It feels appropriate that D.S. Waldman’s debut poetry collection, Atria, opens with the speaker looking at the work of the artist Alexander Calder. Calder’s mobiles and Waldman’s poetry could be distant cousins. Like Calder’s sheets of metal dangling from wires as if weightless, the boxy prose poems in Atria, too, appear as if they’re floating on each page. As the reader moves from one page to the next, the poems don’t pass by as much as they begin to orbit, wheeling into the background, filled with images and ideas ready to re-emerge in new ways later in the book.
In the collection’s opening poem, “Calder,” the speaker visits SFMOMA and meditates on the sculptures in the exhibition:
It is the act of entering that creates loneliness. I stand, at first, in the corner and can’t bear it, the stillness of them—a child looking up for a crib, reaching. The door at my back leads to a balcony and is locked, boxing wind out of the composition.
That short block of text, one of five that make up the poem, is suspended in the middle of the page, surrounded by an expanse of white space. It stands starkly alone, but that loneliness, just like the loneliness that the speaker feels, connects it with the other similar assemblages of prose that make up the poem. As the poem jumps from one block of prose to the next, the speaker considers the leaves in the wind, the light filtering through the clouds, even how to begin a poem set in this very room. Finally, the poem concludes when the stillness of the room is broken:
A family enters and the child moves about the mobiles in a whorl, a step ahead of his mother. Sunlight in a wedge on the wall, over a quotation from the artist: Disparity in form, color, size, weight, motion is what makes a composition. And when the child reaches for one of them, one of the red spades accenting the dark wire, his mother waits. She lets him touch it, once and briefly, before taking his hand away.
Waldman is a committed observer of art, but it’s not his primary subject. His true interest is in seeing itself—directing his open but exacting gaze toward great works of art, but also daily life: the end of a relationship, grief after the death of a loved one, the beginning of a new love. And that may be the most quietly radical accomplishment of the collection: an ekphrastic mode that doesn’t confine itself to storied works of art adorning museum walls, but instead applies the same devoted attention—and critical prowess—to the photographs of Man Ray and the elk grazing at Point Reyes, to Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert and an Oakland skateboarder doing a kickflip. The prose poem “Puddle Jumper” begins:
I don’t know who on this plane is grieving and who’s playing pool on their phone. Who’s really sleeping and who’s closed their eyes for some time apart. During takeoff I raised the window shade and when the pilot banked left I could make out downtown Los Angeles breaching a sea of bright intersections, dark contours, simple void where Santa Monica and Venice and Malibu meet the ocean. Necklace of lights. Black velvet. To call a name out over water is, in the novel open on my knee now, a ceremony of forgetting, the name taken without echo into the boundless Pacific churn. I turn to mention this to Gabby but her eyes are closed, her earbuds in.
That directness—that willingness to invest in seeing—runs throughout the collection, creating a consistency that’s juxtaposed by the variety of forms Waldman uses: prose poems, lineated poems, fragment-like journal entries. In the middle of the collection, two pieces arrive that stand out, formally, from the rest of the book: “Low Poetics: A Meditation,” a critical essay examining the work of Georges Braque, John Ashbery, and Ben Lerner through the lens of “low theory,” and a crown of sonnets titled “Low Theory” that puts that same critical lens into practice. Both the essay and the sonnets explore the childhood accident that left the speaker with a loss of function in his right hand and the long recovery that left him not-quite left-handed as a result.
In the essay, which surprisingly does not feel out of place in a poetry collection, Waldman explains the cultural critic Jack Halberstam’s concept of “low theory”: “a mode of thinking that refutes binaries” and embraces the winding road between knowledge and confusion. Waldman applies that theory to both his accident and works of art like Braque’s painting Violin and Candlestick, Ashbery’s poem “Some Trees,” and the title sequence in Lerner’s poetry collection Mean Free Path. In Lerner’s poetry, he finds a guiding form for his crown of sonnets: “Sentences in this poem do not begin, necessarily, where the line begins, and almost never continue from one line to another. They peter out, stop short; they sometimes resume later in the poem, and sometimes never return.” And that sense of uncertainty, Waldman explains, is the point: “I personally hear, in Lerner’s poem, a speaker trying over and over and over to formulate language in proportion to their feelings—and over and over, failing, having to recapitulate, try again.”
“Low Theory” is the biggest formal departure in the book: 15 syllabic sonnets that make use of the structure from Mean Free Path. Sentences don’t continue with the ends of lines, and that constraint takes Waldman’s language, which previously relied on exactitude, and shatters it, turning the poems into a kind of mosaic:
The ending is right behind us, watching
Confused, having to switch hands and accept
Decades later, a new and different sense
Of linearity. No one ever
Opens a book that way and begins with
Many pencils, tight in a rubber band
Learning, again, how to write their own name.
The disjunction created by the form forces us to exist in the place, as described by low theory, between knowledge and confusion. With Waldman’s usual clarity gone, we have to muster our own attention to bring meaning to the poems, making new connections and savoring unexpected ones along the way.
After reading and re-reading Atria, I kept coming back to the idea of Calder’s mobiles. Waldman’s poems, whether prose or lineated, personal or ekphrastic, are not so much arranged in the book as they are constellated. They hang together to create a system that sometimes orbits gently, sometimes bumps up against itself unexpectedly, and sometimes waits in stillness for a gust of wind, or wayward child, to set it in motion. And part of the pleasure is wondering what will happen the next time you see it.
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