Courting Opposition: On Three Books from Changes Press
Laura Newbern | A Night in the Country | Changes Press | March 2024 | 66 Pages
Zoë Hitzig | Not Us Now | Changes Press | June 2024 | 93 Pages
Jimin Seo | OSSIA | Changes Press | September 2024 | 136 Pages
The new publisher Changes Press, based in New York City, has released five volumes of poetry since its inception in 2022. These books have mostly come about through the Changes Book Prize (formerly called The Bergman Prize), judged in different years by Louise Glück and Eileen Myles. I have been following Changes since they published their first book, Earth Room by Rachel Mannheimer, which I wrote about for CRB shortly after its publication. Between these five volumes, if one looks to characterize the kind of work Changes publishes and promotes, what stays consistent is their variety—a development of structural idiosyncrasy, a formal theme that deepens and guides. For this reason, these books are unlike anything else I am reading: they more explicitly demand that we learn their structural methods, regardless of what might seem familiar to us about the organization of poetry volumes. This relationship seems to me like an exchange: we learn as the poems learn. As I write short meditations on three new books from Changes—A Night in the Country by Laura Newbern, Not Us Now by Zoë Hitzig, and OSSIA by Jimin Seo—I do not mean to suggest a comparison across the individual texts. No structural pattern nor theme recurs that would unify one vision, one trend or another, a tendency or inclination. That’s the point and, I suspect, an early sign of an attentive publisher. In writing about these books, I hope the individual strangeness of each text compliments what feels consistent throughout: patterns of language that deepen our sense of what’s possible, formally and structurally, in a book of poems.
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When I was a child I believed in everything…
Laura Newbern’s first book of poems, Love and the Eye, was published in 2010, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Kore Press First Book Prize; her second book, A Night in the Country, was selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Changes Book Prize. Glück ends her introduction to the volume with this observation: “At a time when most are preoccupied with justice, with what can and must be changed, Laura Newbern writes about what does not change, writing not so much against current modes as apart from them. Small occasions, clear sentences. And underneath, measureless fathoms.” Part of the appeal of Newbern’s poetry, in Glück’s terms, is how it bucks a trend without condemning one side or another, without advocating for itself as better than the ostensible vogue. The colloquial idiom of these poems does not belie but compliments their emotional urgency, or “measureless fathoms.” Listen to these lines from “The Walk”:
And where did I read about planes
in dreams: you
are reaching your goals,
it said, or
you are dreaming of things
you cannot possibly do.
The self-rendering interpretation works because it’s exacted—not challenged—by an alternative. How does one make many options feel as precise as a single observation? “Reaching your goals,” anticipating their impossibility, the reading attributed to an unknown but remembered source: opposite experiences overlap by way of their difference.
And if through opposition these experiences become viscerally true, A Night in the Country intuits the limitations of its material. Glück also writes, “Poetry’s impossible objectives—permanence, the dream of perfection—haunt these poems.” This sometimes happens, as it does in life, on site of a dialogue, the socialized aspect of writing, living alongside people who care about stories. In “Black Forest” Newbern writes, “What keeps you awake at night? / She wanted a writerly, magical answer. / A black forest, a shining maid walking through it.” What is a writerly answer? Perhaps one that inflects the question with a kind of purpose: what keeps you awake at night can be repurposed with the right tools, now please teach us how to use these tools. What is a magical answer? Posing such a question to strangers in the first place, of course, requires a frictionless gall, the sense that this question is actually very important: “The woman—she was a guest, a visiting artist. / I was a guest to her visitingness: polite guest / at an affable table.” For the sake of politeness, to preserve the affable table, the answer should not be so surprising—“My neck”—until the answer is doubled by what it isn’t: “Meaning also / sadness, and worry— / though I didn’t say so.” Compare this exchange to another, later in “Myth,” prompted by a similarly tactless question:
Somebody asked me, straightforwardly, What
is your mythology?
What? I said, meaning, what do you mean—I didn’t understand
the question. Though I remember I thought I should. Understand.
By not understanding how to answer the question, the poem reveals it does, in fact, understand the nature of this question: a functional stumbling block. As before, the interrogator matters to frame the interrogation: “It was a man who asked me, someone / I didn’t know well, but knew to respect— / a teacher, and old.” The question, as before, must prompt a “writerly, magical answer,” which only comes by a claim of omission. The artifice of stumbling becomes a clearer answer than the question could have ever prompted.
