In her 2019 monograph The Order of Forms, Anna Kornbluh defends the honor of abstraction in literary studies against the claims of the particular and the concrete:
my goal is to demonstrate the generativity of thinking the political formalistically, thinking form politically, thinking criticism constructively, thinking abstractions generously. I do mean this generativity to be at once theoretical and practical: we can arrive at new horizons of the goals of theorizing aesthetics and politics if we embrace that theory can be productive, interventionist, and constructive in its own right—not just secondary or descriptive. Theory at its best delivers the benefits of abstraction that mathematical formalism so limpidly sustains: inscription is not the obstacle to possibility but its enabling condition; projective representation uncorded from particulars need not inherently oppress particularities. For criticism informed by such theory, putting things together can become a necessary, newly attended complement to taking them apart.[1]
Prageeta Sharma’s new book of poetry stages an analogous argument, envisioning a role for a “productive, interventionist, and constructive” abstraction. Onement Won weaves together the Upanishads, Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings, the writer’s loss of her second husband to cancer, and the discourse of poetics. It is a difficult book, and an abstract one—difficult in its abstraction. Onement Won mounts a defense of the aesthetic, political, and social necessity of abstraction, one that rhymes with Kornbluh’s literary theory. What can abstraction do for us, both authors ask, in our contemporary world of relentless immediacy and particularity?[2]
Sharma’s archive, to be sure, is a world away from Kornbluh’s. Abstraction in Onement Won refers primarily to painting styles and to the opaque diffuseness of contemporary American poetry that looks to the likes of John Ashbery and Peter Gizzi for inspiration. Kornbluh, meanwhile, reads Victorian realist novels alongside the abstraction of nineteenth-century algebra, architecture photography, Kantian aesthetics, and Marxist political theory. The ultimate philosophical sponsor of abstraction, as she notes, is Plato.[3] Of these points of reference, only Marx is formative for Sharma. (An early poem of hers reflects on a conversation with a friend “in a Marxist merriment.”[4]) Yet Kornbluh’s book makes a fitting critical companion to Onement Won, for its full-throated defense of the political value of abstraction. Without necessarily meaning to, Kornbluh elucidates the logic of difficulty in contemporary avant-garde poetry like few pieces of literary criticism I’ve read.[5] Sharma tries to do with poetic language exactly what Kornbluh says Kant and nineteenth-century mathematicians did with philosophy and algebra, “practic[e] abstraction as the opening of new possibilities, rather than the cementing of old givens.”[6] Not all difficult American poetry is abstract (one thinks of the challenging yet imagistic prose poetry of Elizabeth Willis), nor is all abstract American poetry difficult (consider the lucid philosophical rambles of Rae Armantrout); but Sharma’s is both, and one because of the other.
Unafraid of heady abstraction as it traverses painting, poetry, devotion, music, philosophy, and grief, Sharma’s poetry persistently comments on its own preoccupations. “This is about human consciousness,” she writes in Onement Won, “personality, and the abstract scripture I might / try to induce” (4). “A Moment Has Two Equal Parts and Many Decades,” a long poem that name-checks René Descartes, Ram Dass, Newman, the Beatles, and others, as if warning us not to reduce its arguments to one cultural domain, contains the following extraordinary passage:
And now, as an adult, when my fellow friends lose solidarity with one another
and then they commit lateral violence, especially
when they can’t name what they do with power.
This is what is happening to our unity as a global people.
The fallen sun, the rising moon, its discs in measurement.
This medieval purpose of finding daylight burning
is to locate a concrete metaphor amidst
snow-covered vowels—that patchwork of a social life here.
I am not calling out solely in a lyric utterance,
because how when narrated with small and smaller talk,
it’s almost extinguishing, damaging the selves underneath—
the striking timidity of a companion ungrasping hands
to let the air cool and let sweat dissolve. (20)
Sharma moves away from abstraction toward the concrete, which is to say away from political critique toward lyric inwardness and the arresting image, but not before thematizing that move: “to locate a concrete metaphor amidst / snow-covered vowels.” The passage has plenty of affecting concrete imagery but swears it off in the same breath (“I am not calling out solely. . .”). Concreteness, the poem teaches, emerges from within an abstract “patchwork of a social life” in which we all are caught. Concreteness gets us through the poem, and through life, but it is also a trap. Lyric conventions “damag[e] the selves underneath”; abstraction restores us to ourselves. This is, perhaps, a counterintuitive claim. How does it work? Like an expressionist painter or a Kantian philosopher, Sharma invites us to see how the apparent specificity of daily experience is already crystallized out of general categories, givens, which comprise our selves. “Abstraction becomes a way of featuring a sense of reality,” as another poem avers (29). Or as Kornbluh puts it equivalently, if abstractly, “projective representation uncorded from particulars need not inherently oppress particularities.”[7] I don’t hear a singular discursive arena for abstraction in “A Moment Has Two Equal Parts,” though the passage I’ve quoted begins and ends with social life. The first stanza of the passage is all the more achingly pointed for failing to specify any details. The details of the many ways one’s friends can let one down, the reader feels, are too painful to put in a poem. Instead, Sharma offers “lateral violence,” an abstraction that generalizes any number of micro- or macroaggressions. The closing image, a friend’s hand unclasping, reads less like an instance of lateral violence than a metaphor for it. In this way, the naming of “lateral violence” causes the poem’s texture to come into focus. The abstraction gives rise to the concrete interaction, rather than the other way around, as would happen in a Keatsian ode that moves from an urn to a revelation about truth.[8]
Sharma’s poetry, like Ashbery’s, has the uncanny ability to preempt the terms in which one would want to describe it. “The lambent warmth of recollection. / It is brief but emotionally consequential,” begins one brief but emotionally consequential poem (60). “I need to write a poem about this feeling,” the next one opens. Entitled “Value in Failure,” it continues:
how when I linger in it while finding the right
word I am trapped within its possible
consequence of opacity,
some ashen grave set to permanently define.
