American Book Review

The title of Mark Weiss's full-length poetic sequence immediately conjures up associations with the transformations of dance rhythms by the likes of Bach and Handel, wherein popular musical idioms are subjected to harmonic variation, contrapuntal voicings, and other techniques of sublimation/etherealization. As with these Baroque composers, albeit in words, Weiss explores the multiple possibilities and ramifications of the languages of dance within that most Terpsichorean of verbal forms: poetry. Johan Huizinga's analysis in Homo Ludens (1938) of dance as "a particular and particularly perfect form of playing" and poetry's affinity with play as "apparent in the structure of creative imagination itself" is especially relevant to Weiss's project, where (to quote Huizinga again) "the words themselves lift the poem, in part at least, out of pure play into the sphere of ideation and judgment."

Within that sphere, one might think back to Ezra Pound's "dance of the intellect among words," which certainly holds validity here—Weiss notes "the dance of words / as fixed as a minuet"—but to my mind, the precursor text of which A Suite of Dances is an extension is William Carlos Williams's "Desert Music": "How shall we get said what must be said? // … // Only the counted poem, to an exact measure: / to imitate, not to copy nature, not / to copy nature // NOT, prostrate, to copy nature / but a dance!" Effectively challenging Huizinga's declaration that "music never leaves the play-sphere," Weiss tips his hat to Williams with a subversive alteration of one of the older poet's most often-quoted observations: "No ideas / but in music / No music / but in things." And this book dances to the ever-changing music of/in things, memories, encounters, life itself in all its precarious wonder: "So, in the larger space / as well, and dance, and dance."

A Suite of Dances consists of twenty-seven sections, each composed of an [End Page 137] individual title and numerous separately titled short poems—some as brief as a single word—indented from the "primary" (left-aligned) poem to which they are in a way counter-statements or variations, even at times digressions. What stands out immediately is Weiss's breadth of perception: his noticings often take the form of flashes and glimmers, signs of someone always involved with his surroundings and whose consciousness actively interacts with and processes that which befalls and that which is the case. Moments of quasi-Wittgensteinian philosophical speculation ("What do we mean by / this what we mean by / this thisness") keep company with verbal pratfalls, assonances and wordplay that at times are deliberately childlike, commonplaces turned inside out ("The good shepherd guards his flock / then skins and eats it"), aphoristic observations, lyrical meditations on landscape ("Where a wave crests / fantastic reflections. / The crest of a wave. / The light / of a waning moon"), the behavior of dogs (the most prominent animal presence in the book)—perceptions gleaned from the onrushing stream of life. Whereas Pound in his old age lamented that he could not make his poetic project cohere, Weiss exuberantly embraces such incoherence. At the same time, the seemingly casual, tossed-off quality of much of the book can mislead the superficial reader. The poet registers dissonance, ranges of emotion, the shifting light of landscapes, all manner of non-meanings and discontinuities, insofar as these reflect his own evanescence ("I'm here, I thought / for as long as") and emphasize the illusory nature of any quest to impose a single reading on both internal and external realities and the frequently random and uncertain modes and paths of their interweavings.

Personal memories of other places and times appear, as are, with occasional irreverence, myths of all provenances and slyly altered snatches from the repertory of English-language poetry ("Take oh take your teeth away," "The lover and his loss," "Chopping and slicing we lay waste our powers"), but they always return to the quotidian context from which they emerge—daily life becomes...