Or get anything out of. For one, it has all the markings of the referential, post-post whatever poetry that really turns some people on. Poems set to movie stills of movies I haven’t seen, poems written by reading over people’s shoulders, poems that place one-or-two word lines together with no conjunction, i.e. “Heartbeat- / flipbook. / Clonebooth.” You know what I’m talking about. The kind of poetry that serves as a punchline on late-night TV shows.
But never judge a book by its cover, or a poet by her (or his) line lengths. There are several poems in Elaine Equi’s Click and Clone that I read three or four times – because I enjoyed them, not because I didn’t get them. “Sight Unseen,” “A Woman of the Wrong Altitude, “The Libraries Didn’t Burn,” “To Eddy Poe,” “#1 The Terror,” to name a few.
Take “The Libraries Didn’t Burn,” a poem that’s (somewhat) about how the internet age has changed how most Americans read: “the locket of bookish love / still opens and shuts,” she writes:
But its words have migrated
to a luminous elsewhere.
Neither completely oral nor written —
a somewhere in between.
Here, Equi puts together the truest description of internet reading that I’ve come across so far, that “luminous elsewhere” of the computer screen that engenders the “somewhere in between” of skimming information instead of listening to or reading it. I doubt that I am alone in having to make a conscious decision now to read a whole article instead of just scrolling through the highlights.
It’s all part of Equi’s larger design, though – to try to understand how art has changed in the digital age. And changed it has, she thinks. In the 20th century, James Schuyler “could say: ‘A cardinal enchants me with its song’ and get away with it,” she writes in “Reading Schuyler.” But now, in the 21st? Birds “shit on sentiment / and refuse to ornament / our lawns” (“Canceled Flight”). The Romantic’s nightingale “pauses midsong / for a very, very long time.”
There’s a sense here that nature, which used to be a source of beauty (and truth, to be Keatsian), isn’t sufficient inspiration for poets of the computer age. “Homer invoked Athena,” she says:
Sappho — Aphrodite
Milton — the Holy Spirit
Hopkins — the Virgin Mary;
I wonder who I can get to help?
Because humans, too, have changed. We’re “fin-de-siecle” ghosts,” never permanently anyplace, never permanently ourselves – always part Facebook, part cellphone, part Twitter, part blogger. In one of my personal favorites of this collection, “Sight Unseen,” Equi talks about the ancient symbol of the eye as a way into a person’s soul “seems corny” to us, who live in a world where “everyone has had to become so skilled / as a performer.”
I could go on with these quotes, detailing how “art is the simpleton,” but I’ve gone on long enough to get to my point. In an age of texting and digital skimming, the best gift you can give another person, writer or other, is your full attention. Elaine Equi well deserves it.
(p)eau symposium 