There are clear issues to data in the 21st century. Data as singular pieces of information, that is. The impulse to combine data. Or amalgamate it. Or chart it. Or arrange it in a play, but it’s only the data architecture of a play. The insides of the play turned out, so it’s the outer part. How about thinking of historians as the original data architects. Crafting data so they appear more than congruous, more insinuated so one data point is naturally and inevitably read into the next data point. Henry David Thoreau as a historian meditating on the inside of a data point. These considerations might sound abstract. But I’m hoping it sounds more like a series of abstract gestures that have been couched so thoroughly in the real world history struggles with, because that’s the nature of the data points Nash is using in her book.
Like it’s hard not to see her family background in central Oregon after reading the poem, “Central Oregon.” But it’s also not clear if the poem’s numbered series of impressions are meant to relate a particular get-together, or just a series of moments the poet notes about her family living in this area. And what I’m trying to get at with this whole analogy to data is that data points are, by their nature, single, and, technically, they lack interest in any other data point. In “Central Oregon” the comments about real estate are a data point, and the narrative observations about a hike are a data point. Yes, in the common vernacular related to reading lyric literature, one thing easily leads to the next. But for my reading of Nash, it’s how she plays with the independence of these individual points that’s notable. There is an intentional stretch to the data points’ relevance to one another, so it all might disassemble, and your reading might feel the risk of that disassembly as you move on.
For instance, in the book’s opening poems, Nash presses at what should be a tenuous narrative attached to historical sites. Despite the solid nature of every historical plaque to allay the arbitrary nature of this chapel that’s located somewhere off-the-beaten-path. This chapel is historic in the sense that everything is historic and could be viewed as a data point to history. And yet you’ve decided to visit this one place, and you might even think it’s the more authentic part of your trip to Germany, because it just feels like the right thing to do. Like the various ways to arrange context in “Central Oregon,” these historic poems think about the various ways history can be viewed in the present. Is it about visiting historical sites, and the difference between those that have been tamped down by tourist activities, like spending money there, stepping all over everything? How I imagine Nash goes to visit, say, the Duomo in Florence. “Sure, it’s hundreds of years old. And for those hundreds of years it’s been people every day not even looking at it like it’s a church.”
How does that compare to the historic site that feels more local to its historic relevance? Most people paid no attention to it. But the people who lived there have remembered. What’s that supposed to mean? “Who are you,” I read in Nash’s poems, “to remember this, in particular?”
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.