Some years ago I sat down with a poet friend and commenced to complain about the then-current categories into which critics herded poets. The terms varied, but (or so I claimed, grousing over my espresso) they always seemed to stress the same division, as if the line drawn between Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 and the Hall/Pack/Simpson anthology New Poets of England and America had exhausted the possibilities for poetic distinctions and affinities. “So,” said my sensible friend, “let’s come up with some others.” One of our ideas was to divide poets into astrologers and astronomers—not in any literal sense, although a little effort would probably bring examples of poet-astrologers and poet-astronomers to mind. We sought, rather, a distinction between temperaments. Robert Bly? Surely an astrologer, just as Robert Duncan would be. Marianne Moore? An astronomer, just like Rae Armantrout. I hadn’t thought about this little parlor game for years, but when I began reading How the Universe is Made (Ahsahta, 2019), Stephanie Strickland’s new and selected poems, I was overwhelmed by a powerful sentiment: here, I knew, was an astronomer, as pure as they come.
The first distances we encounter in How the Universe is Made aren’t interstellar, though. The poems Strickland has selected from her early collection Give the Body Back (1991) begin with an account of the distance between a shipboard speaker and a medusa, a briefly glimpsed jellyfish as elusive as it is splendid in its alterity. It’s no coincidence that Strickland chooses to write about the jellyfish in its mythologically resonant medusa phase of development: many of the poems from Give the Body Back depict a feminine presence as unnerving, in her way, as the snake-headed woman from Greek mythology: the poet’s mother. We get the gist of the relationship in a childhood memory from “Mother: Dressed Up” where, mid-embrace, the speaker (most likely a child) tells us:
I am stunned
by your body, trying
to hide
its eagerness
to pull away
from mine.
Later, in “My Mother’s Body,” the emotional distance comes from the daughter’s inability to open up to the mother. “Tell me about writing,” the frail and aged mother asks from her hospital bed, spreading her tube-and-wire entangled arms. “But,” replies the daughter, “I could not tell her.” The daughter has been as paralyzed by the mother as any Greek hero caught in Medusa’s gaze. We see the origins of this poet’s sensibility: reserved, rational, and analytic, rather than emotionally warm; systematic rather than spontaneous; Apollonian, not Dionysian. An astronomer.
Perhaps it is not surprising that Strickland turns to Simone Weil as the subject of her next book, The Red Virgin: Weil, after all, is another woman haunted by distances, what will to connect she has constantly foiled by a world that refuses to embrace her. Strickland’s poem “Comic Progression, 1939–” gives a kind of précis of Weil’s attempts to connect to, and even die for, community. Weil constantly seeks to be sent to the front in France’s war with Germany, and is consistently rejected. Later, she is sentenced to jail and looks forward to finding community there, but her conviction is overturned and the opportunity for fellowship in chains disappears. She tries to join the Catholic Church, but her reasons for becoming Catholic do not fit with the priest’s sense of theological norms. Later, having fled to England, she asks repeatedly to be sent back to France as a saboteur, but is rejected and sent to a solitary desk job. In several poems, Strickland implies a parallel between Weil’s situation and Weil’s thought: Weil’s is, after all, a theology of a God who withdraws so that we may pursue him, and one of her great notions is that of the metaxu, a point of division that is also a point of connection. The metaxu is like a prison wall that divides the inhabitants of different cells, but in so doing creates the conditions for them to communicate by knocking on the wall. Weil’s eventual death—starving herself in English exile out of sympathy for the French living under occupation—is just such a metaxu. She exits this world alone, but does so to sacrifice the isolated self on behalf of the community: she departs in order to draw close. This kind of distant closeness fascinates Strickland, and when she contemplates Weil’s death she thinks of her own mother. In a strange way, the figure of Weil becomes a metaxu itself, allowing Strickland to return to a contemplation of the death of her emotionally distant mother at a safe remove.
True North, Strickland’s next book of poems, examines codes, broadly conceived, and the makers of codes, seeking the significance of both. She begins with a poem on the paleographer David Diringer’s The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind, but soon focuses on two other figures, one well-known to readers of poetry (Emily Dickinson) and one not—the nineteenth-century American mathematician, physicist, and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs. Both Dickinson and Gibbs were introverts, and the products of a particular strain in New England Protestantism that fostered inner passion and outward restraint. Both Dickinson and Gibbs quietly fabricated universes out of their observations, and in their different ways made private codes of symbols that have grown to greater public significance. Gibbs’s work on important forms of scientific notation eludes my understanding, but I am reassured by Wikipedia that it made possible both statistical mechanics and modern vector calculus. Strickland, who understands these things, notes that Gibbs’s social isolation and reserve could be overcome by his fascination with systems of notation, which brought him into contact with others and eventually made possible major innovations in the world. This, perhaps, was his metaxu. In “Young Willard Gibbs is a Physicist” she writes of Gibbs as:
at home […]
with ideas; not, with people—yet, if it were
important, he would praise: eulogizing
Clausius; if it were very important,
he would fight: over vectors, with Tait.
“… but I believe that there is a deeper
question of notions underlying
that of notations. Indeed, if my offence
had been solely in the matter
of notation….”
