Ada Smailbegović’s The Cloud Notebook constructs its own world through shifting and relational juxtapositions. The book is built in two parts: the titular notebook, presented as an included secondary volume, and the surrounding text, a series of prose fragments shot through with the narration of the notebook’s writing. This double structure becomes central to the reader-assisted worldmaking as “an entire world can emerge out of the recombination of the letters of the alphabet as they touch one another” (19 and the notebook). These recombinant fragments of language and consciousness manufactures a capacious lyric present by enlisting the reader in the production of this world, moving beyond a Wordsworthian idea of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility” or a sense of the lyric as characterized by dramatic monologue (as articulated by Jonathan Culler).[1] Instead, Smailbegović uses lyric presence, by which I mean the text’s living consciousness animated by the participating reader, to bring the interconnected and ever-changing nature of the world to life.
Most immediately, this recombinant lyric worldmaking manifests in the notebook as the live process of the writer’s manifestation in the world. Where in the main body of the text we are told only that “she writes in her cloud notebook,” in the notebook itself she comes alive through the traces she leaves for herself. The page (along with its universe) is shaped by the organizing consciousness that selects and records these fragments. The contents of the notebook are mostly impersonal—focusing on facts and theories, instructions and performances, rather than the particular minutiae of interiority. In spite of this, a human hand can be seen in every word, every image, every placement of the text. Her world is constituted by these accumulated ephemera and their interpretation and incorporation. Each page of the notebook makes a physical record of her embroilment with the world. Covered as they are with stray musings, quotations, and images that have been arranged irregularly on the page, the pages capture the objects she encounters in her environs. In this way, photos, recipes, and the relics of art and observation come together not only to give a sense of the unnamed writer, but also of her world. In this way, The Cloud Notebook constructs its world, much as science fiction and fantasy do, through the incorporation of a series elements that define the speculative world.
However, unlike in speculative fiction, the world of The Cloud Notebook appears, at least at first, to be coextensive with reality. In its expansive presentation of the material details of life through the notebook, it echoes texts like Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day (also characteristically focused on elaborating details), though the notebook does not narrativize itself. Instead, it is an object like the ones it describes—quite literally, the notebook is physically set off from the rest of the text as if given by its author to the author of the main text. In this way it instead concretizes the world and its production through the material form of the notebook. The world made in recording is made tangible by the inclusion of the object, as well as the description of its writing. The poem theorizes its own construction of the world—articulating the nature of what it performs—by drawing attention to the discursive and practical boundaries of language through the reminder that the book (and notebook) is a finite object, while still drawing attention to the way a world is made through proliferating connections and elements in the contents of the notebook.
The main text of The Cloud Notebook drops the reader directly into this process of theorization. It leads with a dependent clause and elaboration, the middle of an ongoing thought: “For it is exceedingly difficult in some objects, to distinguish between a prominency and a depression, between a shadow and a black stain, or a reflection and a whiteness in the color. Besides, the transparency of most objects renders them yet much more difficult than if they were opacious” (9). Thinking through the play of light on surfaces, Smailbegović primes perception to flatten and confuse things that are distinct or even opposing. By opening with this half-visible argument, she insists on the ongoing nature of the worldmaking process, built out of the sight of these surfaces which play out over the next several paragraphs. Leading with the second half of something—the causal explanation without the initial observation—takes advantage of its position in the middle of things to animate analysis as an ongoing action. It is continuing and perceptual—the building of the world requires continually seeing and re-seeing, transforming prominences into depressions and vice-versa, letting the world be remade as it is described and analyzed. This transformative play also characterizes and energizes the forms of recombination and lyric organization that fill the book.
This process of worldmaking and the theorization of the same continues to play out as the main text of the book continues. Take the following, especially dramatic, run of fragments:
The body of a bee is fuzzy and yellow and black.
A man named Sparrow laughs.
Sometimes she thinks she hears his laugh even when he is not present, at airports for instance.
She hides the large red bowl in the closet so no one can use it, but she cannot find the small spoon.
One year she enters a bed in a snowstorm.
Another, she hides in the pink folds of it after an event.
She asks the person on the other side of the phone if they could arrange to hold something. (22)
In this moment, we see the theatricality of the movement of both things and language. We can watch the shape of the world coalesce and disintegrate as it builds through connections’ play. The bee is solid and alive, but no Sparrow, unable to haunt the rest of the section. Yet, by putting them next to one another, we introduce the possibility that this bee causes Sparrow’s laugh by virtue of its fuzzy, yellow, black body. Then it evaporates when “he” does, in the airport, in the following fragment, held together by his phantasmagoric laugh that colors not only her perception of him, but of the airport. Why must no one use the red bowl? Does it have to do with the missing spoon? When the snowstorm arrives on the scene, it turns the domestic paranoia of the bowl and spoon into a ritual of security, but it also abandons the thread—the bowl and spoon do not return. If “one year” she “enters a bed in a snowstorm” and in “another” she “hides” in it “after an event,” it becomes a regular refuge, rather than an interruption into the domestic drama of the bowl and spoon that preceded it. Instead, this ritual of security becomes an all-purpose isolation, able to respond to a variety of stimuli as it reaches outward into the future while emphasizing its self-isolation. At the end, we return to the woman, where she is making the bizarre request that someone on the other side of a phone hold an object. Why would she need to do that? Where is she? All this is absent. This sort of scattered causality is not unusual in contemporary poetry, but Smailbegović’s book is somewhat unusual in its deployment of entirely plausible yet perplexing actions. The fragments, like those in many kinds of experimental verse, stand with as little context as possible. Unlike more highly fragmented experiments, though, The Cloud Notebook’s moments have a solidity to them that stems not from the materiality of language, but the materiality of the world. This is not the anti-lyrical and anti-subjective intense fragmentation of Lyn Hejinian in Writing is an Aid to Memory or Susan Howe in Debths, or even the paratactic surrealism of a writer like John Ashbery. Each piece is zeroing in on something concrete, placeable, seemingly real (if bizarre and unaccountable)—the stuff of a life and its environs. These pieces join and clatter against each other, producing both new ties that organize the world and the excess that is required to make it real.
