Jena Osman, A VERY LARGE ARRAY: Selected Poems

Daba Publishers, NY 2023

Jena Osman, A Very Large Array, 2023, cover

Aesthetically varied and wide-ranging, A Very Large Array is an impressive intellectual tome culled from thirty years’ of Jena Osman’s investigations of language. Beautifully-designed, the  volume fully lives up to the ambitious claim of its title. Like the coordinated installation of more than two dozen telescopes in the New Mexico landscape which the title references, this selection provides a coherent vision by aggregating multiple points of view around a central argument.

The book is organized into five “arrays” or thematic sections: History, News, Science, Supreme Court, and Theater. Under each of these rubrics, Osman presents pieces that are firmly grounded in material from archives, historical papers, law cases, scripts, texts from chemistry, and journalistic reports. These provide the source materials from which she extracts language for composition, citation, and commentary. Her approach embodies the critical possibility of poetics—to show the character and operation of language in a place and time. These are not texts about language, but works in language that are acutely focused on how verbal expression embodies thought and has impact in the world in highly structured ways.

Because Osman’s sources are from domains where language is in service to public records, consensual knowledge production, or, as in the case of law, instrumental use it is frequently performative. She reworks this material with a combination of intellectual rigor and imaginative intervention. That description runs the risk of making the approach sound cheerless and didactic, but, in fact, the result is frequently both edgy and playful in its transformative effects. By exposing the workings of language, she brings into focus its material richness and historical character, showing how formal features, specialized vocabulary, stylistic conventions are the way language produces meaning. Her central question is never “what are the works about?” but “how are they about?”—or to put it pedantically, how their work creates the “about-ness” of the text.

As she weaves together quotations, paraphrase, and commentaries, Osman is not merely glossing the source documents. Nor is she doing wholesale appropriation in the manner of (now exhausted) conceptual writing. Instead, she reworks the material she is extracting, taking the raw ore of mined texts into poetic productions, sometimes blurring the line between citation and composition. For instance, “An Array of History,” begins with the piece, “Target” in six short sections of which this is one:

LEAFLET I

reward for information

aerial dissemination and arc light operations

the grief and pain of your death

a dog of nomads, chained at the heel

arty artillery

playing chess connects with the target

we know where you are hiding

person to person without distortion

unless physically altered

unexploded ordinance can kill! do not touch! Help us keep

            you safe!

you are our targets

there is no reason to be alarmed. For your own safety,

            stay away!

Clearly this is not personal language, but official language. Originally she composed this text as a libretto (performed at the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall on October 10, 2004) using language from “leaflets dropped on Afghanistan after 9/11.” [403] By extracting, editing, reconfiguring these excerpts, she makes them into meta-critical statements about propagandistic language. We see the way the first-person plural and second person are used to create relations of power in a conflict situation. Of course, Osman massages the materials as well.. The phrase “arty artillery” was probably not present as a part of a US Armed Forces text, nor, perhaps, was “a dog of nomads, chained at the heel.” But by inserting these shifts in the appropriated phrases, Osman sharpens the distinction between one statement and the next, asking us to reflect on which excerpts are actual quotes and which are deformations of the source text. These acts of linguistic rework are the classic moves of the avant-garde, with its dedication to subverting the normative modes of syntax to alter habits of thought. And that is exactly what this work does repeatedly.

            The “History” section begins with “The Joker,” a piece on the sugar trade and its regulation, interspersing various historical facts with a description of curious comic figures across history. The piece includes the history of the “cake-walk” in enslaved people, comments about the activities of Mummers whose parade in Osman’s hometown of Philadelphia has a long history, and biases against foreign speech. She includes references to literary works of Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, as well as sources for the Joker character in Batman. Erudite and tight, the paragraphs are vivid, dense with suggestive information, all culled from various sources and put into compact prose. These are fascinating and highly readable bits. We find out, for instance, that The Man Who Laughs, Hugo’s novel about a court jester, was made into a Hollywood film starring Konrad Veidt, a German actor who had been in one of the most famous German Expressionist films ever produced, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Paul Leni. Described by Osman, succinctly, “the film was made in a decidedly Expressionist style—a style where the interior regions of the psyche are made concrete by the physical set. The outside is the inside.” [22] Osman’s critical facility and clarity of expression make her scholarship seem effortless.  

            Other projects in the History section include a study of “The Franklin Party,” a failed and fatal expedition to the Arctic, a tour of the Financial District in New York by way of maps and place names, a review of public statues of (armed) historical figures in Philadelphia, and a fascinating history of the way shares in the Athenaeum, also in Philadelphia, have passed from owner to owner since they were first sold in 1815. The associations Osman calls forth in her writing are wide-ranging, as, for example, this quote from a text by Gertrude Stein in the introduction to the just-mentioned “Genealogy of Shares”: “Do you see any connection between yes and yesterday. I will repeat this, do you see any connection between yes and yesterday.” Pulled from Osman’s broad knowledge base, these elements are an essential feature of The Very Large Array, an element that makes the book so unique. The researched materials provide a fretwork of creative thought as Osman constantly generates new constructs through the combination of these cited materials and her own poetic texts.

            Each section and sub-section would reward its own close reading. “An Array of News” begins with “Dead Text” which itself begins with a paragraph about [Heinrich von] Kleist, the German writer whose engagements with chance, misinformation, and misfortune, saturated his works with uncertainty. Then this becomes a meditation on violence and witnessing within the public sphere.

