Pleiades: Literature in Context

1. The cerebrospinal nerves are forty-three in number.¹

2. In relation with cerebrospinal nerves are two rows of central ganglia, also joined to each other by vertical strands of nerve fibers so as to constitute a pair of knotted cords, the sympathetic trunks, which reach from the base of the skull to the coccyx.²

3. A brief google search of the word genius produces a dictionary definition which reads, "exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability." It offers the following sentence an example of the word genius in use:

4. she was a teacher of genius.

5. Why teacher? Why not genius, she?

6. Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's debut full-length collection A Wake with Nine Shades is movement. A honed, precise, musculature baring "the state of the soul's weather" within its pages:

7. Midway through our night's sleep
I woke to find the dream lost
My body shaken from it—salt
\ /

8.

Mid through a moonless wayfaring
Thought unrelenting
\ /

9. Martha Graham (a genius choreographer credited with giving dance a new depth as a vehicle for the intense and forceful expression of primal emotions) contends "Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it."

10. In her essay "The Ordinary Woman Theory" novelist Caitlin Horrocks writes, "a recent request on Twitter for suggestions of movies about female geniuses was answered with a host of dubious nominations: Moana (fictional, child) Matilda (fictional, child) Captain Marvel (fictional, childless). [Parentheticals, mine.]

11. Horrocks continues, "I don't think anyone would respond to a query for movies about male geniuses by recommending Harry Potter. They'd respond with biopics about tortured geniuses, because that is a recognized genre, and the genre is male.

12. The 'great man' narrative, whether biographical or fictional, is a story about exceptionalism, not connection. I realized partway through writing The Vexations that I am less interested in the pole stars than in the constellations, and in the dark spaces between the lights." [Emphasis mine.]

13. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
           mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
           ché la diritta via era smarrita.³ [End Page 263]

14. Caroline Bergvall's VIA is a multimedia art installation based on 47 translations of the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, with the 48^th variation composed by Ciaran Maher as a fractal structure from the voice recording.

15. Midway upon the journey of our life
           I found myself within a forest dark,
           For the straightforward path had been lost,⁴

16. Steinorth depicts a speaker midway through the journey of her life. Confronted by grief, death, loss, accident, and violence, the speaker gestures over and over again, the opening poem alluding to the Inferno in varying, irregular stanzas set apart by blank space and unusual punctuation—slashes and backslashes.

17.

"At the midpoint of the night we were allotted
I found myself in dark apartment
\ / /"

18. There is a fluid turbulence at the center of this collection. This core is both figurative and literal. The poem "Wake: A sleep in Forty-Something Winks" (like the cerebrospinal nervous system) interconnects the entire work in relation to recurring italicized "winks." Each "wink" is an untitled sequence of three to five stanzas, never appearing longer than one page. The stanzas are set apart by unusual punctuation, separated by varying sequences of slashes and backslashes—with forty-one stanzas in all—like vertebrae.

19. The word fractal produces a dictionary definition which reads:

a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation.

20. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
           What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
           Which in the very thought renews the fear.⁵

21. From Latin "fract"-broken.

22.

"What was me then I knew
Though I did not mean to
\ /"

23. In her autobiography Blood Memory Martha Graham writes, "But the path to the paradise of achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths."

24.

"Halfway in a mental ward
Half across a dirty floor
If you have never driven your children drunk
\ /"

25. …these pulses interspersed throughout the collection, activate movement and respond to pain. They lend structural integrity to the book's astonishing visual appearance on the page, which can be [End Page 264] partly chaotic, as in crystal growth, as in galaxy formation, as in ganglia, as in "In Th e Shower" which opens:

26. "I am brave when I say he shot himself
braver/not so brave as him
—scratch that—"

27. Center justified with irregular stanzas, unconventional punctation, and fragmented associations, "In Th e Shower" exemplifies the emotional intensity which reverberates throughout the collection:

28.

29. ⁶

A. a fractal formation cell with branched processes

B. a galaxy Spider cell with unbranched processes

30. As waking life fragments, the speaker resists—exerting agency through seduction, wit and wordplay. Th ese elements are at their most vibrant in "A Trist Little Tryst w/ R. Frost, select billets-doux" a disturbingly playful exploration of a speaker "flirting with crisis. More or less" in fractaled epistolary form:

31. Dear RF,
I love your many layers, but you keep so buttoned up—
You needn't always come so composed.
GenSS

Dear Genesis,
Better for you to undo me,
than to come undone.
Yours/ F
/\ /\ /\

32. Th e tension between circumstance and agency, the gravitational force of external realities which exacerbate chaos (depression, nightmare) and the speaker's circular movement—as the book's dedication reads—"through and up—"

33.

The small clear area at the point of exit of the axon in some cell types is termed the cone of origin.⁷ [End Page 265]

34. …contain peculiar angular granules. Th ese granules disappear (chromatolysis) during fatigue or after prolonged stimulation of the nerve fibers connected with the cells. Th ey are supposed to represent a store of nervous energy, and in various mental diseases are deficient or absent.⁸

35. Steinorth's debut exacts the speaker's insomniac ruminations via visual gestures. Excerpted from her poem "A Door" for instance:

36.

37. Like a sliver of light which appears between a door and a wall in a dark room where upon the other side is bright, this sliver of text makes a shaded column framed on either side by blank space. In other words, the poem illustrates the impulse of which it speaks aloud. Clarity results from the way Steinorth is able to contain her urgent emotional registers within the visual gestures of the poems as they are represented on the page.

38. ⁹

"In dark–the middle sleep/—from sleep—/ twisting"¹⁰

39. Sylvia Plath (two children, genius, tortured). [Suggestion added, mine.]

40. Mother. Genius. Interconnectedness. Choose two—

41. Most astonishing—Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say

42. these poems persist in their reverence for waking—

43. as twisted as that wake may be (choose three). [End Page 266]