A VERY LARGE ARRAY : SELECTED POEMS, Jena Osman
DABA, 2023
There’s a voice in the room and what are you noticing. What are the sounds in the room. Is there a bell that says that the dinner is ready to be served. Is there a bird warming up outside that you are noticing. In what ways does that noticing mean anything good. Is this its own performance or part of something else. Are you listening to someone’s voice while reading this to yourself. Are you listening to the words that the voice sounds or simply to the sound. What kind of sound are you hearing beyond the voice that’s sounding. Do you hear the cars on the road. Do you hear the hum of the fan on the floor. Do you hear anything from the hallway or from the rooms next door. Do you hear the one voice whispering to the other. Do you hear the chairs scraping against the floor. Do you hear a door closing and a latch latching. Do you hear the sound of the breath of the person next to you. Are you noticing your own body as it sits in the chair that may or may not be comfortable. Do you find yourself slowing down, looking up, tracking back. (“TO THE READER”)
I’m fascinated by the more than four hundred pages of Philadelphia poet Jena Osman’s hefty A VERY LARGE ARRAY : SELECTED POEMS (Brooklyn NY: DABA, 2023), a work that showcases an ongoing engagement on her part with challenging the what and the how of the what that can be considered poems or poetry. A VERY LARGE ARRAY showcases a poet engaged with seeking out linkages and connections, and her building materials include elements of conversation, theory, archival material and historical document, the Franklin Expedition, a conversation with American poet Ron Silliman, medical illustrations, the periodic table, the genealogies of words and the origins and influences of The Joker. I’m sure you already know that I’m regularly complaining about selecteds or collected that lack an introduction, something to provide a context of why this poet and why this selection (and why now, etcerta), but the structure and organization of A VERY LARGE ARRAY really does provide its own context, once you begin to go through the material. I would still like to know exactly how (and by whom) this particular volume was selected and crafted, organized as a quintet of “arrays”—“AN ARRAY OF HISTORY,” “AN ARRAY OF NEWS,” “AN ARRAY OF SCIENCE,” “SUPREME COURT ARRAY” and “THEATER ARRAY”—each of which are made up of individual poem-sections, pieces and poem-sequences, suggesting the collection is one constructed across a sequence of concerns over, say, publishing chronology. And in case you aren’t aware, the work in A VERY LARGE ARRAY is excerpted from and organized across thirty years of Osman’s many full-length collections, chapbooks and magazine publications through such as Wesleyan University Press, Fence Books, Meow Press, Creative Time Books, Ugly Duckling Press, Burning Deck, Hot Whiskey Magazine and Roof Books, as well as works for performance, librettos and otherwise commissioned writing. I’m very much appreciating how this collection is allowing me an entry point into a poet’s work I hadn’t seen enough of prior to get a sense of, as well as allowing a hint of the scale of her ongoing work, which seems enormous (although I’m presuming that the selection and organization of this volume offers something closer to an overview-of-sorts as opposed to simply selecting one thread out of multiple possibilities throughout her work—I am thinking of the large selected long poem volume of George Bowering that Stephen Collis put together for Talonbooks [see my review here], or the prose poem selected of Maxine Chernoff [see my review here]).
There is something interesting about Osman’s approach to Franklin, “THE FRANKLIN PARTY,” reminiscent of Robert Kroetsch’s chapbook around David Thompson, offering her own thread on how stories are relayed and told, retold and relate. Poets, one might suppose, are quite attracted to explorers (and their failings/foibles). You might be amazed at how many Canadian poets have explored the stories and archives on Franklin, but Osman offers hers seemingly without flourish, instead organizing the information in a manner that suggests straightforward but bends in the most curious places. As Osman’s piece begins:
1819. John
Franklin leads an expedition to map the Arctic. Many in his party die of
starvation and Franklin becomes “the man who ate his boots.”
|
1825. Franklin
returns to the Arctic and continues the work; for this he becomes Sir John
Franklin.
|
A brief interlude when
he governs Tasmania.
|
1845. Franklin
(age 59) and a crew of 129 men ship out to discover a shortcut to Asia through
the Northwest Passage—the mythic waterway that runs from Atlantic to Pacific by
way of the Arctic. They are never seen again.
|
Our most complete
maps of the Arctic region result from search expeditions
sent to solve the
mystery Franklin and his men became.
Through Osman, one can see the way a seemingly straight narrative bends perception, as though what was considered mirrored glass has been pushed by a lone finger, to reveal a reflective surface far more malleable. She composes distinct sections and sequences that utilize historical and archival threads, stitched together in order to orient or reorient, seeking to articulate how language can be claimed or reclaimed beyond original purposes, or washing through the facts of Franklin, for example, or 19th century medical knowledge. The perspective from there to here, for example, but one thread through many. As part of the preface to the fifth piece of the first of this quartet of clustered sections, she writes:
The Athenæum of
Philadelphia keeps a leather-bound share book which tracks who has owned each
of its shares of stock since they became available for purchase in 1815. The shares
have been passed down from one owner to another—sometimes staying within the
same family for generations—up until the present day. in 1956, Athenæum
librarian Francis James Dallett wrote that “in no other private institution can
the unbroken continuity of Philadelphia life be so strongly felt.” The passing
of shares from one owner to another throughout the last two centuries is a physical
manifestation of that continuity. By following the life of the Athenæum’s
shares one can discover the links between Philadelphia’s past and its present.
I decided to investigate the lineages of
the shares by following nine of them. The decisions of which shares to follow
were based on somewhat random factors—the sound of the name “Tunis,” the fact
that Robert Hobart Smith had very nice handwriting, the fact that Talbot
Hamilton brought a lot of guests to the library etc. I chose to focus most of
my research on the founding shareholders, limiting myself (in the interests of
time and space) to just one aspect of their very compelling antebellum lives. Without
such limitations, one could imagine that the detailed histories of all of the
shareholders listed here would paint a fairly specific (although still
incomplete) portrait of the United States through time (“PREFACE,” “from USEFUL
KNOWLEDGE: A GENEALOGY OF SHARES”)
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [image credit: David Okum] 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, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection 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. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. 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