Must I give you an image for you to see it, feel it? (62)
Again, Sharma proffers the concrete (“ashen grave”) in the very act of problematizing it (“Must I give you an image. . .?”). It is not that she is unable to write in a sustainedly vivid mode, to perform to lyric code; she poses that possibility on the page and then renounces it for effect. As another poem explains: “I am capable, just ambivalent. So I pulled that idea away, out of reach” (51). The immediate topic in that passage is motherhood (Sharma has no children), but it doubles as a programmatic statement about her poetics.
Sharma’s books of poetry are perhaps best compared to themselves. They have their quiddity. Onement Won strikes me as her most Sharma-like to date. The most effective commentary upon it, in that case, is her own catalog of poetry books, five prior ones stretching back to Bliss To Fill (subpress, 2000). The goals and methods of her poetry have not fundamentally changed since then; they have deepened. The value of opacity has always been to the fore, while the painterly, religious, interpersonal, and political modes of abstraction have grown in importance in Sharma’s poetry since 2000. Of her books, Onement Won most forthrightly achieves and theorizes the oscillation between abstraction and vividness that is a distinctive feature of her style.
Like its predecessor, Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019), Onement Won is a book of grief. Sharma lost both her first and second husbands to sudden cancer diagnoses. In responding to her redoubled trauma in verse, then, she found herself in the difficult position of needing to write the “same” book on two separate occasions. But they are not the same book at all. Grief Sequence is markedly less abstract and oblique than Onement—though still very abstract and oblique, by most poets’ standards. Grief in Onement Won is pushed down into the poetic subcortex. Read as Sharma’s second book of grief, alongside such earlier exemplars as Anne Carson’s Nox (New Directions, 2010) and Victoria Chang’s Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), Onement Won raises a question that the other books, including her own Grief Sequence, do not.[9] What does it do to grief to abstract it, to express grief as abstract and maybe, therefore, generalizable, rather than woundingly particular? The question clouds over the book, forking into multiple reactions but no resolution. In one poem, poetry is an escape from the privacy of grief (“get me into the poem quickly before more hurting arises” [24]); in another, it is a poor substitute for the spiritual consolation that Sharma’s poetic avatar cannot feel (“I have hunger for an eternal partner. And you are here. / I hunger this more than poetry” [22]).
The last poem in Onement Won, “Abstract Expressionist,” brings the artistic and poetic senses of abstraction together—abstract expressionist painting versus contemporary poetry that focuses through categories like “lateral violence”—knitting up the Newman and poetics threads of the book:
Abstraction helps me think about concrete things.
Can I write that I am
an abstruse definition that might be
justified in art, in poetry,
in music but not in my human symbolism?
In my waking life I feel indistinguishable
from all the hypothetical explanations
laid bare before us.
The earth is dying . . . (76)
Here, too, Sharma resists the grounding of abstraction in any one field of reference, preferring to treat it categorically, just as Kornbluh tries to account for what mathematical, political, and aesthetic formalisms hold in common. Yet the poem, despite its generality, addresses lived experience. Sharma proposes that it is among the tragedies of twenty-first-century life that we circulate as abstractions of ourselves. Onement Won has dwelt on the religious and racial aspects of this abstraction. “I, myself, was my culture, and for them, used for their yogic poses” (35). Instead of retreating from theory into practice, however, Sharma’s response to this problematic is to write through abstraction. In “Abstract Expressionist” the inner self, the one realer than the cardboard cutouts shaped like the labels “Hindu,” “secular,” “Asian,” or “woman,” turns out to be a “symbolism,” an abstract network of terms. “Symbolism” here corresponds to “patchwork” in “A Moment Has Two Equal Parts and Many Decades.” Paradoxically, for Sharma it’s abstraction all the way down, including the most concrete levels of experience. The feeling of being reduced to someone else’s term of abuse is also a feeling that this poem names as intimate, proper to the self. Meanwhile, outside the self, “The earth is dying.”
Urged on by the high stakes of the present moment, the poem’s argument continues:
How can I continue to bind myself
to theories, to blocking virulence in a liberal bubble?
