Elizabeth Willis' collection of poems, The Human Abstract, was selected for publication by Ann Lauterbach in the 1994 National Poetry Series competition, which selects five manuscripts each year for publication by major publishing houses.
Prior to The Human Abstract, Willis published a chapbook, A/O (1991) and a book-length poem, Second Law (1993). The poems in The Human Abstract are like none I have read before. I hesitate to call it language poetry because to me, language poetry is all about the sound of the words together. You really need to read Willis' poetry on the page (often several times over) to really see what she's getting at.
The poems in Willis' collection will not appeal to many who consider themselves poetry lovers. These poems are not readily accessible; they require much work from the reader. However, that is not to say there aren't parts of this collection that would appeal to the narrative-minded. Willis' poems contain some lovely imagery, such as these lines excerpted from the poem "A Maiden":
No other lovely hero found the back
behind her secret form of symmetry
and
If watching is the manufacturer, and I lose you
what angel takes the place of a dowry
or distance in this leaf action?
Willis' poems are meant to be experienced on the page, as I alluded to earlier. Her line enjambments, use of parenthesis, and reliance on punctuation, italics and other visual cues do not translate when read aloud. A good example of this is the beginning to the poem "A/O":
flower is becoming the graph
"sound of light with
the mirror of their mouths continually
as effecting vision, lost in a contingent following shadow
inward
of the sun's collecting
no sum in their
bellies, we wanted to know
how much
With many of Willis' poems, each line must be valued on its own, for it often seems to have no relation to the lines above or below it. For some readers, it will be difficult making these leaps. But there is a strong audience for abstract poetry, and few abstract poets are ever recognized in big competitions by major publishing houses that are reluctant to take a chance on an author with such limited appeal. In this respect, Willis herself has made a great leap from smaller presses to the big-name Penguin label.
Thanks is due to Ann Lauterbach for selecting The Human Abstract in the National Poetry Series, and for giving the opportunity for exposure to a style of poetry that is little understood, yet so necessary to rounding out the literary world.
