West Tisbury poet and MVTimes staffer Patrick Phillips has produced an experimental and original work in his new book “we plié.” While the French term “plié” is familiar to dancers as a position in which the knees are bent outward, Mr. Phillips uses it primarily to mean “folded” or “bent.” Both uses of the word fit well to introduce his new long poem.
“Because the book was written over 12 years, within the same conceit, whether noticeable or not it is a life folded, a life ‘and body’ danced — and hence ‘plié,’” the poet said in a recent email.
Arranged in a five-section series of 20 connected folds or one long verse, “we plié” fractures conventional language use, giving words, phrases, and even sentences entirely new meanings. Sometimes two words are united, as in “isto” and “tooefficient.” Other times individual words are reduced to half, as in “—plete,” or elided, as in “wrk.” In any case, the poet immerses the reader in an often playful flood of language with serious underlying meanings, a little reminiscent of Jamaican-American poet Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen.”
As Mr. Phillips explains, “Of course “we plié” is a pun or play on words. A hope is that in the cultural contest of identity (where there is not one ‘we’), the pun might leaven any contempt.” In “truisms,” the book’s first section, words like “bitty” and “fullering” demand that the reader pay close attention to the context in which the poet is crafting each line.
Images often surprise the reader with their novelty, so that lips become “water’s thin molds.” The poet also plays with punctuation. Periods, signaling full stops, play a more active role in communication than in more traditional poetry. For instance, the line “bubbles begin. begin.” gains a new emphasis through period use as well as repetition. Occasionally emerging from the rich thicket of language, a single short sentence will stun the reader into fresh understanding, as does “I love you” in the section titled “foldable hats.” Line breaks and indentations as well as spaces help inform the message, where in the third section’s “we both and” introduces war, then indents the following lines “made to think made to/remember again?” With its allusions to the natural world, the section “we both and” may be the most accessible section of “we plié.”
In an example of how one section “folds” into another, “life giving life” continues the references to the natural world used in the previous section. The final section of “we plié” welcomes the reader as “we” and slips into couplets and quatrains as well as split lines. Repetitions beginning several lines, like “what than” and “forget” usher the reader toward a union of ideas:
one kiss lets life unfold—
nowhere now here.
my punctualis my sun day.
Throughout, Mr. Phillips challenges the reader to explore a complex and often enigmatic collection of meanings, “’til everyday thing’s done.”
For more information, visit roofbooks.com or patrickrphillips.com.