“All books,” I recently read in The New Yorker, “exist to feed their authors.” Well, I guess Adam Gopnik doesn’t know any poets—at least of the sort that I read. Example: I doubt the hundred copies of this staple-bound publication is going to put food on its author’s table. But it’s tasty in its own way. And impressive too: a poem of—by my estimation—nearly 700 lines. Or maybe the number of lines is up to the reader? Lorraine Lupo’s The Greatest Outdoors (A Loop) begins in mid-sentence (“…that to be intentionally sequential is like a plumber”) and a note Lupo tucked into the copy she sent me Lupo suggests, “Feel free to start reading in the middle…then on & on…” But is the beginning already the middle? And does “on & on” mean just keep reading in circles? It’s tempting. This poem is not what I’d have expected from the poet I first encountered four years ago in a chapbook of twenty brief, witty, and tender prose poems. It’s made of perpetually unrolling lines of unpredictable measure, with verses ranging in length from one word/one syllable (“Natch”) to twenty words/twenty-five syllables (“In One a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, Peter Handke weaves a soporific spell the likes of which”) and anything in between; much of it employs conventional syntax and punctuation but often the punctuation just drops out and only a capital letter at the start of a line signals the start of a new syntactical unit. Speaking of capitals at the start of a line, in general each line accords with a unit of sense but there are many exceptions (such as that one ending “the likes of which”). Diction is not heightened but rather informal, quotidian, but precise. Breaks and cuts solicit heightened attention. Given that Lupo’s formal choices are not predictable or predetermined, I wonder why they don’t feel arbitrary. The basic principle seems to be, “There is no beginning, only an interruption,” except that even to pluck that out as a principle seems to contradict, not the semantic sense of it, but the way it’s worked into the ragged fabric of the poem as it continues:
There is no beginning, only an interruption, as when Max said, “It’s happening right now,” and I saw, in a panic, that it was, and that my fresh start was a false one. Perhaps I was late already No, that’s not it The water’s boiling, hold on a minute
Never mind that we don’t know who Max is, or what the “it” is that’s happening. What’s curious is how the statement confirmed in substance as the passage continues is undercut at the level of form: the declarative nature of the abstract statement (“there is…”) is as it were washed away on the waves of its reiterated exemplifications. The seemingly unfiltered array of random data that make up Lupo’s “loop”—the echo undoubtedly deliberate—can resemble the modernist stream of consciousness, but also what Fredric Jameson, in trying to explain Karl Ove Knausgaard, whom I won’t read, called, simply, “itemisation” (British style, since he published this in the London Review of Books): In Jameson’s view,
We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them, to list the items that come by.
But Lupo aims at neither the deep inwardness of the moderns (let alone the fluidity of the “stream”) nor the flat disenchantment of the postmoderns. Nothing is constant in this poem but everydayness and an iterative “I” whose most consistent characteristic is an attentiveness equally outward and inward. While Lupo may not pretend to forge a new language, she knows that hers is not the only one possible: “Other languages have words for things English doesn’t and you will never know.” This observant awareness both of what’s around and of the truth that there’s a vast outside to what’s around—“the greatest outdoors” which might even be Quentin Meillassoux’s grand dehors—keeps the poem fresh and open.
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Lorraine Lupo, The Greatest Outdoors (A Loop), is published by Breather Editions, no places of publication listed, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.