rob mclennan : Letters Inscribed in Snow, Practice Has No Sequel and Intaglio Daughters, by Laynie Browne

Letters Inscribed in Snow, Laynie Browne
Tinderbox Editions, 2023

Practice Has No Sequel, Laynie Browne
Pamenar Press, 2023

Intaglio Daughters, Laynie Browne
Ornithopter Press, 2023

 

 

It isn’t that often that anyone has three new poetry titles in the same season (barring Dennis Cooley, I suppose, who had same not that long ago), so I was curious to see this trio of new titles by Los Angeles-born Philadelphia-based poet, editor and fiction writer Laynie Browne. The author of more than a dozen full-length poetry titles and works of fiction prior to these—very little of which I’ve seen, admittedly, having only encountered and reviewed Translation of the lilies back into lists (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2022) and You Envelop Me (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2017), as well as the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2012), co-edited between her and Caroline Bergvall, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place—these three new poetry collections serve as a curious cluster of 2023 titles: Letters Inscribed in Snow (Red Wing MN: Tinderbox Editions), Practice Has No Sequel (London UK/Toronto ON: Pamenar Press) and Intaglio Daughters (Princeton NJ: Ornithopter Press). Browne’s work gives the sense of her approach to writing as a practice of ongoing study, seeking to expand the possibilities of language, literature and lyric. Given the near-simultaneous appearance of three separate collections, it also becomes curious to wonder about the potential compositional order: if there was overlap between these three collections, or if they were composed consecutively; how she might have approached working more than one collection at a time, or even if there are even further projects happening alongside but as yet to see final publication. Throughout these collections, Browne writes out declaratives and lyric fragments, approaching the lyric down to the structure of the interior; and of the sentence, offering writing that simultaneously examines writing. Within these works one can see echoes and even lineages, whether deliberate or simply a shared/common aesthetic, of works by Nicole Brossard, Rosmarie Waldrop, Anne Carson and Margaret Christakos, and most likely far more than that.

Letters Inscribed in Snow is composed as a pentaptych, or suite of five numbered sections—“An Opening,” “Letters Inscribed in Snow,” “The Book of Separating from One’s Skin,” “An Endless Chain of Persons Who Are Not You” and “Instantaneous Book of Silence”—of epistolary prose-poem response to an artwork/text and with its corresponding anonymous author. In certain ways, Letters Inscribed in Snow is simultaneously a book that describes the book and is the book, a meta separation akin to Alberta poet Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001), a poetry collection that wrote the archivist Raymond sitting as the collector and questioner of a pseudonymous (and lost) poet and her work (found). Or perhaps a better comparison might be Bobby “Boris” Pickett and The Crypt Kickers’ 1962 song “Monster Mash,” being a song about an entirely different song that we don’t actually hear. As the first section opens:

We are standing in a gallery looking at the floor. Embedded, sunken, is a four-foot by four-foot square slab of ice, opaque white. Around the slab is a rope, officially cordoning off the area. A plaque on the wall upon entering the small room reads, “A Book Inscribed in Snow.” The ice is blank, bare. The artist did not show up for the opening. We find out later that the artist used a pseudonym. An agent installed the piece and departed. Failed to answer questions. The artist clearly intended an unwritten and therefore open book. Surely the real author or the artist would come forward. But where does that mean—the real author—of snow, of the found, of letters, of invisibility? Bodies standing on frozen ground in winter. Trying to divine what is written beneath. Upon which inscription do you stand?

As she writes on the page following: “How will the book begin?” Letters Inscribed in Snow offers a conversation of letters and lyric on how we self-construct, which includes the very act of writing, writing on which writing is. “That version of me on paper is too mild,” one of the letters offers, “flat, sentimental. I don’t recognize myself. Now I’ve stopped writing entirely. It is so tiresome not knowing how to begin. What to call myself.” There is something interesting in both sides of the conversation, each with the sheen of the one-sided missive sent off into silence, or even as private diary or journal entries, as opposed to a more straightforward conversation through letters. The back-and-forth epistolary of a shifting binary via the prose poem is striking, offering a lyric that explores identity as well as the very act of writing, something very much in the Rosmarie Waldrop vein. How are we built, offered or self-created? How do we write? Or, as a further letter asks:

What I really want to know (that is, what the character in the book will want to know) why am I writing this fiction when I have a perfectly reliable life? I have a perfectly remarkable problem I cannot solve. A dream is transparent only to me and is the safety of that which cannot be taken. I must reverse. It takes a very potent illusion. Why now, I am addicted to abandonment, hidden to my motives? Where is the one who walks into the light, across a frozen letter, wearing only a smile? And that is enough.

