The Origin of the World

I love the voice that Lewis Warsh creates in his book The Origin of the World. His poems are written with these long, prose-like lines. Sometimes they read as non-sequitors. Sometimes they have a deadened, official affect, like the kinds of statements you would check off on a psychological test ("Some nights I feel too lethargic to hang up my clothes"). Sometimes they have the cold, concerned, and omniscient tone of reportage. But often there is a lyrical quality to them. Emotional content being recorded. Capturing bits of detail and sentiment and holding them together.

The cover of the book is of a collage that I think Warsh might have made himself and each poem feels like a cutting and pasting of mental fragments. Because of this quality, it's easy to lose sight of the whole poem, to forget that each has a kind of thematic coherence, an internal structure. Some have a more distinct narrative thread, but the narrative, which is often about a romantic relationship or the past or both, is constantly disrupted by other poetic detritus.

Anyway, I really liked this book a lot.

From "The Origin of the World":

The most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the total work

You leave behind the house you lived in as a child

You leave behind your parents -- they were never there anyway

You leave behind the neat tablecloth, the labels removed from the jars

"Depression," someone wrote, "is the hidden face of Narcissus"

I rushed forward into a world of bad endings & no forgiveness

I skimmed some money off the top & bought a car with a dented hood