Barbara Guest, Now Jill Magi in brevi

by

Robert Mueller

 

Shearsman Books, which seems to spe­cial­ize in poets on their way, recently brought out a fine col­lec­tion of poetry by Jill Magi, her sec­ond full vol­ume, titled Torchwood. This col­lec­tion is assem­bled unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally, even for a time when in poetry books great atten­tion is paid to the pre­sen­ta­tion. For Magi, it started with the patch­work of his­tor­i­cal and per­sonal doc­u­men­ta­tion of her ear­lier vol­ume Threads (Futurepoem, 2007), and is extended here in a sequenc­ing and a selec­tion that are beau­ti­fully real­ized. The poet nur­tures a light touch, some­times a homey touch, and almost always the quick and sure cal­i­bra­tion. Challenging and dis­ci­plined, her tech­niques because of this superb touch freely allow the open space she seeks, while the vari­ety of styles and forms deliv­ers panache with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the ele­gance of each. All in a parade of parts kept sep­a­rate and dis­tinct, bring­ing to mind a col­lage that has been some­how unglued and spread out color by color and part by part along the poet’s writ­ing desk.

There is thus some­thing dif­fer­ent and imma­nent, yet stud­ied and tact­ful, that I like in Torchwood. I can­not quite mean that it is unglued, because then it would no longer be “col­lage,” sensu strictu, even though it feels like it as I take it one by one through the assort­ment of ideas and pro­jec­tions. Yet it has that tex­ture, that quiet­ness even, as if the parts do not com­pete for them­selves to become the whole, as if the writ­ing were being car­ried out under the terms of a non-​​aggression pact.

Also spe­cial in Torchwood is the lyri­cal pre­ci­sion that cre­ates this or that moment of the “col­lage.” One such moment, titled “Nival,” sur­pris­ingly recalls the later poetry of Barbara Guest. This poem or sec­tion fea­tures a well-​​tempoed series of sub­sec­tions, two to a page in 11 pages, plus one extra, each real­iz­ing a shape on its half-​​sheet of space. That sort of mea­sur­ing might be unlike Guest, but the shapes inside their bound­aries do have that look. The semi-​​clauses and the excerpted crisp phras­ings link in open punc­tu­a­tion and in a vari­a­tion of place­ments able to shift to the mid­dle and over to the right side or to add room by extra descents. Does Jill Magi with her knack for under­stated rid­dling enlist an expec­tant reader? Hoping for intrigue, I pounced on what I remem­ber to be so com­pelling in Guest — a blend of spa­tial­ity and charge, an open prin­ci­pled quan­tum effect.

Thus with the newer poet I notice once again the lovely lay­outs. And once again I wel­come this license, how­ever lim­ited to the design, and the play­ground fun of read­ing imag­i­na­tively by knock­ing around in the text, or by stop­ping, quick and square, at its very choic­est points. To be sure, Magi goes no far­ther than to toy with open, cross-​​angled spac­ings as she tucks them into her frames. The expe­ri­ence is close enough, how­ever, to nav­i­gat­ing the pages of Guest that I won­der what to make of it. Under what sce­nario could this lark into adven­tur­ous spa­tial­ity that holds place while the other pan­els in the “col­lage” await their turn qual­ify Magi as an afi­cionada and cham­pion of Barbara Guest?

I am inclined to set­tle the mat­ter by think­ing of “Nival” as Magi’s pat­tern of Guest in brevi. Her phras­ings would seem to be tuned down, to be let down to a smaller and sub­tly imping­ing res­o­nance in com­par­i­son to what in Guest’s poetry are the rap­tur­ous appli­ca­tion of minted locu­tions unscrolled through page by painted page. Though Guest may entice del­i­ca­cies of color, it is the del­i­cate wash itself that Magi enter­tains and that Guest seems uncon­cerned, in cer­tain texts from the 1990s, either to the­ma­tize or problematize.

