Chris Pusateri reviews
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All poetry owes something to its predecessors, and in Graham Foust’s Leave the Room to Itself, a number of influences are readily evident: we see Emily Dickinson (stripped of her emdash) and George Oppen (circa The Materials), as well as hints of Lorine Niedecker and Jack Spicer. As we pan into the realm of the living, the poet whose work invites comparisons with Foust’s own is Robert Creeley, whose sparse, economical style espouses an artistic dictum more often associated with prose: namely, that less is more. Collapse back
Foust’s poetry could be analyzed as workshop topiary, but this would be to do it a disservice. Taken alone, a technical analysis reduces the poetry to little more than a mechanical exercise, and in the process avoids a larger, and to my mind, more important discussion. That is, what wider issues does the work engage? In what ways does it reach, as Joe Wenderoth says in his introduction to the book, the ‘unteachable moment,’ while eschewing the easy metaphysics of the romantic sublime? |
I should like to have spent
When pondering Foust’s use of the room-as-trope, it is helpful to consider how rooms typically function. In an architectural sense, they divide interior space, and by extension, dictate the types of activities that can occur within that space. For instance, some rooms are for eating, others are for sleeping, and still others are chambers for torture. If each poem is analogous to a room, then there are two doors: one leading into the room and one leading out. Sometimes, there is a single door for both. Chop this This discontinuity hints at a crisis of perspective that both threatens and enables the poetic enterprise. Foust’s comment that ‘I have never looked at a landscape/ without seeing other landscapes’ (43) introduces the troubling possibility that the rooms we’ve been viewing are all versions of the same room, each different from the others in the manner that Gertrude Stein’s repetitions were not in fact replications at all, but a series of sovereign occurrences being performed anew. What Foust asks of his readers is redolent of what Nietzsche demanded of the eye: ... an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will [be] our ‘concept’ of this thing. (Nietzsche, 119)
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Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.
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Reviewer Chris Pusateri is the author of Berserker Alphabetics (xPressed, 2003) and the chapbook VI Fictions (Gong, forthcoming). Recent work was or will be published in Bird Dog, Chicago Review, Fence, LVNG, and Magazine Cypress. He lives in Seattle, Washington. |
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