Paul Legault’s The Madeleine Poems is complex in the way that the measurement of a wave’s crest is complex. There is a magnificent tumbling and mixture that is central to the book, but only central in the way that a galaxy is assumed to have a core from which it spirals outward. The book is a departure, a containment, a birth, a silence, a vision, a naming, a speed. In every manner of its making, Legault implies a politics of vision that both aggravates and soothes the desire to give names. This pruning and coaxing of the names of things shapes a portrait that questions portraiture. The long poem of the book, “Madeleine as Crusoe,” is a culmination of this theme:

A thing is in itself—
to name is to bring death to
—eulogy enough.

In her lecture, “Portraits and Repetition,” Gertrude Stein explained her process of writing portraits as

knowing that each one is themselves inside them and something about them perhaps everything about them will tell some one all about them that thing….I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing.

The eulogy of The Madeleine Poems creates the singular body of the unnameable central figure of a Madeleine. The reality of the name is the cosmos of particulars that gives rise to their simultaneous erasure. It is the reader’s movement through the book that commands the resurrection and internment of image, body, and experience, which eventually leaves only the white space of the page: both beyond name and infinitely accepting of the opportunity to be named.

Such a book is less written than it is composed, creating centers for the music of Legault’s lines, which turn the mundane into a new phonics of meaning. The poems stutter to their rhymes and echo their own language constantly. They justify a new landscape: that is, both adjust and prove. There is a fresh quality to every word anchored on the line, and these moorings cast nets of meaning throughout the poems, stretching around the book like a skin that fits airtight and appears beautifully strange, as in “Madeline as Crusoe:”

and the connection is
what it was all along—

a new sense to us

of an old thing, a new
thing of an old thing made

anew—

The velar “-ing” sounds in combination with the resonating dipthongs of “new” “to” and “anew” envelop the initial multisyllabic “connection” and create the “new sense” of these lines, a quality derived more from musical quality than from sense. The important thing about Legault’s poems is that this guiding principle of his composition does not favor either music or sense-making but instead resonates in an indefinite space, a space that the reader is always arriving at and departing from. In “Madeleine as the Balloon and Size from Here,” Legault writes: “Everything quickly became penultimate—the feeling, not the act of some yet-to-be-had-arrival.” And that is exactly what the book produces: a feeling.

So, as the reader experiences the voyage, the book itself moves. There is never a certain direction, but it is apparent that the movement is both away from, and towards a language. Away from text, as the book recedes into the horizons of the page. The poems become sparser and more fragmented, eventually dwindling to only the sparkle of an asterisk on the final page. This movement towards silence is an approach to the world that is born from vision and a hesitancy to give name to. In the absence of language, the reader gains a tendency to understand what the last “languaged” section of the book explains: that “there is indeed // the inexpressible.”

The book begins, like any voyage, with departure:

Madeleine

Open The Book of Take and leave
open the book of your arrival.

          Call me the Madonna of chosen things.
     Know I am righteous and moth-like.

Wash me or tear me; knead me in lye;
know that I will outlast you.

     That it was hot,
the houses burned down;
     the way of fire even in spring then.

                         Woodsnail, breathe for me,
     or beware your life
     which I will take and shudder just to hold it.

Everyone was rich.
     We hunted wild animals.
The worst was when they looked at you.

The act of arriving in these poems is continuously left open, as indicated in the brilliant first linebreak of the poem above. Each line arrives at the boundaries of objects, here the moth-like “me” that is never named, and the hunt for the wild animals that is never resolved or explained. The poems traverse the fringes of understanding, and transcend the need to be understood in their own conviction, as the narrator of the shudders just to be as alive as the woodsnail. In this edge-skirting, the objects of the poems begin to separate from their assumed meanings, and, as in “Forest Gospel,” each becomes “a private thing.” The intricately woven patterns of the book are labyrinthine on account of this constant acknowledgement of the object-as-seen and the simultaneous and compound understanding (or revelation) of the object-as-is. The poems are both keys and questions. Who is speaking? Who are we and us? Is Madeleine a sui generis entity that haunts the text, acting as erasure of signified meaning? Or is Madeleine the larynx of the reader-as-poet, heaping meaning and assumption, implication and understanding onto each line of each poem, a journey out of all the centers in every direction?

The scatter-effect of such a compositional strategy produces a book that is unintelligible in the way that the most private and pleasurable experiences exist in memory outside of both language and time. The private meaning made via the text is transformational as an act of the reader’s powers of imagination under the influence of Legault’s “proper structure,” where “what / went in went out but multiplied” (“Madeleine as Crusoe”). Like shining a flashlight through cut glass, The Madeleine Poems make their own pattern and light as the reader moves through them, the beam of the gaze throwing color against the wall.

