Derivative of the Moving Image by Jennifer Bartlett

I’ve always enjoyed a book of poems that takes me on a journey: be it a full narrative, a lyrical fragmentation, a jaunt into surrealism, or, say, a basic concept: here is a soundscape beginning with A. I’ve mostly enjoyed how these books transgress their own rules, how they break apart the narrative moment to explore a lyric’s unsettling powers to transcribe a narrative on the outer edges of a cup, how they refuse to be stalled in a pattern. A poetic impulse, perhaps, to reconfigure, to remake; to piece together the puzzle while being wholly aware that on those puzzle lines, between those miniscule breaths that the pieces create, there are stories, moods, moments of un/reconciliation. The stories are always on the lines.

Jennifer Bartlett’s Derivative of the Moving Image (DotMI) is one such book. Divided into five titled sections (“When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.”, “Derivative of the Moving Image”, “Essays on Birds and Light”, “The Music Of”, and “Hypnagogic Diary”), each devoted to its own form/al construction: prose/like poems to lined poems that make use of the page-whole. Bartlett’s poems often teeter, often spin, often skip, often drown in the process of grieving.

A friend once said that prose poems should be neat little blocks; the poet who doesn’t make the block is lazy & not doing justice to the poem. I thought the friend was a little rigid and too invested in rules. When I read the first section of DotMI, however, I paused to reconsider that rule. The poems in “When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.” are quite heart collapsing, honest, and vulnerable. Many of them deal with the death of a sister, or death and dying in general. There is loss: of the body (“Her one collapsing lung thrown/onto the emergency room floor” (“When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.” 18, 19)), of what is real, of what one wants (“Why do you desert me? You know/my limbs are fragile (“Ghost Boy” 4, 5)), of what one can(not) hold (“That is why the moment my sister left her body our parents/made us turn from her” (“Elegy for the Trees” 16)), and of course, there is the perpetual impending loss (“This is/where we begin to give up, the both of us” (Coup de Grace 23, 24)). I can only admire the bravado of writing through such quakes, of that intense desire to excise from the psyche those hauntings.

And yet, I wonder I wonder I wonder. At what moment am I reading (Lord help me) poetry. Yes, I’m ready for the attacks. Bartlett’s first section read like the beginnings of essays, the beginnings of poems, the promise of that distilled insight. But these are the beginnings. I hesitated in writing about this book, because I, too, have lost and suffered and wanted nothing but the thing itself out of me. And poems helped me to deliver those things. Poems were the matter that could hold the fragments, the fractures, the dissonance. But, is the book of poems the place to house these beginnings?

Grief is difficult to write about, yes. There are clichés that sit with us (“Angels lie with me against these/worn sheets, assuring my journey” (“Coup de Grace” 2, 3), “my limbs are fragile; like paper dolls” (“Ghost Boy” 5), “Your house smelling like tattoo ink, if it can have a/smell” (“When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.” 5, 6)), and so on. There are tropes that hold the fort (moths that appear (perhaps only) to the person who has lost a love; moths that transform from annoying little pests to creatures “more beautiful than butterflies” (“From a Paris Hotel Room”)). There is the overstatement (“Tulip Farm” and “Elegy for the Tree”) that can create and destroy an entire poem.

So, I sat with this book trying to decipher where the poetic impulses were, where the tight sprawls of insight were, where the (dare I say it) craft was. I wonder: if these prose bits (in sections 1 and 3-5) were “tighter” in outward appearance, would Bartlett have sacrificed some of the easy pronouncements, some of the excessive overmakings (the dependence on the prosaic syntax, for example) to get to the bone? (In other words, could this book have survived without that first section? The other sections pick up speed (although there are still those moments of syntactical proseyness that stalls the emotions), and while filled with trepidations (“I plan on your leaving”), there is a bravado that transgresses the small worlds (“I am getting good/in this practicing”). Yes, there is a sweet wickedness in the I who is “[c]omplete in [her] autobiography of dirty feather” (“Whose Music Excels the Music of Birds” 20).

I love a first book of poems. I’m curious about structure, about voice and tone, about playing it safe, about jumping hard on the burning hot crushed glass, about temperament and musicality; I’m curious about all of those little poetry no-no rules broken or embraced or both. I’m curious about that workshop hand and heart, which is often vibrantly apparent in many first books. Mostly, I want to know that the poet has somewhere to g(r)o(w). Bartlett’s Derivative of the Moving Image is filled to the brim with a willingness to risk it all, and for that alone, I look forward to (a) lullaby without any music.

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