Poems are often excursions. William Wordsworth wrote “The Excursion,” and countless poets have written about walking. I recently finished attending a reading group run by Kevin Varrone on “walk poems” — he sent us one poem a day for many days, written mainly by poets still walking among us. An excursion, a walk, arrives at our door as a noun, but it comes to us as a verb. We have to walk to have a walk. If to walk doesn’t get us to infinity, it’s at least an infinitive.
Poems about excursions tend, to greater and lesser degrees, to describe the objects seen by the poet while they portray themselves as walking, as well as thoughts that flicker through the brain while the body moves. A walk is like a line of poetry, possessed of a beginning and an end, often disavowing a clear path between. Elizabeth Robinson’s excursion is neither verb nor noun, but instead an adjective, “excursive.” My online OED informs me that to be excursive (the word “cursive” ties this to writing) is to wander, be desultory. While one A. Helps, in 1868, is quoted in the OED as writing, “Do keep the point, my excursive friends,” Samuel Johnson steps more in line with the idea, writing of “An intelligence perpetually on the wing, excursive, vigorous, and diligent.”
Johnson’s description might provide Elizabeth Robinson with a biographical note; for decades now, she has been writing vigorous and diligent poems that also fly on wings. While her early work tended toward the abstract, her more recent poetry, coming as it does after being a social worker in Boulder and a minister in the Bay Area, muddies (in a wonderful way) abstraction with grit. In Excursive, Robinson is adjective to Wordsworth’s noun, A. R. Ammons’s verb. The walks are inward, not taken upon a beach or through a pasture.
“Excursive” is the only title in the book that is not preceded by the word “on.” The subtitle is “(Essays [Partial & Incomplete],” its sub-sub-title, “(on Abstraction, Entity, Experience, Impression, Oddity, Utterance, &c).” The phrase “essays on” walks us back to Montaigne’s essays. This is to convey the verb “essayer,” the noun “essaie,” from the French into English, attempts born of trying. Like Gertrude Stein, Robinson is fascinated by the small word, the preposition. What does “on” mean? There are a lot of ideas on the table here, including those that rest on the hard surface of a table, or book. This reminds me that the phrase “on time” can mean you arrive at the moment you’re expected, or that you’re writing about the concept of time. Robinson’s book is full of such double-entendres, many of which are folded into beautiful rhetorical statements: “Our encounters with daily life made it impossible / to know what the impossible was” — or “The good,” which turns out to be best defined not as a “particular and concrete” model but as “delay.” Delay comes from a verb, to delay, but the delay itself is noun.
To think “on,” for Robinson, is to write definitions that don’t quite define, analogies that emerge and disappear, possibilities that rise but do not become static. Unless we’re talking “On Joy,” which gets figured in as hose, as whipping cream, as the scent of used sheets, as pure tone of chimes, as excess, until it forms like a scab where you keep scratching your itch. As she writes in “On Love,” “meaning is oblique.” It’s not the cliché or scab that stalls the movement of the idea-walker, hardening her thinking into a still, and annoying, skin spot. Such spots can’t be seen through. Robinson’s “on’s” are instruments of seeing-through.
There are 76 poems in this collection. Each one merits the justice of a commentary. This metaphorical flutter on “justice” reminds me of one of the more concrete of Robinson’s poems, “On The Last Supper.” As a Christian minister, she is fully aware of the valences of her title, but she’s not writing about Leonardo’s painting. Instead, she lists foods that prisoners on death row asked to eat before they were executed. There is fast food, there is one unpitted black olive, there is a hugely caloric meal that can’t be finished, and “If they choose / dessert, they almost always / want some kind of ice cream.” Two poems later, men named John die of “exposure,” “despair,” though they wrote graffiti poems and made their dentists happy. There’s little justice in any of this. Robinson has written beautifully elsewhere about the homeless; see “Confession” from the journal, Saginaw 9, out of Beijing, edited by David Harrison Horton, which is also a profound meditation on the limitations of narrative. When narrative fails, she suggests we’re left with something at once more and less transient: “Maybe grace / is the bereft comforting the bereft with nothing.” What remains at the end of that poem is presence. “Your hand,” she writes to a homeless woman who killed herself in jail, “never touched my hand, / but I saw it touch another’s, a real // contact that now refuses to be gone.” Narrative is time’s failure; grace redeems it.
