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I didn’t expect to burn a weekend absorbed in Elizabeth Willis’ Alive: New and Selected Poems, an NYRB imprint published in 2015 . . . but the eerie perverseness of her images, the buoyant bungle of her syntax, distracted me from deadlines and other avowals.

This is the end of my body as you know it
its superfluous penchant for love
its poorer costume, its shiny disaster

A dramatic statement followed by an eludication which estranges rather than illuminates. The secret sibilance folded into lines, binding the words by syllable —- and the internal rhymes, as in “By the smallest shipwreck / a daughter is laughter” — I can’t locate a facile comparison for Willis’ poetic diction.

There are images which blaze and linger — “a wall torn from a shadow”; “the sequin we could never come as”; the young William Blake “with flowering ears and hearsay”—- and colors created for the world of plastics and flowers, that “neo-forsythia”.

Willis is comfortable in the prose poem, as seen in “Indirect Catastrophe”, a meditation on holiness, blasphemy, plagiarism, and the rose, the flower which crosses her poems and books.

I thought I was reading but suddenly I’m read. Some kind of artist then, painting his targets. Distinct or indistinct sensation? I prefer clarity when I can afford it. So what if another flower plagiarized the rosary? I’d pick up a dime in private or a quarter in public, money’s always been ‘dirty’, some kind of death wish. Sure I’d like to own a pet, not own but take care of, not a monkey or donkey, but something that loves you like money or luck. Not a puppy made of flowers but like music, in dog years.

In “Autographeme,” Willis tells us:

The present was a relic
of a past I was older than.

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Willis takes an overwrought idiomatic expression that comes to us in folk culture or popular culture and shakes it. She shakes it and turns it and presses her back against until something gives. She also uses these expressions to haunt language, to make us approach differently.

The title, “Kiss Me Deadly,” evoked the Lita Ford ‘s chart-topping big-hair-era song of the same name..

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Elizabeth Willis knows how to work an image down to the unexpected softness of marrow inside a bone. I think part of this has to do with her elliptical use of figurative language, and how she uses images to open a word, to crack the shell of a solid, known thing.

”Metaphor carries something across, but from then on, it’s fugitive,” Willis writes in Alive. It is a statement of poetics.

In “Elegy,” the poem moves by definition, but it does on wood stilts — so one can feel every bump and slight dip in the terrain. She plays with rhymes and homonyms; she lingers at the microcosmos of the syllable, and this is where she sharpens sound:

a petticoat of sand
the mind’s a hinge
a roughly chestnut arsenal
a little box of nothing
an incidental rose

The mind’s a hinge — the image is what she rides to the next sonic speedbump.

I felt the grass’s poem
blown against me
like a fake harp

The abstraction is anthropomorphized, given agency, as in “The Human Abstract”, where: “Innocence shags experience and I’ll never grow.” But then beginning, a few lines later, with this uncertain subject, this enlarged speaker, this soaring line break:

Inventing a dress and the bird
it remembers

Or, elsewhere: “Desire is a form of a fastening”. The mind halts before this small frame, this metaphor, this figurative re-defining.

Another Willis strategy involves using a colloquial expression or idiom and running sandpaper across it. She brings Descartes’ Cogito ero sum to “Plundering Honey” as an interjection:

O, I think therefore I green the grass I’m
pinned upon.

There is a bit of wiccanery in the idiom-play, or in the self-referential quality of the idioms she selects. Many are related to folk tales or fairy tales. Several poems reframe lines from the witches’ speech to Little Red Riding Hood.

In “Friday”, for example:

My heart caves in
the better to see you with

In “A Species is An Idea (1)”:

What bitter landscape
the better to see you with?

A few more thoughts, a haphazard bouquet. The use of definitions as a sort of integument, or a pole vault into the next image, doesn’t land us on firmer ground with Willis — it changes the stability of the terrain.

Metaphor: “This love is a deer crying in a gentleman”.

Similie: “Triumph arches over us like bad emotions.”

Similie leaning into enjambment for suspense: “It’s always personal / like the failure of a knee”.

