Digital Creation

Stephanie Strickland began her writing life on the page, soon becoming an early practitioner of poetry in the world of pixels and code (her new book’s appendix offers generous accounts of her digital works). Even so, she has remained fully committed to print and to books. Admiration for her work, among the poets and artists whose creations are destined for the screen, complements the various awards and prizes her traditional poetry has earned. Strickland is unique in this way. Even her first book was a fully mature poetry newly arrived, and there is no difficulty, now, seeing her endeavor in the one medium informing the other.

Her artistic imprint is unmistakable. Strickland’s exquisite turns and leaps of thought, in either realm, are prized for their radiance and sense of form. I hold How the Universe Is Made in my hands and contemplate how space and words, arcs of thought, allow poetry to come into being. I reflect on how beauty, animation, the pathways within that haunting, fleeting presence of digital creation — which dazzled me from early on — are deeper, more resonant, when writing takes the imagination for a ride.

More remarkable still is the fact that a source of Strickland’s aesthetic power is her informed, scientific intuition, which may account for her initial attraction to the screen. She possesses a knowing, singularly graceful way of seeing, ultimately made material in her poem’s prosody. Her lines absorb the reader within an abundance. The joy in such plenitude has been delicately crafted.

Strickland is not the first science-oriented thinker to have succumbed to an infatuation with the manifest world, its symmetries and quirks alike. In her writing, the observed and natural include equally the made and the given. She is a visionary — although, unlike William Blake, she has no use for the fantastical. The realized world is fantasy enough for her. Like Blake’s, her incisive language, its music and discernment, provide us with elements we have been missing.

The abiding, protean image or state of being, in her work, is water. Here are the opening lines of “Constant Quiet” (from Zone : Zero [2008]):

constant quiet  intercostal    intercoastal green & silver    muscled gillflesh slipping into   opens out ofconstant quiet

constant quiet   Mississippi    overflowing built a levee    longer higher than the Great  Wall of Chinaconstant quiet

The vista of the poem expands, the formal structure of the poem a constant — until the sixth, final stanza:

constant quiet  who can open    who can    hold it    constantquiet

After her first volume, Give the Body Back (1991), came Strickland’s extended verse meditation, The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil (1993). It drew more than the usual public attention. The book’s profound sympathy with and comprehension of Weil, as heroic figure, installs this intellectual woman within her historical tableau. Strickland’s portrait of Weil as champion and redeemer of suffering is commensurate with the twentieth century’s great cataclysms: workers’ struggles, the horrors of colonialism, holocaust, war. Particularly in “Soul Learns Everything from Body” we start to understand her magnificent selflessness:

The bird forgets

but the trap does not. Cassandran, her harsh voice worrying, probing: If any human being show need of any other, a little or a lot, why does the latter run away?

I have much experience, on one side or the other.

Everything from the body:

    a boyrunning down the field can read so well, his  handsare unimpeded, have already caught the  pass;reached out before    he saw. Finallynot to read at all: hands alonefly up, whole body shaping the air, weaned,  immediate.

The soul learns turning,inclination,fatigue:to be worn down.

The body,unastonished by reduction; it feelswhat can be shown:    that there exist remarkableleafless trees of blossom,      tinyback and forth of almond, long, touched,  wands of pinkthat shudder down their whole length and   are...