Infinitesimal Worlds

To open Keith Waldrop's Several Gravities is to walk into a tiny museum, literally. Thanks to Siglio Press's consummate attention to detail, Waldrop's poems and collages are displayed graciously and spaciously. Imagine tiny works of complex art spread throughout a big, beautiful room. Or, as the author says of his own work:

…Mine seems to be turning out,as predicted, a small provincial museum, the kindthat might have in some corner or other one workyou could be interested in, if you knew it was there.

Among Waldrop's primary concerns is the concept of smallness. Only two of the poems extend beyond a single page, and a magnifying glass is required to truly examine the minutiae of many of the collages. But what a universe within! The opening image, Untitled [Hand and Woman], features an antique wooden frame barely containing the scratchy scene of a relaxed forearm and hand lifted toward a woman flying—arms awkwardly held wide—and glancing back over her shoulder to a somber European cityscape. It is nostalgic and surrealistic at once: a dream from another era.

In fact, most of the visual pieces hearken back to earlier centuries, though a few bring contemporary aesthetics and pop culture to light. This effect has as much to do with the images Waldrop selects as with his favorite technique of tearing: "my elements are usually torn rather than cut. A large portion of the elements touch one or another edge, suggesting incompletion. There are tissues laid over some areas…which lessen the distinctiveness of one element from another." The trick of a great collage is to find commonality within the juxtapositions, and for a master like Waldrop, it seems effortless.

The poems are no less striking. Structurally, they reflect Waldrop's tendency to mix and match. What might seem non-sequitur out of context makes considerable sense within the shape of the whole. For all of his thoughts toward abstraction and fragments, Waldrop manages to drop any number of pristine, hair-raising lines: "I would like to be / beautiful when / written." More often than not, however, the poet appears to be explicating the visual artist: "Isolated, the most casual scene becomes formal. Glimpsed in psyche or cheval glass, / random details proportion themselves, heighten into tone. Any picture is another world, / and suggests a whole world." These parallel worlds of Waldrop's, the visual and the written, do not always complement one another so readily, but when they do, the effect is sublime. One of the best moments in this collection arrives when the collage Untitled [Landscape with Candelabra]—an eerie green-brown-grayish glimpse of pastoral and religious architecture and shadows—is laid out beside this excerpt from a longer poem:

This is the house I did not build.

This is the room at the top of the stairs in a house I didn't build.

This is the desk—from a different generation—wedged in the window-nook of an upstairs room in a house someone else built.

This is the mess I've made. Under it all is a fire I did not set.

In the noise the world makes there is no window and here I lay my words in the loud, in the burning, the built. This is a fire from before ever fire came down.

This is my mess, over the noise of fire, window, desk, stair, house.

The "mess" inherent in the medium of collage is also the challenge of the poet. The burning within the artist is both inspirational and critical.

It should be noted that this is a "selected works" in that all of the poems and pieces have been published previously. Yet brought together through the inspired guidance of Robert Seydel (whose excellent essay on Waldrop is included toward the back, allowing the reader to experience Waldrop unfettered by critical apparatus), it all becomes new. In likening Waldrop to William Blake and Henri Michaux, Seydel points toward the range and width of this work while also illuminating significant details of the poet-artist...