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YEAH NO
Poetry. Jane Gregory's mystifying second collection, YEAH NO, begins with a "Knock knock," inviting the reader into a realmwhere "Everything is a pattern / of yesses and no." Within these pages we find Gregory constructing a multivalent world--ripe with struggle, prophecy, and, by the end, a resemblance of hope. Using her highly-tuned sensibility throughout, Gregory guides us through the anxieties of this journey by inventing new and enigmatic forms filled with sonic experimentation and polyphony. YEAH NO builds upon the singular vision found within her previous collection, MY ENEMIES, and continues her elegant and challenging address to poetry.
"At the beginning it feels almost awkward (as well as anguished). Written in poems that are accretions containing both language that's constantly questioned and a more subtle, subterranean lyricism: 'the bower made of agitation' seems to be the form, and the book seems to be about being agitated by different impulses. Suddenly, more than mid-way, everything comes together into a new tone, and what was hesitance. is a method. 'I am against achievement, ' Jane Gregory says in obvious and thrilling mastery of poetic form. She really takes over then. and the reader's pleasure is acute. This is a terrific book to go through."--Alice Notley
"To take the relentless work of sensing/making/relating/judging/desiring/suffering/trying ('What? // Yes. and little else') and wrest it via language into bombs of awful hope and gorgeous despair just is poetry's job, and in YEAH NO Jane Gregory makes it fully and spectacularly hers. 'Thank what is clear / for the grimness, ' she writes, 'what the future's retrojection bore a hole right through.' Gregory's taut and particular rigor is a contagion (read: corrective) that I dearly want to spread across the present tense. Take note of what happens to your heart--I mean the organ, 'tenderer. tenderer now'--as you read this mighty book."--Anna Moschovakis
"At the beginning it feels almost awkward (as well as anguished). Written in poems that are accretions containing both language that's constantly questioned and a more subtle, subterranean lyricism: 'the bower made of agitation' seems to be the form, and the book seems to be about being agitated by different impulses. Suddenly, more than mid-way, everything comes together into a new tone, and what was hesitance. is a method. 'I am against achievement, ' Jane Gregory says in obvious and thrilling mastery of poetic form. She really takes over then. and the reader's pleasure is acute. This is a terrific book to go through."--Alice Notley
"To take the relentless work of sensing/making/relating/judging/desiring/suffering/trying ('What? // Yes. and little else') and wrest it via language into bombs of awful hope and gorgeous despair just is poetry's job, and in YEAH NO Jane Gregory makes it fully and spectacularly hers. 'Thank what is clear / for the grimness, ' she writes, 'what the future's retrojection bore a hole right through.' Gregory's taut and particular rigor is a contagion (read: corrective) that I dearly want to spread across the present tense. Take note of what happens to your heart--I mean the organ, 'tenderer. tenderer now'--as you read this mighty book."--Anna Moschovakis
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
Published March 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 8, 2018
Rapid and staggered, this is a work of a mind that is continuously opening, in continuity of an open field. Linguistically tricky, and filled with the plumes of soulful wit, there is a hunger, an anger, and a cautiousness within these poems. They are charged and encouraging, delightful, and rigorous.
August 14, 2023
"Time existed to keep everything / from happening at once // and was running out, so / everything clamored to happen // at the cost of what was happening."
This is, without a doubt, one of the most illuminating poetry books I've read. Gregory's writing is disorienting, self-effacing, even, and requires an immense precision of attention to digest. I see that as a testament to the sheer richness of this book, with my reading oscillating between utter confusion and complete harmony with the words on the page; by which Gregory acknowledges the inability of language to capture its essence, how it finds itself / we find ourselves "driven against the sky", pressing against the empty, beating, and bleeding heart of what poetry can accomplish -- language is limited in nature and in scope, yet it remains a bridge to our true nature.
The reader's job, then, is to "lift" . . . "the universe by its corners", or to use language -- and its infinite permutations -- to bridge ourselves to an end which begins and ends with us. Like "the moon" shedding "its singleness", we face the constant dichotomy of living in a world of human meanings, yet confronting the vapidity of these meanings on a daily basis, as we identify with the abstractions upon abstractions of our raw, conscious experience, which is simply consciousness itself, with "light" (or to be less metaphorical, the pure 'knowing' of all experience, of which all experience is made [and which is the substance of all experience]) being the "index" of all that is known. In other words, the value of language, and by association, the value of our experience, is to make a "bridge" from concepts to experience, and to guide us to the place within ourselves from which everything grows.
