A Review of Shira Dentz's 'how do I net thee'
By Kathryn Cowles
Some books of poems have to teach you how to read them because you can’t read them any of the old ways. Some books, in addition to being about whatever they’re about, are also about improvising a new way of saying, and therefore require a new way of reading. Some books are an investigation of methodology even as they plow ahead, and this is true of Shira Dentz’s how do i net thee (Salmon Press, 2018). So before I get into the specifics of Dentz’s original, weird methodology and language, I want to posit a theory of the why behind the how—the thinking I see going on behind the doing that manifests in the many luminous and strange visual elements in the book. But just to make sure you don’t lose interest amidst the theorizing process, here are some juicy bits of language, completely decontextualized, to hook you in, many of them employing this poet’s characteristically startling figurative language or her characteristically complicated alliterative twists and turns:
“Sitting here opening chestnuts / one comes out like a coin” (61)
“His voice particular, the inside of a menorah. Silver and warm at the same time.” (52)
“a corseted idea / like sunrise and sunset” (6)
“desire yellow on the burner heat on low” (16)
“mother, / a brief flick in the air like light from a lighter / nod your lips curtain in a breeze” (8)
“a mouth inside herself” (38)
“let’s make some word water two parts salt one part light influenced by the moon junkie streamlined take a cup and fill it that lemon scent in the outdoors air a skirt of pine trees draped along mountains” (15)
“but when I eat, it’s a solid thing, like a right word” (58)
“Apples and whine the voice sublime toes and woes Schubert aglow the spine of tree leaves, mark trunk and bark in back of the crease keep me from falling hot springs dry cracked lips to the vine and back let it go take me the wind drapes like a cloth over my mind, a napkin on my lap.” (57)
So there you go—call it an appetizer.
The first poem in how do i net thee is kind of a bonus pre-poem, sneaked in before the table of contents, a clue into the framework of the book as a whole. The poem is a riffing on/recontextualizing of the OED definition of “net.” It begins and ends mid-sentence and winks at its own materiality, at its own doubling, its words bifurcating and proliferating and opening out. The poem ends like this:
to make by the process of producing network; to
interlace,
to take, catch, capture,
or gather
(This is as good a moment as any to note that all quotations here are approximations since these poems move all over the page and are therefore difficult to reduplicate in miniature. Dentz herself apparently co-designed the book, so it’s clear that spacing matters. Alas for me.)
You know how, when you push your thumb against a running faucet, far from stopping the water, you send it spraying in all different directions with increased force? In this book, Dentz’s poems activate their contents through pressure. They put their thumbs against faucets. Far from trying to settle their words into stable forms, these poems intentionally shake them up.
That first poem, hiding in plain sight before the book even quite begins, ends with a faucet moment of proliferation that could be an ars poetica for the larger project’s methodology.
I like the wild gradations of that take catch capture gather as it destabilizes the “net” from the book’s title. I like the idea of holding together multiple differing gestures at once, of tracking different configurations of the same words and their subsequent effects, of teaching readers to read in split and sometimes contradictory ways. I like building by interlace.
The difference between take and gather, for instance, the movement between, is startling. Take involves something done against-will, implies the creature one takes from, while gather suggests a passive and near-inanimate object, like wheat. Similarly, catch and capture run the gamut. One catches a frog, a small animal, perhaps using lures, bits of food, or subterfuge, but one captures a person, a fugitive, an enemy soldier, a flag, a whole kingdom.
take catch capture gather encapsulates the complex ethical terrain of any poetic gesture of writing-about. It implies an object in varying states of being-acted-against. It knows that there’s a violence inherent in the take catch capture gather-ing of a poetic object, and rather than ignoring it, it puts the violence on the surface of the gesture, makes it meta, makes it apparent to the reader. It finds a new way of writing—of netting the stuff of the world on the page—that performs this contradictory and fraught gesture and therefore empties it of some of its violence against the poetic object.
The ethical terrain of writing/roping something to the page is more fraught if the thing getting netted is a person, a thee rather than an it, like a beloved brother lost, or a perpetually wounding father, two of the central, haunting figures in how do i net thee. Thee is the language of the holy but also of childhood fairytales, and of troubadours, of “whom do i love best in the world” (from “X” 17). Thee is an intimacy but also a pedestal. Is adoration. Is a formal gesture, a performance. Thee calls attention to the fact that it calls attention to the fact of its subject, that it chooses the performance of its how. It puts its take catch capture gather on the surface of its gesture. It shows its cards.
Because there’s always an ethics embedded in poetic methodology. There’s always a netting taking place, even though many choose to bury it beneath the surface. To call attention to it, to put the thumb on the faucet, to give multiple different gatherings instead of just one, destabilizes the weighty authority of truth claims on the page. And indeed, these poems are interested less in Capital T Truth than versions, angles.
To this end, in a number of spots, Dentz will recreate entire earlier poems with no or few differences in word choice but with entirely different spacing on the page in order to call attention to the way spacing on the page affects the words gathered—to draw attention to the surface of the saying. These twinned poems are about what they’re about individually but also about an ethical destabilization, the fact that changing their spacing on the page changes the content, even when it’s otherwise identical or nearly identical, the fact that one can literally say the same thing in terms of word choice and yet not say the same thing.
Or, put another way, different configurations of the same poem can be like different kinds of maps of the same moment in time, each truthful in their own way—the way a topographical map versus a map of the train system of a place would look different, even if they hold the same content in terms of place. Catching the actual, physical world on the page can manifest itself in any number of different ways, each calling our attention to different details as the most important ones.