Not quite misunderstandings—two people speaking past each other—the poem speaks past itself. “And when I asked you // ‘was it too grim,’ / I meant to be funny,” Newbern writes in “Asylum Pastoral, or Happiness,” and one assumes the joke did not land. In this context, the clarification no longer feels like a corrective, more like a formal necessity playing out. We are not exactly learning information about what is or is not meant but about how the poem makes itself known. This is what makes Newbern’s second volume thrilling to read, how A Night in the Country achieves what Glück calls “measureless fathoms.” A potential framework for belief—for what should ostensibly be known, like an answer—exists to exceed itself. In “Self-Portrait with Wolf,” Newbern writes, “When I was a child I believed in everything. / I believed that you / were the sound of a horn…” You are now, impossibly, the sound of the horn. Then: “And that what you ate / could sing inside you.” Impossible, but made true through this impossibility.
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…potential, you would ask, of the variety…
Zoë Hitzig’s second book of poems Not Us Now won the Changes Book Prize; her first book, Mezzanine, was published by Ecco Press in 2020. The inevitable (if not silly) question: if not us, then who, and when? The book positioned in this category of otherness: the figure of “not us” is situated “now,” that in the past, before this now, perhaps the figure could be “us,” but no longer. The present extends and extends and does not become the future. “I erased my contacts,” Hitzig writes in “Exit Muse,” and step-by-step this figure disappears: “First my digital extremities, / then each node in the spindling network / of my internal communication systems.” From the past, a problem is staged: how and why to erase these contacts, to what degree. “Starving the fever, like you always said.” In the now, the problem becomes a series of alternatives: “Now my words fall onto the riverbank like the bottled / voices inside a personality test.”
At least one way of describing the category of “not us”—and one way of participating in it, by reading these poems—constitutes algorithm, its solution-oriented sequencing, the generative metaphor for Hitzig’s collection. Listen to these lines from “Bounded Regret Algorithm”:
Mine is a life dedicated
to the calculation of loss.
I know with certainty
almost nothing. Yet here I am
executing legions
of decisions each moment.
Between calculation and intuition, the algorithm reveals itself with a human affect. And how does our program implement the algorithm’s logic? “Explore, record, explore, / record, explore, record,” the poem continues to describe its own action, as if the self has disappeared, or recurred into sequence: “Eventually I learn to limit / the loss. I come to know / where I should not go…” The metaphor begins with automated precision and ends with the artifice of intuition. Even then, even with this artifice, the human can rarely be willed toward decision: “as if they outgrew us / our hands took / to constant motion,” Hitzig writes in “Dysrhythmia,” a title that describes an abnormality in our bodily rhythms. A heartbeat, brain activity. When the change appears as “constant motion,” what part of the human recedes into unwilled participation? Is resistance possible? Yet we are talking about poems, which must begin and almost always find an end: figures on the page made to enact a particular experience in time. Perhaps the great accomplishment of Not Us Now is expanding that “particular experience” into a variety that, again, recurs—something that at once feels utterly specific unto itself, also something that exceeds itself.
The technology of poetry compliments this kind of variety. When the book more obviously tends toward this mode, emphasizing the poem as a contrived experience, it feels as if form itself becomes as solution-oriented as algorithm:
am
I
the
snake
am
I
the
meth
am
I
the
bone
neck
lace
Am I Am I Am I: these lines from “Simplex Algorithm” again stage a problem without a solution, just many possible alternatives. Is the process of moving through these alternatives one way of managing the problem in the present? Very soon this question will become the past, will change or will stay the same. “When when was now. / When who was now,” says the long title poem: there was a time when when could articulate the present, and when the present could articulate a who. “In the pink the face / says now. When when / was now,” the face is not your own, and neither is your when. You cannot claim a when, it’s already gone, so be still: “When moon / is still. Be still.”
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…your poems from your hands into mine.
The final poem in Jimin Seo’s debut OSSIA is titled “Translator’s Preface,” which begins, “It’s backwards whatever we have to say.” By the end of the book, we have arrived at the beginning, this introduction to a kind of refractory methodology. Because “it’s backwards whatever we have to say,” the book tells us, let’s commit our methods to speaking variously of experience. Seo’s debut is composed in both English and Korean; “ossia,” in music, refers to an alternative passage that may be played in lieu of the original. English and Korean alternatively, the scope of experience enacted in the transitional silence. The audience of OSSIA is not limited to those who can read both English and Korean—though, of course, a knowledge of both will foster the book’s promise, that these languages reverberate off each other. Readers with no knowledge of Korean, such as myself, are confronted by what we cannot access: experience shaped in words, in time, that is not ours. With no access to the Korean—beyond its existence on the page, beyond the prompt to figure out a working translation—our English alternative suggests the functional limitations embedded in the book.
