‘Sentences and Rain’ A Celebration of the Pleasures of Language

“Sentences and Rain,” American poet Elaine Equi’s latest collection, is, at 88 pages, home to nearly that many poems: some 70-odd cerebral delicacies. In these poems, Equi tackles just as numerous a diversity of subjects. From a delivery truck to a George Harrison song to a friend’s library to a discussion of the function of diminutive suffixes, she turns her incisiveness and eye for wry observation onto an array of varied topics. “Sentences and Rain” is, on the whole, delightfully witty and playful, beautifully and finely composed, and formally experimental and inventive. The poems are short and sweet, with quick, nimble lines and sharp discrete visual snapshots.

The title of the collection is also an apt description of Equi’s style: Her poems are frequently composed of long sentences that, divided by line breaks, drip and drizzle down the page, forming little droplets of imagery. Her writing is both fluid and agile; there’s a free-flowing quality to it but also a sense of composed wit. As she puts it in the titular poem, “The sentences / previously / too dry / now bend / and reach / towards meaning.”

Equi’s collection is an unabashed celebration of the pleasures of language. Her poems play with wit and puns, unexpected lingual connections between seemingly dissimilar entities, and amusing insights into the workings of language. Some poems draw on everyday experiences, but remake them in . An especially funny highlight is a romp entitled “Cardboard Figures in a Landscape,” which takes as its subject “a truck / full of boxes…getting jostled, / sliding around / on top of each other” and leads exactly where one would expect: “sex between boxes.” Others feature incisive observations of contemporary life. In “Games of Medieval Sadness” she writes, “[There is] a dungeon / with my name on it. / When I wish to be chastised, / I need only log in.” Others are far more abstract in subject matter, the most notable of which include “In Black and White,” an evocative, sensual celebration of that color scheme, and “Ode to Distraction,” a darkly funny and acutely insightful exploration of inattention which opens, “Give me something / not to pay attention to / and I’m happy.” While some of her poems address the subject of language directly—including “If I Have Just One Word,” on the variety and power of language, and “Yo y Tu,” a beautiful, intimate meditation on the significance of the informal you in Spanish and lack thereof in English—all of her poems are marked by the serious delight she seems to take in language.

In the collection, Equi writes about language both explicitly—she is one of few who can make discussions of grammatical forms captivating and beautiful—and implicitly, as many of her poems seem to stem from little language games and experiments. The collection includes, among others, poems that only contain words spelled with certain letters, poems composed of artfully arranged lists of titles, poems entirely made up of lines borrowed from other poets’ poems, and a three-part poem inspired by words played in a game of Scrabble. Of these poems, one particular delight is “Literary Lipsticks,” which simply lists titles of and lines from other poems that could double as lipstick colors, such as “I Have Eaten the Plums” and “Frost at Midnight.” Another is the aforementioned Scrabble poem, “Scrabble with the Illuminati,” one section of which goes: “Owner / axes / plans / for / banal / lemon / ants / advent / event.” Not all of these more experimental poems are as whimsical or as light. In “A Medium-Rare Serenade,” an epithalamium poem dedicated to Equi’s niece and nephew-in-law, she only uses words that are spelled from the letters in their names. In this way, Equi tries to tease out the couple’s future—the poem is full of hopes and predictions for the couple as well as little pieces of wisdom and advice. It is an exquisite, moving poem, a triumph of experimental form.

What keeps this playful innovativeness from devolving into mere experimentation for experimentation’s sake is that Equi takes her play and her poetry seriously, hitching her humor and wit to beauty and insight. She is a poet of an incredible dynamic range, and her poems range from lighthearted to serious, sometimes several modes being activated in a single poem. This range and variety seems central to Equi’s poetic vision. In a poem entitled “Zukofsky Revision,” which references Louis Zukofsky, one of the founders of the 1930s school of Objectivist poetry, she updates his formulation of poetry as an “An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music” with what she calls her “corollary”—“Upper limit thought / Lower limit noise.” Clearly, to Equi poetry is something integrative, in multiple senses of the word. Interestingly, she reverses Zukofsky’s syntactical structure, as if to emphasize a sort of opposite parallelism. She reformulates his “upper limit” music as her “lower limit” noise, and his “lower limit” speech as her “upper limit” thought. If to Zukofksy poetry can be conceived of as a sum total of all the little variations of expression from speech to music, to Equi poetry is that sum over the range from noise to thought. “Noise” references the purely sonic properties of language. “Thought,” on the other hand, implies meaning and ideas conveyed. This is where noise is the statistical scatter, compared to thought or premeditated intent.

To Equi, poetry encompasses everything imaginable in the physical universe. It leaps from pure sound to pure thought, from the seemingly random scatter of the world to the most thought out, internally composed verse. From reading Equi’s powerful, beautiful poetry, it is clear that her definition holds true.

—Staff writer Amy J. Cohn can be reached at amy.cohn@thecrimson.com.