Jennifer Soong, a poet, may also usefully be thought of as a musician, composer, and test audience—a one-person “focus group for / disappearing things,” as she puts it in her recent full-length collection Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (2022).[1] She makes economical, swift melodies from introspection’s hesitations, reversals, and leaps, amid the fear that “What I say // will be used against me” (26). Revisiting traditional lyric ground, Soong raises at times unexpected renovations, fashioning taut—sometimes claustrophobic—poems of the secret self. From where this music derives is a mystery. There are few biographical, historical, or other familiar signposts—yet this work effectively leads one into privacies that hit as specific, tight, and well considered. Soong offers unsettling, enterable fictions of interiority; her poems, even when they deploy the second person, often resolve into self-address.
The “you” in Soong’s poetry often winds up being the speaker, one who resonates, quarrels, and bargains with herself:
The well which deepens
shall be your grave.
I shall deepen the well.
I shall be my grave.
Then do it when no one asks. (26)
As Soong sings at grave-making, her modes of address advance and retreat, twist and turn. The stanza’s opening two lines at first appear to notify or warn a separate other (they indicate “your” grave). Yet such an assumption is complicated, even reversed, in the lines that follow. To “deepen the well,” the poet moves gradually, vertically downward into a burial pit of her own making, one ultimately synonymous with herself: “I shall be my grave.”
Digging her own plot, Soong gets down to classical elements, earth and water. A well makes for an unusual burial place—the water table sustains life as much as it threatens decomposition, and contact with the source always risks its adulteration. Deepening the well, then, becomes an act of collaboration with life and death on a journey to the interior. To progress, the poet must win moments of solitary refusal necessary to imagination. “No one asks” for the speaker’s work, but she feels compelled to make it “when no one asks” for, or puts demands on, her time.
Suede Mantis certainly contains poems aimed at others beyond the page: “I watched the stars slip out, / your hand, in mine” (85), for example, or “Stay with me, or else” (89). Such calls are shot through with a wry grasp of singularity among the numerous: “Nothing belongs to us much. / You don’t get to keep your body after you die. / You don’t get to take your poems into heaven” (85). All lyric, traditionally understood, represents a solitary singer that declaims singular affective melodies while amidst a crowd. In some ways, Soong’s work is no exception. From poem to poem, readers will imagine, perhaps inevitably, a mutable lyric speaker with their suggested dramatic situation and implicit addressee. Yet Soong’s work in Suede Mantis charts privacies markedly extreme even for the lyric—inner chambers within the genre’s customary chamber music. In doing so, Soong’s poems resonate with the joys and infelicities of a close writing that springs from a close listening to self: “I hear it now as one hears oneself. / For a minute, I think I know / What stays and is gone, what exists.”[2] As she declares: “I’m free to talk to myself / as anyone” (99). And talk to herself Soong does.
In Suede Mantis, Soong’s lyrics emanate from what she has proclaimed a “PRIVATE SPACE,” and modulate inward voicings to attract imperfect understanding.[3] As she puts it in “Untitled (for America)”: “To enhance sensory congruence the dither / begins in a soft voice.”[4] With its rapid and at times confounding detours, Soong’s work repays the patience of readers that can “stare with…noise-cancelling eyes.”[5]
Such heightened receptivity, the laser-like readerly focus at times brought on by these poems, is delivered via decades-old methods of notation that have been digitally reinvented. By the 1950s, Black Mountain poet Charles Olson, among others, had heralded the typewriter as a revolutionary instrument that unleashed immediate transmissions of melody and suspiration. Olson enthused:
For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.[6]
Olson’s close colleague Robert Creeley—probably a greater influence on Soong—also saw the typed poem as a “score,” and went further in emphasizing the page’s blank space as physical material, significant as ink, “in the sense that [words’] spatial positions there will allow a reader to read them with his own voice, to that end the poet is after.”[7]
The smartphone and laptop computer allow for transcriptions of greater fidelity to shifts of intention: poets adjust, move, delete, and rearrange their words long before their poems touch paper (if, in fact, they ever do). Soong’s improvisations give the impression of having been arrived at quickly—mid-hesitation, mid-realization, mid-revision. Long before the advent of the personal computer, poets at the keyboard could be adept as jazz soloists as they punched out quick transcription and spacing. As is common among today’s lyricists, Soong can also ply Microsoft Word’s ruler, clipboard, and all-powerful delete key, while keeping open a Google search window for rapid retrieval and deployment of allusions, quotations, anecdotes, and facts. However, Soong’s swift, subtle play using such compositional technologies—and this sets her apart from some contemporaries—is anything but heavy-handed. What one might call her lyrics’ digital staves recede into the background.