She lists foods, causes of death, but in most of these poems the list form can best be described as a fire hose of metaphor and analogy. It’s telling that the first lines in the book (in “On the Apparent”) are about the impossibility of definition: “’World’ does not mean ‘harm’” / “’Body does not mean ‘straight’”[.] This first poem lists some of the book’s key terms, rather like an abstract: “O” and “Mouth” and “World” and “Lip” are among these words. In desultory fashion (and “fashion” is another important word), they wander through the book, crucial to some poems, missing from others. But take that “O”: in the first poem, “’O’ does not / mean ‘I exclaim. ‘Mouth’ / does not open at the cry.” But in the book’s final poem, “On Zero”: she begins, “O, as in exclamation.” This “O” is also zero, a hole, and an apostrophe. In the first instance, it’s apostrophe (“O’s apostrophe”) and in the second it’s a calling out: “for it is to you I speak. O, you.” So “zero” is at once absence and beckoning. It’s like Buddhist “emptiness,” also referred to as “spaciousness.” The terms may at first appear to contradict one another, but they rhyme.
At times, these idea-rhymes cancel themselves. Try “On Light,” which begins ominously with, “Light, the well-meaning friend / who destroys a precious thing / meaning only to caress it –.” Light is the ultimate self-effacing agent, freshening laundry while bleaching it of color, eating what it feeds. An observer, “what light witnesses, it / cannot help but change.” Yet language permits the poet to make a list of what is given and what is taken away, so that they co-exist, if only on a single line, in a single moment of time. Light is what the poet can offer, and she knows how risky a task it is to illuminate concepts, abstractions, utterances. In “On Only” — oh for an “On On” — she notes the way language changes meaning in its disappearance. “Only to change the idiom from ‘to fall asleep’ / simply ‘to fall.’” What is left, she suggests in the next strophe, is surface. But she suspects that it’s better to wake up “Beneath the blanket. Or, better — beneath the surface.” In “On Extinctions,” the poet becomes a “preposition to the collapse: / beneath.” Beneath is the opposite number to On; what they have between them is a surface.
Robinson knows that there is good to be found on top of, and beneath, but that these metaphorical prepositions also represent something more sinister. In her poem “Extinction,” which appears before “Extinctions” to keep the order of the alphabet, she writes of theorizing “how to disclose what no longer exists.” You can name it, she suggests. You can perform other language-games with it. But the central sting of the poem comes in this line: “Or to be not.” If Hamlet contemplated not being, Robinson, in this era of climate collapse, thinks about “being not.” One once was, but is not now, except in words. Does that make the poet powerful, or merely a writer of epitaphs? Robinson sometimes seems worried that the latter is true, though her epitaphs sing more truth than most written these days. If meaning still holds some value for us as readers, she has summoned us (“O, You”) to participate in it. Like everything else, to use the favorite word of another poet-definer, Emily Dickinson, it evanesces.
The poetry of witness is historical. What Robinson offers in her work is a poetry of witness that is also meditative, imbued with spirit — and sometimes great wit. She understands that nothing stays, that words multiply their meanings. I was reminded of Hart Crane’s word lists as I wrote this review. Like Robinson, he understood each and every meaning of the words he used. Words, like the lives we live, are profoundly unstable. They either zero out, or they open like a mouth to call us in, or on. Robinson’s book ends with her mouth open to us.
[Published by Roof Books on April 1, 2023, 140 pages, $20.00 paperback]