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Curvism by Will Hubbard
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011.
Reviewer:
Carrie Bennett
 

The prose poems in Will Hubbard's debut collection move with the same direction and purpose as a single Cy Twombly line on a canvas. And like a Twombly line, which both suggests language and denies it, Hubbard establishes a constellation of themes in the very first poem and immediately refuses them in the second. Curvism's brilliance is its sustained narrative denial. No matter how many thematic connections–and there are many–one might glean from Curvism, it teaches us in the first two pages not to expect an easy logic. Forget beginning, middle, end. Instead, like Twombly's circuitous line traveling across the canvas, these startling prose poems curve back on themselves, returning to the same ever-shifting topics. In fact, Hubbard directly references this type of artistic activity when he writes of William Yeats and how Yeats "saw everything as a series of concentric, downward winding spirals" (31).
Hubbard's collection doesn't want us to create a cohesive, fixed reality (narrative), but something closer to the fluidity of "winding spirals." The opening poem speaks directly to this impulse: "Once I carried an orchid, uncovered, many blocks through the snow. Inside, the frozen petals made clinking sounds, like a toast. I called my mother to see if there was anything I could do. No, no, she said, just let it happen" (1). The mother gives no advice, no formula to "fix" the frozen orchid petals; instead, she offers the speaker freedom from the traps of meaning, storytelling, and the traditional impulse of cause and effect found in most writing.
The second prose poem undoes, or derails, any potential cohesive familial narrative arch:
English poetry began in the hay. The disturbed dream of a stable-boy. It was mostly the same thing repeated over and over again. During the next five hundred years, the nude female body replaced the name of God Almighty and all it kennings[...] It wasn't until recently that we washed the soot from all the nude statuary and realized, Yes, marble does give the illusion of human skin. (2)

These two poems illuminate Hubbard's ability to construct a different way of experiencing "narrative": he offers the reader a seemingly autobiographical poem reminiscent of Lynn Hejinian's My Life and follows it with an ingenious academic micro-survey of English poetry. He toys with narrative while simultaneously annihilating it, a pattern repeated again and again throughout the book.
Among family and history/origins, winter, the body, romantic relationships, language, childhood, freedom, nature, and even the possibility of miracles are also repeated thematic lines drawn throughout. To watch how just one of these "objects" of consideration–the body–moves and transforms throughout the book is an incredible and rewarding feat. Early in his collection, Hubbard directly addresses the human figure when he writes,
NOTHING'S MORE BORING than the sight of your own body. Add a rash or bruise and you have something partially interesting. Seeing inside the body, what's close at hand but carefully hidden, would be a terror. The body of another takes it even further, so vile it's almost beautiful. (7)

During the course of Curvism the body becomes frozen orchid petals (1), the "nude female" (2), a lover (16-18, 27, 37), a frozen dogwood tree (25), sleeping children (29), nude actresses on magazine covers (33), a "small, diseased fish" (44), the composition ("body") of Greek texts prior to the "Sixth Century B.C." (46), a beautiful "woman dredged from the Seine" (50), Leonardo da Vinci as a baby (53), birds (60), among many other body-figures. In this way, the body becomes a single line spiraling through the collection.
Somehow, as obscure as the night sky, Hubbard's collection of prose poems creates their own beautiful set of constellations. In fact, a darkened sky remains a resonating image in this collection, and in the final pages is born into full significance:
To notice this particular time of day one must be detained. Quickly it becomes dark. Seeing it from a window, the chilling feeling of coherence does not come. Instead the desire underneath the desire to obtain comes to mimic love. You turn back to the house, to the people. It all happens in the blue dark light at day's end. (77)

Like the mother who deliberately offers nothing, "coherence does not come." What is left when we shed our acrobatic intellectual abilities? What becomes of language stripped of forced metaphorical connection? The unimaginably vast and mysterious "blue dark light at day's end." In other words, the observed object (night sky) rendered in all its bright autonomy, independent from both the speaker and the reader, something very close to Ezra Pound's belief in ABC of Reading of Chinese ideogram's ability to keep the object and the word used to describe the object connected without abstraction.
By the end of the collection, Hubbard achieves the difficult and tenuous combination of freedom and control. The final prose poem speaks to this drama:
I DREAMED A GOD was teaching me to paint clouds. He said, You paint them in black paint, and from the earth they appear white. (78)

Like the body, the clouds shift, forever changing in appearance. Life is not made up of stagnant experiences or fixed objects, and just as easily as the clouds are painted black they are seen as white. This give and take momentum moves the book to its own profound completion.
By mere chance I read the following passage from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five during the same time I was reading Curvism. It so perfectly encapsulates the nature of Hubbard's incredible book, and the experience of reading it, I want to end here. At this moment in Slaughterhouse-Five, the Traflamadorians explain to Billy how they read books:
There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time. (88)

I imagine if one could replace the night sky with all the pages of Curvism and read them simultaneously they would shine as brightly and brilliantly as the stars.