A poem in Suede Mantis begins:
So much alone
time thinks yet
cannot say
it thought
the sky
the sky
not even as it
continues to fall
like a minor act of violence (87)
Line breaks and tabbed blank space form an invisible lattice, informing a number of possible interpretations. If the break between the first and second lines registers a pause for breath, one ends up with “time” as a personified abstraction: “So much alone[,] time thinks[.]” Conversely, if one reads these lines as enjambed, it is “alone time” that, it would appear, “thinks.” Such riddling, along with the poem’s soft but persistent half-rhymes (“say…sky…sky,” “yet… thought…it”) animates its puzzling of doom-think. This Cassandra may be right, after all; but no one, in isolation, can think the firmament. The sky is falling, yes; thought falls, the heavens descend and menace; these stubby lines themselves drop down the page. Yet, the resultant “violence” may be regarded as “a minor act” relative to the universe, on the one hand, or the individual, on the other.
Soong has claimed that her work emerges from and precipitates an “inside voice.” In an interview with Ariel Yelen, Soong asserts, “I think of an inside voice as extremely private, in the sense that private can mean withdrawn. It needs to be enticed out while being protected, maybe even earn your trust. It’s something intimate.”[8] This inner voice, for Soong, is something “sacred” that speaks to “one other” at a time, an addressee that, as she puts it, could be “yourself, or the person you want to be, or the person you are tomorrow, or a dead person.”[9] Of the four examples Soong provides here, note that three are aspects of the poet herself (in the second person), while the remaining auditor posited is deceased.
Soong, in fact, frequently gestures toward the departed. Her work abounds with elegiac turns. Threnodial moments in Suede Mantis, among many, include: “The point is underground” (24); “there is no shadow in the night / only dust” (20); “The names which bent in our throats / were as sweet / as they are stone” (11); and “You desire / to produce warmth with the dead” (86). Soong grasps keenly that poetry is built, in large part, from language of the dead—that of literary predecessors as well as all other lost speakers. From within her privacies, Soong reaches up to breach the boundary that Peter Gizzi describes as “the ultimate line that poetry has continually crossed…between the living and the dead, or the visible and invisible worlds.”[10] These poems are haunted by such crossings, even when they riff on vibrantly present sensation.
In her attention to what Frank O’Hara called “the minute particulars where decision is necessary,” Soong demonstrates an affinity for, and debt to, New York School poets, especially O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery, along with second-generation practitioners such as Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan.[11] With them, she shares an at times breezy manner that can belie keen attention to sound and sense at the level of the syllable. And, in many ways, Soong’s construction of lyric interiority follows from these poets’ theories of writerly/readerly ties.
Alice Notley, for one, posits a “secret self,” a construct that resonates quite strongly with Soong’s “inside voice.” In her essay, “O’Hara in the Nineties,” Notley claims that Frank O’Hara “got right into […] the part of my head that has a silent tongue, and his waggled like mine.”[12] Notley continues:
One, and I seem to believe anyone, has a secret self, a rather delicately pondering inner person. Much of poetry exists to communicate with this entity. Its thoughts have the shape of speaking, but it doesn’t have to explain as much to itself as one does to another person.[13]
Even when they employ gestures and grammar of open address—what Notley calls “the shape of speaking”—poems of the “secret self” also wire a substratum circuit between author and receiver, a solder of “utter vulnerability” that, as Notley proposes, “melts in and out” and “doesn’t have to explain as much.”[14] Likewise, Soong’s poems in Suede Mantis (though, contra O’Hara, they do little to constitute their speaker as a historical individual) seek to speak directly into intimate or occluded inner spaces—attempting an end-run around an audience member’s reflexive refusal or indifference.
