Open Box

by Carla Harryman

Poetry. OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS) is the newest book from prolific poet Carla Harryman. "GRNN alert just in--Joseph Cornell is doing the can-can over the delicious debris organization in Harryman's OPEN BOX. This dance of demi-characters--half half, semiquaver, three hooks quarter--places (a State) under an obligation not to maintain armed forces. Next removing oneself to another place; migration"--Tina Darragh. Carla Harryman's recent books include BABY and THE WORDS AFTER CARL SANDBURG'S ROOTABAGA STORIES AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, both currently available from SPD.

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2007

Reviews

[mwpm]

Blank note
When one listens becomes
Don't finish the thought
As it would shut away

The page will not inflate
Lungs to
That's clink between
Thus and shine

- pg. 7

*

Who said the spine wanted them
Signals
A sponge wants liquid
And I ate them

Which means said the doctor
There is no truth in art
Spurting with signals
But let us make an examination

- pg. 16

*

Being here was stolen time
The future
Is in the hands
Of a shovel

Man and son's voices
Reach through the
Window window
Lengthening to treble

- pg. 24

*

Better that one knows
Please forgive
Turned speech and weather
Friends at table

Have marked
The royal we with the tender logic of skeletons
So please forgive an insult
Extra tears

- pg. 35

*

Someday
Some say
Snarl
For fun

One can love between words
For a long time
In bad times
Friends build dummies nests

- pg. 46

*

Of America I don't believe in it
Anymore
Than a certain innocence
Amassed below

The legibility
Of every lie
A person
Working up to wake

- pg. 50

*

Portrait shadow every action
The curving line
Is not abstraction
Completely dissed

I didn't know I even knew you
Is that a big
Has the hook
Fish

- pg. 66

*

In it
A person, live
My
Thought

In
From
Edge
Of box

- pg. 78

*

Dangling in box
A tiny screw
Attached to scream
Switched to arm

Levels of lips mounted on top a slogan
Quick
Sides turned over
Sun

- pg. 84

[Louis Cabri]

Like Ted Greenwald's You Bet! (1978), Carla Harryman's Open Box (2007) is made of quatrains -- 154 of them, 2 to a page.

It would seem that each of Grteenwald`s quatrains doesn`t care to start "at the same point." There's as if a deliberate effort to forget about or erase or deny location:

Assume for a minute you're
Not living or in your
Living room in fact don't
Know where you are

............................

Final state way of denying
The unexpected others the
Other the very, how true!,
Existence of word the

The the word has these
Multiple pronunciations
Bib up put down put
Across, well isn't that nice!

Here, the referential and deictic (ie pointing) function of the word "the" -- creating location -- dissolves or dissipates in the allophonic play of sounding-out the word.

In contrast, it would seem that each of Harryman's quatrains does start, quite deliberately from the same "place" -- or, placeholder. Perhaps it's because there's more of a sustained argument in Open Box beyond dailyness, a rhetorical arc across the quatrains requiring that one find one's place inside it over and over again in order to sustain it across the quatrains and so develop it further:

Of America I don't believe in it
Anymore
Than a certain innocence
Amassed below

The legibility
Of every lie
A person
Working up to wake

Also, there's more of an acknowledged exterior to the "box" of the stanza, in Harryman. This is part of the argument, in particular of box as poetic artifice of words:

The psyche of the poet
Exceeds the poem
Without the poet
Disappearing

Into an exterior world
In which it cannot survive
The poem is therefore
A representation of an edge

Harryman's quatrains are often paired, as these two sets are, on the same page.

[Hannah]

A few really elegant turns or startling juxtapositions, but overall, a feeling of sameness from page to page and sometimes a sense of being bludgeoned with obviousness.

Love, for instance:

Every time the conversation turns toward
A little chill
Turf colors
Bow