Jenny Boully : He Wrote in Code

(tarpaulin sky press)

Over the bridge, the narrow, single-lane bridge.

With a caution sign before it.

And somewhere, in California, you drove your truck over

You called it your Millennium Falcon, and from the rearview mirror you hung a miniature one in the same way the religious keep sacred.

You gave me parting gifts: a miniature dinosaur, a miniature Gorbachev, your miniature Millennium Falcon to keep me safe in the air.

When you crashed, you did not have

You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies.

Afterwards, a woman came out of her house to inspect; she asked your friend who survived if he shot her dog. And that was it. That was that.

A few years ago, a sculpture, called Kryptos, was installed somewhere in the center of the Pentagon. Kryptos is a sheet of green metal with Greek letters cut into it. The artist made it so that there were hidden messages in Kryptos, messages which would change with shadows cast by sunlight. Most of the messages has been decoded except for one segment, the very last. Kryptos still stands undecoded, unread, not completely understood. You said you would be the one to solve it; you said it like you were Arthur of the sword.

@

First off, two things before I get around to Jenny's wonderful stuff. Scroll to Onto if you just want to read about her.

One is that I've been writing what for me counts as an unusual number of negative reviews recently. I'm not sure why. Writing a negative review of someone weighs on me a lot, although not when I'm typing -- then there's blood in the water.

It struck me that one of the poets I gave a poor review to is a Chicago poet, and now I'm doubly scared of going to readings because I might meet him and if we did one way for him to totally fuck with me would be to pretend it wasn't his work I said mean things about (I have a terrible memory for names) but then only do it once we had struck up this great camraderie over beers.

In my ideal world, everyone would read rhubarb every time I posted, except when I wrote a negative review, and then everyone but the author would read it and it would be an anti-secret among us. I definitely do not get off on the idea of upsetting another poet (although I do, actually, get off on the idea of insulting another editor -- I think it's an editor's duty to prevent writers from publishing their B-game.)

Perhaps, in the end, that's it: negative reviews are a way for me to communicate with the culture -- the culture of editing and reviewing and discussing -- and not with the poet. I think if posting evaluative-analytical stuff on poetry to a blog has any value, it comes in I think raising the bar for readers and editors. It's an act of taking seriously.

Two is that I've all but retired my manuscript. It went out on the contest circuit last year. I was stunned that over the course of two years I had put together about eighty poems that I could simultaneously think well of. But I'm gradually moving on, and writing new things -- writing monologues and dialogues and really populated material -- and seeing my old work in new light -- seeing clearly its deficiencies and evasions and parlor game aspects -- and I no longer want to see it in print. I know -- a great loss to World Literature, thanks.

Onto Jenny. Tarpaulin Sky press sent me a batch of wonderful little books; they look fantastic (although I disagree with the decision to mix serif and sans-serif face in Jenny's book.) While I was paging through Jenny's book I was struck by He Wrote in Code (above is an excerpt) because it reminded me -- in its sort of propositional form -- of Carole Maso's Ava.

As it turns out, the debt to Carole Maso is deep enough that Jenny acknoledges it in the opening, which I didn't read until later (am I the only one who jumps around in books? -- the last time I read a book cover to cover was Graham Foust's, and that was because I was trapped on a plane and thought I'd try.)

Prose poem or short fiction? I think to read this as short fiction, if only because Jenny's interrogations are at the level of plot, narrative, time -- and not at the level of language, sound, breath. I liked this -- that Kryptos has some of the fun of a Richard Powers novel along with the Masonian (look at that!) seeming-brevity.

I like the way that Jenny here can pause -- video like -- and play the motion. This is pretty much guaranteed to be a tired move (I am reading Terry Eagleton's novel Saints and Scholars and literally groaned when he did it.) But Jenny really pulls it off in a subtle, understated way, so that you feel a kind of soft piling-up of detail.

I think it's fair to say that Jenny is writing out of the feminine, that she is taking "feminine" qualities from one of the hoary old binaries and giving them her own spin. The divergent, as opposed to convergent, moment seems to be one of these, and Jenny seems really aware of how to create divergence, branching, diffusion of attention.