Jennifer Moxley's The Line (Post-Apollo Press, 2007), second selection

A little context from the blurb by Rosmarie Waldrop: "We're in the state between sleep and waking, where consciousness resists the tasks of reason and routine but instead views, from the perspective of darkness, the whole span from newborn promise to the old mammals, erosion of muscle."

"Morning after morning while you lay sweatily wedged between weary physicality and tedious selfhood the punctilious programs of the already dead tromp heavily through your mind."

* * *

"It is my belief that this tedium all started when the elusive present you so longed to possess at last became all that was left."

from "Mortal Aurora"

"Is this the reason old houses comfort you? Their sleep allows for mysterious things--filmy journeys over ethereal banks, star-by-star stone-stepping, beneath your feet soft waters of nothingness and centuries of hidden thought--events that work your defeatist will into a strange elation."

last stanza of "The Milky Way"

"The gift of minor eternity, on a brief mammalian scale, is not this relentless coming to be but the tale you will later tell about it. It is a kind of love, insofar as it moves you."

last stanza of "The Sadness of Old Mammals"

"I sleep with approximately 14,000 days sitting on my chest. A slow hour many years old pushes aside yesterday's appetites and enters as a whisper through an unmuffled ear: 'remember me, remember me, remember me!'"

from "The Periodic Table"

"What an idiot! Why did he choose inevitable defeat by picking the fancy solution?"

end of "The Mattress Raft"

"Why does this poem exist? Nobody knows. But it seems to be mourning the ideal."

end of "The Wrong Turn"

"The lives of the rich are so fabulous! The destruction of the poetical lies heavily on their hands, as on their swollen notion that we are always watching. There is nothing behind the mask. Nothing suffocating under its pressure, no human essence trying to get out."

* * *

"It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life."

from "The Atrophy of Private Life"

"You are plagued nightly by memory-pictures of a time that no longer exists. Admit it, some illogical part of you secretly believes you can go back. The place hasn't vanished, perhaps it even looks the same, but the angle of time that became what you laughingly call your 'experience' is gone. Except in the deceitful subjunctive."

opening of "The Cover-Up"

Jennifer Moxley's The Line (Post-Apollo Press, 2007), first selection

Jennifer Moxley's outstanding book, The Line, is one of the best books of prose poems I've ever read. I'd like to copy here the following poems in their entirety: "The State," "The Endless Conscription," "The Pitiful Ego," "The Interruption," "The Clock" and "The Railing." You'll just have to read those for yourself, as I don't want to infringe on copyright. Here is a first set of selected passages. This sentence from Alice Notley's blurb gives some useful context: "These prose poems tell the story of sleeping and waking, of this very bout of writing, of the search for the line of time and the poet's immortality."

"Newborn, palpable loneliness shakes you from even the deepest sleep. Against the cold air and shadowed darkness flooded with sudden consciousness the vulnerable flesh recoils. In the liminal all times converge. Severed memories long for the text, the comfort of dialectic."

first half of "The Promise"

"The heartbreak of time is not that it passes but rather the language yoke. By grace of grammar alone the moment's fleeting existence."

from "In One Body and One Soul"

"How many more days will you awaken? The flesh envies the word's longevity but not its delayed effects."

* * *

"You are asleep before belief, held captive mid-metamorphosis."

from "Awake"

"Yesterday was exhausting, yet there is no meaningful reason to think you are lost for good. Though sometimes you do."

from "Address"

"You have accepted that this repetition will kill you, though it remains your only hope."

* * *

"With no new experience to feed it your amulet mind seeks asylum in imaginary visions of a falsified past."

from "Experience"

"True faith does not need the state to enforce it. It makes neither hope, nor a shroud."

"You will walk out of the visible and learn to accept the darkness. You will find the line. It extends backward eternally into the past and forward into the future. The utterance cup, the gentle metric, old words new mind lost time and loves."

* * *

"In other words, write. Find time in words. Replace yourself cell by letter, let being be the alphabetic equation, immortality stay the name."

from "The Line"

"You step off the curb into nothingness where the line offers itself to your hands. Grab hold or fall. Happy in the thought you might never recover you consign your trust to this flimsy thread that nobody else can see."

end of "Mystical Union"

In the UK, Jennifer Moxley's The Line is prohibitively expensive. In the US, you can obtain it from Small Press Distribution, but its UK shipping charges are high because they use FedEx, so I have to recommend Amazon.com, which will charge $15 for the book and $3.99 for international shipping. So, who wants to borrow my copy first?