“Starred Together” is a short dense provocation to consider the intersections of optical and celestial phenomena in psychic and cosmological space: “A glance hits an object or person and pins it down like a star.” Further on, “A systematic assemblage: the Pleiades. The means by which people who have nothing, make something of it.”

 “Tacit Captions” contains caption texts for photographs (no images are present) identified only by a short phrase: “US Marine Corps Sniper,” or “In Aleppo”. These are followed by poetic reflections which are also replete with references and concretely suggestive phrases. 

            “An Array of Science” begins with a long work, “The Periodic Table As Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist” which is a curious and thorough “reading” of, precisely, the periodic table. But the readings begin with the chemical names (letters) in each column read downward beginning with H (Hydrogen) through six other chemicals to arrive at Fr (Francium). The designating letters (e.g. “Na” for sodium) are used to generate a second word as if in some revelation of the “true” meaning or identity of the chemical. For example, “Na, Sodium to Narcotics” reads like a linguistic version of a chemical transformation. The first line “the youth was his own headache remedy” and so on. [133] The facts and images in these compact texts make a language-cabinet of curiosities, droll and disconnected, but specific in each instance. What, for instance, is “a monad metal” or “petalite recovered from brines” [133]?   

            One long section titled “Popular Science” deals with phrenology and its connection with various documents, diagrams, famous figures and the practice of reading the shape of the skull. Another study focuses on William Wagner’s curiously idiosyncratic museum in Philadelphia, the showcase of his own collections of natural objects. Here Osman’s rhetoric shifts to commentary as poetic practice, in lines like these at the end of “System of Display”: “I might want symbiotic bargains.” [255] This section ends, “You might want all of the surface area, all of the sun.” Again, a shift of first to second person plays with subject positions produced in the text. Science has become, as throughout, both inspiration and source, language matter and poetic material.

            While all the works have a trenchant edge, the section titled “Supreme Court Array” feels particularly poignant and disturbing. Osman makes us keenly, unflinchingly aware of the extent to which the use of language becomes an instrument of legal oppression through debate that actually undermines ethical values using interpretations that become precedent. The first piece in this section, “Dissent and the Hydra” begins “We turn our collars up against the chill of raw judicial power” Indeed. Her title borrows from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s characterization of the work of the court to battle “this vile infection” in a decision where Justice Alito suggested “we must ask what the Fourteenth Amendment means by the term ‘liberty’.” [258] This is exegesis put to negative effect. The piece that follows is a long examination of the language of Citizens United. The work has a truly chilling effect, particularly as in this election cycle we are confronted with its impact and realities. Poetics becomes a means of calling these practices to our attention, with the maximum critical edge Osman can bring to bear.

            How did Osman come to know so many things? Have so broad an acquaintance with so many areas of knowledge? These are works that can’t be faked with shortcuts, created in a few hours’ time, or manufactured from a scan of this or that text. Each reflects a deep dive and serious pursuit, and then embodies a spirit of generosity towards the reader, sharing insight and information. Reading this book, which never becomes repetitive or formulaic, felt like having a conversation with a friendly polymath whose eclectic command of knowledge on a surprising range of subjects is always piquing one’s interest. But this is also a deeply poetic work, crafted to a high degree, skillfully edited, organized, and presented.

            Osman’s work has parallels in works like Susan Howe’s A Bibliography of the King’s Book or Eikon Basilike (1993) or Rosmarie Waldrop’s A Key into the Language of America (1994), but it also reminds me of the work of W.G. Sebald in the way the prose weaves topics and associations together. Osman’s writing is more porous than Howe’s, and allows more ready access, and more varied than Waldrop’s. Still, the work bears the imprint of Osman’s formation within the orbit of Language Poets (including personal/professional associations with both Howe and Waldrop) for whom attention to language as material was a tenet of belief informed by their acquaintance with Russian Formalist theory—Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, and others. These figures were crucial to the formulation of an avant-garde strategy that focused on how the ideological activity of language was forged within its normative structures and syntax. The point of poetics was not to depict or reference politics, but to enact it. Whether one can continue to subscribe to such beliefs in this moment is a matter for debate across a range of partisan positions, but that language is the site and instrument of ideology is incontrovertible. Osman’s work, without the least hint of didacticism, makes that point—broadly, encompassing knowledge production and presentation across human domains. In the current climate, to read work that addresses itself to such intellectual inquiry provides a welcome infusion of non-formulaic thought.

One of the strengths of Osman’s poetry is that it is so clearly a personal voice­–not the lyric voice of moments of epiphany, or the trendy “me-poetry” of identity aesthetics—but personal because it is so clearly positioned, situated, in historical, geographic, and cultural circumstances. Osman speaks from not about her situation, and that comes through in the descriptions of locations in Philadelphia, New York, and the range of references which, if analyzed across her text, would map a certain demographic in terms of education, class, gender, and experience.

 I love the metaphor as well as the specificity of “A Very Large Array.” In my reading, these selected works remain distinct, the collection is refractive and multi-faceted, rather than singular in their outlook. But they are unified by their point of view, its unique, razor-sharp, and relentlessly observed perspective on language in our culture and times. So rare.

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