I’m coming to understand that a point of this project is to find out whether unsystematic, undisciplined, impulsive reading—the kind I have been indulging in all these years—can in fact be a project, without becoming somehow or other becoming more systematic, more disciplined, and so on. Or anyway with its becoming much more so—it’s inevitable, after all, that my consciousness that anything I read might become part of this diary must in some way inflect my choice of what to read and how to read it. Paradoxical as it may seem, my choice to read The Transfer Tree—to re-read it, actually, like what Karena Youtz calls “a note to open / as soon as I forget the note”—is exemplary of this randomness. I don’t understand how this book ended up on my shelves. I’m certain I didn’t buy it, for the simple reason that I know nothing about the poet. Given the year of its publication, it could conceivably have arrived as a review copy, because at that time I was dabbling in poetry reviewing—a practice I’ve since gradually let lapse, for several reasons, among them: one, that to do this to my satisfaction I would have to strive for something like an overview of contemporary anglophone poetry in general, something I didn’t desire or consider, for myself, possible; two, if I were to cover poetry more widely than just that small overlapping set of those books that both arouse my enthusiasm and immediately give me something to say, I’d make more enemies than friends, and not because I would ever write as a hanging judge in the William Logan manner, but because my lukewarm tolerance would be found even more infuriating; and, three, never mind. Anyway, I doubt this was a review copy for the simple reason that I don’t find anything else by the well-regarded 1913 Press in my library (not even ones they published by poets I happen to know personally); a press hoping to attract reviews tries more than just once. Anyway, I’d never have been able to review Youtz’s poetry. It’s too elusive. Her language seems, like my reading habits, erratic, unruly, volatile—slightly out of control. And yet she must exert some occult power over it because each line, a sweet strange cry, always ends up where it can extend the emotional import of the previous one in some unexpected but retroactively inevitable direction. I don’t claim to understand how she does it. “Chaos a pattern / waiting to happen” is the message here, and her lyricism occupies that unstable space of waiting by hewing closer to the side of chaos rather than of pattern. Delicately scrambled syntax (“The her or room’s / dissolving colors were oriented to firm”) accords each word perspicuous presence without denying it a perhaps more potential than actual relationality to its neighbors. If I trust the portentous recurrent evocations of a visionary realm where “Arriving stars part like curtains” and “from an earth of light he cuts cloth,” it’s because they occur in the banal world inhabited by a researcher and a paralegal. Rewriting Yeats, Youtz (I want to pause right there, at the quasi-echo) sings that “No dancer / can leap from the dance.” Who is this Youtz anyway? Maybe a first cousin to the Delphic oracle.
❂
Karena Youtz, The Transfer Tree (2013), is published by 1913 Press, no place of publication listed.
❂
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.