In general, it’s recommended that you read poems more carefully, attending to their individual words. If just because the poem’s shape makes word choice more conspicuous or more acutely recognizable for the reading. Sometimes a word is fancy. Sometimes the poem makes words repress their full meaning, because the poem’s designed to momentum its sentences forward. Like reading poems in Eileen Myles’s Different Streets (‣) as a contrast to Amanda Nadelberg’s Shake Until Cloudy. Those poems’ words are just involved in their sentence-ish constructions. And the words like it that way. It gives them both primary and secondary purposes. The primary purpose: let’s get this show on the road. The secondary purpose: fun. Like how fun it is winking at an audience while you’re reading a poem. Myles has some fun with a word like “fishy” in the poem the perfect faceless fish. But the fun isn’t at the expense of being awkward about love when it comes at the wrong or right time!
Maybe Eileen Myles is a master poems that feel like holding a fish. And maybe there’s something in that statement that’s relevant to the poems in Amanda Nadelberg’s Shake Until Cloudy. At least for drawing the starkest contrast possible. Because while Myles might vigorously throw language around, Nadelberg’s sentences feel more subtle. Like holding wet sand. The subtle shifts if you start moving your hand. Or hot dry sand, when you’re walking across the beach in sandals. You’re “moving forward,” sure. But everything around you is hot and ecstatic. You learn to embrace the slowdown. That’s the method of meaning for Amanda Nadelberg. Where sentences keep changing shape while you hold them in your head. For your personal reading pleasure, I would suggest you see the poetic sentence for its eagerness to be complete AND for its composition in words and phrases AND its interest in redirecting whatever it is that makes a sentence eager to compete itself. Though don’t think of it in the “rejection of closure” light. Think “soft objectivism.” Or maybe you like objectivism in your poetry, so you can just call it that. Personally, I’ve always found the objectivists mean. They throw these huge gaps in their poems. They carry around this briefcase that makes a portmanteau of “ethos” and “wordiness.” And I’m left thinking, “Just say what you really mean.” Or “Make it a sentence!!!” Like everyone I know likes Ronald Johnson’s Ark, but I never will. He’s just so mean to readers like me.
I keep piling these other people into my review of Amanda Nadelberg’s book. It’s because her poems are operating in subtleties that benefit from the contrasts. But it’s also because Myles and Johnson know what sentence-ness is. They know how reading the words of the sentence, you’ll feel the forward momentum of syntax. And their work innovates on redirecting that energy. In Nadelberg, it’s almost guaranteed the direction of any given sentence will subtly shift in the space of your attention.
A great example of this is in the poem “The Formal Beginning of Packing.”
Don’t picture me pausing to take a photograph I wrote about syntax in Frost not the woods.
Note, first, the poem pretends to be making a sentence. Which is a helpful guide, but not because there will be subject and predicate for diagramming whatever sense might be communicated. Instead, use the “sentence” as a container of forward momentum. When your read to “woods,” you can take a mental pause. You can mark a unit of sense-making. And, for my reading, at least, the sentence marks the bounds of a whole. Which your reading should be dividing into parts. Here’s one suggestion for diving the parts of this “sentence”:
Don’t picture me / pausing / to take a photograph I wrote about / syntax in Frost / not the woods.
In this the first division I’ve marked, the instruction is clarified a little, but who is doing which action (are “you” not picturing AND pausing or are “you” not picturing while the poet pauses) only adds more to the poem’s ambiguous commentary. And it goes further. Should the second and third line be enjambed, so the poet is writing about a photo she took? Or did the poet take a photo, which leads her to write about syntax in Robert Frost? Nadelberg is making a statement on writing versus living. And here she’s involving the reader in her wish to understand what it all means.
And to feel that what these sentences are meaning has a timing to it. I don’t personally look for the period to know a poem’s “containers.” Instead, I’m settling into each poetic phrase. It’s like reading W. S. Merwin, but much more slippery.
But to what effect. I’ve read one other Nadelberg book, Songs from a Mountain. In that one, the subtlety unspooling the poet’s thoughts seemed to sort through a recent divorce. I don’t know that that’s what actually happened. This book, however, doesn’t present biographical holds. It feels more like the flatness of living. Like I’m reading Claire-Louise Bennett right now, and her narrator’s struggle to balance social isolation with simply living in the world feels like flat living. It’s why I focus so much on Nadelberg’s style and sense-making. Again, the contrast between Myles’s syntactic centripetal force and Nadelberg’s sentence-as-shifting-sands involves the space the reader is invited into. Myles is full of gusto and take-it-or-leave-it-I’ve-got-something-to-say. They charge through their thinking. And the velocity of their thinking is a head space. Nadelberg’s reader is invited into a a quieter place. Where sentences aren’t about clicking pieces together. More about relating a series of impressions.
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.