To receive a new Elizabeth Robinson book for review is an intimidating, though entirely welcomed, prospect. Robinson ranks high among poets whose work is loved but who challenges readers at each turn, leaving me, certainly, in the best possible place a poet can: facing an uncertainty which mirrors the uncertainty of living in our chaotic present. Imagine a meditative state wherein the question you are contemplating leaves your mind void. Robinson’s work often leaves me in a wash—a post-Language abyss of abstraction from which I’m slow to recover.
And perhaps it is best not to recover. Turning the pages of a new book by Robinson produces new challenges because there is no certainty and no formula— there is very little expected or predictable. Each book, and each poem within it, feels like a new work, unbeholden to the work that preceded it, not marked by scars, or colored by what has come before. Surprise is the most consistent aspect of Robinson’s work and there is no defying of expectation because Robinson never creates an expectation of what we should be finding in her poems, which has carried me through her various books, both as reader and as instructor. We no doubt come to expect this of many poets: when we pick up their books, we generally have a sense of what they are going to give us. But Elizabeth Robinson, at each turn, is a different poet, a different kind of writer with every new book, with every project she’s working on— and Excursive follows that trajectory. These are among my favorite aspects of Robinson’s oeuvre, and a reason to fall into it headlong.
The most immediate task of Excursive is apparent quickly: to be a winding catalog of living. The “on” motif of the poems’ titles, followed by the dive into that embodied experience in the space of the poem, opens up a door into a grand room in which the title serves as a kind of guidepost. Works of theory, of theology, of deep thought begin with “on.” Robinson is signaling that these poems are in an ontological tradition, questioning meaning and existence in equal measure. These poems, then, are in that deep vein that runs through language to the objects the poet is viewing, bringing them back to us in new and unexpected ways. We are left in a discursive moment which circles back on itself but allows the mind to wander on a bit. Strangely, this wandering is not immediate, in that the titles are laid out in a rather ordinary, alphabetical way. Here is where the catalog returns: it’s a list, yes, but where the poems go— where Robinson takes us—is anything but ordinary.
Since I have been dealing more with my own embodied conditions of late, I was drawn to “On Numbness”:
Left thumb disappeared,
fuzzy in the gesture that might clarify.
A velvety smear of sensation
Down the right hip
and indistinct sparkling
like champagne
poured on the right foot. (80)
According to Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe in Poetry as Experience, a poem “translates experience” rather than event. Considering two poems by Paul Celan, one about visiting Martin Heidegger at his Black Forest chalet and the other about Friedrich Hölderlin, the German Romantic poet, Lacoue-Labarthe observes that experience as something that differs from living. Rather than simply describing events, poetry tasks itself with working in memory and the sensations of a momentary experience. A poem, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, is “A visit in memory of that experience, which is also in the non-form of pure non-event.” Poems don’t capture event—that’s what prose is for. Poems capture experience, which is the intangible outlay of event: “What is the work of poetry that, forswearing the repetition of disastrous, deadly, already—said, makes itself absolutely singular? What should we think of poetry (or what of thought is left in poetry) that must refuse, sometimes with great stubbornness, to signify?”
Thus, in “On Numbness,” Robinson does not write us an essay on numbness, on damage (as the opening of the poem notes), but rather provides the experience of numbness, of losing contact with the outer reaches of the body as damage takes hold. In this poem and the book as a whole, Robinson connects language to experience, poetry to memory rather than to direct recollection of event. Poetry, in Excursive, is about signifying, not about the signal itself. Robinson here manages to do this without “stubbornness,” and not by telling us what happens, not by giving us the technical statistics, the prognosis, or the data on numbness, but instead the experience of it, the sense of it.
And this is very much the point. These are not data sets. You can count the words, you can count beats and count measures as in music, but Robinson provides something entirely different when it comes to this particular curation of a catalog. Robinson’s catalog is not informational, so for the titles to be laid out in the book’s alphabetical order creates a dissonance in terms of the titles and the text within. There is the logic we know— the alphabet— and intangible knowledge of experience, and these pose a challenge to each another. Perhaps strangely, “On [a theory of] Resolution,” which in terms of logic should come at the point of resolution in a book, comes instead in the midst of the book, feeling like a kind of anchor poem:
You find you are so tired. You find
the very weave of your skin
so tired it tears.
