Reviews

Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation

Los Angeles Times

– Rigoberto Gonzalez, in Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation, 2008/01/06

La Boully


I’ve been making extensive cross-country flights this past month, from NYC to Seattle, from NYC to San Francisco (twice), and from NYC to Ontario, California on my way to the U.S.-México border, and each time I carried a book on board to keep me grounded (pun intended) during these lengthy, gravity-defying plane rides. Well, on one occasion, I had a copy of Jenny Boully’s new book of essays under my arm and as I made my way down the aisle a woman sitting in an exit row leaned over and asked, “Is that a poetry book?”



How could I fault her for this question? The book is as slim as a standard poetry volume (57 pages to be exact), it’s got its artsy cover (I remember seeing the actual piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years back), and then that intriguing title, The Book of Beginnings and Endings.



In a previous post, a few of us bloggers gushed over Jenny Boully’s work, so I was anxious to read and mention her work here again, mostly because her art defies easy categorization and challenges readers to construct narrative in the absence of narrative (as was the case with The Body: An Essay, a book made up entirely of footnotes) or rather, she asks us to reposition ourselves in relation to language and to reconsider how this interaction instructs/constructs meaning.



Boully is a conceptual poet, and this new book is composed of two-page narratives that include the opening and closing paragraphs of longer narratives—a critical thesis, a manifesto, an exploratory essay, a scientific study, among many other genres covering a vast spectrum of subjects—which may or may not exist. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that when the writer collapses the space between A and Z, between Alpha and Omega, between Prologue and Epilogue, the reader must converse with the impression of ideas, with the ellipses in articulation, with implied meaning. Boully trains us to approach these narratives much like we encounter lyrical poems. Hence why Boully opens the book with a quote from Kenkō: “Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?”



And then the parade of compressed statements containing images that echo the close proximity, indeed the comfortable intimacy, between a beginning and an end:



“The old tradition would continue, the one of births and funerals.”



“The compost would, come spring, serve to feed the crops that, more than the others, liked to rise from rot.”



“Before dying, the old woman said that she had been dreaming, and in her dream she was flying; moreover, she was naked and inhabited her four-year-old body.”



Perhaps this book is a gathering of pieces that demonstrate that succinct and poetic creature that John D’Agata (who blurbs the book) calls the “lyric essay,” though he is probably one of the few successful writers of this genre. Boully, then, another.



In any case, these “essays” have also managed to shorten the distance between poetry and prose, though this doesn’t mean these shortcuts are now prose poems.



Is this a poetry book? If I’m to take my cue from Boully’s own declaration about what poetry does, then the answer is yes:



“In order to set the captured butterfly to flight, in order to work the projector, the poet must befriend what fails: language and stasis. In order to create poetry, language and stasis must be transfigured into so much more: moments and eternal renderings, impressions and longing, the semblance of movement and flight alongside the sense of being forever grounded. The poem then is always paradox: light and darkness, totality and void, captured and created, becoming and dying, stitched and torn, cut and spliced.”



How fitting that I should have turned these pages as I soared high in the wide-open skies, seemingly suspended, moving and not moving, within the claustrophobic cabin of a cramped airplane.

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– Susan Salter Reynolds, in Los Angeles Times, 2007/12/23

Discoveries

The Book of Beginnings and Endings
by Jenny Boully


"If you develop an instrument that is highly sensitive," poet Jenny Boully writes, and she is not talking about fiber-optics here, "you can locate almost anything. I am not portrayed as the last survivor of a rare orchid species, nor am I a legendary cowslip posessing miraculous medicinal properties; rather, I am a leaf-cutter ant that, although oblivious to its object at the end of the trail, follows nevertheless with the faith that it is being led to something somewhere."


Boully, born in Thailand and raised in Texas, displays in these miniaturist essays a passionate sensitivity of the kind that makes us fear for our adolescent children. Its absence in our own lives may well make our children fear for us as well.



“It occurred to me that there ought to exist some sort of machinery that could record accurately the thoughts and epiphanies, the visions and idealizations of the user,” Boully writes, in a piece bravely titled “The Realization of the Infinite.” “What image of beauty we hold exists so brilliantly, so beautifully in our minds, and the sad task is then to somehow transcribe this image so that it becomes viewable by others. If I think of a visual image, the machine would then be able to reproduce perfectly this image in the form of a painting. If I were full of a sudden poetic frenzy, then the machine would be able to write out the lines in pristine prose or poetry.”



It’s uncommonly good to read the work of a writer who believes so unabashedly in the miracle of writing – that some dimension, unlike any other, exists between the writer and the reader; that literature is an “open system,” a “living system.”



Like Anais Nin, Boully believes exclusively in love; it’s her religion. “She loved him; she loved him as if he were full of false hope and blue canaries. In the beginning, the universe exploded with the ferocity of a waking child, enough to burst forth infinite galaxies. She loved him as if a coal-miner. She loved him as if a pulsing quasar.”



In love, we create the ceremonies that carry us from the particular to the whole. Al those particulars — the “daily rearrangements of bed sheets,” the 14 cats, the “clogged plumbing,” the “rotting fruit,” the bus stops, the shared meals – make her a superstitious writer: If the fire doesn’t start, the love affair will fail. It’s a bit like tea with the dormouse – doors open on interpretations after every phrase. It’s an artifice – a little needy now and then, but fine and wanton nonetheless.


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