What is a poetry that acknowledges the everything that is existing everywhere. Consider, for instance, the role “everything” has in a poetry of Dailiness. Is there an accounting of the events that accurately sums up what any given day is? Are there items that could be listed out for arriving at a given concept? “Everything,” though it implies the limitlessness of whatever’s around you, is still a mere word. It can only encompass. What is a balloon in evening, if you keep blowing air into it? Inside the balloon might be everything that a balloon is. Like the grammatical statement might appear as the sum total of all the words, and spaces, it’s constructed from. But then when you observe the balloon, or you try relating the story of the balloon to someone named “the reader,” the balloon’s everything is going to be more than just the balloon. There will need to be language of observation. Language of analysis (especially if you’re Kimberly Alidio). And likely, there will be language about influence and reflection.
I should make clear I’m incapable of reading Alidio’s book without Stacy Szymaszek accompanying me. Her two books, ‣ and ‣ are the constant conversation in my mind when I’m thinking about all the everything mundane world around me, and how poetry might speak of it or describe it or inhabit it. I don’t know what verb to use for this. And I know other books have been just as avid to be in the every day-ness. And I know Alidio’s book isn’t really about the everyday. And I know that insisting a poet’s partner be included in my reading is unfair. It’s just that Szymaszek brings in a useful reference for conversation that involves Maximalism, especially when it’s related to the mundane. Where those two books by Szymaszek trudge through a day’s events, how they implicitly understand the limits of language to say “everything” while also giving the reader an overall sense of what “everything” felt like, that’s the challenge Alidio brings to her work.
However, where Szymaszek dwells in the physical details, Alidio’s Traceable Relation addresses the didactic. In particular, the presumption that didactic writing could truly lead its reader to a set meaning. Alidio poses the challenge of meaning through a variety of mediums. For instance, what is the meaning in film or video. Is it rhetorical purpose? Does it involve the impression a film or video might leave on someone? What exactly would be the difference between “meaning” and “impression”? Maybe when you read, you see that distinction as an interesting open-ended question. But what if a poem started with the intention of settling that open-endedness? And what if the poem started telling you that language is wholly unequipped to keep up with all the visuals in a film or video? What exactly is the writer’s Grand Design in these poems? Well, the poem carries the affect of answering. That feeling when you’re reading something and you’re pretty sure it’s going to settle on an answer. But then the poem keeps opening itself to other considerations, and its ambition to find the full answer appears to be derailing the Grand Design. And maybe (as I think Alidio would comment) this is the most equal language can be to the medium of, say, film. And so, yes, her concession synthesizes with the didactic. It’s like put the didactic on a treadmill, and let it walk itself out. And then, for good measure, give it a soundtrack of that fun Unk song, “Walk It Out.”
Because poetry is about activity as much as it’s about language. But given the fixed existence of language on a page, it can be difficult to observe all the activity being done by language. This is the paradoxical point Szymaszek addresses in her dailiness work. This is the paradoxical root of nostalgia as addressed by Kate Colby in her recent book ‣. Alidio addresses the paradox directly. Or no, she inhabits the paradox for its generative poetics. Or no, she illustrates the paradox as it exists with writing about music, or sound art, or just the noises that exist in the background. Wherever you might look, there is an incongruence of language and “everything.”
What exactly is language for? Which might be one of the maddeningly fun things about poetry when it doesn’t even know what it’s doing with itself. And for Alidio, this intensive self-awareness primarily artistic mediums, or at least a running read of a life that is thoroughly influenced by art. But this awareness of language is also used in a poetry of grief. And while there can be books whose poetic methods are immersed in the grieving process, that help to navigate the poet’s understanding of that moment (I think of Marie Howe’s ‣ and Emily Pittinos’s ‣), Alidio’s grief operates more as one more instance of language falling short. Her awareness of grief, her difficulty putting that grief into language when there is so much ambient noise complicating what she might start feeling about her father provides an undertow for Alidio’s book (I’m especially struck by the poem, “W9NCD,” where she lists out the words her father had copied out to build his vocabulary). I’m not sure, though, her grief ever rises above the book’s other concerns.
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.