-290-9
price: $11.95
Brown occupies a unique place in the "scene" of younger American poets in that her poems appear something of a throwback to a set of classic bohemian values -- "free love," spontaneity, return-to-nature lyricism, the "voice," etc. -- that have somewhat disappeared, at least among serious poets, during the influx of such phenomenon as poststructuralism and Language writing.
In this sprawling first collection of poems, Brown explores -- with an engaging, faux innocent but candidly libidinal energy -- a wide variety of forms and subject matters, ranging from "Sestina Aylene," a buoyant love poem that is also mediation on the writing of verse, through the "Two By Fours" written in collaboration with the poet Jack Collom (reminiscent of the famous "Pull My Daisy" of Kerouac and Ginsburg), to the long unpunctuated prose meditation "A Long Sentence Distance," a tour-de-force of grammatical hijinks and tonal shifts which excessively catalogues Brown's loves of life.
Write the most beautiful sentence in the world and fill the whole page with its sinuous references to longhand inquisitive beauty despite always remembering you girlfriend suicided and world may not give you everything you ever wanted asking yourself should I grow up [...]
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starts "A Long Sentence," and continues at breakneck pace with breathless candor for six unpunctuated pages.
Play is the order of the day, here, and even the shortest poems combine humor and thoughtful insight with a need to keep afloat, such as "Poetry": "a condensed form / of food & time." "Dreams Listing" is a light exploration into surrealist autonomy: "A small purple bird is on its androgynous animal shelf. I ask it to step out onto my wet finger. It does and turns into a tiny man dressed in a grey suit, " while "To Jennifer M." is a girl-power anthem, one of many quasi-erotic poems in the collection:
Let's make out in the girl's room
Let me write you a wild heart [...]
But it couldn't surpass yours
beating so multivariously
in your left aligned margin.
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Split into three parts which are sometimes divided into sub-sections, Polyverse is an encyclopedic argument for poetry at every interstitial moment of life, including collaboration and imitation as a sort of cerebral sexual activity, with a sincerity and child-like greed that is addictive.
The first section, "Her Hearsay Book," has sections titled "a museme" -- process poems that use their titles as the pools of letters from which its words are formed -- and "CoLabs", poems written in collaboration with other authors, ranging from the well-known to the up-and-coming -- both "experimental" sections that don't fail to invite the reader in for the fun.
The second section "Velocity City," contains poems written in homage to popular singers, capturing both the energy and immediate satisfaction of rock music, and strongly contributes to the portrait of an ephemeral social scene that the book portrays.
Brown's polyglot, easy mastery of a variety of forms may be distracting to readers, who may suspect that she is not doing justice to her obvious talents as a writer by including so many spurious, in some cases entirely unrealized, poems, many of which seem like momentary jottings in a notebook that still seemed interesting a few days later.
The "Comfit" section, for example, while very charming as modern-day haikus, don't seem that distinguishable from similar poems from the 50's and 60's. "The A," for example, a sort of snapshot from a subway -- a type of poem Paul Blackburn, who died in 1980, excelled at -- runs in its entirety:
Young
Black
Exec
Books
on
his lap:
How to Get on the Fast Track
Nods
Exhausted
Somewhere around 125th.
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The weirdness of the concretization of the metaphor "the fast track" when it appears on a subway held by a dozing aspirant is amusing, but somehow the sentiment is either just not very exciting, or just hearken back too much to a sort of faux-zen, daily record sensibility that one has already seen.
A later untitled poem in the book, noted as being dedicated to Bruce Andrews and written in the matter of his "Mobius", sounds very much like a Lee Ann Brown poem but utilizes some of the constructivist spatialization and fragmentation of "Mobius" -- in other words, it is a complete departure from the earlier urban plein air notebook jotting of "The A," not to mention the various imitations of Emily Dickinson, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, and Gertrude Stein, or the poems that sound like Southern folk songs, that appear throughout the book.
The questions that are being asked, then, is whether a system of values is inherent in the form of the poem itself, whether the "form" of the poem can be truly divorced from the "content" (i.e. is taking a form invented by a Language poet and filling it classic "Brown" content subverting the form or the poet?), and most importantly, perhaps, whether a poet's "sincerity" is tied to the type of expression that is being used in a poem.
The surprising thing about this collection is that the reader rarely becomes suspicious that Brown is merely showing off her facility with formal variety, nor is she ever simply adopting a "persona" for the length of a poem that she later discards -- there is a complete continuity between the individual poems, even with those written with other writers. That she can write a Dickinsonian stanza in one poem, a New York School run-on the next, seems to fit in easily with the Brown project of simply doing everything, trying everything, and most importantly interfacing with as many people as possible.
Brown probably can't claim to have ever invented a form, and she is often quite honest in her work on her use of formal strictures or permissions as ways of getting in her work; "Taxi, Thank You," for examples, is quite obviously a list of taxi cab drivers with odd names like Ulysses Flaubert and Simon Ng, while "Demi-Queer Nation" starts off with an obvious allusion to Frank O'Hara and doesn't disappoint:
As I pinch my nipples and think of you
I'm sorry Frank O'Hara isn't as cute
as you expected...
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Like many of the most vital cultural products of its generation, Polyverse combines optimism, a collage "pop" sensibility, shameless narcissism and yet a tremendous Whitmanic generosity and gregarious social sensibility in a way rare in books of poetry today; it has justifiably gotten a fair amount of media attention, at least in comparison to other books published by Sun & Moon.
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