Imagine longing for something that passed you by. Imagine that longing figured into one of those galleries at a major art museum, but it’s one of those just barely-a-gallery’s. Because it’s space that had been converted from a hallway. So while it’s creating new space to exhibit art work, there’s something unsettling. An acoustics doesn’t exactly serve the art. This is the space Sophia Terazawa’s Oracular Maladies takes me into. It’s a space where I find it hard to actually hear the performance the book has framed. And that could be by design. As the book situates both “poet” and reader outside what might be the events in the play. I’m not sure, however, the poet is concerned on the readers’ behalf. Most of the poems are brief allusions to characters, consequences, and history. Things that the poet is just now learning about. Or maybe it’s her family history. Or maybe it’s living in Ithaca. All of which feels significant to the poet, but the poems don’t seem to get past mere accounts of how the poet deems everything they know or don’t know as significant. Yes, our collective access (poet’s and readers’) to what these performances might be communicating is understandably imperfect. However, I think it’s difficult to sustain only imperfect access when the full length of a book is interested in what’s being performed.
Granted, I might be the imperfect reader for this book. Terazawa offers explicit references to another text existing beside this book. Sections are numbered “scores”—a term I appreciate, as a “score” feels like a musical interpretation of what’s happening on stage. It speaks to at least one remove from the original text, as a “score” exists as a set of instructions for the musicians. In my mind, I’d tried figuring the book like an art installation that was multiple video pieces playing in parallel. Something that could address the paradox of being subjected to multiple voices while also trying to single out any one of those voices. What is real in the multiple, and what depends on the individual among the multiple to really feel what’s so real in that real. Like Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, a multi-channel video work where he filmed musicians and performers at Rokeby, a historic mansion in upstate New York. Everyone was singing together, though from different parts of the house. And it’s not entirely clear whether the viewer should think of the piece as “everyone singing together”? Is the one song a merge of professional improvisations? Was Kjartansson, appearing in a bathtub for one of the video feeds, leading? There’s a lot that’s not clear. But there’s also a lot that’s clear in the harmony each performer contributed to—a harmony that could be heard everywhere in the gallery while viewers moved to watch each screen. On each screen, there’s a new performer playing in some other room of the house.
Unfortunately, though, I’m not sure why Oracular Maladies has to mean anything. One of the challenges of books that avidly embrace a larger project is negotiating the immensity felt by the poet and the actual content the poet is going to give the reader access to. Oracular Maladies introduces a “cast” and a “synopsis” at the book’s opening. The book is structured around a series of “scores.” But the majority of the book consists of poems working with a Minimalism approach. They are flashes of content. But these flashes would work better if the poet and the audience shared access to this art work. It’s as though the book has stationed the reader and poet in a shared gallery. But the only person who actually sees or hears the art is the poet. They can see, hear, and experience it. And while I understand the poetic gesture in this (a comment on generational trauma or a poet who’s lost their past), the poems don’t truly connect a reader with anything outside the poet’s implied commentary that “this is a really big deal” to them.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.