Well, in reviewing the posts in this blog over the past few months, I wonder if this will be the year for village and insect tropes. Previous entomology related works have included Abe's Woman in the Dunes and Ammons' Ommateum and small villagers have also been found in Louise Glück's A Village Life and, again, Abe's Woman in the Dunes. I've never really thought about the observation of bugs and creepy villages as being good topics for literary works, but I looks like they are. And I should note, unlike my weekly progressions, this was not planned. Anyway, now I’m going to add Lisa Olstein’s Lost Alphabet to this list. Maybe I'll have to get some Nabakov in here soon.
Through five sections composed of paragraph-prose poems, Olstein structures the collection of poems around a lepidopterist who arrives at a small village to study moths within her private hut, sometimes with the assistance of an enigmatic (know-nothing/know-everything) trickster-sort named Ilya. And maybe a possible reference to Ilya Prigogine? More likely that than the Inland Lake Yachting Association.
From a literary standpoint, the collection is dependent upon the merging of the two different writing methods of prose and poetry to make it work. On the one hand, there is the semblance of horizontal narrative concerning the new arrival to the village and her private study. And in this, the study of moths develops various metaphoric possibilities when thinking of group-individual dichotomy and symbiosis.
However, this is still poetry and also relies upon the vertical lyric, which demonstrates how many of the poems were likely composed from passing phrases Olstein would have had going through her head during the day and then her working of those into a poetic order by night. In this, the moths could be see a stand in for poetry and language itself. Each moth, the distinctions, the structures, the similarities equating to words, syntax, sentences and paragraphs.
Interestingly, many of Olstein’s topics could also be found in Ammons’ works, as there is the scientific method that emerges within the techniques behind the poetry and its development (which takes on some interesting detours as Olstein explores the distinctions between analysis and observation). Through this, like Ammons, Olstein confronts the physical inevitability of loss and perpetual change and how a person, with the illusion of a centered self, can develop a meaningful relation with these continual variances.
While the collection is somewhat academic, as there is an obvious focus upon the development of poetry as innovative craft rather than personal declaration, there remains in emotional interior that grounds the poems within the human experience. Perhaps it could have been developed a bit more– and certainly Ammons would be the go-to person for finding a perfected balance between a poetry of scientific approach with toned shading of interiority– but this is still a good collection that is both experiential and identifiably real.
Through five sections composed of paragraph-prose poems, Olstein structures the collection of poems around a lepidopterist who arrives at a small village to study moths within her private hut, sometimes with the assistance of an enigmatic (know-nothing/know-everything) trickster-sort named Ilya. And maybe a possible reference to Ilya Prigogine? More likely that than the Inland Lake Yachting Association.
From a literary standpoint, the collection is dependent upon the merging of the two different writing methods of prose and poetry to make it work. On the one hand, there is the semblance of horizontal narrative concerning the new arrival to the village and her private study. And in this, the study of moths develops various metaphoric possibilities when thinking of group-individual dichotomy and symbiosis.
However, this is still poetry and also relies upon the vertical lyric, which demonstrates how many of the poems were likely composed from passing phrases Olstein would have had going through her head during the day and then her working of those into a poetic order by night. In this, the moths could be see a stand in for poetry and language itself. Each moth, the distinctions, the structures, the similarities equating to words, syntax, sentences and paragraphs.
Interestingly, many of Olstein’s topics could also be found in Ammons’ works, as there is the scientific method that emerges within the techniques behind the poetry and its development (which takes on some interesting detours as Olstein explores the distinctions between analysis and observation). Through this, like Ammons, Olstein confronts the physical inevitability of loss and perpetual change and how a person, with the illusion of a centered self, can develop a meaningful relation with these continual variances.
While the collection is somewhat academic, as there is an obvious focus upon the development of poetry as innovative craft rather than personal declaration, there remains in emotional interior that grounds the poems within the human experience. Perhaps it could have been developed a bit more– and certainly Ammons would be the go-to person for finding a perfected balance between a poetry of scientific approach with toned shading of interiority– but this is still a good collection that is both experiential and identifiably real.
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