Scratching the Universal

Alan Bernheimer's book of poems The Spoonlight Institute made me think of me when I'm not myself and therefore most like myself in those moments when I'm not being me. I have famously left the blurbs unread to pressure and pursue my own recommendation for simply reading these poems as they are, ensconced in their separate orbits.

Perhaps that's why I keep wanting to read the title as "The Spoonlight Observatory." Maybe it's the "light" in "Spoonlight," or maybe the Spoonlight reminds me of a telescope that could observe the stars as well as any radar could pick up the distant frequencies of a Spoonlight sonata. "Observatory" as in prefatory remarks on having looked at how these poems have responded to me before I've even read them reading me in the stars or in my inverted image as seen in the concave side of a spoon dry as moonlight.

But was my approach wrong, can we ever be wrong before we read, and isn't it better, more surprising to be wrong rather than right? And when it comes to Bernheimer's work, we shouldn't cling to such false categories of superficial judgment, but begin right where the shovel seems poised to dig in. So when we read in the epigraph to the second poem from Charles Peirce that "Every man's senses cue his observatory," we know that we are on track and no longer questioning whether we're right or wrong, just sensing our way through the words.

Bernheimer's work seems to relish in the disorders of the lower syntax. For the most part, no punctuation pressures the poet to sculpt his lines either to stop or to continue making sense. Instead, because they keep overspilling their borders, the lines reflect on their very order, reflect on syntax in order to pause and reflect in the midst of never stopping. This method reveals the fact that Bernheimer's poetic thinking is based on a variation of the following pattern: word, phrase, line, juxtapose, repeat. The lines are settled in their unsettledness as if birds or separate fingers had decided to light on the page like spoons.

In these poems, particulars are what matter because they are the matter from which the poems derive. Thus, details become absolute particularities and thinking about these details in turn leads us to particularize even the concept of the particular. Philosophers head for the hills in an attempt to catch up with poets whose heads are already there. Particularity: the state of being particular rather than general and relishing in an exactitude of detail, attention to or concern with detail. In Bernheimer's work, the unit of poetic thought is not determined by rhythm or meter, but by a relative stability or smoothness miniaturized through a sequence of transitions, moltings, and metamorphoses. His lines are streamlined fuselages, and as we read them, we forget that we are speeding through an atmosphere just about eight miles high. Details, particulars, "impetuous details." When reading these poems, we should always beware of missing the trees for the forest. Poems always start from scratch and scratch the universal with their fingernails. Or, "If you don't pay attention / to the little things / the big things will fall down."

These poems are openly self-reflective, and self-reflexive, although peering into these spoonlights is like peering into the concave curve of the spoon so that the image is inverted and the inventory of stars gathered from this observatory is only gained by looking down to earth and seeing "words…in all their instars." "But it wasn't the stars that thrilled me" because we were attending to the "instars," those stages in the life of insects between two successive molts. Bernheimer's lens is focused on thinking through these transitional phases of the instar, or the successive moltings of the personality. These poems are about "me," not about the poet, even if "the picture doesn't recognize me." Perhaps "me" is the new "you...