The composite portrait of the sound and sense, and arrival and departure of these poems is a result of vision and allusion, reference and difference. The succession of images and the speed with which the poems move, does not reveal an identity of what a Madeleine is, but instead leaves the reader the blank page, the single star that closes the book, from which pours our aloneness. “We are too much of us,” as stated in “Madeleine as the Balloon and Size from Here,” so Legault allows us to become ourselves, nameless, and depart.

Paul Legault:: The Madeleine Poems:: Omnidawn

At this summer’s Rethinking Poetics conference held at Columbia University, Marjorie Perloff, on a panel entitled “Poetics as a Category,” asked the question: “Why is it that people who are writing something that doesn’t look or sound like a poem want that something to be called poetry?” The query, rhetorical to a T, arose during a discussion of Vanessa Place’s Statement of Fact, which openly culls its content from courtroom documents and, as a consequence, reckons a close association with the long and porous history of documentary poetics. Unconvinced of the work’s status qua poetry, Perloff later in her talk referred to Statement of Fact as “an important work of conceptual writing, but not poetry.” In response to Perloff, numerous members of the audience exhaled an audible, though anonymous, gasp, signaling their discontent with her restrictive directives. This gasp—the experience of hearing it while seated within it—left me with the impression that categorical imperatives—the ones underpinning Perloff’s question about genre formation and maintenance—work by making invisible the contention that exists between outliers and affiliates. The fiction of generic fixity relies upon the suppression of anomalous instances of hybrid literature.

Documentary poetry, a term that brackets together Place’s text with the disparate poetic projects of Muriel Rukeyser, Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Charles Reznikoff, Barrett Watten and countless others, stands more as a floating signifier than a tenable category. Characteristically, the label evokes a range of aesthetic impulses and ethical critiques that relax the boundaries of the page in order to bring the poem into a more direct relationship with the voices that for various sociopolitical reasons disrupt the teleological march towards progress and therefore stand to be silenced. Of course there are documentary poems that depart from this thumbnail description, but in general it is a mode of expression coeval with the generic concerns it incites. Bearing witness to the unpredictable particularity of these voices, silenced under piles of non-fictive material, the documentary poem counters the notion of fixed, insoluble genres by marrying aberrant content with a form equal itself to the unconventional. Thus the documentary poem questions the question of poetry’s waning efficacy as a delimiting genre. To carry this line of thinking to any useful conclusion strikes me as far too expansive a task to take up in a brief review. Nonetheless, I mention it here because it resonates so adamantly with the drive to document the documentary that Allison Cobb enunciates in her recent book Green-Wood.

Through a mixture of prose passages, lyrical sequences, and embedded quotations, Green-Wood delivers a disjunctive account of Brooklyn’s famous nineteenth-century cemetery of the same name. Referring to it as America’s first filing system, Cobb follows a historical index of headstones and exhumes a series of facts that connects America’s current political climate to topics as diverse as Emersonian self-reliance, Marxist interpretations of British Enclosure Acts, and Colonial Ornithology. The book’s ecological concerns are not limited to content. Through formal decisions, Cobb implicitly critiques the self-satisfaction associated with sentimental portrayals of paradise waxing parking lot. By organizing Green-Wood into succinct prose-blocks, Cobb uses juxtaposition to draw attention to the associative space that separates and connects any two prose-block passages. The intermediary space between passages becomes as important to the arc of the book as the content of any single passage. This formal choice demonstrates Cobb’s awareness that ecology is not merely the study of organisms; it also applies to the constant discovery of relations that connect and separate organisms to, and from, one another and their physical surroundings.

Rather than make superficial comments on a large swath of quotations from Green-Wood, I want to address a single passage, which touches upon three thematic concerns that recur throughout the book. On the first page Cobb writes:

Among the crowd I see Micah Garen, who will be kidnapped in Iraq while
shooting a documentary about looted artifacts. Fact means not “true.” But
“to make.” The fact of art a trace.

The statement offers both journalistic reportage and inferred commentary on the nature of aesthetic experience. By drawing our attention to the documentary filmmaker, Cobb foregrounds the self-referentiality of her own documentarian project. This kind of meta-gesture develops throughout the book into what I see as the first thematic concern: the poet’s sustained deliberation on the often unacknowledged instruments of knowledge production. In the above scene, Garen arises out of context. We see him enjoying life in the same physical body that will later become instrumentalized by the camera, and thereby sublimated in order to function as a part of the frame that separates and connects “real life” and documentary film. Here the filmmaker’s body stands at the mercy of someone else’s candid vision. Cobb records Garen outside of his role as filmmaker, producing the effect one might associate with coming upon a screwdriver left surprisingly on the bathroom sink. Taken out the expected context of the toolbox, the screwdriver becomes noticeable in a manner that highlights its stunning utility (Why is there a screwdriver in the bathroom, a screw must have been loose around the lightswitch plate). Likewise, when Cobb places Garen’s body inside a context different than the documentary film, she arrests the reader with the utilitarian function of his body, showing it to be a part of the filmic scaffolding that makes possible the documentary aesthetic. His emergence from the crowd, like Stetson in Eliot’s “The Burial of the Dead,” demonstrates Cobb’s quickness to notice the confrontation between everyday experience and documentary mediation that ultimately reveals the latter’s profound artifice.

