by Joshua Corey

VERSE, Volume 23, Numbers 1-3. The Places as Preludes by Gustaf Sobin

Gustaf Sobin writes from a verge, the gap of perception suggested by his epigraph from Vincent van Gogh: "There's a note of a certain nameless black in the restless gusty blue of the broad sky, and, in vibrant contrast, the poppies' bright vermilion." The poems in Sobin's last book tend to begin in medias conspicio, opening like eyelids between the title and, often, a set of ellipses that yield to a discovery of the natural world colluding with the senses to make something like a meaning, like writing:

. . . even the wasps, spastic over
still water, partake in
that hallucinatory spectacle you'd gauge, if you
could, set to the
scales of some
ob-

fuscated order.
("Prelude VI")

But such orders are always offside (Sobin's floating "ob-" is entirely typical; Latin prefixes are continually set off by line breaks in Sobin's poetry, turned into the tiniest units of movement, prepositional gestures), dissolved in a blink without the accompaniment of sincerity or Sorge: "not a note, though that doesn't / dis- // solve at the least / specious / reading. that doesn't refute, so doing, mis- // nomer." We can scarcely resist the attempt, for as this poem, "Prelude VI," concludes, "earth's // grammatology, remains to be / written." But these scanned, sketched places are "as" preludes to the work of writing that has yet to be done – perhaps to be completed by the reader, as the events and perceptions in Wordsworth's The Prelude were meant to prepare the ground for his "real" poem, The Recluse, which went unwritten. We do, however, have these lines from the "Prospectus" Wordsworth wrote for The Recluse:

my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted: – and how exquisitely, too,
Theme this but little heard of among Men,
The external World is fitted to the Mind . . .

Sobin's fragmented sprawl across the page and eye for the "luminous detail" (he wrote a book about the prehistory of his adopted landscape in southern France titled Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc) would seem to place him firmly in the Modernist camp of Williams and Pound, at some distance from Wordsworth's Romantic narratives. But the adequation of "the individual Mind... to the external World" and the more extraordinary corollary, "The external World is fitted to the Mind" is Sobin's great subject, or rather his great gamble. Each poem is a throw of the dice that could never abolish chance but which might found an ecstasy, a standing-out from mundane experience into the dialectical flash between landscape/ animal/ flower and word, which in seeming to imitate one another intoxicate their point of mediation, the human being:

SEPTEMBER

               for Michael Mayan

. . . now that the Swan
has swung southward on her blue
wind-
beaten pedestal, will the syllables, at long

last, harden? the breath, so
doing, catch on its
lost

dictate? the heavens themselves, as a set of
recondite signals, would release the
ruffled, the winged, the
intuitively
dis-

posed. lactiferous, hadn't she, from the deepest
pleats of
her

being, already insinuated, by her
inclination alone, the
Way?

"Pleats" is a word characteristic of The Places as Preludes: words caressing forms abound to mark a style I should call the palpable abstract: pendulous, refluent, volute, pulsatile. Sometimes this seems to be in service to a Whitmanian inverted fallacy of writing in imitation of nature, but rather than rendering nature legible, nature instead lends to language its power of pleasing without a concept. That is, "a scribble of roses at the earth's very edge: what, for all their pun- / gency, passeth all understanding" ends a poem, "Transparent Itineraries: 2001," which began, "for the perfumes, you'd come to realize, were far more substan- / tiating, finally, than the flesh." Scent here, the sense for which we have perhaps the smallest and most inadequate vocabulary, comes to stand for that ineffable zone (Stevens' "fragrant portals") between green nature and human nature, language and meaning. Each poem repeats this gesture, none perhaps more simply and compactly than the short "Pro Lyrica":

. . . three pebbles
make a path. the least breeze, though, would
tatter the
wafted strands of
this tenuous syntax, dissipate all sense of the com-

ensurate. wedge, then, to
what if not

these very knuckles. for only there, in taut ac-
cretions, might the moon, in all its
octaves, come to
quaver.

Full stops, pebbles, knuckles: from letters to the body and back again, chasing the "smoke" of spirit, the breath that in the very last poem, "Prelude XVIII," "at the very // end of / its beaten pilgrimage, might, at long last, squirt gold." The sexual imagery here speaks to the fundamental eroticism of Sobin's "unuttered" interruptions in sequence, the "wedges" that attempt to break open an "idyll of apples and / oleanders." Sobin feels himself to be the hinge between the seen and the palpable, the present and the past, a door of perception produced by the action of the beloved, language itself. So the figure of Echo reverberates in "The Goldbeaters," in which the speaker "would tease from her / tongue its / least // glistening particle," and in "The Physics of Verse" Sobin makes his priorities for poetry clear: "meter, therein, in pursuit of matter." It is the moment before meaning happens, "frivolous with immensity," which stands as Sobin's palpable elysium: "nothing's too far if it // draws, in- / volves you: takes you past this / fist- / ful of viscera into such in- // commensurable displays."

About the Author
Joshua Corey is the author of two full-length books of poetry, Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), as well as a chapbook, Compos(t)ition Marble, (Pavement Saw Press, 2006). He lives in Ithaca, New York where he is completing a dissertation on modernist pastoral at Cornell University.

Visit Joshua Corey's weblog....

VERSE

Editors: Brian Henry, Andrew Zawacki
Managing Editor: Kevin Hart
Associate Editor: Chris McDermott