The Brooklyn Rail

“Remove us from history but
not from your air”

–Alice Notley, “White Phosphorus”

The first track on The Beach Boys’ doomed 1967 masterpiece SMiLE—an unfinished record of immense strangeness and sorrow, belied by its sunny title, and one so cursed that its creator suffered a debilitating psychotic breakdown and abandoned the project—is an acapella composition called “Our Prayer.” What does “Our Prayer” pray for? Nothing. Or perhaps, everything. For sixty-five supernal seconds, a kaleidoscope of cosmic vocal harmonies hums wordlessly in and out of scales that seem almost inhuman in their crying beauty. The contentless prayer offered is the particular modulation of air through vocal cords and windpipes (another exquisite, fluttering track on the album is entitled “Wind Chimes”), timed and keyed to a choral communing: our. Our prayer is air, our air is breath, offered up to no one, from not one. “Our air” is also sonically (which is to say, aerially) contained in the phrase “our prayer,” with the plosive consonant blend “pr” dividing the open mouth vowels of “our air.” The shimmering tones of “Our Prayer” often reverberated in my head while reading Nora Treatbaby’s volume Our Air. This is perhaps because the author shares something of Brian Wilson’s spirit, incarnated especially in that wordless track, where utter bliss and aching sadness collapse into an undifferentiated point. From this point, condensed into a seed, something wonderful and strange can germinate.

Treatbaby’s extraordinary Our Air, winner of the sought-after Nightboat poetry prize (a press that consistently publishes some of the finest new experimental poetry, especially from queer writers), is one of the most remarkable and significant American poetry debuts of the last decade. Our Air introduces an utterly original voice that calls out from under the leaves and back from the future. Equal parts vernal, philosophical, sensual, and experimental, Treatbaby’s verse possesses a kind of timeless wisdom that hides in 7-Eleven parking lots and desolate strip malls, and is all the more gorgeous for it—as she said in one interview: “I am a line that receives heaven in the AT&T store.” Here, she’s riffing on a line from Our Air (“I am a line that receives heaven”), one of several such lines in the book that stage a meta-play on the polysemy of the word “line”: a phone line (AT&T), an electrical line, a spine, a vector of direction of time or travel, a mark, a channel, and most of all, a line of poetry: “a line that imbibes grace.” The poetic line becomes a subject of itself, but a deliciously passive subject, one that is formed to receive heaven and imbibe grace. Lines themselves, here anything but straight, are jots of paradisiacal receptivity: “There has been beauty / and now there is / you to receive it.” It is difficult to give a sense in a review of just how gently the lines sit upon the page in their green typeface, exhaling and uncurling in vernation. Reading the book is like lying on dewy grass on a forest floor; sometimes some sap sticks to you. There is little guile here, though the immediacy is tinged with a slant wisdom that gives over to wistfulness. Recalling the lush metaphysical charm of Francis Ponge, this wisdom is just as often Orphic as it is rigorously philosophical:

our aim is not to disperse
things from their categories
but to dissolve the
tenses from which
arrangement is possible

a blossom bloomt
the genius of relation is
tendril between ache
feeling like a desert in one's
own clothes

in spite of cliches
of the multiple
one must ask:
who is not coming
through us?

What are the tenses that make arrangement possible and how do we dissolve them? Grammatically, tenses are usually temporal markers—past, present, and future tenses of verbs, for example. It is tenses that secure the arrangement of temporality and its ordered succession, and it is the arrangement (syntax) of time that arranges a society, a set of social relations. In dissolving syntax and succession, the aim of poetry is to alter the felt experience of time such that maybe the missing people, the coming community, can finally have come through us.

