{"id":10029,"date":"2012-05-01T11:34:26","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T06:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/jen-currin-delight-and-brilliant-imagery\/"},"modified":"2012-05-01T11:34:26","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T06:34:26","slug":"jen-currin-delight-and-brilliant-imagery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/jen-currin-delight-and-brilliant-imagery\/","title":{"rendered":"Delight and brilliant imagery: Jen Currin’s The Inquisition Yours"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine a world in which identity is a question you ask of yourself. The world of Jen Currin\u2019s most recent collection is such an inquisition. It is not in a state of \u201cbeing,\u201d as was the twentieth-century world, but of reading and of being read. The Inquisition Yours<\/em> is two worlds, splitting, always, into more. It is the world \u2018you\u2019 asks of \u2018itself\u2019 and the world in which it answers by assigning readings to take the place of texts, objects, selves and moments. It is a world full of delight and brilliant imagery. It feels painted. It is artful. In Currin\u2019s \u201cThe Lake,\u201d for instance, the I that \u201cleaves its mouth like smoke\u201d is transformed, after four brief lines, into \u201cA donkey converses with an angel.\u201d It is mathematics\u2014luckily, at its best. The computations have special rules, played out by special characters. The characters are you<\/em> (not to be confused with a reader), I<\/em> (not to be confused with a writer), and we<\/em> (not to be confused with independent human actors in a so-called real narrative). There are lots of other characters, too, many of them played by the spiritual presences that past writers referred to as objects (oranges, Saint Beauty, salt\u2026). Many of these characters are even single lines of text that read as if they find it rather enjoyable to be all jostled together into objects called poems, in a room called a poetry book, although they might be just as comfortable in foot-high text covering art gallery walls.<\/p>\n

To read these texts is a lot like walking between them. There is a lot of space here: single-line stanzas, lists, masks on racks, and a kind of anti-Platonic sense of a world being made out of immaterial ideas and responses to objects, set side by side. World and anti-word are independent here, yet all working to the same end: they pass the writer on like a hot potato. It\u2019s the job of the writer to catch herself before these objectified post-human responses drop her with a splat. Such are the trials of a physical body in the net of a non-physical one carrying the name of Jen Currin. It\u2019s a game of catch, and a deadly serious one. She plays the game well. She often wins. She often leaves it before the end, too, as in \u201cHalf-naked or Partially Clothed,\u201d which ends with a hyphen (\u201cthe sun had gone dark and crimson \/\/ and it wasn\u2019t for laughter, \/ the only victim\/of my enormous pity-\u201d). More than anything, it is a world of laughter, a world of physical stasis and a cognitive circus, in which \u201cYou might move. You might \/ move someone\u201d (\u201cDance\u201d), in which \u201cMy comfort lies in these stories \/ so burn them\u201d (\u201cReading\u201d), and in which \u201cwe\u201d are \u201ctrivial, difficult, unnecessary, and pranksterish\u201d (\u201cAnother Vulnerability\u201d), whose self-awareness of the prison of poetry and the deadening world of textuality leads us to conclude that \u201cLacking, we turn to laughter\u201d. This world is the world. It is powered by love. It almost catches it, as in \u201cThe Sexual\u201d which notes, \u201cNo one talks about the erotica of the absurd\u2014but what sort of room spills wine like this?\u201d This sort.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Harold Rhenisch<\/strong>‘s eleventh book of poems is The Spoken World<\/em> (Hagios Press). He lives in Vernon, BC, where he blogs okanaganokanogan.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

Come into the room called poetry; wander into Arc<\/em><\/a>.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine a world in which identity is a question you ask of yourself. The world of Jen Currin\u2019s most recent collection is such an inquisition. It is not in a state of \u201cbeing,\u201d as was the twentieth-century world, but of reading and of being read. The Inquisition Yours is two worlds, splitting, always, into more. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1745,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"12886,10138,10235,10300","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1588,1629],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[170],"issue":[],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[],"topic":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10029"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10029"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=10029"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=10029"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=10029"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=10029"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=10029"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=10029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}