Julian Day : Light Waves The Leaves, by Razielle Aigen

Light Waves The Leaves, Razielle Aigen

above/ground press, 2020

 

 

 

          night . moon . stars .  we’re
          learning                            to

          communicate                    in
          the dreamlanguage  we  will
          have been tracing  .  in    the
          beginning         ,         before
          speaking   .
                               (“Before Speaking”)
 

          Light Waves The Leaves (above/ground press, 2020), Razielle Aigen’s debut chapbook, lays out a poetry of constraint and connections. The fourteen poems of this collection turn between the personal and the interpersonal; between our relation to others, to the cities we live in, the world around us, and the ways in which these exist between us. This is a collection of enormous exploration carried out in small spaces, as Aigen works in and around the themes in her characteristic poetic form: tightly boxed, the boundaries rarely broken, poems whose spacing, syntax, and line breaks are employed to tremendous effect.

          Reading Aigen is to read a poet deeply attuned to sound and timing, her columnar form slowing the eye and allowing the poem space to leap and offer small epiphanies:

          larkspurs                   heralding

          a beginning  ,  like air filling a
          building      .       budding       .
          our  spring hearts soonly to be
          being   .  an almost awakening
          ,                            a springtime
                     (“A Cabin in the Woods”)  

          Aigen’s work is difficult to quote in sections; in terms of individual lines, almost impossible, each one so interconnected to those around it, so dependent on its particular spacing that it’s difficult to know where to begin and end. Aigen’s full effect, the feel of her poems, is best experienced in a poem’s entirety, in the way it begins – almost fragmentary – and continues dreamlike to its conclusion. And within these poetic moments, Aigen creates an uncertain space where the internal and external world are half-fused, open to the life of her poetic voice. In “Light Waves The Leaves”, the speaker speaks of words leaving their companion’s eyes on waves of light; in “From the Outside”, of creating a loophole in reality, a “visual palindrome” in which rain rains on both sides of a windowpane, the speaker and their companion entering and exiting their shared space, our own perspective shifting and wobbly, the separation of person and place continually in flux. And all the while, the poem’s hypnotic flow is held by Aigen’s skillful use of sound and rhythms, as in:

          time frames the firmament   ,

          a   site-specific   shaping    of
          what’s outsiding . entering &
                    (“From the Outside”)  

          That repeated rhythm dropping and lifting, line after line, almost Anglo-Saxon in its chant-like intensity.

The confluence of speaker, subject, and place is one of the major themes of this collection. But as interested as Aigen is in this, she is also concerned as with the self and its connection to the temporal, explored in poems such as “Birth of Venus”, “Eventide”, and “Wintering”. In the last of these, she plays on the title with its implications of staying still, or in a particular place:

she’s                     wintering
          they     say       ,        mostly
          because of how she cancels
          herself    out

But while she opens with a projection of other people’s perceptions on the subject, the “she”, Aigen’s quick to turn around their understanding:

            … time is what is

happening .  at any given

cross-section   a  lifetime

is spanning  .  a tinting at

the   beginning  of  being

 

           Aigen carefully closes the poem with an inversion of the original usage of “beginning” and “being”, breaking her own form to create lines of single, left-justified words to heighten what’s really going on in this wintering: an unseen and personal expansion, one that’s invisible to the simple interpretation of outside observers.

             … a tint of timing

the being of a beginning  .

spanning

a    lifetime   ,   wintering ,

branching

expanding

Light Waves The Leaves is a collection that demands slow and repeated readings; a collection in which meanings can turn on inversions, slant rhymes, word-halves, hard enjambment. In it, Aigen explores in tight spaces what it is to be part of the world, and for the world to be part of us. She expands and contracts time, showing the deep disconnect between the inner and outer self; and throughout, she does so with an powerful command of sound and rhythm, creating a world in which the poem’s sonic dreamspace hovers unbounded over the written, the offered truths a little different every time.

 

 

 

 

 

Julian Day lives in Winnipeg, where he works as a software developer. His work has recently appeared in Train and Whale Road Review, and his debut chapbook will be published by Anstruther Press in spring 2021.

Dessa Bayrock : Razielle Aigen and the inside, the outside

The Cruelty-Free Ivory Tower: a recovering grad student presents tongue-in-cheek semi-academic poetry reviews

There is perhaps no better time than a global pandemic to think about what it means to be inside, to be outside, to be somehow caught between the two. This is precisely what Razielle Aigen’s poem “From the Outside” (from her chapbook light waves the leaves, above/ground press, February 2020) struggles with, struggles against, struggles into: a poem which is “creating / a loophole, a visual / palindrome in which / rain rains on either side / of a windowpane.” 

