Notre Dame Review 26

Seth Abramson’s Poetics

A poetics of economy often results in staid lines, the severe compression wrangling emotion from the verse. Yet such compression can also produce a curious mixture of specificity and spaciousness, as in the poetry of Seth Abramson. In an eight-poem set profiled in the current issue of the Notre Dame Review, Abramson often opts for lines of medium length, and yet his decision to fragment and indent the structure implies a world beyond the lines no less important and visceral than the words presented to the reader.

Abramson’s form-focused structure colludes with the subject matter of “Bronx Flyweight in Drag,” the first poem in the series. The well-indented first line—“Finding your form”—bleeds into the next few: “is not a form of discipline. He held still / in the bulbs of light / while the shutters clattered & saw.” The words “form” and “still” are repeated often in this tight poem, as are the conceptions of light and absence of light. In “Bronx” and other poems, Abramson eschews the usage of “and” for the ampersand, and while the practice may appear mannered in the hands of less skilled poets, Abramson uses the symbol as rhetorical glue to the progression of the poem: The described subject of the poem is often shown in movement, yet in a shuttering movement:

He wanted to go down the alleyway because

it was dangerous,

& because he wanted his good side

to be briefly in the dark.

“Bronx” transitions well into “Ruin,” the second poem, which starts “& backwards go / the men into the garden.” As a poet, Abramson is clearly invested in action, and yet his tendency to repeat choice words within the same poem enables him to connect the first line to the last. “Ruin” uses “herding” to connect the backward-moving men of the second line with the “ponies” of the final two lines. Abramson is not being heavy-handed here: The reader drifts toward these meanings during re-reads. Abramson appears more interested in simply moving these poems forward, getting from start to finish with a moderate-amount of words, yet with an accumulative amount of emotion and sense. His economy produces a notable amount of feeling in “Prelude to Two-County Search,” where a simple image of a man holding a flower evolves into a meditation on death:

That florist

was old enough to expect

death. That flower was old enough

to be picked.

The duality of Abramson’s diction allows him to move from the mundane to the memorable, the specific to the universal. James Galvin has a comparable esthetic, and while the two writers often have different subject matter, Galvin’s poem “Fragments Written While Traveling through a Midwestern Heat Wave” is a worthwhile comparison to Abramson. “Fragments” contains five brief, evocative sections; it begins “However lonely we were before / Becomes unclear / In our next loneliness.” Galvin’s poem continues in wide swaths and breadths, pausing to set the splintered narrative in “The soil of Oklahoma.” The third section is particularly important: “Down here in the level world / Oil rigs make love / To the earth beneath the wheat.” In “Fragments,” Galvin is using the arid pastoral to connect big and small, earth and Heaven, farmer and machine. Here Abramson is a useful window into Galvin, and visa versa: spare, taut lines need not be narrow and vacuous. In fact, such lines are both individual and free, enabling poets to craft concrete images while sliding into wider metaphor.