The second part of TOUT VA BIEN is entitled FUGITIVE STATE and is a more traditional poetic form.

Actually, the first page and a half consists of three line stanzas, with relatively lengthy lines, focusing on forms and framework and things that limit. It’s all very good and I wish she’d kept it up. Not that the rest of FUGITIVE STATE isn’t good, it just isn’t as good. The changing formal nature (shorter lines, longer and shorter stanzas, prose poem paragraphs) doesn’t add anything for me. Partly, this is because I was so wrapped up in that initial bit that the shift was disappointing for me. It’s like reading a novel and discovering that the guy you really liked at the beginning is not actually the main character. Sure, maybe you’ll like the rest of the book and this new, real protagonist, but you were really into that first guy.

The focus also shifts to identity. Now, that’s a complete break, because, after all, isn’t identity a limiting agent? And Stein definitely explores that, but also gets into the meaningless of identity (the repetition of a line about an ‘anti-terrorist’ who is financed by terrorists), but that subject is a little worn over for me. She does take it over to the subject of political alienation (as you can guess by the ‘anti-terrorist’ bit).

I should note that she does go back into (mostly) using the long lined, three line stanza structure, but even then, it’s broken up with other forms and the spell (a repetitive spell that brings attention to form) is broken (though breaking the spell also brings attention to the form), or leastways it was for me.

Stein also has tendency to let cool sounding phrases take the place of lines and stanzas that actual move the poetic project forward.

I was an American correspondent in America, who could no longer correspond to anything…

I don’t know. Too me, that’s cool thing said in a coffee house to a friend after too much coffee and collegiate philosophizing (or after too much time in the bar after too much alcohol and barfly philosophizing). Not so sure it belongs in a work of poetic creation.

But credit where credit is due. The ending, the final page of FUGITIVE STATE is magnificent and could stand as a fine poem in its own right:

so How long until How make long the lost bucolic?
there’s a descriptive act and a de-descriptive act
surface-oriented slippage I wanted to Ask
internal Organ failure internally
accurate and externally Sordid
as gestures that aren’t That didn’t
make
I wanted to Make
it was building it was irreparable
taken    apart    Under    Accidentally    Right    on    Target
with the script flipped I once               there was
Absolution, once        Have you taken stock of your Conduct?
The crowds inside, or the Trap as, we were well before
the fact
Desire’s a Tool to put to use I wanted to

That’s a great bit, and also crystallized for me the implicity touches from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari’s book, Anti-Oedipus, with its ‘bodies without organs’ and ‘desiring machines.’

Speaking of which, did you know that Anti-Oedipus is now being published by the Penguin Classics imprint? Seriously. I feel old.