We’re all acquainted with windows: one side is out and the other is in, and we sit in and look out. In this poem, however, Aigen begins to think of what it looks like when the outside, somehow, appears on both sides of the glass. The barrier hasn’t been broken down, but it has been circumvented, somehow. Is in still in? Is out still out? What happens if—or when—one becomes the other? Can in and out remain distinct from one another if they cohabitate or fall in love? What happens when these seeming immutable barriers suddenly become mutable?

These are perhaps familiar questions, posed not only by this poem, but by constraints on current living. I hardly need to tell you that the majority of us are stuck in our homes, leaving only for vital work or necessary errands before quickly returning inside. All of our narratives, understandably, have become inside-centric, and there is danger in something being purely internal—a one-sidedness that becomes an overgrown tangle with nowhere to go. I think most of us would recognize this as a self-evident truth of these times, pointing to our own restlessness, anxiety, fear, and loneliness as the proof of forced inside-ness gone awry, gone too far. 

How, then, might we imagine “a process of / overriding the insiding”, as Aigen puts it? The truth of the matter is that no one wants to be stuck inside, whether “inside” is a one-bedroom apartment or the walls of a single mind, unable or unwilling to emerge or communicate with whatever’s on the other side of the glass. It poses questions we might all be obsessed with: how can something that belongs outside be forced inside and still survive? How can we once again bring what is inside into a sphere where it can be shared, understood, or even loved?

Fittingly, then, the joy and excitement and driving force of this poem come from an instant in which these barriers seemingly disappear; even hidden within, the poet can be seen: as the poet’s lover repeats throughout the poem, “this is really you.”  

The poet brushes this off, mostly, but still feels compelled to “open all the windows and doors”—in other words, to dispel the barriers as much as possible, and continue growing closer to her lover. Together, the two of them begin to call out the things they see through these newly-opened portals—the birds, the plants—and begin naming them anew, as though they are Adam in the garden of Eden on the first day of the first spring. This naming feels monumental, captivating, somehow mythical in the way that reminds us: names have power. 

Stuck inside my one-bedroom apartment, it’s easy to see how this is a power we all have and yet all too easily forget. Aigen seeks to remind us of this power: the power not just to look but to see, and to understand and to know through our conscious, purposeful seeing. Put another way: how often have I stared out my balcony windows but not seen anything I’m looking at?

Perhaps we can rediscover this blessing, then, even stuck inside our lonely boxes for the foreseeable future. What are the names for the birds and trees outside the windows we stare at, day after day? What will it take to throw those windows open and to recognize what we see? 

Aigen writes:

pine-sparrow. walnut-lark. 

maple-pheasant. birch-

starling. holy oak! 

their shapes are pleasing. 

we are at ease. […]

we can’t explain what’s 

happening.

But her lover can, and does:

“I’m getting to know you,” she says “from the inside.”

There’s such joy in these sparse lines, and of course there is—because Aigen is not just looking out of her window, but out of herself. The poet becomes one with the world outside her window, but also begins to dissolve the barrier between her thoughts and her lover’s thoughts — and between her self and her lover’s self. The poet, too, is seen, and named, and understood. 

The end of the poem tangles all the threads of this discourse up beautifully: Aigen and her lover grow closer and closer in their separate understandings until it becomes a single understanding, falling into bed or into love, the clear boundaries between their bodies and words becoming blurred, forgotten, mutable. Love erases the barrier between inside and outside, blending both together into something that simply is.

So too is naming—or even just seeing—an action which transcends the boundary between the inner and the outer; a name, after all, is the shortest possible shorthand to signal knowledge of something or someone. By vocalizing our internal understandings, we make those understandings external, public—shared. Nested in her lover’s arms, this becomes clear even to Aigen, who tells us, at the end, that “by way of naming, we are / creating, we put it / outside.” 

She describes, then, the translation we all seek: from unspoken to spoken, from inside to outside. Even in the times we feel most stuck, Aigen seems to say, we can create connections out of seemingly nothing — building a vivid, shared reality out of the knowledge “nestled / on the inside, a hologram / of what we know is / happening.”

And so this poem has a message for this time of self-isolation: throw open the doors and windows. We can’t leave the inside, whether we take that to mean our homes or our heads. But we can open our eyes to see and our mouths to speak, and listen to our names for things twining together outside like garden snakes in the grass — verdant, gentle, flexible, and so very, beautifully, inarguably together. 

Dessa Bayrock lives in Ottawa with two cats and a variety of succulents, one of which occasionally blooms. She used to fold and unfold paper for a living at Library and Archives Canada, and is currently a PhD student in English, where she continues to fold and unfold paper. Her work has appeared in Funicular, PRISM, and Poetry Is Dead, among others, and her work was recently shortlisted for the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors. She is the editor of post ghost press. You can find her, or at least more about her, at dessabayrock.com, or on Twitter at @yodessa.