[Beautiful Days Press; 2024]
Geoffrey Olsen’s dense and mind-bending debut poetry book, Nerves Between Song, often challenges attempts at understanding, through a surprising interplay of nearly tangible abstraction and sense data pushed to the edge of comprehensibility. Yet, at the heart of these poems (if that is even the appropriate metaphor to use for poems that play on the boundary of the human), there is indeed the product of “nerves between song,” an outpouring of anxiety that prevents the achievement of a harmonizing music. The collection’s opening poem is an appropriate introduction to the kind of intuitive and frenetic motion these texts capture.
the fur is dream and gelatinous
I can’t speak or present can’t speak
life within mouth of leaves
dream mouth
arrayed around the bleak opening
I do not have ownership over blade and all the
things of a blade on the edge of
climactic or feral
and the edge reproducing the dream in
a now of disaster songs
after songs and I’m also
the cat and the imbued indirect
that waits, waiting
unordered, unwindowed
Reading as an overture to the subsequent “disaster songs,” the poem prepares the reader for the disorientation and fragmentation to come through several gestures. The most immediately obvious is the fragmented syntax and the disruption of grammatical categories: It is not a central “I” or a “present” that speaks, and readers are treated to “a now of disaster songs / after songs.” However, both of these bendings of phrasal structures are evocative in their rejection of “typical” grammatical logic, effectively communicating the centrifugal motion they narrate. The use of “now” as a noun, for instance, conveys the alogical simultaneity of the text’s nervous unfolding.
The straining of conventional syntax, the poem implies, is a symptom of an unstable speaker, or at least a speaker continually doubting his verbal abilities and even his immediate identity. He informs the reader that he “can’t speak” before swapping his subject position for an even more impersonal and immaterial “present.” Though dreams are typically thought to be one of the more subjective phenomena, here the speaker oozes out of his personhood through them, ending up both a cat (whose fur the poem opens with) and “the imbued indirect.” Imbued indirectness, albeit abstractly, accurately describes the unbalanced, yet enigmatic loops that animate this text, drawing the reader through a dream logic that is always just out of reach. The poem ends with two negative adjectives that succinctly outline the text’s progression: out of linguistic and personal orders, out of the literal and proverbial window.
The most immediate form of “disaster” and instability the collection confronts is ecological. Many of the poems depict the natural world in peril as a result of climate change. For instance, the aptly titled “THERE ARE SACRED CONTOURS AND FRAGMENTS,” a poem thematizing the discomfort of being a human “I” amid a natural world being destroyed, abruptly ends with a lament for the destruction of an ecosystem: “the plural of animals / the other worlds ended / within this one.” This most immediate “disaster,” as Olsen repeatedly shows, is caused by a hierarchical privileging of the human over “the other worlds” that constantly hum and vibrate throughout these texts. In place of these hierarchies, the poet imagines “communist forests,” replete with ghosts from destroyed ecosystems. Though Olsen often turns to post-apocalyptic imagery—citing the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl and Samuel R. Delany’s novel Trouble on Triton, among others, as inspiration—the spectral persistence of these ecosystems testifies to their ultimate resilience.
While the majority of the works in the collection thematize fracture both on the level of form and content, structures—literary and ecological—emerge as bulwarks against or even despite the forces of environmental collapse. Often, these forms appear to be impersonal, or at the least external to the speaker’s subjectivity, a kind of guide into language. Just as “the fur is dream and gelatinous . . .” draws an analogy between the fragmentation of sentences and the disappearance of an agential self, literary form fully realized, or “song,” is the ideal that these texts strive for. Olsen’s collection consists of five sections, each usually defined by a specific form. This is most apparent in the titular “nerves between song,” where each text is a tight square prose poem organized as a series of associative leaps. In place of syntactic connections, as in the opening poem, the speaker moves associatively, often following sonic or impressionistic intuition over realist logic: “mold. molding. spreading. spore. interlinking. lung. what was in spite of. taking purple.” Words in their phonetic and morphological mutations mold and spore as independent organic beings, seemingly outside of the speaker’s conscious organization.
In his questioning of his own organizing influence as the author of his texts, Olsen aligns himself with the broad philosophical tradition of posthumanism. A loosely-knit grouping of thinkers, such as Donna Haraway and Timothy Morton, posthumanists question the priority given to humans in our world picture. As a response to the Enlightenment’s valorization of the human as a universal category and as the touchstone for knowledge and ethical action, posthumanism calls attention to the dangers of prioritizing the human over the non-human. Indeed, the belief in human supremacy over the natural world has undeniably led to climate change. The very notion of human separation from nature, even in more seemingly benevolent models such as “responsible stewardship,” positions human civilization as outside of the “natural.” Thus, Olsen’s poems frequently introduce explicitly human and technological imagery, which at first may appear jarring in a collection primarily devoted to ecological themes: “SAFE INJECTION SITE,” for instance, opens with post-industrial images of “freight noise drone estuary piece of glass.” However, this dissonance is navigated by removing the false binary opposition between humans and nature: The same poem ends with a striking image of “the bleeding executive whose / fossilized body becomes / life in the bifurcating bone.” Even as human exceptionalism and capitalist greed threaten the survival of “other worlds,” life manages to return amid the ruins.