Soong’s use of second-person self-address is one of her most effective techniques for breaching such firewalls. Her speaker can at times waggle her tongue in one’s head. Or, as Soong puts it, wielding her own corporeal metaphor:
[…] There’s a mouthful of eyes
I say, in your head. That’s how your sight
begins to turn on you […] (85)
It would be wrongheaded, though, to consider this work solipsistic. Soong publishes her poetry, performs it in public, and serves as its ambassador in the world. Despite their privacy, their quiet vehemence, these poems are made to coax readers along. Soong persists in “moving the meaning again and again” (87). Readers who “watch my mouth do weird things” (99), and imagine their way into the poems’ strict confines may “have to rummage / to find anything” (30). But such efforts of reception, it is at times suggested, might hasten much-wished-for outcomes: “The motor, labor, the politics-poetics / we seek” (24).
The title of Soong’s first book, Near, At (2019), suggests a process whereby authorial/readerly proximity may over time become a shared locus—the comma standing in for the period elapsed. “Like the Voluntary Disappearance of Space Between Me and You,” with other poems in the collection, elaborates on this theme:
as I came down to play
by a very nature
concentric moods
and heard amidst it all
indecision
…………………………………………………
how many sides
to it as it
deliberates
over time
this is how a path
begins to
and departs
all along
from[15]
To “play” her “moods,” Soong settles herself in compositional space-time as if sitting down to (“I came down to”) a musical instrument. Her moods are “concentric,” suggesting a widening of affective circles, like fixed range rings on a radar screen. Registering lyrical charges from “many sides,” and considering them “over time,” Soong arrives at a poetic in miniature: a poem could be a “path” that author and reader (“Me and You”) walk “all along” together, companions for the asynchronous time it takes to be written and received. This is a messy process, rife with “indecision,” that calls forth complementary acts of will and “voluntary” work.
Making lyric spaces, for Soong, means thinking forward into a ludic composition, but also embracing a forgetting that time and again wipes the slate clean. In an essay, “The ‘To-Do’ List Poem: Prospective Memory and a New York School Genre” she defines prospective memory, after Jonathon D. Crystal, as the ability to “remember to remember,” an “outlook [that] not only presumes a future but also entails an implicit imperative or promise to oneself.”[16] Lyric imagination, focused on the creation and rehearsal of song, lives in a space of semipermanence, between solid things and insubstantial memories. Soong welcomes “a kind of forgetting that is essential to the poem,” a take on poetry as “a site of possibility rather than actualization, wishful thinking rather than resolution, changing one’s mind rather than seeing things through.”[17]
In many ways, Soong’s notion of poetic forgetting echoes J. H. Prynne’s endorsement of “forgetfulness” in “Lashed to the Mast,” a poem collected in The White Stones (1969):
[…] love the
forgetfulness of man which
is our prime notion of praise
the whole need is a due thing
a light, I say this in
danger aboard our dauncing boat
hope is a stern purpose &
no play save the final lightness[18]
For Prynne, “forgetfulness” both immediate and ultimate is not only an unavoidable crisis, but a precondition for love and hope in a community confronted with immanent catastrophe. Aboard lyric poetry’s “dauncing boat,” forgetting is not a liability, but a precondition for “praise,” “hope,” and “play.” Unremembering is a method of portaging forward and restoring the imagination via renewed mindfulness.
