Evocative Imprecision

Quantum Jitters, a term that is evocative in its imprecision, is associated with a branch of theoretical physics known as string theory. By choosing this title for her collection of poetry, Patricia Carlin asks readers to get comfortable with seeming contradictions, for example, a blurring of formal distinctions coupled to the potentially unifying force of the lyric. Although Carlin chose a cosmological concept for her book's title, and despite a few references to "moon" or "sky" or "galaxy" sprinkled throughout the collection, only one poem, "Dark Matter," explicitly draws upon physics for its vocabulary and resonance. Here,

time's arrowruns backward into the black holebeyond the event horizon.Dense, dense under pressureHeavy as dark matter.

Elizabeth Macklin, in a book cover blurb, claims that Carlin's poems "are a pulse-taking scan of experimental forms metabolically torqued to breaking point." Indeed, Carlin frequently employs techniques such as substitution (in a quasi-Oulipian sense) and quotation. With "Yes, They Were Beautiful," she composes a slightly slant pantoum and, with "Landscape with Repeating Moon," an ekphrastic one. "Social Science," a poem that could be considered a fractured fairytale, reimagines the fates of Hansel and Gretel: "The children become versatile foragers, using a wide range of / stalking and killing techniques," as well as that of another fairytale female, Snow White: "The girl's body survives longer: it glows through the glass box." There is nothing new in such techniques, however, since by now, after years of use by "experimental" poets, they can almost be considered mainstream.

The poet puts her best poem forward, so to speak, when she opens Quantum Jitters with "Untitled," a short poem that functions both as Ars Poetica for the collection as a whole and as sly restatement of John Keats's much used and abused notion of negative capability:

We were coming toward something.Blunting the touch, slammingthe long-drawn-out sameness, east to west,globe to nexus, night to early. To gaping.And nothing. And for what? Basementscaving under their cold load.Is that a structure?Molecular incoherence: the lyricdisassemblingof what could feed, could buffer.Overcoming bravery. Refusing consequence.Never beginning.Negative night, still climbing.

"Negative" here becomes capability in the sense that with the "caving under" of lyric, new possibilities are to be found. When the speaker asks, "Is that structure?" she seems to be inquiring whether "caving under" and "disassembling" may be new forms in and of themselves or, rather, features along a path leading to such forms. The poem ends ambiguously (and wonderfully), leaving the reader in uncertainty. Is it lyric that is "never beginning," or is it night? Is it night or the speaker of the poem who is "still climbing"? Carlin's ability to leave be, in the sense of letting her poem rest in uncertainty, is perhaps her greatest skill as a poet.

The notion of structure reappears in "Not Food or Love" as "Sleep might have been a structure / to protect the eyes." The idea of sleep as a form of organization is an intriguing one, although not, I think, fully developed here. The poem falls apart into fragments and contains so much "air" that I have trouble making anything out of its pieces. In her notes, Carlin reveals that some phrases in the poem are taken from Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985). Knowing this, however, does not add to a reading of the poem. Whatever Carlin borrowed from DeLillo could have come from anywhere.

Like many of her contemporaries, Carlin employs white space and breath as material elements in her poems, even presenting air as subject in the poem, "The Air You Live On." She pushes this predilection at times to the point where a poem appears to consist of nothing but air. Barely there, poems such as "Not Food or Love" teeter on the edge of ceasing to exist, and I'm undecided as to whether I like this effect or not. That said, wonderful phrases appear here...