I've thought and thought (in a sort of diffuse, even off-handed way) about what it means to have epiphany and/or transformation occur in a poem. This morning, reading Forrest Gander's "Science & Steepleflower," I realized that I was "reading" along a rocky, bouldered watercourse. It was like experiencing manifestations of "other" inside the confining condition of being "other," or "manifest," oneself. Or, like trying to see red with a red gel (mylar film) one one's eyeglasses.

I drowsed for a moment after swirling inside Gander's poem "Sinister," and I dreamed a recipe. On waking, I couldn't remember the recipe itself, but only the feeling of having "arrived" at a final result, a beautiful, culminating dish. Take an ingredient (by itself insipid) and another ingredient (well, a little interesting, but hardly remarkable as a single taste), and fold and stir and mix and heat and grill and broil and voila! we arrive at the epiphanal, transformational, alchemical dish...like no other, and born of enacting step-by-step procedures. A recipe is an agenda. The resulting dish is the final distinction. "As if a distinction might be drawn at the end of a continuum." (from "Duration and Simultaneity")

I don't experience the poetry of Science and Steepleflower, however, as having "arrived," as having reached any particular point along a continuum. Rather, as in Picasso's portraits, these poems look at "reality" from multiple perspectives, and simultaneously. That activitiy is, in itself, the epiphany or transformation for the writer/reader. In ordinary states of consciousness, we tend to take single perspectives, consider singular events, singular meanings, and generally come down on one side or another of a dialectic. We are rarely content to hover in potentiality, possibility, and contingency, more often wanting resting places of synthesis, resolution, articulated meaning that takes on the gloss of fact. As Gander says in "Knife on a Plate," "A donkey finds a magic pebble. The referents / for the story's terms / are a function of the story itself, / and the boy knows there is no one world / we approach by approximations. // Only choose and choose and choose / cracks over us. I jolt awake- / but no time has passed".

So, how do we hear and see the world through all of our own racket and clutter, our own noise and debris? I listen to this uncanny phrase from "Duration and Simultaneity": "The cicada collapses its own eardrum, blocking out / its own song or goes deaf" and realize that this is (often) how I go through my own life. The double-bind is that by shutting down "self-perception," I shut down "other-perception," unlike the cicada, who appears to have a more selective eardrum! I (often) imagine that my own "song" and the "song" of everything/everyone else are distinct, even autonomous entities...when in fact, they are enmeshed in a matrix of sameness and only pop out into a sort of "on-off, yes-no" manifestation. Yet, at the same time, it is my own "song," my interpretations and stories about the world, my likes and dislikes, that drown out awareness of all the other "songs" of the world. I make up so many stories, look so frantically for the unusual and unknown to stimulate myself in the midst of the auditory and visual racket I create. If only, as Gander writes in "Knife on a Plate," I could more often know that "The / audacious originality of the ordinary / sometimes suggests an opening / and to enter is to hear the measure / not of nostalgia but nearness-that fetching / lack of doubt and perspective, a world / zoomed-in close / enough to count the black ants / under dog-stunted spirea...There is disturbance like a kiss / through which cognition disappears." Now, after all this mental cud-chewing on Forrest's poetry, I haven't even hinted at the incredibly erotic trances this book invokes... (August 8, 1998)

I think of Holderlin's line in "Bread and Wine': "...and what are poets for in a destitute time?" and think to myself "THIS, this is what poets are for." Yes, there is that "inbred (and often haunting) spirituality, bringing new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace" that is promised on the blurb on the back of the book, but so much more, in these poems "I hear the black tongues crawling my forearm/called by your voice, your cool matutinal warbling, to enrich/my hearing with another hearing." This is a poetry that goes into the bone and needles the marrow out of its sleep crawl. It *thrums*

I read quite a bit of contemporary poetry, but this book knocked me out. I had lost myself with enjoyment by the end of the first page, scribbling "Great line!" with my nubbed pencil in the margin. What can I tell you? Forrest Gander is wildly avante garde at times; you may also find him writing sonnet-sequences. Either way, you will read lines that you've never read before; and even when you have no idea what Forrest is talking about on the first read, you'll still know that this is great stuff. Subject matters range from geology to erotic love to some great explorations of father-son relationships.

Each sequence is punctuated by a poem with "Love's Letter" in the title. One of these has a line which goes, "The trace on my lips of her nipples' rouge improves the taste of wine." You could likewise say that, for me, the aftertaste of "Torn Awake" improves the taste of life.

This book un-numbed me. Gander's trademark shifts between lyric and abstraction, between figure and ground create tensions that open the ordinary, the daily numbness which, "torn," gives voice to our exigency. Sure, he has a formidable intelligence, but when the poem suddenly shifts focus from the welter of involved thought to, for instance, a wet dog's face reflected in a hubcap, you feel a vivid, PHYSICAL recognition of the way we negotiate actual experience. That back and forth ballet takes place in each of the book's long poems. Typically, the landscape seems to orient our mode of perception. But clear images retreat as language itself comes to the forefront of our attention. And just when our attention to the EVENT of language begins to falter, we fall through the words again into recognitions of the erotic, the political, our dire and fragile world. In a way, all the poems also involve translation (of Spanish, of geology, of interactions between child and parent, etc.). It's easy to be swept into Gander's orchestrations of rhythmic movements-with an intensifying sense of what? Human presence? Gravitas? I feel summoned toward a sharper intellectual and emotional awareness where I locate an intensified possibility of myself. The title gongs: Torn Awake.