Sounding pressure. Pressure of meaning.

The poem is meaning. The poem is disbelief. The poem is anti-meaning and so is this sundry review. I'm supposed to ruminate and think about the text, the telltale signs, signals of information.

Think square feet—

Think stage, style, numerous movement; opportunities there—

Askance, quadrants are the page.

Miri Karraker offers us the page as a canvas. The page as a stage.

Her debut full-length collection, Garden Path, published by Community Mausoleum, breaks boundaries of assumptions of what is supposed to happen in spatial recognition and what must reside within it when spatial recognition is its own affect. Or, at the very least, as we are all constantly contained in space, whether in a room, a city or an open field, a type of enclosure postures. Postulates. Karraker shows scattering to the outward sound, stage left and right and then off—and there space stops. Or it continues as a puzzle of meaning and possibility.

Think space as confined, yet such confined space allows for a freedom of movement; do what you may on the stage, which according to the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, holds no progression, there is no frontward or backward, simply movement. The dancers exude the banishment of space. Karraker's poems are deftly placed in the top left corner of each page, there they are banished turnstiling:

"shot

put

up

on"

Where the shot is, and who is shooting, and what kind of shot is beyond sense; it isn't relevant whether a basketball is shot into a hoop or a rifle is firing, what's vital is the sequence of actions, a taking of turns experimenting with the ball, the bullet, or otherwise; driven by prepositions of place and direction: put up: put on: up on: shot up: shot on: shot put: on put: up put: put shot: on shot. The stage is no longer horizontal, it has gained verticality.

Stage right / stage left— If there are stage right and left, there must be a compass style analog for front or back, yet here re-orient, turn stage left and suddenly right and left are on differing sides, altering orientation, rendering hegemonic spatial orientation relative. There may be a garden path, but without upkeep, manicured by working hands for standards, it will overgrow, creating a new spatial entity—not a path, not traction, an amalgamation.

Within the quadrant more quadrants—think square footage—think square footage and acres of land and garden. Measurement is king—literal king's feet; the US's designation by the monarchy's unfortunate measures.

Think grid—Karraker offers us a grid measurement formally:

How to read the measurement? Equidistant right to left, left to right, diagonal, skipping? A "path towards" does not lead towards anything, it is simply a path, a square meter, a place where space converges along with other ideas, feelings, entities, and information as though an outline. The "path towards" "being in"; the "path towards" "every single"; the "path towards" "no vibration"." The grid's power and separation: like Agnes Martin who broke up the square's power, Karraker's book breaks up the power of reading rules and conventions where the grid is the page; sentences and paragraphs obeying order. A feeling emanates from beyond the grid—it is there to undo, to contain the feeling, but the feeling is uncontained, it is in the aura and colors of paintings, those paintings of Martin who worked on square canvases, yet continued to break up its relative power of the square of being ness, that wholeness by the interiority or the placements of grids upon the square, the grids not square—rectangular, uncontainable feeling, relatively emotional in the squire's square meters. Martin's "Night Sea" is a deep blue square bordered by a gray outline, gridded over or through by delicate, narrow rectangular spatial endowments. Each one blusters out duration, time's timeless timeliness—the night sea is not only the sea, a single body of water, but it is singular in its messiness and multiplicity.

And so is language—

The verse or the stanza in the grid-like shape holds the form of what a stanza or a verse should portray, yet the reading experience does not hold shape. Convened at the edge of the page, just touches the zone, decentralizes information to the outskirts

Language and repetition cross-stitched and bound into the landscape's query that image makes.

Measures were taken. Measures were taken to disrupt the grid. "Measures taken" against an act or behavior, as though the garrulous unruly behavior out of line defected to the need to measure and contain again in formula or scientific means; enclose, return to obedience. Well, Karraker brought the measuring stick, its nucleus, to the tableau, the plane. If math terms are recognizable and acceptable—utilize the plane and the 2D space as language's three-dimensional counterpart d—words enumerate order only if/and when the statute clings to the hegemonic abiding. In her square meters of time, the verse as a dimension of time or duration—duration as long as the reading of the verse takes, the duality is such—Karraker measures out possibility in time's lapse:

Dusk comes loud
With everyone singing
D ssonance is the truth about harmony
Or something

Dusk arrives on time, but each day dusk is at a different time, at least a minute's lapse. Possibility is "something." Often "something" is used as a replacement for emptiness, a non- entity, a throwaway, an unidentified feature. Yet, Karraker undoes the potential aphorism of "Dissonance is the truth about harmony," the certitude that sparks in the brain upon orientation oneself in time and space, sound abiding by time, by ending the poem with "or something" flippantly, but it is this very derisiveness that cracks through the rule abiding closed statement, allowing for time to endure and leak into the atmosphere outside the poem, outside the grid.

Duration for as long as the poem exists and is read by others. Not a singular or accurate counting for time—and time here takes on different measurements—how much of the language will pass through in the reading of the poem—the two-line dimension allowing for multiple possibilities of the left and right—south, north, east, west—and ever though north and west hold directional and orientational power sanctimoniously, thinking about the compass as a simple orientation for direction—the globe that does not hold progress or a forward motion, simply an axis— mathematical. The axis does not need to be hierarchical.

Let that particular bondage fly

The axis on the compass simply tools for mirroring or a faux idea of symmetry, yet there is symmetry in there, the mathematical desire and overture.4

There's an endless back and forth—a sharing and interpreting of information.
It is seasonal and time-based.

This reflective rhythm responding to another is also encountered in Karraker's collaborative work with Caroline Rayner. Their co-written chapbook from Spiral Editions, DAWN NOON DUSK MIDNIGHT, elaborates on, or sets the stage for Karreker's interest in responsive symmetrical asymmetry. The two poets were spatially apart in between Minneapolis, Asheville, Richmond and Easthampton, listening to Cindy Lee, NTS Radio, watching Janet Planet, and reading Sight by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino (another collaborative correspondence) while engaging with one another's work. The poems, responses, and translations concern themselves with phenomenological attributes of the day, those spatial and timely recognitions. Their mirroring divine is organized by the four points of the day or the 24-hour period of night and day—split and measured based on the clock and sun's point. English does not have a word for it—in Russian, however, sutki (сутки), 24 hours is an entity of time in and of itself and therefore has language to hold this space of collision.

At dawn prose form is found: "All dressed up for your arrival, / attentive to the kinds of things, such as cheeses, having arranged several and earlier, gathered, even earlier, blocked, I need still an essence—incense, maybe, salt water, probably." Each idea paused with a comma, a heavy block carried, this attention.

Several pages later, a response at noon in verse: "tender cattails beyond / my double sink i was / squeezing you allow / light ease cleanse here. me: / that might burn or burst i / forgot— something unhooks." Attention flailed, transported to forgetting, the unhooking of attention that "probably" undoes the spatial or observed expectancy.

It is unknown who wrote which poems, unless one pays attention to syntax, form, and thematic interests. And truly, it does not matter, thus the project's endeavor. Yet, in my observation, I believe Karraker's words live on the edge, at the very top in prose, singular lines slipping from page to page; negative space's abyss the matter of the poem. Just like the day's hustle, abstention from detail or participation in overdetail, the time space containment only holds so much, only some is responded to, and the rest is absorbed into mindless demulcents—later attained, spored into the page's convection.

An infectious attitude is taken.

The attitude of too muchness

Excess memorabilia.

Within the confined space of the poem, Karekker allows for too muchness or excess of the poem, the repetition, the sense making. Her poems are mirror quotations, quantities, quadrants, and quandaries; how excess derives from compactness.