Figment: Rebecca Wolff

If John Ashbery’s dreamy lyrics were amalgamated with Frank O’Hara’s sharp but meandering city writing, the result would be a style resembling Rebecca Wolff’s Figment. Lessons learned from reading Ashbery’s poetry apply to Wolff as well—working too hard to locate a string of logic through each individual component of a poem may prove a frustrating task. Wolff acknowledged this when asked to identify her ideal reader in three words. Her response? "Kind of lazy."

Instead, the logic of the poems are based around an overall sense or tone, and the emotional logic of the poems are usually consistent, even if a traditional narrative is not—still, the lyrics of Figment aren’t discrete to the point that they bear no relevance to the overall cohesiveness of a poem, and in pieces such as “The Big Snow,” there’s a definite sense of the poet communicating a message to the reader:

Out of nothing
how do you conceive of anything?

By imaging what the better part
might applaud.

A few lines down, Wolff writes:

It means something,
that is clear, but without charm,
is it worth simply meaning?

One of the major themes of Figment seems to be the current state of the poetry community, or, perhaps, the current state of the poet in soceity, and this poem seems to be poking fun at an aesthetic that Wolff has termed “The Big Snow,” perhaps for its connotations of mass blindness and uniformity. The stanza above, specifically, seems to be a reversal of mainstream critiques of poetry that is being written for the sake of language play, or “charm,” but without narrative, or meaning. “Have no fear,” Wolff comforts the reader. “The Big Snow/ will never find us./ It mistrusts us, essentially.”

It’s easy to see that Wolff is actually very funny, and her wit, which shifts from aesthetic targets to self-deprecation in a few lines, is what gives many of the poems their energy. The second poem in the volume, “A good idea, but not well executed” also contains lyrics that lightly mock narrow-mindedness in poetry before skipping quickly on: “A first draft: Why the very idea/ to suddenly lose consciousness” might be a statement Wolff heard while discussing her aesthetic. I’m guessing that self-hypnosis or meditation plays a role in Wolff’s procedure, especially as association—recording a line or image and following it stream-of-consciousness style—plays a role in her poetry. Like Frank O’Hara and his lunch time jaunts, Wolff explains that since she’s so strapped for time between Fence (The magazine and book publishing company she founded in 1998) and her family, she often records what she experiences on the bus or subway.

“A good idea, but not well executed” also introduces another major tone in Wolff’s poetry—nostalgia, or more accurately, a wistfulness for the past often brought on by occurrences in the present. It ends with the lines:

a sweet breath flew from the mouth of the Northeast,
the last thing you want to be familiar with,
flush of unlove. O Mama

your baby in the future

The tone of “A good idea, but not well executed,” builds in a strange way, and the reader isn’t fully prepared for the emotional impact the last lines deliver, which again, I think comes from the reader being willing to enjoy Wolff’s obvious talent for crafting language that hooks into emotion. This stanza also highlights the way Wolff’s passages flow throughout Figment. She puts together some beautiful lines and stanzas, such as the one above, where the alliteration of the ‘F’ and ‘L’ sounds carry through the middle lines (flew-last-familiar-flush-of-unlove) and transitions to the deep assonance of “flush of unlove” and the astonishing ‘O’ that breaks the rhythm—this is a brilliant sequence of sounds which simply drops off, unpunctuated, into the white space before the final line, “your baby in the future,” with the final ‘F’ sound providing closure to the poem.

Rumpus Interview with Rebecca Wolff
Fence Books