Dentz invents a number of other linguistic tactics, poetic tactics, spacial tactics that make this complicated, ethical gesture of take catch capture gather. For instance, her sentence edges sometimes get all slippery as they try to keep up with her thoughts (or her speaker’s thoughts; but let’s just problematically say her thoughts and call attention to the violence of it in a parenthetical note, wink). Conjoined-twins sentences, is what I started calling them in my mind.
Like “are they singing or laughing or clapping back to desire young young how do i net thee with my shredded heels no i don’t want to look humpty dumpty had a great fall for heaven sakes” (from “Anatomy” 16). Sentences overlap onto each other, as with that “look,” which can attached itself to “no i don’t want to look” or “no I don’t want to look humpty dumpty” but also “look humpty dumpty had a great fall for heaven sakes”. The effect is one of both immediacy and great speed. Of asking questions and sometimes answering them right after, and in real time, of finding out what one thinks via thinking it, form running hand in hand with content. This kind of writing nets, but spraypaints the net a bright and visible color.
It’s worth noting here that how do i net thee has a handful of pieces of pictures of net, I think culled literally from an image of a net inside the front cover, thrown in physically in the middle of poems, like little chutes from Chutes and Ladders games of my youth, further drawing attention to the materiality of the netting and also gathering/yoking words and pieces together that might otherwise be isolated. These pieces of net help pull the entire book together as project even as separate little poems go their separate ways.
Or consider the methodology for how things make their way into the poem “watercolor tongue” (19)—at the speed of thought: “yesterday bikes in a forest / with deer. would be perfect, a man. my head could / race, maybe did one too many now it’s coming back how i asked what’s / your schedule. i’ll have to look. why did i bother, brother, watermelon / claw, green shades of sunset flesh.” In these lines, we are moving through language that feels remarkably like thinking, with its diversion-ed momentum. We are in yesterday in a forest, and then now thinking of a man (“would be perfect, a man.”), then thinking about thinking (“it’s coming back now”), about the head racing, and then recounting the thing the speaker wants the mind not to race to, a conversation (“i asked what’s / your schedule. i’ll have to look. why did i bother”). And then the word bother, the look or sound of it, remarkably, turns to “brother,” to that thread of net, that chute, haunting the entire book, a lost brother whose voice is slipping out of memory. The way brother enters into the poem is the way things that haunt us enter into our thinking, mid-thought.
Or consider the methodology of strange metaphor and image progression in some poems, which is quintessential Dentz. The poem “Marsupium” begins, “A girl of freezing ice in my stomach; papoose; / skinning my meat” (4). The strange emotional precision of the embedded metaphors strikes me here. And yet the metaphors don’t settle into their equal signs. They wiggle and proliferate into further metaphor and so do a different kind of work:
i’m a basket of eels on the backseat of a car.
curled like question marks.
Am i the girl who makes the empty plank of a brother
white keys on the far ends of a piano
a baldness, with nothing around it
Silence
Vaseline on my senses
being angry comes in waves you see the flight pattern but no bird
Dentz frequently juxtaposes sharp image after sharp image in order to suggest a new grammar or logic or relationship between things, in order to constellate. The images accrue, they gather themselves into something cumulative, something akin to metaphor, but not exactly metaphor. It’s like a metaphor of feeling, images trying to get at some complex feeling, some other-side-of-an-equal-sign, from multiple angles. It’s metaphor in the process of take catch capture gather. The images are trying to get something from the world down on the page, and the something is not simplified. It refuses to be reduced in the netting process.
It’s hard for me to say just what this poem is doing to me and why I like what it’s doing so very much. It has both precision and expansiveness, switching lenses on me line by line so I see something both small and up close and then a whole larger landscape in a short amount of space.
I also like that it’s difficult poetry, to use that age-old, often problematically gendered term, and yet difficult in the service of something I can feel in my gut. It’s difficult on its textured surface but also tied to something that feels core and human. It gut punches via the intellect. This is a glimmering kind of balancing act indeed.
Because ultimately just saying something in a new way, and then getting meta and saying that you’re saying something in a new way, isn’t quite enough for me with a book of poems. Such a gesture alone doesn’t actually take catch capture gather at all. It doesn’t net anything; it just sews nets prettily or elaborately. It puts its finger on a conceptual faucet without turning on the water, without getting all wet. I do often like to find myself in the kinds of poems that are a purely intellectual enterprise, that make me think about language and how it operates, that delight me on a surface level with their twisty-turns.
But my very favorite poetry does something more. It asks “in the dark are there kind letters and if so which are they” (58). It delights with intellectual twisty-turns, yes, and strange methodologies, but it does so with an ethical, human anchor and purpose, with a beating heart, and in doing so, it turns me into something more than a passive subject. It take catch capture gathers me up and actually moves me, which is what I would ultimately say to describe how do i net thee: it moves me smartly, it transports me, intercepts, arrests, apprehends, gains possession of me, entangles, affects violently, seizes, snatches, grasps, lays hold of, grips, snags, hooks, it captivates. And good.
Kathryn Cowles is an associate professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Cowles’ first book of poems, Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name, won the Brunsman Book Prize, and Cowles’ second book of poems, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. Cowles’ work has appeared recently in such places as New American Writing, The Georgia Review, Boston Review, Verse, Diagram, Best American Experimental Writing, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-day.
