For me, the challenge to reading Wallace Stevens's essay, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," is I'm never sure how I'm supposed to relate "reality" to "the imagination." Yes, reading poets and critics who have read Stevens's essay, I can see the idea that perception of reality is complemented by the imagination. And the imagination affords the poet an abstract space for seeing, understanding, and recognizing the reality around them. It's finding a suitable balance between these two aspects of poetry that is fundamental to his argument.
      But what is the pretext for the dynamic between them supposed to be? Stevens's essay has various thoughts on this, which is why I struggle with it. I'm not sure, for instance, why all Italians should be considered "imaginative" and all Spaniards "realists." And I'm not sure how to situate the connotative versus denotative parts of language. Should I read connotative to denotative as a 1:1 analogy for reality to the imagination? But when Stevens comes around to time and the poem as a record of the poet's experience in time, what I might call a poetics of temporality, I am interested.
      Because in many ways, reading a poem often feels like, as a reader, I'm spending time with the poet. Their presence is present for me. And, in the case of Endi Bogue Hartigan's oh orchid o'clock, I see a poem aware of time and recognizing it has a limited time to be in the moment. In fact, the poem might or might not capture that time to satisfaction. A poem existing as an inadequate poem.
       Granted, every poem could be described as inadequate. Because it has to end. Whatever the relationship established between reader and poet, it exists to be concluded. And in Hartigan's book, many of the poems dictate the exact time of that relationship, be it an hour or a minute or a second. How does an explicit nod towards time inform how the poem is read? Consider "hour entry: All bells must hold all clocks," quoted in its entirety:

The clock's etymological root being 'clocca' being bell, a nerve root shivering roundness, a medieval prayer alarm, a cradling sound shell. The bell a striking into the temporal then a tidepool retraction, the bell an oscillating fraction of the friction of continuance, pulling water instance out and out and out.

As with Hartigan's previous books, the poet's relationship to language and syntax, the collection of perspectives and sources, they're all at play. With the poet as a kind of conductor tying the points together. Sometimes loosely (as I would describe this poem), and sometimes more intentionally taut. What is new for oh orchid o'clock is the explicit reference to time. And what about an hour might make this an "hour's entry"? The book contains many of them. So how does "All bells must be clocks" compare to an "hour entry" subtitled, "When John Adams wrote," or another subtitled, "call it rhinoceros." My speculation is they're poems built over the course of an hour. Like the poet had an hour's worth of attention, and an impulse to follow (what is the root for the English word "clock," for instance), and here's what she discovered and wrote as she spent time with that impulse.
      So, what is a poem like this supposed to mean? Maybe the better question is what does it mean for the poet to take an hour in pursuit of a concept? To contextualize the concept by relating it to real events from contemporary life? "When John Adams wrote," for instance, juxtaposes people dying from automatic rifles in the 21st Century to what gun ownership meant when John Adams was living, and then, because Adams had written something about time, the poem shifts to that subject. And from there the poem freely associates to the poet just making it through another day in America, where people talk about tragedy, and it's not clear what anyone is supposed to really do about it.
      I would say these are poems about the poet's attention. The scope of Hartigan's reality. How her imagination conceives that reality to form a more expansive understanding. Like I said, a poetics of temporality. Where, as Stevens would put it, the poem's subject is not that reality existing as a "collection of solid, static objects extended in space." The poem is the instant the poet recognizes these objects should be in a poem. And the successful poem will capture that instant of time that mattered to the poet. As in, the poem isn't just a matter of describing the world and the poet's perspective on it. There's a frame of mind perceived by the poet, and it's unique to that instant. Who I was last month will not see a "collection of static objects" the same as I will in the moment right now when I'm writing this. And it's the abstract space afforded by my imagination to understand and appreciate the difference.
      Hartigan's poems recognize the finite nature of time. As well as the specialness each instant of time represents. At least that's how I would describe the frame built by the book's pieces labeled "hour entry" or "minute ballad" or "second entries." And given these pieces' persistent presence in the book, their placement on the page so they interrupt the conventional poem-start-at-the-head-of-a-page rhythm, their priority is clear. What is time? How does a poem occupy time? And how might a poetic focus intensify the experience of time.
      Say, for instance, you discover a chandelier on the side of the road, like the poet does in "someone was throwing away a chandelier." What does that discovery feel like? What if, in order to express this feeling, you occupy the feeling in many different forms? Rather than settle on the perfect image, or rather than relate the most apt narrative, or rather than tangentialize the language that might expand on what is implicitly present, the poem does many things.

/the instrument a kind of dusty faux gold crustacean, an 8-legged industrial crab, barnacle-fluted, embossed,

bent lily-socketed, overlaid with chains, a grotesque heap of decorative loot

/it was tempting to want to gently kick, or lift it up to see
|lamenttent| |reactionwrought| /to carry the cankered creature of it

home hanging from my wrists, to be a strained makeshift ceiling

Hartigan proposes the image of a "crustacean" as equivalent to the chandelier, then she contorts that image, pulling it back to its material existence, gradually unromanticizing the "chandelier" part until it's a "heap of decorative loot," then the poem fantasizes what she might do to the object. There's no reason for her to kick the chandelier, of course, except it feels right for the moment. And it's each of these moments visited by the poem, understood in the poem as a facet of what the poet feels seeing the chandelier. For my reading, each facet is a sufficiently realized line of vision so they're not just an impressionistic series of poetic observations, but something more involved. Should it be read, then, as a sequence of highly textured impressions or would the poem prefer I mentally arrange them as a simultaneity—the poet's mind aware of all these observations together at once. Like a chandelier giving off light?
      I'd prefer not to answer that question. Because my pleasure in this poem and all the poems in the book is more involved with the rhythm of understanding. If I were to return to Steven's vocabulary of "reality" and "the imagination," I would say the each of these poems is enjoying a rhythming imagination that surges through the poem's views on reality. So that a reader's view of reality feels distorted or bent. And, ultimately, it assembles an abstract space that feels fresh, thickened in its sensibility, and involved.