Always with one toe already in heaven—a reticent heaven occulted in the voided wastescapes of America, in Family Dollars on mute highways, Kroger freezer aisles, crumpled waiting room magazines—Treatbaby also catalogues the omnipresent harm of capitalism (“All harm is braided. My air is yours.”), how it takes our time, our earth, our air: “One day we will be hurt in specific ways, like rent. I’m glad my money’s fake. / My world began in the trees, behind what was being written on me.” What is the temporality of that first sentence? In projecting the unfortunate invention of rent into a future “One day,” the line speaks as if from the impossible present of a world before rent (punning on the “hurt” of being “rent,” torn), inviting us to dwell there, and from there also to inhabit another green world after rent, where wounds rent open are healed (later in the book: “Identity rents us to each other”). This is poetry at work dissolving the tenses of past, present, and future, shepherding the paradise lost and the paradise regained to kiss in the now. A world after rent: an earth. “Why is earth perfect?” the book’s next page asks, in one of Treatbaby’s characteristic questions, equally childlike and Socratic (some others: “Why does pain hurt?” and “Do rocks cry?”). Stéphane Mallarmé transmitted that the sole duty of the poet was the “orphic explication of the earth,” but Treatbaby pursues its infinite interrogative. The poems in Our Air initiate us into these telluric mysteries, helping us pick up the clues strewn about everywhere: “Earth is dropping hints / like ‘I’m real’ / and ‘love me.’” The book is flush with seeds, leaves, flowers, streams, earthy pleasures and pressures, but it delights as much in the greenness of things as in bland brutalist grandeur; this is the figure of the poet as cosmic friend and roving street preacher, John Ashbery gathering apples, the seer with store credit.

One of the most entrancing aspects of this debut is the way its experiments in lineation, syntax, and form seed its philosophical and political desires, instilling in its readers the urgency of taking (back) our time (“this is our time” is proclaimed in the final sentence). The book’s motto might well be its injunction to “abolish chronology.” Hidden by the oft-leisurely tone, there is an ambitious philosophy of history in Our Air, a metaphysics patterned according to the logic of juniper branches, a trans phenomenology of time. Here, personal history maps onto capital-H history in the techniques we might employ to dissolve the pretensions of both: “To unbolt / from a linear history / of the person” is also to question progress and historical development, capitalism’s imposed temporal narratives of development and teleology. History marks the body, is what hurts, as they say. Near the end of the long poem “Of,” composed mostly in lines of two to four syllables that mirror the length of the intervals between breaths or heartbeats, we read:

A body is just
replacement space
for the limitless truth
of each other
but also where
the centuries
actually occur
history has a form
in bruise

The body—like the person, like the self—is a dubious construct, merely “replacement space” we might use reluctantly, but it is as real as the wounds that constitute it, shaped by the accumulated bruise of history. We endure it (though unequally), and we might endure it together and better when we realize that the centuries are not carrying us anywhere, because everywhere is here. Treatbaby balks at “progress,” because:

a straight line can only ever
be empty / from here to there
being everywhere

Lines like this cultivate the verdant joy of “Spinoza in her youth” (in the phrase of poet Norma Cole). Poetry, then, would offer a scrambled reticulation of time, a banquet of queerer here and now-ness. Why else read it? It is the temporality of transness that is offered not as a narrative with an endpoint (“I’m not a goal”), but as a taking leave of narrative altogether:

I left my only
body so that it
would change

At one point, the poet ruminates on “the experience / of womanhood” less as a potential essence that was actualized—a goal—than as “a missing memory, / some spring in / dappled forest” that, once tasted, works like liberating Lethe of the assigned, confined self. What if we are already the dappled things we praise? Yes, think womanly Gerard Manley Hopkins, but if he were a good bit more chill. Or think if Éric Rohmer’s gay anarchist brother Réné Schérer made the former’s films, with the metaphysical walk-and-talks through gorgeous, bird-chirped locales taken closer to the edge of things.

