Book Review

It is a shame that reading calls for a silent, sitting period. It is difficult, if not impossible, to go for a walk, to talk with a friend, to identify plants, while reading. Instead, one must incorporate reading into a life’s alternating rhythms—read, walk, talk, remember, see, and so on. Each act a distinct opening to an always new other. A practice of encountering.

This turning, opening cycle motivates the re-turning of attention throughout Jordan Dunn’s recent poem Notation, out from Thirdhand Books. The meter of Jordan Dunn’s single extended line follows a quotidian meandering of noticing, recalling, grieving, loving, naming, and other acts of presence; through the line, Dunn seeks a meter of union: “there is a / meter I would like to find that would displace separation and soothe silence at the end of the word.” Attempting to continually “displace separation,”  the poem seeks to encounter “mortal opening in the face of an indeterminacy that we have come to rely on.”

As indeterminacy indicates, chance is a guiding factor for Dunn as a Cagean method of resisting eventuality while maintaining continuity. This is not to say Notation is random or automatic; rather, it quietly but deliberately moves between furtive associations as revelatory of the linkages that keep the mind within the world. The poet, listening to a cardinal sing, sits and waits “for the next association to describe its own wandering path in relation to its original impulse.” The poem operates on an ethics of porosity—of remaining distinct and incidental. A flower erupts into attention that had been caught on grief; a friend’s recalled dream leaves linguistic residue; or a word inexplicably links to a memory: “the word ‘allium’ stirs a / memory, for a reason I cannot properly define, of one afternoon when I sat with Lisa on her front porch.”

Following these encounters, Dunn conceives of Notation as one in medias res poetic line that acts as a gathering force—a Heraclitean logos that listens to language to know what speaking is. It is worth quoting at length Dunn’s description of the project, as he explains it to a friend:

I try to describe this feeling at the moment of inscription, that it’s a feeling to study, to understand more, not the intention of the composition, but the fiction of my being present in the face of all possible outcomes, the pleasurable constraint of maintaining a line of events and interjections that are not preconditioned but arise at the moment of composition, or appear to, because I’m still uncertain, I say, what is ordering the images’ attachments to each other and what is causing some of them to brighten enough to stand out against the shifting background of their origin

These images and their attachments move between “the cicada’s call” into “a cricket undertone,” from “the refrains of Akira Rabelais” to “playing pool with Brad at a dive bar,” from “my position on the shoreline” to “a memory of Owen, aged two.” As with true constellations, the position of the storyteller communicates to us, the audience, the relationship between things. Dunn deftly creates quiet image rhymes and long-running syntactic equivalencies. Even as he admits uncertainty, his language constructs natural passages, narratives, and noticings that recognize each distinct event while simultaneously cohering it to another. His uncertainty, in fact, works towards an organicism that “aligns properly the pine boughs with sunshine,” before we are even aware the trees are there.

The question thus reverberating through Notation is, as the title suggests: how language works as a kind of field guide to living in the world as a reader and a friend—how “living could be like writing.” Notation’s clearest assertion is that this kind of living is not done alone but is done through “our two or multiple selves joined through friendship’s arrangement / on the page.” Alongside bird and flower names, Dunn’s poem incorporates the texts of friends, such as Rick Meier and Lewis Freedman, and other writers, such as John Cage and Clarice Lispector. Some of these texts are books available for references, others are letters, texts, and recalled conversations. All utterances are given equal footing with Dunn-the-reader as centered justification for their presence.

Instead of their destined significance, Dunn finds meaning in random discovery:

Perhaps this is part of the reason I keep writing through the writing of others, not because their texts possess a determination in my selection of them, but because of the randomness with which they manifest in my life

Randomness turns every text read into a love letter to all who might read it—an expression of its general capacity to be read.

This is the rare gift of Dunn’s text to a reader—the text opens me to openness, to the pathways only extant in chance attention. As I read, I want to keep reading and simultaneously go for a walk, stare at a plant, talk with a friend. Dunn’s earnestness transfers from word to reader and I find myself more attentive to how the paths of my language follow the arc of my experiences—and how broadly experience may be defined.

I would point to earnest’s Indo-European root: *er- (1) “to move, set in motion.” I find the fossil of this root in Dunn’s poem which, in its fervent earnestness, sets in motion the thinking body. And it is, in Notation, undoubtedly the local, place-bound body that thinks—that discovers, grieves, and remembers. So that reading is an act of inhabitation that drives the body into a participation with the named and unnamable world—a “reading of friendships over time and my rhythms.”

Dunn admits his own desire to inhabit, even dissolve into, the texts populating Notation: “I want to be surrounded by the text entirely, to inhabit it.” Yet, the minute and grand particulars of this life (memories, recognitions, responsibilities) keep him present and in passing time. Notation becomes less about maintaining moments and immortalization and more about noticing the quiet, constant returns and alterations. So that “a practice of writing” becomes a way to acknowledge that “I am / simply a person who changes place,” with “change” working on both person and place.

An elegy, a pastoral, and a (reading) journal, Notation teaches us how we inscribe ourselves with language to read the world—or, perhaps more accurately, how language inscribes us into the world: “now you’re in the poem, too.”