Kendra Sullivan’s Reps

How many ways are there to rim Reps? In her relentlessly probing debut, Kendra Sullivan provides a wide lens, harnessing, with a speculative poetics that weds lyric and narrative with the procedural framework of machine learning, everything from Curious George to Julia Kristeva to write a book that escapes definition. Rather than a poetry collection, I like to think of Sullivan’s Reps as a leaking database, or maybe a portable library, which picks up information during its discontinuous movement, like Walter Benjamin’s infamous suitcase that never left his side, until it was confiscated in a hotel in Portbou upon the philosopher’s death, unless it was picked up by Hannah Arendt, months later, and brought to an actual library in Paris for safekeeping. To attend to the archive, it is necessary to understand how often the archive passes hands; the indeterminacy of what it means to store anything—intentions and outcomes and allegories and accidents and logical fallacies and false analogies and foreordained trajectories and retroactive interventions and encounters both consensual and nonconsensual: the inner and outer and alternative histories that live inside any moment charged with collision’s likelihood. Sullivan’s practice is speculative and iterative, but also stochastic. And if the “collection” of poems as a textual mode can be characterized by precision, cohesion, and a general lack of deviation from theme or concept—ingredients prone to the construction of the “boring poetry book,” as I once was recorded as saying in The Brooklyn Review—then Reps, on the contrary, is game for play, diverting in service of an itinerary that wants to imagine, in the face of everyday trauma, extant colonization and war, and global ecocide, better futures.

“Exercises Against Empathy”—the first of Reps’ three sections, thus begins with a search for subjectivity that can only be gleaned through unstable and mutable relations, a nimble parsing of intimacy, whose electric nexus resides in the causeways of nearness and delay, the crossroads of approximate and imminent exchange rather than any notion of finite transmission:

Assigned to the same position as somebody else, I began again beside myself. It’s not so much that we lived in the same cell, but could be accessed by the same keystroke sequence. Since we shared a number, not an address, I waited by my phone for someone else’s calling. When at last it rang, I grabbed my keys and raincoat and ran to the car. (“Collision (Hash)”)

In pursuit of both depths and surfaces, access points and event horizons, Reps mobilizes and calls into question the “I” of traditional lyric and more broadly, the “we” and “us” of Western universalism. Sullivan’s anonymous, polyphonic speaker is variously a plumber tending to flow, a mother caring for her child’s curiosity, a cartographer redrafting edges and borders, a custodian combing the strand for trash in the advent of “yesterday’s historic storm,” and a scientist learning to “undo the ‘human’ without hurting anyone,” performing the iterations necessary toward a desired result, whereby reality should be understood as a process and representation cannot be considered without attending to its omissions and assumptions: “the face of ‘form,’” as Sullivan writes in “Tomb” (Collective),” “at the gates of ‘formlessness’” with clouds for brains. Who wouldn’t want brains as concentrated and untrustworthy as clouds? Who wouldn’t want to rescue the premature arrival alongside the belated, the postdated, the debt and truancy (treachery) of the historical record, which “mainstreams global unity over near-total discord”? Might the “tomb” of the parenthetical “collective” cited above neither be a sanctuary nor a resting place but a site for dredging? Might the “collective” not be a stand-in for “community,” but the sign through which we might problematize community as empty or atrophied signifier?

Sullivan’s speaker can only figure things out by returning to the beginning, all sites of primary rupture, preliminary egress. And thus Reps moves, if not in reverse, then through reverting, incessantly, while addressing the formulaic script of narrative: “I began again” and “A story about” are employed as leitmotifs throughout “Exercise Against Empathy” and the book’s second section, “A Typology of Possible Biographies,” making way, after so much preparatory work on futurity, for the material past that characterizes the book’s final sequence, “Margaret, Are You Grieving?” and Sullivan’s lineated narrative of a young person learning to witness, to become a witness, in the specter of catastrophes both recent (9/11) and distant (the Atom Bomb, the Omaha Race Riot). Years ago, I imagined the role of the poet as a caretaker and poetry as a form of care, and no book of poems in recent memory has exemplified this role and function with more invention and intention than Sullivan’s astute, curious, and sensitive Reps, whose title cues “representative” and “repetition” but also “repertoire.” So the nature of Kendra’s methodology is less chronological composition than the itemized choreography of the list form stirred with the associative “jump-skip” kinetics of indexical disorder; so her materials include, in addition to the incomplete pentagram of air, fire, water, and earth: science, poetry, and fiction; so the story she tells is of the uncanny conditions required to produce plausibility. As the speaker observes in “A Typology of Possible Biographies”: “‘create’/and ‘remember’ need to happen / at the same time / for a story to feel real / to feel like a real memory” (“Becca”). In this book that “flow(s) / both ways,” Sullivan wants nothing more than the generative friction of a good correspondence, the warping of time and space upon receiving a letter from a distant location, from a close friend or a stranger with whom you’d like to be close, the inversion between sender and receiver, the hand-held erotics of running one’s fingers over the printed letters addressed to you in the guise of literature and flung across borders both psychic and spatial; but even more, for the writer to become the reader and the text to become a life, returning as the living tissue from which it whirled, the ecstatic hypostasis of “total temporal-sensorial / immersion in a shared reading list”:

A story about being inside
the same stories with other people
for a little while
A story about reading the same book
the main character of the book
you are reading is reading

about writing a book you want to read
about reading a book you wish you’d written
(“Becca”)

It is no coincidence that every poem of “A Typology of Possible Biographies” is named after somebody; Sullivan is interested about the nature of address, about the ways in which we are by and for one another, about the ways, too, in which an identification with might slip productively into identifying as any other, and how the act of reading is inseparable in this regard from the wish fulfillment offered by language’s re-inscribing of the self. “A story,” Sullivan writes, “about how telling a story / can alter the story or the storyteller” (“Lucy”). Sullivan, whose dream guide chapbook, Zero Point Dream Poems (Doublecross Press), was published late last year, is concerned with similarities and resemblances, with infections and imitations, but also with variations and discrepancies and the ambiguity between waking life and fantasy, the defects of figuration that make “religion” and “art history” one and the same; how a bridge between any two distant things might be built the more we hold up each to each, side by side.

If it is the iterative conditioning of the book’s preliminary “Exercises Against Empathy” that sets Reps’ aesthetic temperature, the collection’s closing act brings Sullivan’s roving wonderment and rigorous interrogations together as the culmination of vulnerability, risk, surrender, and yes, the imaginative displacement necessary for the labor of empathy. Named after the opening line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” “Margaret, Are You Grieving?” eschews intellectual calisthenics for the fragility of human testimony, echoing Hopkins’s muscular verse and intense feeling toward the projection of both the profoundly personal and incidentally ethereal moments of the speaker’s life at Ground Zero, in the aftermath of ruins and the genesis of an education, a life and a learning which is still ongoing. The archive is incomplete, but so, too, is every reading.

I began again. With the reminder (all repetition: a memory; all memories: a recital of forgetting) that the self is slippery and friable, and the price of representation is steep. Owing that we are running low on time, that culture can be costly, and that, as Sullivan’s speaker howls toward the very close of Reps, “we’re never/going to get/over this,” we might keep moving, we might keep going, we might keep living and learning and loving. Reps’ last lesson could be that the debt we owe to ourselves and one another is not, in fact, returnable or remunerative but rather reparative. That what we owe to one another is nothing less than the world in which we would like to one day live.