Unlike Prynne, Soong is not interested in building monuments of verse. In the “Dear Reader” epistle at the outset of Suede Mantis, she declares, “Everything I’ve previously written I renounce” (7). In fact, Soong has been known to request journal editors take down her poems from websites. Declining to flirt with posterity, or at least purporting to, she invents fleeting occasions for readerly intimacy forgettable in a generative sense. As such, her speakers are often in haste to get on to the next thing: “I want again / to begin in the way I discovered it” (31). Yet Soong does share with Prynne a judicious enthusiasm that reflects “a stern purpose,” after all. She demands not to be memorized or recited, but to be taken up with present wit and improvisation.
Soong’s partnership with the reader is not always harmonious. It can also be skeptical and barbed. The first poem in Suede Mantis puzzles an unwieldy relationship that feels unevenly divided. The poet seeks cooperation, but also holds the baton. A pastoral is painted “as May thickens / with green strengthened against the sun […] Everything in the day / falls like sleep, continuing to give off / the heat it takes” (9). Within this lush and relatively tranquil space, (possibly a refraction of suburban New Jersey, where Soong was born and lived for many years), speaker and addressee copy (“we reproduce”) and toil to grow (“tend to”) a shared representation (“our demonstration”), yet their creative work is interrupted by false starts and revisions:
It leaks the heat of our demonstration
and is expensive
this expertise we waste
(or is it better this way, no that—)
If you could tell the difficulty apart
I would love you no less, for
what I would expect of you
is time
and precipitates what we are: not one but half
of what we were
as the green grows fat
and good, hiding the birds (9)
The speaker’s inner monologue, and her pleas to the reader along the way, spring from a half-despairing wish that a romance of indecision and misinterpretation will be hastily resolved (“If you could tell the difficulty apart”). This sets in motion an insistence that love’s survival demands sustained effort (“what I would expect of you / is time”), and in turn extrudes (“precipitates”) a future halving of these lovers, who become both less and more than what they were. Soong offers a contract of sorts (“our best bet”) to bind the pair as they drift, without ardor, through splintered space:
This I think is our best bet
A love without passion
or memory of once with
Everywhere
as the seen pieces glisten (9)
Hopes for loving communion, however imperfect, are tested, if not fully abandoned, in fiercer poems, such as “Let me know my friends,” which witnesses the speaker, for a despondent moment, “finding out / free love / was never free // endless love / just a loop // You’ll have to rummage / to find anything” (30). Elsewhere, Soong adopts testier tones, voicing frustration, for instance, that “Your sole obsession is your inner life. / You are desperate to function / in it” (86).
At times, Soong sounds a rage hard rather than soft. Consider a poem that launches with an ominous ultimatum (“Stay with me, or else”). Here, the speaker seethes with jealousy, aggression, suspicion. Far from championing human solidarity, per Prynne, she decries the limitations of fleeting bonds. Here is the sonnet in full:
Stay with me, or else
these words were clipped for nothing.
The stars fuck and align
for nothing, not even misery, our mutual-feeling.
To not be here, yet feel entangled
in cold reflections I’ve been seeing,
a tree moving in its own way. What
would be the point of that, reader,
save to cut you with the blunt end
of my face reproduced in the knife?
We are close in fake spirit.
I can feel it upon my organs.
I need a reason but first
the street is getting away from us. Please do not,
I mean, best not to be. I assure you more and succulence
not in one but two fell swoops. (89)
The poet is a collagist, a textual compositor that cuts and pastes language (“these words were clipped”) while worrying such effort is “for nothing”—after all, “the street is getting away from us.” A disquieting partial rupture (“To not be here, yet feel entangled”) provokes a fatal ultimatum: “Please do not, / I mean, best not to be.” In this case, the poet offers not a fraught bower, but a fighting ring.
While Soong’s poems often strike such minor-key notes, these darker energies are sometimes rehabilitated. For example, in the sonnet beginning “Birds will sing on the day she dies” (92), the speaker anticipates that, upon the loved one’s passing, “The useful poems will suddenly be useless, and the hopeless / poems will have a say.” A bit later in the poem, a different realization arrives:
I happen without me, and an unavoidable mass
seems like it will never disappear. I admire
the small ruin painted in my heart. There is no moral,
yet naturally we want to do it again, this time knowing
life is imprecision made exact:
September in fall as if it were spring.
