Review: Jim Leftwich’s “Public Displays of Affection”
Daniel Barbiero
August 2023
Jim Leftwich: Public Displays of Affection
Luna Bisonte Productions 2023
A truth that poetry is uniquely positioned to capture is the truth of contingency. That truth consists in the intuition that each moment is an aggregate of thought, sense perception, affect, and imagination. And language as well. Words are woven into each moment along a spectrum of the possibilities they afford as they capture, miss, idealize, distort, silently underwrite, bring insight to, and finally express the way we are in the world and the world is in us at any given time. Jim Leftwich’s Public Displays of Affection, a generous volume of poems written while Leftwich was traveling through the US West Coast in 2022 and 2023, takes this truth as its starting point.
The poems here are a reflection of Leftwich’s encounters with the places he passed through. In some of them, we get clear allusions to the physical locations and features he experienced. Here, for example, is a meditation occasioned by being in the presence of the Hoh River, a water course that runs to the Pacific Ocean from the Hoh Glacier in Washington State’s Olympic Mountains:
…Time
Is real. The present, like
The Hoh River, flowing in
Front of me “as we speak.”
Experience is as real as
Thinking. I think I participate
In the affairs of my mind.
My own mind? Is that right?
The Hoh River. Google it.
What Leftwich gives us here isn’t a narrative travelogue or a catalogue of the plants, animals, and geologies of those places – the in-itself otherness of the external facts of which they’re composed — but rather a record of how the specifics of place engage the mind confronting them, and how that mind responds in time and through time. Leftwich dissects the present moment as consisting in a combination of the immediate sensual experience of the river flowing in front of him with the flow of thought accompanying that sensual experience—with an acknowledgment that the latter has an immediacy in its own right, and one with as much legitimacy as the ostensibly more direct mode of sense perception. At the same time, the passage has a wry coda in the command to “Google it” – as if to say that the scene experienced through the senses and mind somehow isn’t really real until it’s legitimized by having been indexed and served up by an internet search engine.
Inextricably bound up with perception and thought is language. Language, no less than locality, is at the center of Public Displays of Affection. Throughout the book, Leftwich foregrounds language as an element intimately embedded in and consequently inseparable from the unitary sense of what it is like to be somewhere, rather than an alien force brought in from outside:
Under the Eternal Sky
Until the Internal Sky
Unknown maybe useful
emptiness of the
Unending
splotches
Against
a Terminal Sky
In these few lines Leftwich provides us with the sketch of a multi-modal experience of being outdoors. The sky is characterized through the rhyme-based wordplay of internal/eternal – a kind of existentially ironic pun if we consider “internal” as pertaining to the necessarily limited inner life of ourselves as finite beings, in contrast to the seemingly “eternal” duration of the physical universe as emblematized by the expanse of the sky.
Leftwich’s special interest is in the supra-semantic relationships pervading language. As André Breton pointed out, words have secret affinities; they can relate to each other based on something other than their conventional meanings or their uses in practical discourse. Through their sounds, their shapes, their rhythms, their mutually overlapping, extra-linguistic associations, and so forth, they can assemble themselves – or allow themselves to be assembled – into imaginative texts. Leftwich demonstrates how this works throughout Public Displays of Affection. Sound in particular is prominent as his organizing principle of choice. Take, for instance, this passage:
bad poem bald poem braided
poem mad poem clad poem
clay poem play poem praying
poem radiant poem dented
scratch and dent demented
What is notable here is not only the internal rhyme scheme built on recurring vowels and repeated words, but the way staccato monosyllables accumulate in a mass of abrupt plosive and dental consonants. The logic of the line as it unfolds is the playful product of words’ sounds rather than their meanings – or better yet, their sounds become their meanings.
In a similar vein, Leftwich offers this virtuoso display of alliteration:
Moon moss mesh mush mash
hewn Moan mown hone horse
horn cairn mane name harsh
mood mess nest push gash
told toed toad tolled tune floss
By juxtaposing homonyms and near-homonyms, replacing vowels while keeping consonants constant and vice versa, and exploiting the legato effects of the smoothly segueing terminal and initial sounds of the words he’s chosen, Leftwich creates a sense of forward movement through a process of gradual sonic evolution. This may be one extreme example of the kind of verbal juxtaposition, independent of semantic considerations, that pervades Public Displays of Affection, but it does demonstrate Leftwich’s sensitivity to the depth to which linguistic forms and fictions interact with the extra-linguistic facts of phenomenal life.
What poems like these remind us of is the fact that there are many modes of experiencing the world around us and within us. Language, no less than perception, cognition, and emotion, is one of them – and in fact is inseparable from these other modes to the extent that it helps to define, articulate, and express them. Language gives us a world as much as do any of the senses. Which raises certain questions. Both Plato in the Cratylus and Parmenides in the Doxa expressed a distrust of language because they supposed it to show a world in flux. And they were right that it shows flux – that it shows things as they exist in their contingency, in other words – but they were mistaken in thinking that this made it untrustworthy. In reality, langauge and world reflect each other in ways that are impossible to disentangle. The world comes to be known as the world through language just as language serves as a modality of experiencing the world to the extent that it is the medium through which the world makes itself present in the guise of expressible phenomena. (And ironically, it is only through language that we can conceptualize and define things in situationally transcendent terms – as Parmenidean Being or Platonic Forms.) To the extent that language grants us access to the world and the world presents itself to us through language the world is, as Gadamer held, “verbal in nature.” Which makes it imaginative in nature as well.
What Leftwich’s poetry helps do is demonstrate just how imaginatively constituted and reconstituted the world as verbal in nature can be. It can follow its own logic especially if, as Breton also asserted, the reins of ordinary logic are loosened and language’s everyday utilitarian role is relinquished. The experience of language as something more than a medium of exchange of information – the experience of language in its extra- or infra-semantic modes, which is to say as a semi-independent aesthetic object – opens up to the insight that poetic logic is a logic of its own, and that imagination plays a role, no matter how subtle, in shaping what we see and know, or think we see and know. Language, in its capacity to forge the kind non-semantic associations that it does in Leftwich’s poetry, provides one major route through which imagination enters into and colors the world. Just as water finds its own level when allowed to flow freely language, when uninhibited by the demand that it “make sense,” establishes its own connections either through the objective means of its material or aesthetic properties or through the subjective path, particular to any given language user, of affective resonance. It is a process at work throughout Public Displays of Affection.
While it’s impossible to synopsize in a few lines a work as diverse and complex as this, Leftwich himself may come close when he writes,
The river is singing to my
Mind. Local Reality is not
Only asemic chamber music.
I think I participate
In the artifice
Of my own mind.
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer, and writer in the Washington DC area. His reviews of poetry and essays have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, and Offcourse. He also writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work. His music reviews have been published in Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, Avant Music News, and elsewhere. Barbiero has performed at venues throughout the Washington-Baltimore area and regularly collaborates with artists locally and in Europe. His graphic scores have been realized by ensembles and solo artists in Europe, Asia, and the US. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press.
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