New Poetry: Grow No Moss
The apparently indefatigable Julia V. Hendrickson will soon be printing Grow No Moss, a collection of her own clever and finely tuned poetry. What makes her work a pleasure is her sense of timing: it allows her to situate her apt, sometimes wry metaphors at perfect junctures. One feels—in an odd, almost tactile way—the rhythm of her thoughts, or the rhythm to which her powers of observation converse with her sharp intelligence. She can be funny, punny, or, my personal favorite, nostalgic and slightly theatrical. If you’re in or around Chicago on August 25th, you’ll want to see her read at Andrew Rafacz Gallery.
Hendrickson’s project entails that she be personally involved in every step of Grow No Moss’s creation—not only the arrangement of words, but the selection of paper and the pressing of ink. (Arrangements and selections alike being driven by weight and texture.)
She has assembled a humming network of artists, artisans, and apparatus to effect the many stages of physical translation required to bring a single volume of poetry into being. Colleagues, workspaces, machinery; painters, printmakers, and at least one offset press. Her ability to marshal such resources through her numerous relationships in Chicago’s artistic community—rather than, say, through some black box that does the work of mediation/fabrication for her, like a publishing house—demonstrates the great and well-flogged potency of community. That is, it reminds us of how art, though it may rely in part on some type of holy solitude, relies also on networks of people who respect one another and do the hard work of building bridges between disciplines.
It’s easy (even cliché) to theorize the necessity of community while treating it, in practice, as something that will materialize ex nihilo once one has put the finishing touches on one’s flawless magnum opus. The Emersonian artist toils alone; relations are filigree at best, distractions at worst. Worthy work will percolate to the surface of public awareness, and the maker will be applauded in life—never mind Emerson’s destitute pal Thoreau!
Perhaps our attachment to this view of the artist comes from our view of her opposite: the gladhanding networker who passes out business cards at funerals. Someone crass, craven, philistinic, unctuous. Who wants to be that person—more to the point, who wants to imagine herself as that person? But there is a grain of wisdom in the habitus of the professional networker. She acknowledges that a thing becomes more real as it recruits more and stronger allies. Even something as rarefied as Hendrickson’s collection of poetry (and Hendrickson is far from being that unctuous networker) coalesces via a subtly concatenated series of blog posts, emails to friends, acquaintances made at openings, books dog-eared and paged-through, paper bought and sold, complex devices held together with mundane screws and plates. The artist is crowded about with allies animate and inanimate, intimate and distant. Graham Harman, describing Bruno Latour’s relationism, uses Pasteur as an example of the same kind of node:
Pasteur initially stands alone in his fight with Liebig over the cause of fermentation, or with Pouchet over spontaneous generation. Gradually, Pasteur amasses a formidable army of allies. But notice that not all of these allies are human … Instead, Pasteur’s motley allies include mighty politicians who grant him funding, pieces of glassy or metallic equipment, and even bacilli themselves. Actors become more real by making larger portions of the cosmos vibrate in harmony with their goals.
How fortunate for us that Pasteur did amass those allies. And how fortunate for us that Van Gogh had his faithful ally Theo to buy his paintings and his paints. And how fortunate for us that Virginia Woolf had her allies the Bloomsbury Group and Hogarth Press for sharing ideas and publishing novels. I say “fortunate,” but it did not happen by luck. The power of these actors to mobilize people and things in support of their work is an aspect of their artistry. If “larger portions of the cosmos vibrate in harmony with their goals,” then it is because they did the hard work of plucking the cosmos’ strings, and so much the better for the cosmos.
It may be possible to write good poetry by candlelight in some cobwebbed attic apartment. Perhaps while wearing fingerless gloves and warming the tip of one’s fountain pen with every other exhalation (which is how I imagine Emily Dickinson). But the words will be dimmer for being less read, and everyone will be dimmer who hasn’t read them, and the writer’s friends will surely be dimmer for not having had the chance to ally themselves with something they might have found lovely.
So the first remarkable thing about Grow No Moss is the poems inside. The second is the fact that it exists at all—just as we might say of any work of art that moves us, famous or obscure. And the third is that, for all the actors involved in its generation, the book remains a singular record of a singular voice. It is not some soupy “collaboration,” but gives the sense of having been distilled. I will use a belabored word and call it an encounter: who knows with what? But with something, or someone, and distinctly not a collective. Hendrickson herself writes of, “The pleasant hypothetical / symmetry of seeing / a stranger in profile … / There is such volume, / so many shadows in a beak.” A thing is offered and a thing is guessed at. “One thinks,” writes Cynthia Ozick,
of the burgeoning, all over America, of those artists who are active artisans, who care for beautiful paper (and sometimes fabricate their own) and beautiful type (and sometimes set it themselves, the old-fashioned way), and with their own hands turn out pleasing sewn folios that, while they are certainly books, are at the same time art objects of high dedication. In the crush of a lightning technology that slams out computerized volumes stuck together with a baleful glue, it is good now and then to be reminded of a book as something worthy of body-love. The nostrils also read.
If Ozick evokes some red-knuckled, fiercely independent handyman-artist, then Hendrickson takes her a step further. The physicality of art-making, the “body-love” due to well-wrought work, demands not only self-reliance, but reaching out to others, which we never do as gracefully as we hope. Hendrickson’s poems are crowded with bodies seeking some respite from isolation: characters (including whole cities) who swell, sweat, stick, shed, and occasionally stumble into communicating. Old selves reappear as salt pillars in the kitchen; memories turn up as fossils on once-known river banks. The sheer magnitude of effort required to keep oneself from dissolving and the sheer magnitude of effort required to make oneself a little known to anyone else—these surface on every page of Grow No Moss. Not only in the poems, but in the paper, the glue, the ink, and the ally-trafficked rooms of its creation. Hendrickson should be admired for her ability to set her allies in motion, to direct their efforts and negotiate with their various capacities and limitations, as much as for the rare voice in which she writes—writes, one imagines, alone.
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