The singleness of our nature -- the unity and oneness of reality -- is "vacant of origin" and of end, simply due to it being an end in itself; the nature from which our experience derives, and into which our experience collapses.
This is probably an unconventional reading of this book. Perhaps I'm reaching a bit. But what I love so much about literature is that each reader is given the opportunity to bring their own understanding to a reading of a particular work -- meaning is found in conversation between the reader and the text, with the denotation of words themselves (especially as poetry) providing only some elements of what makes reading such a rich activity. Gregory's hesitance in her language use, and constant self-corrections, illustrate this point, and also indicate that there is something primary to language, and thus incapable of being captured by language itself. Language's job is to rid itself of language -- to free itself from its form. All of this, as you might've guessed based on my goodreads profile, is informed by my spiritual pursuits (yes, typing that made me vomit in my mouth a little), and particularly by the non-dual understanding. But I simply had to read this book from that perspective. There's so much in here that reminds me it, and of myself, and what it means to be a "sufferer" in a world through which suffering can remind us of who we truly are, and free us from the constant identification we have with the form of our experience, rather than the nature of it.
This is, without a doubt, one of the most illuminating poetry books I've read. Gregory's writing is disorienting, self-effacing, even, and requires an immense precision of attention to digest. I see that as a testament to the sheer richness of this book, with my reading oscillating between utter confusion and complete harmony with the words on the page; by which Gregory acknowledges the inability of language to capture its essence, how it finds itself / we find ourselves "driven against the sky", pressing against the empty, beating, and bleeding heart of what poetry can accomplish -- language is limited in nature and in scope, yet it remains a bridge to our true nature.
The reader's job, then, is to "lift" . . . "the universe by its corners", or to use language -- and its infinite permutations -- to bridge ourselves to an end which begins and ends with us. Like "the moon" shedding "its singleness", we face the constant dichotomy of living in a world of human meanings, yet confronting the vapidity of these meanings on a daily basis, as we identify with the abstractions upon abstractions of our raw, conscious experience, which is simply consciousness itself, with "light" (or to be less metaphorical, the pure 'knowing' of all experience, of which all experience is made [and which is the substance of all experience]) being the "index" of all that is known. In other words, the value of language, and by association, the value of our experience, is to make a "bridge" from concepts to experience, and to guide us to the place within ourselves from which everything grows.
The singleness of our nature -- the unity and oneness of reality -- is "vacant of origin" and of end, simply due to it being an end in itself; the nature from which our experience derives, and into which our experience collapses.
This is probably an unconventional reading of this book. Perhaps I'm reaching a bit. But what I love so much about literature is that each reader is given the opportunity to bring their own understanding to a reading of a particular work -- meaning is found in conversation between the reader and the text, with the denotation of words themselves (especially as poetry) providing only some elements of what makes reading such a rich activity. Gregory's hesitance in her language use, and constant self-corrections, illustrate this point, and also indicate that there is something primary to language, and thus incapable of being captured by language itself. Language's job is to rid itself of language -- to free itself from its form. All of this, as you might've guessed based on my goodreads profile, is informed by my spiritual pursuits (yes, typing that made me vomit in my mouth a little), and particularly by the non-dual understanding. But I simply had to read this book from that perspective. There's so much in here that reminds me it, and of myself, and what it means to be a "sufferer" in a world through which suffering can remind us of who we truly are, and free us from the constant identification we have with the form of our experience, rather than the nature of it.
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May 23, 2018Given my enthusiasm for Gregory's previous book, and the title (THAT TITLE!), I was eager to find out where or what for. And maybe I should click on the "spoiler alert" below, but "where and what for" might be the entire theme of this collection. Like imagine a speaker who had put a veil over her head, and she kept moving around, and this was reality. And what this book might argue: THAT'S WHAT REALITY IS! You're fooling yourself if you have any thought otherwise. Objective reality as experienced by a subject, WHO USES LANGUAGE! is doomed to incompletion and being fooled by the feeling of comprehensive. Not this writer. Not this Jane Gregory. And I like this vague ambiguous horrible demonstrable use of language to relate language as a paucity.
May 23, 2018
"There is an audience | that is dangerous | to imagine, mostly, | and clearly ex | ists," goes one quatrain here, and yep, he raises his hand, with something like the pre-emptory interjecting avunicularity of the volume's title. So continues one series, "The Book I Will Note Write," from the debut volume My Enemies, a "prefer not-to" to set besides the progress made in the new volume's original series, "Profices," which promises to re-appear. "But don't feel bad for me, reason | , which word also was an accident | that fell from the arms of men | that touched the bell and then the stone -- "
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews