In the final lines of “Motet for Mom,” Ruth Lepson asks her mother, “What do you think about?” Her mother responds, “Everything that happens at that moment.” It’s a good description of Lepson’s perspective and focus throughout on the way: new and selected poems. As the introduction to her recent reading at the Grolier Bookstore notes, her poems are enactments of consciousness. Little escapes her attentive eye and ear, and what she registers while in the moment often surprises, enlightens, and delights.
On the way includes work from five decades, beginning with her first collection from Alice James Books, Dreaming in Color. Lepson’s debut contains the sideways angle of vision that will serve her well through a long career. “Living with People” begins, “Talking is something./And tables, talking at tables./Eating and painting and what walls./What are they asking./What am I looking at.//…//I’m looking at the eyes/that don’t look at me.” With great economy, Lepson sketches a social scene–perhaps in an artist’s studio?–as one perception follows another, with the lack of question marks at the end of lines 4 and 5 reinforcing the sense of unmediated experience. A sharp surprise wrapped in animated conversation, the “eyes/that don’t look at me” are, Lepson reveals, one of the consequences of “Living with People.”
Selections from Morphology, a collection of untitled prose poems based on dreams and photographs by both the author and Rusty Crump (this edition includes the poems only), tilt in a different way . “The snow turns musical like the scroll on a player piano,” Lepson writes, as object and mood shift shape and purpose. A man recites “one of my dream poems–‘dream’s a café’–to me in my dream, approvingly–I forget this until, the next night, I start to sleep & wake with a start.” I don’t find a poem with such a title in Lepson’s collections; poetry remains a dream within a dream with power to confound, the way “start” can style both a beginning and an end.
Both Morphology and ask anyone–a collaboration with musicians who were students and colleagues (Lepson has been poet-in-resident at the New England Conservatory of Music for over 25 years) –express Lepson’s interest in ekphrasis. Her poems are less descriptions, though, than active habitations of the art she explores. A poem dedicated to the memory of musician Steve Lacy, a soprano saxophonist who collaborated with Robert Creeley, punctuates her mourning with sax-like plosives beginning with “sp”: “not a sprinkler or even a sprig… sphinx spellbound or a sphere no more spells spats or chaps or spasm…” The final section of “3 dufy woodcuts, written after Dufy’s “The Cat,” reads: “how crowded the world is/ I’m almost wearing a lampshade on my head/ but this ain’t no party/ since I never get to go outside never ever.” The woodcut’s details–flowers in a vase, and a flowery tablecloth–emphasize for Lepson what’s absent, rather than present, in an otherwise mute creature’s life.
Lepson can animate the natural world in pastorals that offer a similar mix of imagery and epiphany. “Swampscott in a Warm December,” from I Went Looking for You, begins, “Ocean’s a huge brain:/light thoughts, gray thoughts, trillions/arriving, veering off–none the truth,” and ends “Like a pancake, spreading/across a pan, the sea sizzles at its edge.” In between grieves the stanza, “How should I treat my mother?/ Like a piece of glass,/ God says silently.” The ocean’s both a brain and a pancake; sounds repeat–“thoughts/thoughts/off/truth;” “piece/glass”–to sidle up against ideas that can be lies, painful as a sharp fragment, and silent.
Lepson’s most recent poems continue her curiosity toward different arts blending in different ways. Her long poem “Calling All Cats,” dedicated to Cecil Taylor, includes the story of Inanna’s descent to the netherworld, inscribed on “broken clay cuneiform tablets” like “…broken marble steps,/Broken strands of DNA.” Time collapses in her hands like Zeno’s arrow, never arriving at its target: “how the hi-hat divides time,/how the cymbal divides time,/…/I mean, it becomes infinite.” “An ant running as fast as it can across the windowsill–and you don’t think it has rhythm?” Lepson asks, thanking Inanna, “progenitor of all the gods, who has given every living thing its vibration.” The poem wrestles with an attempt to structure time–“Once I was/Then I was/Then I became/Then I am/Then I will/Then I won’t”–and concludes with the art she practices: “And in a new sentence, a calm,/A hearing, a way through.” Lepson can’t solve the conundrum of time; her work carries the pulse of simultaneity through a medium that must be experienced in increments. But this paradox has energized her body of work for decades, and the title on the way suggests that readers will enjoy more to come. Many thanks to Ben Mazer for selecting, and Mad Hat Press for publishing, this fine collection.