This play between coalescence and disjunction allows the main text to take advantage of that solidity, to allow each fragment in the main text to partake of the same moves of object making and concretization that the notebook as a whole creates. In doing so, it builds a theory of worldmaking through relation, of experience constructed out of the concatenation of the material components of life, just as it is literally made of vibrating atoms and as a narrative world is made of words and letters. It presents this new understanding of the world through both content and form. This analytic dimension plays out most vividly in a later section of the text, which reads,
She says, “if it has disappeared we would not know it, not know if it has gone or is only missing.”
Another hedgehog may still be running through the woods.
She passes by a moment where you ate the banana that had been lying on the sidewalk.
The sun is in things but so is the wind.
She does not know what is visible yet.
In a tiny pot a plant whose leaves are orbs.
Someone positions texts about objects on top of objects that they represent, a copy of Ponge’s La Table on top of a table, for instance.
Or what occurs takes a different turn, a toy in the shape of a hedgehog being positioned on top of a book about hedgehogs by a small boy. (48-49)
At the end of this segment, the world and its representation fall into each other—the text and the table directly, and then, at the end, the book and the toy. The “different turn” here transforms the toy hedgehog into a “text about objects”—here, a toy is a text about the representation of hedgehogs, and the book is the representation represented. But this movement is part of a larger sort of generative self-patterning that emerges as things link up and disconnect, reflecting the real hedgehog “running through the woods” just a few lines above. That hedgehog is itself “another hedgehog,” populating the forest with the hedgehogs assumed to precede it before it can return, like a ghost, in the doubly abstracted representation of the hedgehog at the end of the section. At every stage, the world of the poem comes into being as its pieces collide with and connect with each other—allowing momentary linkages through reading to disappear and resurface. This embodied theory, performing the echoes of echoes in order to interact with the full range of material making up the world, is then shot through a series of fragments that use their strangeness and alienation to attract the attention to the processes of meaning making that we engage in every day by bringing it to life. In doing this, the text partakes of the Russian Formalist sense of alienation, using the separation from our expectations that the text creates to force reflection on the everyday. In the creation of a lyric present, the book takes advantage of this alienation to think through its own self-organizing combinatorial effects as it builds out its world.
At the same time, the lyric alienation of the text extends worldmaking beyond merely the book’s structural and formal dimensions, passing into the realm of science-fictional estrangement from our reality via objects like the plant with orbs for leaves. This science fictionality is what prevents The Cloud Notebook from lapsing into the melancholic bewilderment that Andrea Brady identifies with the “arrangement” poem composed of many disconnected fragments.[2] Instead of embodying a fatalism, Smailbegović captures the processes already at work in worldmaking as real potential. The fragments in this text are not material surplus, the unconsidered and unrecuperated detritus of capital. Instead, they are relational, transformative, and alive, coming together and apart in a world that is already not our own because it is being created right now. The speculative world of The Cloud Notebook is almost, but not quite, the world we live in. We cannot “pass by” a moment physically and the orb-shaped leaves are impossible, but we too have hedgehogs and take pauses on the sidewalk to eat. Our world, too, is radically transforming itself all the time, susceptible to the lyric consciousness that animates a poetic world and to the recombination of its parts into new arrangements. The speculative nature of this world allows The Cloud Notebook to theorize this explicitly as it puts these shifts on display, to not only write a world manifested by the reading process, but also to write about the way that is done.
The Cloud Notebook is a triumph of participatory reading. It creates a whole world and theorizes its creation at once through the reader’s encounter with the world/text. Consciousness, in the form of the reader, is echoed in the notebook’s fictionalized writer, elaborating the present as lyric subject, moving towards the totality of the world as it comes into being. This play between theme and form—like in Susan Howe’s Pierce-Arrow, which, though wildly different in theme is exceptionally resonant in how it uses its experimental form to display and theorize its positions—allows the book to play with reflexivity and to really explore its central ideas of the vitality of worldmaking through recombination and apprehension. Its world is not so different from our own, which allows it to be fully focused on the process of worldmaking rather than on the world made, enacting its theoretical insights at the level of expertly executed form beyond the level of content. By grounding its speculative impulses in everyday events, the similarity between the forms of worldmaking at the heart of the everyday and the fantastical is put on full display. Ultimately, The Cloud Notebook’s construction locates us in a world that is ever being made and that is densely interconnected. By embroiling the reader in such creation, we are encouraged to consider the dense and accumulating construction of our own worlds, both social and physical.
[1] William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, (London, 1800; Project Gutenberg, 2021), vol. 1, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8905/pg8905.html
[2] Andrea Brady, “Alternative Arrangements,” FENCE 40, vol. 22, no. 1, (Winter 2023): 211-212