Cobb’s decision to include the filmmaker into her depiction of the cemetery sets up the theme of intersecting contexts, earlier referred to as the book’s ecopoetics of relation. The Garen episode develops out of Cobb’s description of the cemetery on a day in which the management has agreed to open its historic catacombs to visitors. By meandering into the historic building, Garen activates the book’s sprawl to embrace one topic after another. Spotting the documentary filmmaker leads to a discussion about the Iraq war, and from there an observation on late capitalism in general. This overlapping propulsion enacts a salient commentary commensurable not only with an ecopoetics of relation, but also with Francis Fukuyama’s contentious conception of “The End of History.” The end of history, according to Fukuyama is tantamount to the flattening out of cultural difference under one homogenous market. Cobb, however, shows how this cultural flattening is anything but apolitical, when she reminds us that Garen’s position at the nexus of contemporary life depends upon his being kidnapped by Iraqi militants.

In her mentioning of trace, “The fact of art a trace,” we’re shown another theme that appears throughout Green-Wood: the discussion of art in terms of its material remnants, the residue of creativity. In the passage, we’re told that Garen’s work in Iraq involves accounting for archeological sites that were ransacked during the early stages of the war. His lot then is to document the absence produced by pillaging and warfare. The filmmaker is left with no option but to collect interviews in hopes of casting a keener lens on vacancy, since the artifacts are not visibly accessible. This rhymes with the poet’s task of building her utterance out of the invisible contents of a cemetery. Rather than interviews or accounts, Cobb’s compositional practice includes historical curiosities, common-book quotations and litanies, consisting of objects left by grave-side visitors at Green-Wood:

stars and stripes pinwheel
glow-in-the-dark angel
muddy stuffed bunny face down near Crescent Water
Batman action figure
frog riding a bicycle
Virgin of Guadalupe pen
DADDY WE MISS YOU pumpkin

These objects signal the bind inherent in the act of documenting that inherently produces absence. Such is Maurice Blanchot’s point in “Literature and the Right to Death,” where he recognizes literature as “a being deprived of its being”. Laid bare to strangers who happen upon the headstones (like the reader), these memorial arrangements abbreviate the departed into an empirical trace.

Also, the trace line touches upon a formal technique that appears throughout Green-Wood. Repeatedly, italicized statements cut the informative tone of Cobb’s prose-block with an indeterminate lyrical flourish. Oftentimes the use of italics implies that the emphasized line of text has been drawn from another source, one that can be traced, as it were, in the lengthy notes section at the end of the book. At other points, the italicized statements evade citation and seem to suggest a pattern of meta-commentary. In the Micah Garen passage, the italicized trace leads us to consider not only Garen’s elegiac footage of missing artifacts, but also the level to which an irreducible absent presence characterizes Cobb’s own writerly relationship to the empirical world. The phrase insinuates that the work of art evolves, and is then limited to, a factual dimension. The corporeality of the canvas, sculpture, and poem are hulls through which inspiration once passed.

With its exegetical prose, Green-Wood resembles the footnotes that might accompany the classically difficult Modernist long poem more than it does the actual Modernist long poem. And this will likely cause some to question the book’s generic fidelity. But the faithful reader will surely regard Cobb’s generic promiscuity as indistinguishable from her larger critique of problematic economies of exclusion—the cordoning off of the human from the non-human, and the garden from the wasteland. In so far as documentary poetry is far too broad a concept to function as a delimiting genre, it is serves as the perfect marker for Cobb’s brand of cross-genre work. For her, like Susan Howe and Robert Duncan, the truth of what a fact is lies in the term’s historical derivation, and that truth, contrary to popular belief, shows fact to be a form of social production, a gathering rather than a dividing of cultural values and observations. To think of fact in this way, socially constructed and process oriented, compels us then to re-imagine the parameters of Perloff’s question. One reason for writing something that doesn’t resemble “poetry” and then passing it off as such, could be to historicize and denaturalize the very notion of genres. Cobb confirms art and fact to be ineluctably commensurable with one another, conceiving both to be in essential correspondence with the trace. With Green-Wood, she maintains that the document, the archive, and the cemetery industrial complex—all facets of the empirical world—exceed their own non-fictive function and imprint themselves in patterns of prose upon the imagination.