You observe tears
gliding down your face. You
and only you
are these fluids, these rips
this tear in its ripeness
dripping onto the wound
which also flows
with its own flow. (99)
While the play of “tear” and “tear” seems apparent on its face, the poem leads us to realize how the logic of contemporary life unfolds before us. We are so very tired. We are so very aware of the failures of the systems we reside within, of the failures of institutions and long-standing ideals to secure us. “Our encounters with daily life,” Robinson writes in “On the Impossible,” “made it impossible / to know what the impossible was” (58). And while other poets might not assert these sentiments in the midst of the work, in Robinson’s poems, the “resolution” must appear among the r’s, of course, at its place in the catalog but not necessarily where readers might find resolution itself. We find ourselves resolving the logic of the text before we are ready, pre-tired, pre-grief stricken.
Nevertheless, there is a warmth, a kind of charming humor throughout Excursive. “On Men Named John” reminds me of every academic meeting I’ve attended of late— an endless caucus of Johns in our university spaces. One would be remiss in forgetting another, more regional inflection here— the southeastern Pennsylvania use of the word “Jawn,” meaning most nearly “thing,” or…whatever you want it to be, really. “That’s almost a metaphor for eternity,” Robinson lobs our way. But Johns and Jawns fit Robinson’s catalog of experiences just as much as anything else. The poem becomes a friendly ode for someone who has gone. Charming, if sad.
“On Typos” plays with our ears and our eyes and our senses, reminding us of tear vs tear:
It’s these,
a thesis:
where made
to wear its self, it’s
tangled in sameness—a little
grove of the subtlest confusions and
a tune
I might have sung. (124)
The playfulness draws us into the questions that the text asks by reminding us that not all moments have to be serious, something a poem can do because it has no ultimate destination. Not to say that other forms of art can’t do that, of course, but somehow in a book of poems, it comes as a kind of relief in the midst of the heavier considerations, as in the poem “On Rape.”
In this poem, the thread of interiority that runs throughout Excursive, the body experiencing itself from within itself, reaches a crescendo. “On Rape” presents the heinous crime by presenting the detachment of the interior from the exterior:
We feel rupture from the inside whether
we come from the inside or out.
Though technically nothing was broken, just
an orifice that wasn’t part of us before, or
where you
are streaked and smeary, hurrying
past the anatomical, quickly
I was and
apprehended and you
cupped the cavity
we held outside ourselves… (88-89)
Traumatic experiences cause dissociation, a break between the self and the body, the housing, the artifice. This duality is already the center of much philosophy, but in Robinson’s book, we do not find the theorizing of such fracture, but rather, again, the experience of it. Event here seems meaningless: what is placed before us as readers is not a recounting of anything in particular, but the measurement of the fracture that has taken place. Towards the end of the poem, there is a kind of breakdown in language itself:
…I
could justify you, they
say, you say—
could we prove again
were we
in or of, this who
prizes—that is, pries, open our own place
to insist who’s always been inside it. (89)
There is a breakdown here in what felt like, up until this point, a kind of linear understanding of language, a logical roll out of ideas and thoughts throughout the poem. There is a loss of agency, of ownership of interior and exterior. That relationship has been severed by violence, by another whose prying has broken even that attachment to words, their order and meaning. “Prizes” and “pries” are so neatly— and nauseatingly— reflective of one another. Robinson, again, does not tell us, but provides us the space of grief in this poem. But there is healing. There is, some pages later, “On Surviving”: “There are caches of this radiance /inside each woman, / hoarded” (116).
Near the end of the book, in the last five poems, we may not reach a conclusion, but we reach the end of our time in excursion, in journey. The San Andreas fault becomes the reminder that everything we know of the planet we live on will not even exist as memory, as experience. Earth is endlessly changing and our short lives will have witnessed none of it. “The sky above threatens” but it is what is beneath our feet that we cannot cling to, what will ultimately slip away. “On Youth” reconsiders this journey: “bring the loop to completion” (135).
Robinson’s trajectory through these poems, through the inexhaustible catalog of human time, ends where it ought, in linear fashion. In the end, in “On Zero,” we seem to be zeroes, nothingness. I am reminded of The Caretaker’s multi-album project Everywhere at the End of Time, the slow degradation of music to mimic the mind long lost to the diseases which rob us all in one way or another. The album series ends in silence— the silence of death, the heat death of the universe—unchanging stasis. Perhaps in Robinson’s final poem we experience a moment of terminal lucidity, a moment before the end in which the mind resets itself: “O, // for it is to you I speak, O, you” (136). Acknowledgement, termination of the book, but also of the end of experience, of catalog.
Amish Trivedi is the author of three books, most recently FuturePanic (Co•Im•Press). He has poems in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Brooklyn Rail, and others. He has an MFA from Brown, a PhD from Illinois State, and is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Delaware.