Let me give you an instance of the pic­to­r­ial Guest from her 1996 poetry book Quill Solitary Apparition (Post-​​Apollo Press; my ref­er­ence reverses the roman and ital­ics arrange­ment of the words on the title page). The pas­sage begins on the sec­ond page of the poem “Pallor,” at the top of the page. Well-​​cut seg­ments in a tim­bral trac­ing cre­ate an effect that I will illus­trate by using the surveyor’s method:

Beginning with “: fig­ure on road­side”, there is then a drop of three lines and sub­stan­tially over to the right with “who fasts wait­ing for the brown toad”, then a lit­tle below that back half-​​way again toward the left mar­gin comes “the azure del­i­cately blot­ted”, after which the drop is of some six or seven lines com­ing upon other sorts of phrases that play out in syn­tac­ti­cal expres­sions hav­ing com­plete thoughts in them but not real­iz­ing full peri­ods, that is to say other shapes in open com­po­si­tion and stilet­tic order, as fol­lows, with “where the planter drops a knife” and then “he excises” and then “the blocked har­bor:” and then “( mis­cel­lany of clouds — )”.

You will notice that though the items link, are not a mad­cap suc­ces­sion, they charm with the engross­ing whim­si­cal­ity of some­one who sniffs, who hunts around cir­cum­spectly, the mind and the feel­ings alert; alert per­sona or inclin­ing pres­ence who observes sharply and sweetly, and is out for big­ger game quixot­i­cally qualified.

The map Jill Magi draws is not the ardent chase. If Guest paints por­traits — large fig­ures, flee­ing epipha­nies —, Magi stud­ies land­scape, keeps it close within her inten­si­ties. At the same time, the leaps and lacu­nae can some­times brighten deli­ciously. Here, also in surveyor’s form, is one of Magi’s half-​​canvasses from “Nival”:

First comes a phrase from the left mar­gin, “Wall-​​expansion after”, which leads (the spa­tial plot­ting begins) two lines down and fur­ther to the right (so as to look cen­tered) to the sin­gle word “grief” and two more lines down and back again against the left mar­gin to another mere sin­gle term (with punc­tu­a­tion), “porous.”, and then a fur­ther drop­ping down, but not to the sec­ond but to the third suc­ceed­ing line, and there is a full sen­tence, but only the idea of one since it is enclosed in paren­the­ses and is overly enig­matic for any reg­u­lar Joe of a sen­tence, “(Marginalia sus­tained the binding.)”.

I hear a gnomic voice that I fre­quently hear in Guest’s poetry. I also hear the reflec­tions becom­ing dis­tilled, their thrills diminu­tived and drawn still fur­ther into the in brevi pat­tern. It is no sur­prise that Magi’s minia­tures, whether coy or care­less, cogent or casual, can be her best treats, as when a look of espe­cial bril­liance ultra-​​clarified yields the plen­ti­ful quizzi­cal­ity of “Warming — ” (way to the left) fol­lowed by “enough god — ” (way way to the right) and then “if” (way to the left). Some of the sub­sec­tions are more nearly reg­u­lar, but they all have at least one or two of these ellip­ti­cal moments.

I hope that gives you some idea of an inspired moment in Jill Magi’s Torchwood and the bit-​​by-​​bit vari­a­tion of a style rem­i­nis­cent of splashier strokes plot­ted and devel­oped over a num­ber of books by Barbara Guest. There are many sorts of plot­ting to be sur­veyed in Torchwood, telling me that I can look for­ward to enjoy­ing the poetry more and more. I can look, for instance, at the spaces and the sep­a­ra­tions in the “Relationships” sec­tion and appre­ci­ate not half-​​sentences and winged utter­ances but her strange ways with the full period.

All in all it seems that a con­fi­dent rec­om­men­da­tion is in place. I already yearn to attend to Jill Magi’s forms. But in the mean­time I con­tinue to won­der about the per­ceived con­nec­tion to a major poet’s major form and where, if any­where, it could lead. What is this other aspect that elic­its a coinage, that prompts Magi to exam­ine a species of “Nival,” the snow-​​filled preteri­tion that may pre­clude the com­mon river­bank and its talk of the “Rival”?

New York City

January 2009

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Copyright ©2009, by Robert Mueller. All Rights Reserved.

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