Another innocent question: “Is time a delay?” Its evasive nonanswer in the astonishing poem “Love” exemplifies Treatbaby’s penchant for gnomic statements that fall like apples on unexpecting heads (wisely, she never ends poems with an aphoristic punctum, but keeps things moving). This is prose-poem as river, as cascade: “We sketched a cosmogony of depth. Found none. Is time a delay? We devise each other in exchanges of that nature although at this conjuncture all the world’s a contract. The self is its continually deferred penalty. Metaphysics builds a house but not a home.” Goals keep us working toward a paradise that is not-yet, and time itself is the deferral of the kingdom, holding back a bliss so consuming it can be frightful. So the angel guards the garden gate, not realizing that a stream discreetly trickles out toward us. If language is the house of being, according to a philosopher, what is its home? There is an intimate connection between the desiccation of the word and the desertification of the earth (consider that every LLM chat exchange gulps an obscene amount of water) (“We are walking around a desert of our own motives”). It is poetry’s task to renew and refresh the stream of language so that we might live lighter on the earth and imbibe its grace, in common. Don’t let its intermittent breeziness fool you—Our Air takes this vocation extremely seriously. It calls language back to us and us to language, grafting our degraded words with “sapling syntax” to invite us to “live in the splendor / of the gerund.” The gerund is our ongoing doing, saying, living; it’s that which is already happening here, being, becoming. Our habitat in the word is preserved through festivals of common use. Compare these two passages on the living use of language and the extractive systems of using the earth for profit:

Words without synonyms
Water and time
capital cannot understand
language aches to be used
…
it is our life’s work to struggle
against something so useless as profit.
land becomes impregnated
with systems of use
instead of just use. what
can be borne of these seasons,
planned as they are to repeat?
life such as ours split into a metronome

There are moments of startling clarity here that recall the pearls of Etel Adnan. Treatbaby understands poetry is a certain use of language (“language aches to be used”), but a systemless use. Form is how we gather without a system, or outside, or against one. The form of our life, our shared dwelling in language and on the earth, refuses to be separated or “split” from this life, cut up into timed units that swing to the metronome of the wage. It is profit that is useless, certainly for us, and ultimately even for them. The pun on “just use” is epiphanic, revelatory: what if the only just form of use is just, i.e. merely, using according to our needs without possessing? If this feels like an impossible fable, it’s one we also unknowingly enact every single day. Poetry, which is sculpted breath, is just use of our air. The poet knows this and wants to tell us so that we feel it in our flesh. We need this poetry desperately, like oxygen and water, like justice. Walter Benjamin wrote in a fragment in 1916: “There is no system of possession, regardless of its type, that leads to justice. This, however, lies in the conditions of a good that cannot be possessed—a good through which all goods become propertyless.”

I once asked someone I love what time was, and they said “breath.” Our breath, our air, our hours, are stolen from us by capital, which mandates most of us working for money to make what is not ours: “by wage / moving through our air / our air frothing with / subjugation and balm.” The last poem in Our Air, “Leaving” (the title a Hopkinsian pun on finitude and foliation), cleaves its two stanzas intentionally with a page break, with text nestled at the very bottom of the page, to register and militate against the violence and pilfered time (“the privation of time a shared resource”) we live under. Here the book’s fold between verso and recto mimics the gap between the promised life and the present state of things, recalling the earlier line: “a small gap of scorched earth between two types of living.” There is a scorched earth in the gap between the way we do live and “the way we could”:

We endeavored to think of something we love whether infinite only, or on the surface of the world precisely so that we know acts of recognition exist and one could then have a thought like this: I am like you to which I said I wish I had never hurt anyone and now the world is being remade in the image of regret but the feeling is falling away. The means of relation available to us seeks the privation of time a shared resource we have no
[page break]

choice but to surrender eventually and maybe my other body is free to give it away by breathing but here in this world we have to fight to live the way we could because capitals communication between disparates is not yet an interval but the present moment is always sparkling w our prayer to be collected in flux screaming this is our time and thus overthrow this loneliness, the gap between all things and say to each other we are each other.

Our Air is an instant classic, a work equally of woundings and of clearings, a new testament to the beauty in the wreckage. As the book progresses, the poems build in emotional intensity and reach several devastating crests of agony, apology, sorrow, and catharsis. And there, in Our Air’s final sentence, is “our prayer,” a prayer that is involved with a “fight.” What do we pray and fight for? To be gathered in flux, summoned in latticed choir, held in our time, unstolen. “This could be / paradise tomorrow.” Paradise tomorrow! Wouldn’t it be nice? It would be. It is.