Rain starts falling on a sunny day. An old friend shows up at your door. You’re driving through an intersection and another car t-bones your own. Everyone knows what it means for something to happen out of the blue. But what about out of the blank? It’s the old phrase told slant, swapping the blue of the sky for something even more abstract than color. It’s also the title of a new book of poems by Elaine Equi.
It’s a telling title, too – a little silly, a little profound – one that speaks to the fact that nothingness and opportunity have always gone hand-in-hand. Appropriately, the book’s first poem issues from primordial ooze, its speaker speaking “from the first darkness,”
prima materia,
moon enclosed in cloud caverns –
trailing a watery shadow, wet flame
– before contemplating statues of Goethe and Gandhi, the latter “striding through Union Square.”
Once I actually saw someone snatch
the necklace of pink carnations
that had been draped like pom-poms
around his neck. It didn’t faze him a bit.
Implacable, he just kept putting one foot,
always the same one, in front of the other.
Equi’s poems are just like this: like the statue holding motion in a single, frozen stride. Never in a hurry, her words tend toward the absolutely ordinary, but their rhythms do not. They dabble with dreams and visions as readily as the thoughts one thinks while standing in line. They reject the ancient poet’s duties to solemnity, utility, and gravitas, and often say so with a subtle music. It’s poetry for everyone but misanthropes and snobs – poetry that walks “straight into the day’s diamond mine,” poetry that’s capable of detecting the irony in a t-shirt, poetry that finds cause to describe a clock as “wounded.” There’s nothing epic here, just the amusing movements of an offbeat mind at play.
Not a single poem stretches past a single page, and many make do with half of one. Equi’s brevity is part and parcel with her penchant for wit, pithiness, and the kind of poem that packs a punchline. Yet some of her poems still struggle to make it past the finish line. “Have It Your Way,” for instance, spends six of its eleven lines numbly alternating between the words “moonlight” and “headlights.”
Borges suggested that a poet should be judged by his or her best pages, but it isn’t always easy to tell what’s best here. Forgetting the weaker ones, which vanish as suddenly as they appear, the majority of the poems are charmingly idiosyncratic and refreshingly unpretentious, if sometimes annoyingly lackadaisical. You’ll find yourself calling balls and strikes as you flip your way through, marveling and despairing to find the line that separates effortlessness from the absence of effort. Then, inevitably, a poem as superb as “Weather Vane” turns up.
If only I had one,
I’d keep it for a pet.
Let it perch on the roof
tethered to the wind,
warbling a tinny,
whirring song.
Let the body of the house
sag beneath its talons,
go limp as it lifts
it and us up – up.
Gilded bird,
crowing at midnight,
pecking at the grain
of stars.
Out of the Blank is a kitchen-sink kind of book, and like any generous gathering of poems it runs the risk of obsessing its reader with ratios: the good, the so-so, the not-so-good. These aren’t poems that reject that rubric, but they will make you aware of a certain humility, a playfulness, a whimsical quality that gives credence to the notion that, if one of the duties of poetry is to transport us, it’s poems like these that can offer a refuge from the seriousness of life.
Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, Open Letters Review, Rain Taxi, and Full Stop, among others.
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