Laynie Browne's Translation of the lilies back into lists
It's a lot to wrap your head around...
Laynie Browne has put out a sizeable body of experimental poetry of the conceptualist tendency since the mid 90s. In 2012 she co-edited an anthology called I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women.
In practice, conceptual writing appears to be similar to proceduralism: coming up with formal constraints in order to generate some new and unexpected content. But as I understand it (since conceptualism was rather popular during my time in a writing program) conceptual writing has an extra layer.
It takes up a rather Cartesian idea that the process of conceptualization and composition is more important, more real than the work itself, which is a mere “product.” We’re used to thinking of art works as simply the objects, books, paintings, whatever. The imaginative labor had been applied in the past, and it has disappeared, as far as accounting for the work’s value is concerned.
Browne’s book under review, Translation of the lilies back into lists cost 20 bucks, not because of Browne’s evident intellectual and imaginative capacities, but due to the fact that Wave Books titles have luxurious monochrome fiber covers and high-quality printing on recycled cream-colored leaves.
But the conceptual movement turns this relationship around: it’s the invisible and intangible parts of making art that are principal. The artist thought, therefore the art is.
To put it even more extremely, maybe there is a dualism of an artist without need for results on one side, and a work of art with no apparent ego on the other. Browne disputes this thought as “another false construction.”
Probably no one would take the above idea that seriously. Only clowns like me.
For this letter, I will rely solely upon my memory of reading this book. I have already donated my copy to the neighborhood free library. With no reference to the actual text, I shall rely on concepts alone, and the product will be what it may.
So, what about the title? Translation of the lilies back into lists has a nice prosody to it. It’s a semantic morph of a title of one of C. D. Wright’s collections, Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues.
Browne has been at work on an interesting series of texts in homage to her “page mothers,” older poets who had influenced her, like Bernadette Mayer, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Wright died in 2016, while Browne was still working on the manuscript, and so the homage also became an elegy.
What Browne did exactly was to make a list poem almost every day for a few months, based on her actual to-do lists for each day. Each poem is headed by the date, and every line is enumerated. Some days were quite busy with almost 50 items.
I remember one line in the first poem going like this: “Do crossed out items count?” We don’t get to know whatever task was at hand for each item, only poetic expressions that come around the edges of the item, whatever it was.
Sometimes the list form tells little stories, or contain a weird image. Some of them sound related to teaching workshops. There were some lines that said something to the effect of the lists as inventories of lilies (beauty, reproduction, delicate and concrete) as a resistance to “finitude.”
One line I’m pretty sure I remember well, because of its rhythm:
[##]. Every item on this list is number 9.
OK, it’s probably not surprising that my relationship with conceptual poetry is that, indeed, I find the ideas behind the text more interesting to ponder than reading the actual thing. There must be a certain formal relation between the list project and C. D. Wright’s work, as Browne understood it. Wright’s poems are plainspoken while still cosmopolitan—and there’s often a concern with counting, and the question of what counts.
But the propositions that count for Browne’s list poems suggested a “pure” contingency to me, the kind of contingency that’s something of a cliché in postmodernist aesthetics. It’s like walking outside and reading every street sign you come across and calling it a poetic experience.
A lot of people feel at home in that kind of position—not me!
The early modern philosophical flavor to conceptualism seems like a rigid metaphysics. There’s an inert, meaningless object on one hand, and a performance that created the art work that is the real work, but we can’t access it. Art is no longer something that addresses your human sensual perceptions, but some kind of object that is overwhelmed by museum captions, gallery reviews, theoretical papers, in short the chatter of the art world.
And what about “conceptual writing?” There’s a kind of divorce between image and word in this framework. Is Browne writing towards a “de-materialized” version of writing? Do her words somehow refuse words as a medium? How does that work? I don’t think it does. Not only is a universal conception of art possible and necessary, I think, but we need to find the right relation between universality and particularity (which so much of that early modern philosophy focused on), the particular inside the universal, but also the universal inside the particular!
Here is the page on Browne’s collection at the publishing house, where you can preview some actual pages.
See Heather Green’s concise review for accurate quotations.
For more info on Browne’s process and project of homage texts, see her interview with Kevin O’Rourke.