Also in this issue, Juliet’s poems
by Kate Greenstreet
Ahsahta Press
ISBN: 0916272893
$16.00
Reviewed by Juliet Patterson
Kate Greenstreet’s debut volume of poetry, case sensitive, is astudy of invention, not in the conventional sense, in which somethingnew is created out of nothing, but in the way a frugal person might makesheer curtains out of a wedding dress. The underlying materials remainconstant, but find new shape and expression through carefully chosenadditions, shifts and alterations. The result is a book full of luminousfootnotes, details, attentive readings and hypnotic listening; anarrative experiment that seems to move easily between the associativeconnections of poetry and the recursive thinking of the essay.
Constructed of five sequences, case sensitive centers on onecentral character, though with a minimum of plot. The whole book can beseen to trace the event of a woman driving cross-country to anunexplained house that awaits her on the opposite coast. En route, sheis listening to a novel—a mystery—over her car’s CD player; hertraveling companions include a variety of texts; the letters and writingof Lorine Niedecker, Agnes Martin, Paula Modersohn-Becker and MarieCurie. What unites the book as a whole is the formal structure of thesequences—five chapbooks created by Greenstreet’s character that givehints about her life. As they are imagined, the chapbooks are stitchedtogether by Greenstreet’s driver-reader, forming an immediate vehiclefor the book to ultimately address its own creation.
It’s thestructure and order of these chapbooks that pushes the project towardextended narrative and essayistic thinking. Taken as a whole, the poemscreate a fragmented and journalistic portrait of Greenstreet’scharacter, a mysterious and mythic ‘everywoman’ for the reader, anordinary person on a kind of hero’s journey. Each of the chapbookschanges in tone and strategy, stringing together a “story” as a collageof forms— part poem, part gossip, and part documentary.
In oneof the more emblematic sequences in the book, “Great Woman ofScience,” we’re given small clues about the speaker’s life (detailsabout a childhood home, snippets of her experiences on the road, andmemories of her brief encounters with ghosts) but are never told exactlywhere she’s headed or why. With the book’s opening lines, we’reimmediately warned of the mystery that lies ahead:
- Many things about the story are puzzling.
The womencooking, the men
Swimming in the sea.
I believe we needlight
inside the body.
Her necklace is
Sparkling, see?
See the sparkle lines?
Wood into gold,“this diamond, this
poetry I speak of”—
Thesecond sequence of the book, “Salt,” uses a recursive form tocreate an enigmatic narrative of the character’s childhood. Each poem istitled with a phrase that relates to the uses and properties of salt.Although at times it’s difficult to draw connections between the contentof these titles and the meanings of the poems (especially in light ofthe character’s journey), the combinations make for immenselyintelligent readings that operate beautifully in the context of thebook.
In contrast, “Book of Love,” operates largelyas an interior dialogue that allows the reader a deeper look into ourcharacter’s mind. Here, Greenstreet relies on a collage of voices—LorineNiedecker, Agnes Martin, Paula Modersohn-Becker and others—to explorethe relationship of doubt to love and loss. The spare, lyrical qualityof these poems and their attentiveness to detail is reminiscent ofNeidecker or even to some degree, Robert Creeley, with their querulousinvestigation into the speaker’s consciousness.
In the othertwo sequences of the book, Greenstreet continues to merge and samplevoices. While “Where’s the Body” samples from a mystery novelthat the character is listening to on her car’s tape player,“Diplomacy” is written as a long prose-like sequence thatborrows from sources as variant as Heidegger, the bible and linguistictexts.
Because one can never entirely pin down or locate the“speaker” of Greenstreet’s poems, they seem to exist inconstant motion. Likewise, exterior location is only hinted at orrevealed in fragmented moments. What propels these poems is a fluidmixture of language experiment with the more lyric emotion of thefirst-person voice. Ultimately, Greenstreet’s work spirals into thelandscape of sound and the argument and randomness of thought, creatinga narrative that could be any of the past lives, dreams, or presentcircumstances they represent. Most of the writing itself is simple, withlittle decoration or rhetoric. This is essential; a surface simplicitydraws the reader all the more into moments when language moves andcreates a new reality.
Here’s another passage fromGreenstreet’s “Book of Love,” one of the many poems in whichthe speaker hears her own randomness speak:
- Leave openings
for entrance from the street.
“That’s why they haveconductors”
(those big tubes running underneath thefloor).
In art, like sex, the unbidden
and thewillingness.
(the melting point the boiling point the meltingpoint)
It’s difficult not to come away pleased with therhythmic pleasures of these poems, to admire Greenstreet’s dexteritywith pacing and narrative. However, what makes them most remarkable isthe sensation that the reader is not only overhearing these words, butis also herself in the midst of the work, encountering the same voices,the same questions. The effect is at once personal and casual, as if,she should continue reading, without too much effort. “The wordsjust came,” Greenstreet writes in another poem, and that’s just howthe reader feels—these poems simply arrived.
