Leveler Poetry Journal
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The Work




“It is not your duty to finish the work, nor are you to deter from it.”

—Rabbi Tarfon, Mishna Avot 2:21








Alex Rieser

levelheaded: The Work


At first look, “The Work” appears to be a series of random, evenly-spaced letters. By reducing language to its most basic parts, the poem foregrounds the work we do when we read or write. On a fundamental level, reading and writing requires us to combine and coordinate abstract letters into words, ideas, and images. As the poem’s epigraph suggests, as long as we are communicating with other people, this kind of work is ever-present.


But there is more to “The Work” than an abstract spattering of letters. Poetry requires some participation on the part of the reader. Speaking broadly about reading, Emerson said “One must be an inventor to read well.” When it comes to reading poetry sometimes one must be especially inventive. If we spend enough time with “The Work,” pieces of identifiable language begin to leap out at us—“it is” in the first line, “deter” from the third, a vertical “duty” somewhere in the middle, etc. Once we realize these words are parts of the poem’s epigraph, we can start piecing them together:



So, the poem is essentially a word search. The question then becomes: why? Like much conceptual poetry, “The Work” makes its most obvious comment on language itself. For one, we are familiar with word searches. This familiarity allows our first step into the poem’s cerebral space. When recontextualized as poem, the entire concept of the word search—an essentially flat, arbitrary interaction with language—seems strange and exotic. When we compare that supposedly flat interaction with language to the clinical, evaluative approach we often take toward less conceptual poetry, we might find both resemble a game with a deceivingly definite solution. “The Work” questions the way we read poems—the work we put in—in an elegantly simple and open way. Taken one step further, the poem asks us to examine our own intellectualizing of even the most straightforward poetry. It is in these questions that the real work (and pleasure) of the poem are found.



-The Editors