Like I have been handed them all” (“May Morning”). The thoughts of the sleep-walker, and the trashman, and / the flower tender, and the / teenage couple at the mall. She seamlessly transitions from “one edge of the everything to the next,” and moving from border to border provides a means of access to consciousness: “The thoughts of the schoolgirl dragging / her backpack across the grass. The poet effectively juxtaposes an organically-composed repetition (“bread that rises and continues to rise”) and a futile habit (“the recital performed every night / little girl… in an empty audience”) an historical archetype of violence (the “solider / on a horse / bearing a skull on a pole”) and a personal admission of lingering regret (“I call your name, many / years too late”). “That Men Should Kill One Another” offers a perfect example. An aptly titled poem, “Perspective,” describes the structure of The Infinitesimals as a collection and the structure of individual poems as well: both are akin to “the pages / of the novel / scattered by the wind: the end / at the beginning / in the middle again.” This narrative form, or lack of form, deranges and rearranges sequence, and offers Kasischke a more “polished lens” through which to witness the varied aspects of her own life. At the very least, it means pressing the boundaries of linear temporality. To become a witness one provides formal evidence that some event transpired becoming a witness to everything, though, could mean providing evidence for what has transpired throughout all of time.
To account for microscopic details like “this ant at the picnic confused inside my sandwich” and macroscopic ones like the Creator who “snapped His fingers over the water” requires an almost omniscient, transcendent perspective that Kasischke herself become infinitesimal that she crawl “in through / eyes, depositing, then / leaving,” as she writes in “The Two Witnesses” that she become, as much as possible, a “witness / to everything.” The inclusion of the grand pronoun everything is significant. Such iterative imagery and structure divides a life into its infinitesimal parts, emphasizing the multitudinous array of sensations, memories, histories, and values that are gathered together in the formation of a single identity. Each of the book’s four sections are titled for a poem that’s located in a different section, and she uses the same title, “Beast of the Sea,” for four different poems, each in a separate section. Kasischke acknowledges, for instance, her long line of predecessors-mostly “dead white men” like “Pound / in Pisa in a cage” and “his friend Eliot / holding a fountain pen-as if to uplift their words so that they “step / shyly off the page”-and revises established symbols from the Western canon as well, invoking Dante’s Inferno but replacing Virgil with Plath.
0 kommentar(er)
