levelheaded: Folio #25 – Symphonic and dreamlike

Even at a glance, “Folio #25” seems fragmented and strange. The poem’s slash marks leap out and break lines into two, three, or four separate phrases, making already abstract lines even more slippery. The slash between “They reform and synthesize” and “in conundrum,” for example, interrupts and complicates the relationship between a simple prepositional modifier and its subject, giving us pause where we might normally push ahead. Also, the poem splinters as it moves down the page. The poem’s earliest lines are relatively uniform in length. These give way to very long lines matched up against very short lines. Similarly, logically constructed lines like “They expressed satisfaction as / they drew each other” yield to patchwork lines like “signature/splatter / sardonic accidents / a shipboard inventory[.]”

So what do we make of a poem that so purposefully subverts coherence? Part of the answer lies in the title. The poem is at least nominally an effort to be “Symphonic and dreamlike[.]” It creates an atmosphere where the sounds of language knock against each other and we come to expect surreal, imaginative leaps. But even in its disjointedness, there may be some logic to the poem’s movement down the page. Its first three phrases, “Their various orchestrations / their floating juxtapositions [/] They reformulate and synthesize[,]” introduce us to a “they” that later breaks down into a “He” and a “Her.” Both “He” and “Her” are in some way involved in recording an image of the other, “He” through “lithography” and “Her” through “tracings of him.” These characters and their recognizable actions give us something to hang onto while the poem swirls on around us.

Then there is the beautiful line, “endpapers as points of departure,” a phrase that reconciles the physicality of paper with the abstraction of what that paper can contain. It presents us with a figurative continuum between the tangibility of a medium (“endpapers”) and the intangibility of an idea (“points of departure”). The poem’s tracings, drawings, proofs, inventories, manifestoes, and charts are all fully real, but they are also limited by their existence as physical objects. Even the “He” and “Her” of the poem are described as “a work destroyed by fire.” A word is only as resilient as the paper on which it’s printed (or the database in which it is stored!), so we are brought back to the fact that this poem is a “folio.” It is constructed and impermanent.  It is just a lump of paper.  And in this case, it is persistently mysterious.

– The Editors