Gibbs, in Strickland’s rendering, needs solitude to create the language for certain mathematical ideas, but at the same time he insists on the social being of those ideas, their validity as a way of participating in the world. We get a good sense of this in “0 Shortcut to What?” which presents us with the only recorded moment of Gibbs speaking in a Harvard faculty meeting over a long academic career:
Gibbs, hidden at home, creating the loneliness
he needed to assume just one responsibility—for which no thanks,
much complaining of it, some wonder.
[…]
The reward for
getting past the failings of language? To be found
un-readable. Gibbs rose. He said: Mathematics
is a language. And sat down.
Gibbs highlights the social character of the ideas of mathematics—asserting that math is a language makes a claim for its ability to connect people, to produce the conditions of sociality, circulation, and communication.
Later, in “Heaven and Earth, 1666,” Strickland shows us a submerged human connection between isolated scientists working on the same problems over centuries, with Copernicus’s observations augmented by Tycho Brahe, then formalized by Kepler, and incorporated in Newton’s thought. Astronomy separates these men, alone in their studies or staring at the night sky, but also connects them—it is a kind of metaxu. The isolated figure finding a strange, oblique connection with others fascinates Strickland, and she returns to her icons of connected isolation—Weil, Dickinson, and Gibbs—again and again throughout her poetry.
Indeed, Strickland dedicates her next book, WaveSon.nets/Losing L’Una to Simone Weil as just such a figure, noting her need to reach beyond isolation in “her Life & Thought;/her need to touch;” In the poems of this book we see Weil dedicating herself to humble labors—pitching hay, working beetroot fields, picking grapes—in an attempt to identify more fully with the common people. We also find Strickland’s instructions on how to approach her poems, which are often constructed in series and, even when presented as discrete, connect to other poems in the oeuvre via recurrent characters, themes, and motifs (count the number of witches, of references to Adam naming the creatures of Eden, or of mentions to cuneiform script as you read How the Universe was Made and you’ll see what I mean). “Gentle reader,” Strickland writes in “Errand Upon Which We Came,” “begin anywhere. Skip anything. This text/is framed/fully for the purpose of skipping.” Strickland gives us the stars: she lets the reader draw the connecting lines that make constellations.
Some will be frustrated by this invitation for readers to make their own provisional wholes out of the parts on display: the obliquity and fragmentation of the “WaveSon.nets,” for example, can seem more like a collection of notes for poetry than like fully realized poems, and “slippinglimpse,” from the next collection Zone: Zero, consists of a collection of snippets from various articles and interviews about technology and the arts, awaiting strong intervention by the reader if she is to find points of connection and areas of signification. But this elusiveness is a common enough feature of the period style of experimental poetry during the years covered by the collection, and it provides its own pleasures. I’m never quite going to understand a line like “Gnova, Gnomon, Goose, Ouzel, Orca, Longdark” from “WaveSon.net 14,” but that’s not going to stop me from enjoying it as it rolls off the tongue, or as I attempt to wedge it into some elusive pattern of meaning.
Given her love of scientific codes, it should come as no surprise that Strickland—who sits on the board of the Electronic Literature Organization— adores information technology. We see this in Zone: Zero’s “Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot,” a kind of elliptical drama or dialogue between Sand, a figure for silicon-based computer technology, and Soot, an embodiment of human life, destined to end as ashes. We see it, too, in her increasing turn to ekphrastic writing in her more recent books, where the art she engages is invariably electronic: “Rara Avis,” for example, from Dragon Logic, addresses a telepresence installation by Eduardo Kac in which remote participants are invited to inhabit the subjectivity of a robotic macaw in an aviary. Here we see the idea of the metaxu yet again, as people separated by technological mediation are also connected by participation in the shared subject position of the bird. Another poem from the Dragon Logic, “Algorithm,” includes a list of instructions that reveal Strickland’s quiet sense of delight in the construction of codes and systems:
map a metaphor or more
to computational processes ( not
to compositional
capiche? )
twiddle ( de dee ) tweak ( de dum )
execute / run repeat
till well ( enough )
The twiddle de dee and twiddle de dum are entirely ludic, and show the spirit of joy that must have animated Strickland in the construction of her many electronic poems, descriptions of which appear, along with illustrations, in the final section of How the Universe is Made, “Poems Procedural, Generative, Kinetic & Hypertextual.” Several of these are, alas, no longer functional with current information technology.
Ahsahta is to be commended for many things about this book: the handling of difficult typography, the presentation of numerous images, and the selection of the cover image, a Micronesian stick chart of wave patterns and ocean currents in the form of an irregular grid of rods and pebbles—the perfect representation of Strickland’s sensibility. Only a nitpicking wretch would bother to complain about a table of contents that lists only the titles of books rather than of individual poems, or of endnotes that tell you who Walt Disney was but do little to explain what Bell’s theorem is all about, other than refer the befuddled reader to John Stewart Bell’s 1964 Physics.
Strickland’s name has never figured prominently among the experimental poets of her generation, which includes such figures as Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, and Charles Bernstein. Perhaps this is because Strickland has had only a marginal connection to academe, or perhaps it is because the delight that animates these poems is—like Josiah Gibbs’s quiet passion—only detectable when one listens carefully. No matter. How the Universe is Made gives those who have missed out on Strickland’s remarkable journey a chance to catch up.