And yet I want the philosophical interpretations
postulating unreal language, complex phrases, deep remarks,
ideal statements, to buttress the indefinite terms:
writing in a non-concrete voice full of recondite words.
What can happen in an ample transcendent announcement
with corresponding arguments encased in vagueness? (77)
The autodebate here about style (“How can I continue. . .?” “And yet I want. . .”) reverberates back through the whole collection, illuminating the political ambition of its dense and self-consciously “recondite” verbal texture. On the next page, the final sentence in the book is a declaration worthy of Keats, but updated for the twenty-first century and recalibrated to Sharma’s sensibility: “It is abstracted and then real” (78). That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Reading “value” as the unstated antecedent of Sharma’s “it” (the preceding stanza discussed “the Capitalocene” and “the industrial revolution”) suggests the “non-concrete voice” that the poem desires as a product of late capitalist economic relations. For better and for worse, abstraction is what we have to work with these days. Under these historical conditions, a lyric concreteness will always be a lie. In these lines, at least, Sharma’s abstraction puts on a recognizably Marxian habit, joining the lively interchange between contemporary poetry and Marxism in the creative and critical work of such contemporary writers as Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, Anahid Nersessian, Sianne Ngai, and Keston Sutherland.[10] It is a heartfelt moment in Onement Won, never retracted, yet it is only one of many facets in Sharma’s kaleidoscopic investigation of abstraction. “Value,” another keyword of the book, sometimes does and sometimes does not bare its Marxist inflection.
With Kornbluh, Sharma writes against the presumption that abstraction always destroys something we should admire, whether that something is interiority, or poetic depth, or verbal texture, or a quiet moment that escapes neoliberal instrumentalization. Kornbluh refers to the anti-abstract stance in literary studies as a “particulate ethos.”[11] It is exemplified by, for example, the literary criticism of Virginia Jackson, who assails “the long history of abstraction that has come to define both poems and persons.”[12] “Abstract” and “ideal” carry disapproving meanings across Jackson’s scholarly prose, while “actual” and “specific” index a countervailing value.[13] Jackson’s is only the most vociferous version of an antipathy to generalization, hence to abstraction, shared by many writers today. For Kornbluh and Sharma, by contrast, abstraction is a strategy for understanding the present and constructing the new. It is compatible with strong affects and individual experience. In fact, it is what fills affect and experience with meaning in the first place. As Sharma writes, in what could be a summation of her life in poetry so far: “I found both abstraction and pain” (18).
Notes:
[1] Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 32.
[2] Immediacy is the title of Kornbluh’s next book. See Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2024).
[3] Kornbluh, Order of Forms, 27.
[4] Prageeta Sharma, Bliss To Fill (Honolulu: subpress, 2000), 23. Another poem in the same collection uses the words “materialism” and “commodity.” See Sharma, Bliss To Fill, 35.
[5] I make an exception for Anahid Nersessian, “Romantic Difficulty,” New Literary History 49 (2018): 451–66. Nersessian’s essay has one eye on Romantic poets and the other on contemporary American ones. Uncoincidentally, Nersessian, like Kornbluh and Sharma, is an avowed Marxist as well as an advocate of strategic abstraction.
[6] Kornbluh, Order of Forms, 14.
[7] Kornbluh, Order of Forms, 32.
[8] The term mediation, often taken to be roughly equivalent to abstraction in Marxist theory, states the causation of Sharma’s abstraction backwards. I therefore avoid it
[9] Sharma’s Onement Won resonates as well with Chang’s subsequent book, With My Back to the World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024), which responds ekphrastically to the paintings of Agnes Martin, another minimalist abstract expressionist. Newman (1905–1970) and Martin (1912–2004) were contemporaries, just as Chang (1970–) and Sharma (1972–) are. In fact, Newman was a friend and early advocate of Martin’s. The synchronicities are striking. Is contemporary American poetry having an abstract-expressionist moment?
[10] Particularly pertinent is Sianne Ngai, “Visceral Abstractions,” GLQ 21 (2015): 33–63.
[11] Kornbluh, Order of Forms, 1.
[12] Virginia Jackson, “What Is Poetry?” Hopkins Review 17.1 (2024): 40–48, at 48.
[13] Cf. Virginia Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry?” PMLA 123 (2008): 181–87, at 183 (“the more ideally lyric poems and poetry culture have become, the fewer actual poetic genres address readers in specific ways”), and “Please Don’t Call It History” [review of Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)], nonsite.org 22 September 2011, online at https://nonsite.org/being-numerous (“the particularities of actual poems and actual social relations. . .various verse genres that had specific social functions”). In both cases, it is unclear what interpretive force actual could have in context, other than to reinstate a transhistorical normative account of poetics that Jackson explicitly opposes. Jackson specializes in nineteenth-century American poetry and poetics. From the vantage of her chosen period of study, she apprehends the history of poetry since 1900 as a history of loss and distortion. However, one could describe the same history more neutrally as a metamorphosis, neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad.