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Verse and Multiversalism

2020; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lit.2020.0000

1542-4286

Greg Londe,

French Literature and Poetry

Verse and Multiversalism Greg Londe (bio) There is a tendency in literary studies to make a distinction between lyric modes of compression or economy and longer poetic forms that seem somehow too big for the intimate rooms in which we revolve. But here, deep into the era of the Epic Fail, the only critic I care to hear on the subject of epic or other comparably extended, purportedly ambitious "poems of force" (to borrow Simone Weil's accurate phrase) is Selena Gomez, who sings in "Bad Liar," "But just like the battle of Troy / There's nothing subtle here." How do poets interlineate the violence down here, so nakedly rapacious that it's visible from space, with grander and potentially more inclusive ideas of order? After all, "astrology" means feeling explosions at a very great distance, and then lending names to the mutual reverberations of faraway burning things and our own needs. As such, scripting the skies now largely goes under the name "empathy" and gets derided as useless by those who refuse to hear about the stars' sheer weight on us. In June of 2018, when US President Donald J. Trump began proposing a "Space Force" to complement or supersede the comparatively terrestrial Air Force—all that money in the air mingling with the usual summer blood-smell and grief—I was busy reading dozens of cosmogonies. It is amazing how many worlds and cosmic origins one can devour if one always has an appetite. [End Page 222] Prompted to discuss the contemporary poetry network, I have to admit that often my own networks feel hopelessly nebular, have been damaged or destroyed, corroded by persistent and pervasively etheric gaslighting. Removing myself from the gravity of an emotionally and physically abusive relationship, I've had to spend a few years learning again to "take space" without trying to keep it. Saturnine but getting good therapy about it, I study poems to unforgotten gods and too rarely phone home. (Our personal lives glimmer with the vocabulary of cosmos, blinking out news of other networks and other solar systems.) Most of these poems from "outer" space argue, in some way or another, that there is nothing more obvious than the idea, non-Euclidean, pre-Euclidean, that the part can, in fact, be greater than the whole. "I walk out remembering that for millennia we have called ourselves Lakota meaning friend or ally," writes Layli Long Solider in her book Whereas (2017), "This relationship to the other. Some but not all, still our piece to everything." Atop endless plunder and trade paperbacks, we are awash in universes, multiverses; we can navigate their plurality as easily as ever, as poorly and incompletely as ever, and do so with sufficient everyday knowledge in the extended poetics of force to suspect, at last, that it isn't hard to make or remake worlds. Happy are those ages when the starry sky provides relief from the endlessly mapped world of the possible. So let's highlight the flourishing viability of the cosmogony, a poetic genre or function that has always existed, always filled shelf after shelf, and never been more accessible or workable than today when official standards no longer measure time by the skies, but by the shimmy of an isotope. Interpreting the alignments of something co-extensive with, but effortlessly grander than, the constantly quantified prison of visible causation, poet-astrologer Ariana Reines writes in her horoscope column for ArtForum (July 12, 2018): "It is as though the sky were saying, fuck the possible. The real is much much bigger than the merely possible. Pluto's black light is irradiating our illusions. Today's carceral nightmare, its open war on women, people of color, and queers was a gradual process of policy. For some, this hell used to be more ignorable. We should be grateful it has been dredged up into the light." Listening carefully, in the star-stuff of your burning core, to what you know to be true can, in effect, be a way of listening to the future, where one spins off from a waning ellipse at the end of combustion and prepares for new gravities. What does it mean to be...