Jennifer Moxley’s “Deceitful

Subjective”

Nerys Williams

The Line Post Apollo Press 2007

isbn: 978-0-942996-61-6 $15 us

It is always tempting to search for an emerging sense of continuity in a poet’s

work. Jennifer Moxley’s recent volume The Line initially offers intertextual echoes
of earlier poetry. Indeed the title poem from The Sense Record retrospectively
presents a surprising prologue to the space and duration of thought created in
The Line. Moxley comments in this poem on “The evil spirits of the waking life
/ spoil my clothes as I sleep / the body a fragile vehicle / its impotent words,
its decomposition.” As a form of poetic dream-work The Line interrogates the
perseverance of the recollected image, the intersection of perception, and
mediation and the relationship of agency or politics to the everyday. In the
sequence of forty-three prose sections the motivating consciousness of The
Line is frequently hesitant, doubting, delayed and at times punitive. Possibly
Moxley’s poetry has been read too readily as an exemplar of a reconditioned
lyric. Her startling volumes Imagination Verses and The Sense Record establish
certain correspondences with a tradition of 19th-century European and
American lyricism. But one must also acknowledge that the earlier written,
and recently published, volume Often Capital, with its drafted references to Rosa
Luxemburg, challenges this neat interpretation of Moxley’s poetics. In The Line
Moxley again shifts the tempo of her writing and challenges a reading which will
corroborate her work to a tight “neo-” or “circumspective” lyric definition. She
has commented that her relationship to lyricism is an expansive and enabling
one: “the lyric “I” is not a political universal, nor the guardian of the rights of
men, but neither is it the flaccid marker of an outdated bourgeois egotism.”
The Line is a quest, not necessarily for the right road lost, but for a complex
cartography of everyday life and its relationship to action, or as the case might
sometimes be, paralysis. In “The Wrong Turn” we are told “You’ve been taken
by a fast talking salesman and won’t see your money again.” “The Atrophy of
the Public Life” presents an acerbic commentary on E!-channel culture: “The
lifestyles of the rich are so fabulous! The destruction of the poetical line lives

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heavily on their hands, as on their swollen notion that we are always watching.”
The desperate and darkly comic linking of the culture industry and poetic
production alerts us that here is a work attempting to create connections,
activate debate, curiosity and incredulity at the slick madness which surrounds
the act of writing. Throughout The Line there is also a keen awareness of the
doubtful power of literature to activate change. In the title poem awareness
becomes a self-punishing gesture: “It is trying to push all this crap aside and
find the missing line. Nobody least of all the future, cares about the outcome
of the quest.”
Lyn Hejinian is one poet who has commented upon the tension between the
line and the sentence. Citing the line as a form of “perceptual rhythm” Hejinian
asserts that the line “is for me the standard (however variable) of meaning in
the poem, the primary unit of observation, and the measure of felt thought.”
Moxley’s poetry displays a considered skepticism towards what one could name
a phenomenological line. However, her work may have more in common with
Hejinian’s proposition that poetry “based on the line bears in it a high degree
of semantic mutability.” The mutability and momentum of The Line seems far
from the violence of parataxis. Occasionally the explorations appear as guilty
interrogations of the ego as in “The Lost Bird,” where the speaker states “I
tried to trap him in my cupped hands but whenever I did I felt guilty. I wanted
him to come willingly.” Or the narrative of “The Pitiful Ego”: “How could you be
so stupid as to mistake deferential attention for ravenous sexual desire.” The
ambitions for writing threaten to become textual reincarnation as in “The Line”:
“Find time in words. Replace yourself cell by letter, let being be the alphabetic
equation, immortality stay the name.”
A fear of textual or citational cannibalism is communicated in the volume.
The wonderfully self-aware, often archaic turns of phrase one associates with
Moxley’s poetry are monitored closely. In “The Local” there is a series of gnomic
snippets of advice: “Be warned: self-importance mimics progression but never
surpasses the smallest circle. The tunnel is long, the line invisible, and only
the resolute breakthrough. If you ask for meaningless echoes you will never
find your way.” The duration, momentum and patterning of the poetic line also
evokes enchanting possibilities. In “Possessed” Baudelaire’s Albatross is revived
to relieve the protagonist from a cringe-worthy domestic scene: “an albatross
lifts you by the scruff of your neck and pulls you magically through the roof.
‘Have you forgotten how to fly?' it asks in an exasperated tone.” The instability
of image-making creates linkages between birth and writing in “The Periodic
Table”: “She was wearing a dress that looked like a book but actually was a baby.”
Reading The Line is not unlike the first bristling encounter with Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
These sequential poems alert one to a pleasure and terror of textuality and a

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narrative of interrelated linkages and labyrinthine pursuit of conclusions already
lost. Moxley questions emphatically the nostalgia and amnesia of experiential
recounting, or what she lineates far more eloquently in “The Cover Up” as an
experience gone “except in the deceitful subjective.”

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