Across the book, with poems like “Richard Asks Me for a Poem,” and “Richard Tries to Set Me Up” and “Richard Has Trouble Sleeping,” the lingering presence that guides OSSIA is the late poet Richard Howard. Friend, teacher, guide: “So use me while I’m useful,” Seo writes, “it’s the reason / we met, your poems from your hands into mine.” The utility in this rendition of “Richard” extends the book’s guiding structure: another alternative, Seo’s vocal counterpart in Howard. As experience between two languages begets translation, OSSIA considers other types of material and figurative transactions: poems for a kind of impossible usefulness, “when making good is making good money,” as Seo writes in another Richard poem. The promise of poetry lacquered by its fiscal hollowness, OSSIA wills itself towards an unlikely optimism, playful and funny, not something I would describe as hope:
God,
When did I become a diplomat? The art books
you say? Put them on the very bottom shelf.
Art does something at last. A counter weight.
These lines from “Richard Asks to Sort Books Together,” shuffling the impermanent objects of a life, at last resolve the goofy question of anglophone poetry. Better for the books to become a counterweight than for Richard to embrace his title as diplomat: or not quite, not yet. By reenacting these familiar oppositions—art does or does not do something, anything—OSSIA positions itself in the between, not so easily resolved, like the question itself.
“This border between us was never easy, I / know that is no surprise. To speak is ecstasy. / To kiss something else entirely,” Seo writes in one of the seven title poems. The figurative border on the page, with the Korean counterpart to the English on the opposite side; the border between the living and the dead; the physical divide between lovers: to dramatize alternatively, these poems return us to their material, language positioned in opposition, thus situated across. Seo writes later in the poem, “What / use is language when the ancients divide us into / our final haunted constellations,” and again we return to a functional uselessness. Because the ancients divide us into our final haunted constellations, the question becomes useful—though in asking these questions, OSSIA does not resolve itself to easy stratagems. “Isn’t learning a new language just a new way / of saying the world we live in isn’t enough?” Yes, and what other options do we have but to live in this not enough, but to resist this not enough?
Alternatively: OSSIA enacts this process of switching from original to another, other back to original, original to alternative original, and this process is not determined by choice but by self-imperative. Because “the world we live in isn’t enough,” one must accept or resist its lack. Because “my language is a worry / the world can’t convince / me I’m right,” the book expands its language. This expansion, as suggested before, is at times erotic:
There can be nothing of your lover’s body you can’t
forgive: the wilderness of his damp hair, his weather
shy cock, a dark fruit you graze until he reappears
in your own body disguised as a heavy bruise you
carry with you always, anywhere and everywhere.
From “Richard Reads My Poems,” what cannot be forgiven permanently disfigures, and what prompts this observation is advice for composing a poem: “My friend, there is no such thing as a corrective / for an unfinished poem. Can you imagine telling / your lover to hurry up and get with the program…” The imaginative tissue of “can you imagine” is at once colloquial and figuratively telling, a revealing moment of process. The French axiom of workshop pedagogy rings true, but only through reversal: a poem is never finished, only abandoned (Auden’s paraphrase of Paul Valéry). No way to fix an unfinished poem, and no way to finish a poem besides abandoning it with the public: the best we can do, as OSSIA often points out, is make something finely built. Thankfully, our models for how to do this never abandon us, as Seo writes of Richard later in the volume, “that is how I remember your fiction as my fiction / as my life and yours // smelt together like a stone split into dust.”
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As Variously As Possible: variety must be a goal for any publisher’s catalogue, though even variety, in my experience, tends to be classified one way or another. Presses become known for a kind of work; writers will try to publish with presses that celebrate and promote the kind of work they imagine themselves writing. (The fact that poetry does not court the same financial benefits as other ways of writing has meant that variety is generally not beholden to what sells.) The variety of Changes, however, is utterly idiosyncratic; so far, one cannot anticipate what will come next.
As these short meditations should suggest, I return to how these books court oppositions: embedded in structure, enacted across poems. A Night in the Country staging impossible questions to avoid the rhetorical carrot-and-stick; Not Us Now attending to a solution-oriented form, located in its many alternatives; the chamber rooms of OSSIA speaking back to each other in Korean and English, self-translating from the living to the dead, the dead to the living: Changes Press is a young publisher of extraordinary poetry. A young publisher at what seems like a pivotal moment in their development and growth: what happens next will secure their role, in my mind, as an agent for thrilling poetry.