Olsen’s experiments with formulating a perspective beyond the human (or at least attempting to formulate such a perspective) certainly have precedents, including Brenda Ijima, a credited mentor to whom one of the poems is dedicated. Most recently in American poetry, Jorie Graham’s 2018 collection Fast strove to imagine perspectives of the deep sea floor and a surveillance program as a means of working through grief. In his attempts to surpass or destabilize individual consciousness through an emphasis on literary form, Olsen also approaches the hypnotic mantras found in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s 2020 A Treatise on the Stars. Berssenbrugge’s long lines destabilize their speaking subject by pointing to some celestial being through their mesmerizing rhythms, much like Olsen’s ideal of an impersonal “song.” What’s unique in Olsen’s approach to posthuman perspectives, however, is his thematization of the failure of reaching a truly non-human vantage point, the “nerves” that get in the way of “song.” Berssenbrugge’s prayer-like poems mimic the oneness with the universe that they thematize. By contrast, Olsen’s anxiety about “never listening enough” acknowledges the difficulties of achieving this larger cosmic perspective. Throughout his poems, he repeatedly calls attention to the imposition of human subjectivity on the natural world, noting, for example, “noise gives the listener duration as an artifact” and “the genesis of sound is in the sense of hearing” (incidentally, both of these lines happen to be quotes from other sources, further questioning the role of the poet as the creative force behind the text). In both cases, the reception of sound by a human ear, the fact that it is heard, creates its characteristics, i.e., its duration, calling it “sound” in the first place. This combination of anxiety about the presence of human subjectivity with a resignation to ultimately being unable to escape it is the central tension structuring these texts.
However, perhaps nerves don’t “get in the way” of song. Despite the abstraction of some of his imagery and the anxiety of being a human in a world shaped by this species’ hubris, Olsen’s “way out” is not to escape or to imagine some alternative to embodied existence (both of which frequently appear in critiques of posthumanist philosophy). Rather, his texts repeatedly foreground the speaker’s bodily presence as in the aptly titled “BREATH WAREHOUSE”:
fan swirled projection
circular yellow
pressing incidence of own turns,
clear descending the column
renewing where breath is mine, mine,
inward movie stretching front of this habit
emerging color changes in the process of science fiction
Here, the body as a site of material connection with the outside world becomes not merely a source of “nerves” but the space for science fiction-like transformation.
In terms of correspondences with posthumanist theory, Olsen’s texts resonate the most with the work of Jane Bennett and her book Vibrant Matter (2009). Like Olsen’s frenetic and vibrating texts about a constantly changing and chattering world, she invites us to recast the world of things as “not only imped[ing] or block[ing] the will and designs of humans but also act[ing] as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” Whereas other posthumanist thinkers emphasize the “coolness” of things, their fundamental inaccessibility from a human perspective, Bennett emphasizes human interactions with things and the natural world, placing us within a network of vital and vibrating actors. For Olsen’s poems, this emphasis on the interaction between the speaker, albeit one that questions his own authority and ability to speak, and the outside world is always mediated through the body, through physical interaction. A rare spot of harmony is glimpsed towards the conclusion of the collection in a poem that contemplates the speaker’s interaction with language itself as a kind of natural object:
each word the sparkling trace
not of our grievance
withdrawing into the pleasure of sound
creeps, crepuscule
that could then need to be quiet, to run through the dark woods
that’s my skin, therapeutic system
no nausea coiled around the pleasure
within unexpectation
insensible disasters
In this poem, ultimate harmony is achieved not through an escape of the body and its nerves but through focusing on the senses that allow the speaker access to the world: his skin, the alliterative “pleasure of sound.” In place of the “unexpectation” and imbued indirectness that leads the speaker into disasters elsewhere in the collection, there is a final therapeutic calm achieved through quiet intention amid other intentional beings at dusk. The aim, according to Olsen, is not to deny our humanity but rather remove the human from its privileged position above the natural world. Similarly, Olsen’s poems invite us to reflect on our enmeshment in the natural world, to recognize ourselves, nerves and all, as integrally part of these systems.
Venya Gushchin is a poet, literary translator, and PhD Candidate at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on the late styles of Russian modernist poets. His translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Elizaveta Mnatasakanova have received the Columbia University Slavic Department Pushkin Prize. Blockade Swallow, selected poems by Olga Berggolts, translated by Gushchin, appeared from Smokestack Books in 2022. Most recently, his translation of Yevsey Tseytlin’s Rereading Silence was published by Bagriy & Company. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus; Action, Spectacle; Midway Journal; No, Dear; and elsewhere.
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