I first met Ruth Lepson when Alice James Books was publishing Dreaming in Color in 1980 and we were both working members of the collective. Her subsequent books include I Went Looking for You and Morphology, a collaboration with photographer Steve Crump, both from BlazeVOX. Now I get to catch up with ask anyone, her new collection from Pressed Wafer.
Lepson describes ask anyone as a record of her encounters with some of the musicians she’s taught at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music for the past twenty years, and with her colleague Steve Lacey, the soprano saxophonist who collaborated with Robert Creeley. The book is paired with Box Lunch, a recording you can listen to and order from Lepson’s website <http://ruthlepson.com/box-lunch>. I read the book first, then listened to the poems set to music, alert to the differences between the two experiences, which include hearing the poems in “my” voice and hearing Lepson read them.
One reason I enjoy Lepson’s work is that she does things I wouldn’t think of on my own. She’s interested in the interstitial spaces between language and music, between words loose in our head and words fixed on the page, and in the synergy between language and visual art. She’s influenced by Creeley—as much of a New England laconic as Frost is—in her concision, her rhythms, and her deployment of rhyme as occasional punctuation.
The more I listen to Box Lunch, the more I’m drawn in to the suspense of language. This is especially true in pieces like “relaxed.” Reading, I’m impatient; although I’ve told students that short lines slow a poem, I tend to rush through the one-word lines. Listening, I hear something new—the sound play between “as/damask” and “ask/anyone;” the possible meanings among “it/was/beige/day,” “it was beige/ day//third/ the fourth,” and “the/fourth/one//came saw.” The words are suspended in music, and I wonder what will come next in a way I don’t when I see the poem’s shape before me on paper. I also admire the the verbal/musical counterpoint in “we are small” and the emotional tensions of “the boy in the special crib.”
ask anyone includes love poems, angry poems like “i hate it” and those about the degradation of our planet. Among those not set to music are elegies for Creeley and Larry Eigner, members of Lepson’s artistic family tree. Like the painter in “the painter’s turning his head,” Lepson believes that “in talk in art two things going on//two languages one of love and one of noticing//each a pleasure they happen together.”