1. It is not a LONG long poem – it is 213 pages, as opposed to,
say, 800. It is that rarest of animals: a non-arrogant long poem by a male
writer. He manages to be serious (even representing his own experience -- !) without
being sententious. There is a questioning, open observing that is confident
without being overbearing. Sometimes this stance results in humor:
begin again
begin again
to undo
the beginning
not a fugue
but a fudge
This is not “A” – that seemingly interminable “fugue” – it
is a poem that begins again and again, sometimes muddling along, that makes modest claims for itself:
“the colloquial uncertainty / as always.”
2. Pushing Water flows. That is, through a combination of
headlong syntax and cascading enjambments, this poem MOVES like few others. If
Stein disliked commas, Alexander dislikes (or doesn’t believe in) periods:
and air lives (with a short
vowel) and air lives (with a
long vowel) we are all
shortened and elongated
according to our wishes and
desires in a changed but not
yet ended world or arena of
. . . and of course it goes on – that’s part of the point –
the ongoingness of things – the flow of air, water, life, thought. The air
lives short, lives are short, vowels live as and in air. We are all long
vowels, changed but not yet ended. We’re pushing with and against the water at
once.
3. There is a delightful variety in the form – which is open
form (unreproducible by a technical idiot, in a program like Blogger), using the
vertical space of the page via line-length, indentation, spacing (vertical and
horizontal). Sometimes in stanzas (numbered, even), sometimes in run-on
double-spaced sections. And the form rarely seems unmotivated. The verse
usually revolves back to itself, using the form as poetics:
they come to come
by the water in a place
that invents every thing
again
a new line
4. The book contains memorable passages like the ones above that,
nonetheless, do not overwhelm the rest of the writing. Neat trick. There are
lines like this: “When she wrote her life why didn’t she leave it alone?” –
that seem to be just another point along the way, but end up saying more than
they seem to say. Alexander is “remaining ever in the company of small / words
like of and around” – lively words and lines that aren’t weighted down by
nouns.
5. I just keep coming back to it. It’s playful without the
deadly serious playfulness of some American ironists. Maybe Pushing Water reminds
me a bit of Larry Eigner – not so much in form as in tone. I like typing out
the lines:
the words are distant, abstract, bloodless,
except for the singing of the lullaby tonight
after the poem my daughter came
and asked for a lullaby – the poem ends and the lullaby
begins
or the poem never ends, the war never ends, the lullaby
never ends
the light goes into the air
the water goes into the light and the air
I ask my friends where the words end
they don’t have the same answers that I don’t have
they don’t have the same questions that I don’t have
in all the places I have been
in the words have gone
they all are taken
the water pushes as far as it can
the light is out
tonight
the light is out
