By Claire Bateman

In If I Could Give You a Line (University of Akron Press, 2023), Carrie Oeding further develops the voice-driven associational thinking that characterizes her first collection, Our List of Solutions (42 Miles Press, 2011), while recontextualizing and transcending its concerns. The earlier poems are richly populated with neighbors, lovers, friends, and peers as their speaker navigates the fraught social dynamics of early adulthood, repeatedly referencing music/dance as she struggles to map out a workable configuration of intimacies and distances. Primary emotions include status-anxiety and longing—sexual/romantic, and even ontological. In the poem “Joy,” Oeding writes “And if everything is aspiring to be music— / the making and the dancing and the joying, / if they are all dying to be music, why does music just get to be music?” If I Could Give You a Line is continuous with that project in terms of Oeding’s fascination with space and distance; however, in the new collection, she explores relationships (both intimate ones with her partner and her daughter and intellectual/aesthetic ones with the work of a number of artists), questioning the nature of place itself. The book comes across as a series of dance-like thought experiments about motion in poems such as “The Making of Things,” in which Oeding, responding to Richard Long’s conceptual land sculpture, “A Line Made by Walking,” uses a strategy of negation to interrogate a variety of understandings of the line:

                             This line is not a path. Not a row. Not an aisle of what you need and don’t need.
                             Not a border. Not an alley, a lane, a route. Not direction or division.
                             Not a large chute or hiking trail. No corn maze or dark hallway to the video art.
                             Not a driveway or horse stall or balance beam.
                             What is a voice in a field? What is a line in a voice? This is a voice on the stairs.

Oeding’s project is more cartographic than traditionally ekphrastic. She mentioned in an interview with Rob McLennan that “[t]he book started with my envy of contemporary visual art and the immediacy I feel when I walk into a gallery or museum and experience that engagement with something made.” That said, these poems seem to be motivated just as much by radiant curiosity.

Her propulsive method is a combination of self-interruption and topical overflow, as is evident in the extravagant title of one of the poems: “A Bunch of Different Parts Can Make Up Ekphrasis, Including a Scoff When I Round the Museum Corner with My Baby in the Stroller. Or The Invisible Push to Keep Moving that Means Keep Looking, Like Stop Looking. Or The Things I Think of When I Look at Art and Won’t Ever Explain.” In this and other poems, she finds it impossible to disconnect art-making from motherhood from being female in our time from various places that have been formative for her. Riffing on the idea of the “line” (scars, marks, highways, waiting in line, ropes and tightropes, horizontality/verticality, borders, etc.), she reveals her underlying fascination with being and becoming/bringing forth. In the poem “The Making of Things,” she writes,

                             . . . I drew a line, and there was a history
                             Of me in it. I was also falling apart.
                             Or was it that I had a problem, and I drew a line.
                             Or was it that I drew a line and then had a problem.
                             I had a problem that I loved. It was a blank page.
                             It was a line on a page . . .

She’s also fascinated by time itself, and in the previously mentioned poem “A Bunch of Different Parts Can . . .,” she writes: “An artist tells me when he read to his child, every time he turned a page his son was learning about time.”

The poems are peripatetic, improvisational, and confident as they seek ever more fine-tuned uncertainties. Moving down the page, it’s impossible to anticipate whether the next sentence is going to be blocky or enjambed, cryptic, oracular, aphoristic, quirky/conversational, cynical/wordly-wise, angry, speculative, preoccupied with the potential for its own erasure, high-concept, or down-to- earth (for instance, about the pleasures and the daily grind of mothering, as in “Any Time You Want, You Can See Mothers Wiping”). The rapid shifts keep the reader on high alert even as the repetition of words and images make some passages seem dreamlike, even incantatory.

In their serious play, these poems powerfully convey how acts of creation—through art and poetry, through bringing forth a body from one’s own body—are deeply strange and fundamentally destabilizing, experiences we can’t expect to get used to, get over.

---

Claire Bateman is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently, Wonders of the Invisible World with 42 Miles Press and Scape with New Issues Poetry & Prose. Her hybrid collection, The Pillow Museum, is forthcoming with FC2 Press in January 2025.