reset
he decides to ask
if she’s ever followed the dead
her skull bobs a bit like a crane
and he decides she’s pretty this woman-bound bottom-feeder
she draws out a road map
in ink that could be blood
and says something about
more people being alive today
than ever have died
her beak clicks like the end of a pen
and something of his protrudes
he gets a bit distracted tickled with a feather
but collects a stable retort
from the furrows in his brow
he quotes french translations
about how cuteness denotes helplessness
and how dear existence is only relative to sight
i paddle through his little waterways of cleverness
watch crane-girl pack her throat with his trout
and figure he’s got a point
i really should get down
to writing all those letters
dear emily
i have to alphabetize you
dewey never needed numbers for loss
or regret
but these days when names seem to change so freely
when gone looks as good as graved
and when i keep seeing all your surnames
in the faces of women who have big ideas
about speciesism bleeding out
perfect-scale streetmaps i end up in mumbles about
how it would have been nice if someone had left me
anything
to discover
i really would have liked to name the mississippi after you
ink out its bends
in the geometries your limbs make from the side
no one would ever question the way
your legs kick through colorado
how the lake of your fist drills
a hole deep into nebraska
or that new streams like fingers
carve through this city with their current
no one would ever
take the time to check
when they could just tell me
what a great map it is
and point to the places they think they’ve been
Jeffrey Allen |
levelheaded: reset
Glancing quickly at Jeffrey Allen’s “reset,” we see that the poem isn’t punctuated, it’s littered with white space, and there are no capital letters. Of course Mr. Allen isn’t the first or last person to employ these methods. Nonetheless, in an effort to better understand his poem, it’s worth hypothesizing about the reasons behind his chosen typography.
The variant shape and lack of punctuation speak to spontaneity. Like the “he [who] decides to ask” at the start of the poem, the speaker himself is looking for “anything / to discover.” As the poem moves from one cluster of words to another, each little thought cloud floats there on its own before drifting into another. All three of these above-mentioned poetic techniques, in fact, contribute an airy quality to a poem that’s heavy at its core.
At the heart of the poem is the relationship between its pronouns—“he,” “she,” “i,” “you,” and “they.” After a bitter third-person account of a male/female relationship, “i” finally shows up in line 18. The four italicized words—“loss,” “regret,” “gone,” and “graved”—help us find the root of the poem’s angst. The guy’s hurt. If learning this doesn’t validate the speaker’s tone, we are at least brought to empathize with him. However, this poem isn’t merely a plea for someone to feel bad for its author. It challenges us to feel for ourselves. More on that in a sec.
First, let’s revisit this “i.” The decision to leave the first person pronoun lowercase could be simply attributed to stylistic preference. Regardless, this tactic also does things. On the one hand, it puts the self on the same plane as the rest of the words in the poem—no more important, no less. It could also be argued, though, that this very decision to leave “i” lowercase actually does the opposite; that is, rather than leveling (yeah—we said, “leveling” and our journal’s called LEVELER) the playing field, leaving “i” uncapitalized calls more attention to the word. Could it be that Allen wants to do both things at once?
When the author decided not to capitalize or punctuate, when he decided to scatter his poem about the page, it’s as if he makes an effort to fling the “road map,” the “perfect-scale streetmaps” to the wind, knowing full well that the window is closed. Then, in the process of complaining about being unable to discover and name the Mississippi, he magically creates the “mississippi,” likening its twists and turns to violent acts of the body. The window’s closed, but the door’s open.
We love routines because the unknown can be so frightening. How many of us have seen a map and pointed to where we’ve been, rather than the places we could go? We are the “they” at this poem’s close. Arthur Miller once said, “I write as much to discover as to explain.” We’re guessing Jeffrey Allen does, too.
– The Editors |