Practice Has No Sequel is a curious book of between, of lingering; of internal narrative and discordant lyric, one that generates a space far more expansive than these words on the page. This is a book held amid thought, and one that, as the title suggests, is something akin to that ongoing, life-long practice-as-study. There may be a myriad of beginnings, but there is only one end. This collection is composed as a triptych, three sections of short fragments that accumulate across the length and breadth of the open space of the page: “Practice Has No Sequel,” “A Weaving” and “Ceremonies for Words.” The collection exists as a threaded sequence of prose-pools of thought, such as this piece from the third section, that writes: “Everything is made up. Momentarily alarmed, even her children were figments. No, none of this was true. Every photo torn, every person in some configuration of private or public torment. No perfect inscription exists, not even paper.” It is through this collection alone that Browne may have emerged as one of my favourite contemporary poets, and I felt an immediate kinship to what she is doing here. Browne offers a lyric of hesitation and ongoingness, flow and a sequential, perpetual and singular present, one that utilizes a concreteness of thought, presenting an abstract constructed out of the building blocks of language and experience. Or, as she writes deep into the second section:

She implores—me to linger. And now from middle—distance remembering—as if time were a seamless loop one could twirl like a lock—on the beloved—crown of one—the way my father cuts—a lock of her hair just after she died.

To leave is to cut. Why would I want to rush away from the one missed every living day—and here she stands before me—between selves and other moons—her body a threshold. No I don’t want to run boldly into any untold future—yet every future is unspoken—and I will not be permitted to stay.

Why not be inside—meeting—unceasingly—in the way each—moment may open accordion-like—the way any person is infinity. Your opposite pushes like a wave—back toward solidity. Grief—ebb tide—mirage.

Intaglio Daughters is a collection that responds directly to and riffs off a particular work by American Lyn Heijinian, specifically her The Unfollowing (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2016), a collection of “anti-sonnets” composed as “a sequence of elegies, mourning public as well as personal loss.” I haven’t seen that particular Hejinian title, but Browne offers a note on her text at the end of the collection:

Intaglio Daughters is an homage text for the poet Lyn Heijinian. All titles (in italics above teach poem) are taken from her book The Unfollowing. In the preface to her book she writes “I wanted each line to be as difficult to accept on the basis of the previous and subsequent lines as death is for we who are alive—a comparison that I make intentionally, since my intention in writing the sequence of poems I’m calling ‘The Unfollowing’ was to compose a set of elegies.” In considering a form for Intaglio Daughters I wondered—what follows loss and rupture? What follows unfollowing? The mourning process often involves a non-sequential experience of time—and many returns, wavelike, in spirals or contradictions. In keeping with this idea of rounds, sinuous or labyrinth-time, reaching backward and forward simultaneously, my book is a series of rondels, with the final line in each poem returning to, and resounding Hejinian’s language.

As in the first two collections, the poems in Intaglio Daughters are propelled by language, sound and meaning, offering a way through and beyond the possibilities of what language offers. These poems exist in response to a specific work, and riffing off into further directions. Hers is a gestured lyric, one that sweeps a hand or arm across narrative, almost akin to a monologue or performative speech, but one deeply attuned to the shape and sound of words. “We have entered the opposite / side of each minute.” she writes, early on in the collection. Further on in the book, offering: “Once upon a time the unhappened / spoke: Bake a loaf of bread—to keep tongue brave / Give your beloved: twins with molten hours / Bury yourself in earth up to your neck. You, thief of beauty / will have no rest even in your grave [.]” There is something fascinating through the way Browne works these individual book-length projects prompted as response works, whether responding to an external prompt (ie: Heijinian’s The Unfollowing) or epistolary, as though her writing requires a point through which to counter. If one can hold that the multiple books that made bpNichol’s “The Martyrology,” Robert Kroetsch’s “Field Notes” or Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest (University of California Press, 2006) each as “life works,” then one might also suggest that Laynie Browne is engaged in a similar kind of ongoing, lyric study, one we’ve yet to fully see the larger shape of. “I held the two words in my mouth,” Browne writes, mid-point through Intaglio Daughters, “Not names or actions yet they signaled new relations [.]” Further on, as the same poem offers: “Because I didn’t know how to make your absence / disappear I strung shell around my neck [.]”

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. The writer E. Annie Proulx once told him to take his feet down off a chair. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com