American Book Review

In a Poetry Foundation interview with Jill Magi, poet Jennifer Firestone explains, "I was originally taught that the poem comes from knowing and that knowledge should be written down in 'beautiful' words. But that model no longer suffices. Also, fundamentally, poetry is how I learned to think critically—I'm always trying to raise the bar on my own thinking." Firestone's fifth full-length collection of poetry, Ten is a book of implicit questions: What creative work is possible when pain and drugs control the body? What determines when a collection of lines is a poem? When does process become result? When does question become art? Is it possible to record experience without invisible interference of a lunging ego? And can we make the inevitable interference a viewed experience?

While still caring for her toddler, and unexpectedly facing a painful knee operation, Firestone responded by adopting a discipline that would enable her to continue to write during her lengthy recovery period:

The narrative changed. Not the way you wanted or planned. The stories kept ricocheting, flying through car windows. The post-op was the "space" that needed designation. A nice outfit. A frame. Ten. It was clean. It could be done. Ten lines a page. If you did it in a day, you'd feel okay. That was work.

The resulting book, titled Ten, explores constraint and freedom in artistic self-expression via a simple logic. There is no table of contents. Instead, Firestone sets up a structure in which four untitled poems, each containing exactly ten lines, are followed by one-two pages of framing prose poems. This mathematically satisfying pattern repeats exactly ten times for a total of fifty poems. The prose poems read like journal entries and function to give context to the more experimental ten-line poems. The quote above is an example.

During her recovery, with limited mobility, Firestone continues to add constraints. She looks out the window, simultaneously attuned to her own looking and receiving, and records in the scene:

But now you will always hold that view. Preserve it. One might feel you are being forced. That is true. Or might feel you are being present. Also true.

In contrast with the prose-poems, Firestone's free-verse poems, populated with bones, a tiresome sea, light, death, straggling vines, robots and particles, are disjointed. They record and preserve the view while trying to remain true to the shockingly fragmentary way in which the mind moves and comments. The lines deliberately resist the process of making meaning, at least a linear, deductive meaning; instead, they allow the body, with its emotional intelligence, to have a more shaping voice.

Firestone, in the interview with Magi, says, "Inviting boredom and silence can be a great practice on many levels, including as a gateway to experimental poetry." We rarely welcome or even notice what happens internally in such a moment. By her example, Firestone suggests that here is fertile ground.

The swelling. Could be an enormous wave.  Well,close to it. Always in water – so your thoughts.Farther away than noticed. Well.Ten seems somewhat bare today.For what? Wet ropes—sea knots.Noting the temperature by leaves. The breeze.Well, inside thickening. She notes [End Page 26] atmospheric dips. And at four someone at  the door,regulating.

In saying that the intelligence of the body is given a "shaping voice," I mean that the poet allows her verse to pay uncensored attention and to voice impulses in feeling and body, as well as in thought, that are as subtle as the play of a fickle wind. In doing so, she broadens and questions a sense of self that our automatic functioning in the world regards as known. Here is Firestone, again in the Poetry Foundation interview: "We're so focused on answers—it paralyzes students or awards the most verbal or aggressive ones. I always think about poet Kaia Sand's statement, 'I am interested in a poetic practice that insists on inexpert inquiry, gathering ideas and ways of knowing to open a space for more...