Ending with a question, as in “Accidental Breezes”: “What little monster have I made, to favor love of all that’s said?”

Undoing of artistic conventions: “A fig leaf only makes a crotch more obvious.”

Pronoun fluidity, particularly in Address (which feels kinned to Gluck’s You): “In this type of you / I see I am a sequel”

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“Sonnet 63 ½” is a damn marvel. It nudges Willis’ words from an earlier poem: “As when the heart has lied / yet has a figure in it.”

In the end-notes, Willis described “Sonnet 63 ½” as a “loose translation” of Shakespeare’s sonnet 63 and sonnet 64. The half suggests this sonnet lands somewhere in the middle. Juxtaposing the two sonnets in order to trace Willis’ “translation” is fascinating and generative.

Sonnet 63 begins: Against my love shall be, as I am now,

Sonnet 64 begins: When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced

Willis: Against love’s battle lies, ungrammatical.

She closes the sentence in that first line, contra Shakespeare. There are so many levels of engagement and translation in this poem— I could stare at it for hours. It’s an easy writing prompt, a generous model to thieve (and attribute, if the poem moves into drafts). For example, write a sonnet which loosely translates Willis’ “Sonnet 63 ½” and Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 69”. Do whatever math makes sense for the titling.

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Aritra Sanyal first met Willis in February 2019 at the Book Fair in Kolkota, and his interview shares the poems she read aloud, including “About the Author” and “Address”. When Sanyal asked what made it possible for poetry to resonate and reach out to a reader or audience, Willis suggested a slight wariness with the word, empathy:

I think it is mystery and curiosity more than empathy. What makes me slightly suspicious of empathy is that I think it suggests that one being knows–that they can and do know–what another being experiences. It seems to me entirely possible that that might happen in a mystical sense but not in a narrative sense. That is, I might relate to, or identify with, or have sympathy for another person’s experience, but I can’t know everything that informs it.

As we’ve been talking, I’ve often thought about how many resonances there are between our perceptions about poetic and political reality. But I hope I never presume to know, empathically, what you experience. It seems more appropriate to respect the differences as well as the similarities in what we know–what Frank O’Hara calls “the love we bear each other’s differences.”

“Fear isn’t always obvious, but obviousness is one of my greatest fears,” Willis wrote in Alive. Also: “When a mystery is made obvious people call it a revelation.” This comfort with inexhaustive definition is a mark of poetry, and one which Willis plays like a personal lyre.

The lyric of the image: “People think God is obvious, or not: everything or nothing. A hole held open by a word."

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The use of aphorism characterizes her more recent writing. “Steady Digression to a Fixed Point,” which she dedicates to Rose Hobart and Joseph Cornell, is sharp example of Willis’ conceptualism. Aphorism is impressionstic here. The poem begins with Willis’ trademark flora, a gesture invoking Hobart:

A rose can’t change the world. It can only open or close.

The poem moves in fragments, cinematic collations, and assemblaged forms. I’ll add a few of my favorite lines in no particular order:

This is a poem about a fox. An alligator. The misplaced animals of the backlot.

About looking into the face of desire until it blinks.

An assemblage makes of an I a “we”.

The body is a formal constraint. It has this one life with which to make eternity.

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Willis has written about the proximity of a burning world. Her essay, “Notes from and on a Landscape: Hell, Fire, and Brimstone,” begins in brimstone, in “the part of us that’s subject to ignition.” Brimstone “is a kindler of rage.” The lyric essay layers a sort of geomorphology into the the language, and then ends with a question:

The AAA guide for Wyoming lists more jails as historical sites than any other category of tourist attraction.

Jails were made to last.

By what sulphurous art may poetry, the “true fiction,” labor to take them down?

“Without its leaky reverie, the face is a shield,” Willis poems. The leaky reverie here— the evocation of tears, wonder, pieta statues, without using the usual language. Evading in order to expose.

Or, as she wrote in “Viewless Floods of Heat”: “The body is always softer than its image. Shined up, collectible, all it imagined.”

[Get your own copy of Elizabeth Willis’ Alive: New and Selected Poems from NYRB.]