The installation of a twee sublime (“the small ruin painted in my heart”)—and some clear-eyed reflection on poetry’s dubious claims to ethics—enables a fraught equipoise, despite life’s “imprecision.”
Such disquieting ambivalence plays through Suede Mantis, such as in this poignant stanza from the long sequence “searching up an earache,” which occupies the center of the book:
old shirt
stab your love for him
make it die
an old shirt, like a puddle on the floor (65)
Monosyllabic line endings build a cadence of stubborn insistence, rendering emphatic the speaker’s self-command to snuff out her affections. Further on, a sober appraisal of external hazard brings again the realization that natural forces (much as with the “well which deepens”) both sustain and threaten the speaker’s wayward existence:
The object of my life faces the objection of my world
.
Whole reams of sand spilling and tumbling in the ocean
.
While keeping me adrift (25)
§
Jennifer Soong composes introverted lyrics grounded in posited writer-reader partnerships. She invites readers to take up her book and lend voices, ears, and wills to high-fidelity play that vanishes as if into a haze, and reemerges by way of new improvisations. Some of her lines are in fact quite memorable—not a bad thing—yet Soong would erase and reinscribe, time and again, a poetry poised for a suspenseful moment between presence and oblivion. She sets forth the challenge in this way:
What we tried we couldn’t remember
and what we did
took hold and would not change. (24)
This work issues from a zone of privacy, yet casts off sometimes dismaying, sometimes edifying sparks. Soong defends and trespasses borders of selfhood while also remaining attentive to voices closest to the heart. Soong addresses herself, the dead—and the rest of us—as potential receivers largely unknown, perhaps unknowable, but nevertheless out there. Out here.
Soong signals as much in her chapbook Contempt (2021), written after but published before Suede Mantis. There, she calls out, as if by long-distance FaceTime:
I don’t miss much,
not of my former life or how I used to
in my writing sound. I’ve used up
those breaths and you may use them
to come and find me
gone[19]
Soong’s poetry, attentive to ironies inherent to the directly voiced lyric, invites readers to discover, amid its infelicities, new pleasures and perils well worth remembering, for now.
Notes:
[1] Jennifer Soong, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Brooklyn and Arkville: Black Sun Lit, 2022), 54.
[2] Jennifer Soong, Near, At, (New York: Futurepoem, 2019), 25.
[3] Soong, Near, At, rear cover.
[4] Soong, Near, At, 85, emphasis in original.
[5] Soong, Near, At, 75.
[6] Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse.
[7] Robert Creeley, A Quick Graph: Collected Notes & Essays, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970), 27.
[8] Jennifer Soong and Ariel Yelen, “Interview: Inside Voices, Fast Poems, and Forgetting,” Futurefeed, 2019, https://future-feed.net/a-conversation-forgetting-in-poetry.
[9] Soong and Yelen, “Interview.”
[10] Peter Gizzi and Levi Rubeck, “Q&A with Peter Gizzi by Levi Rubeck,” BOMB, 2011, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/q-a-with-peter-gizzi/.
[11] Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto,” Poetics of the New American Poetry, eds. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 354.
[12] Alice Notley, Coming After: Essays on Poetry (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2005), 5.
[13] Notley, Coming After, 6.
[14] Notley, Coming After, 6.
[15] Soong, Near, At, 53-54.
[16] Jennifer Soong, “The ‘To-Do’ List Poem: Prospective Memory and a New York School Genre,” Journal of Modern Literature, 43, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 92.
[17] Soong, “The ‘To-Do’ List Poem,” 93.
[18] J. H. Prynne, The White Stones (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), 16.
[19] Soong, Contempt (Glasgow: SPAM Press, 2021), 13.