The Infinitesimals

"Yeah, she’s great, I write about her every chance I get! She’s someone who is alert to the conversational and informal dimensions of language and to ways of talking about ourselves that have been there in spoken language but haven’t made it into the written language, or have but not in sufficiently memorable ways. She has written about marriage, and then about divorce and re-marriage, and about the ways that women’s lives are shaped by other women’s experiences and by what other women have told them. She’s a mom and a step-mom and she’s written, for most of her career, beautiful poems about parenthood and motherhood – and that’s something that’s been more talked about than written about for much of the history of poetry. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She’s also in her most recent work – The Infinitesimals , for example – writing about illness, about having elderly parents pass away, and her own very serious medical experiences (she’s had breast cancer), and those are experiences that have been more talked about than written about too. She’s been able to bring her thoughts and ways of talking about often taboo or shameful or suppressed experiences into a place where she can use the resources of hundreds of years of previous poetry, without sacrificing the appearance of spontaneity, without sacrificing the conversational, without sacrificing the vivid surprise of speaking with someone. It comes from the epigraph which is the 18th century philosopher George Berkeley objecting to Newton and Leibniz inventing calculus which, as you may remember from math class, has to do with how to account mathematically for ratios and ranges and qualities and numbers that are always changing, or that are too small to state as finite numbers. And Berkeley’s objection, in a letter, which Kasischke picks out is, “They are neither finite quantities not quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?” And this is a way for Berkeley to object to the new math that Newton was inventing, which turns out to be math that works pretty well, but it’s also a way of thinking about experiences that seem too small to state in memoir or in narrative form and whose only form can be lyric. It’s also a way for Kasischke, I think, to think about the soul, the spirit, the persona of a human being, and it may also be a way of thinking directly about the soul or spirit of the departed. In this collection in particular, she’s thinking about ghosts, the people we used to be and no longer are, about the presence of the girl you used to be in the mind of the woman you now are, about the presence of people we mourn in the minds of the living – all of which are not nothing but are not tangible, and therefore belong in the domain of lyric poetry. That’s right and an infinitesimal, of course, is also 1 over infinity. It turns out that when you focus on the tiny, you also end up imagining the very large. That’s one of Kasischke’s discoveries in this book in particular. When you focus on the spirit or the soul or the persona or the lyric voice or things that are too small to pin down in language, and you’re in the realm of the transcendental or the realm that has for many belonged to religion, you end up thinking about the end of everything. You end up thinking about your own death, about the death of everybody, about the ending of civilisation, and about the death of the material world. A lot of these poems juxtapose the fleetingness of personal experience with the fact that all experience comes to an end, with a kind of apocalypse. It is a book – and this is new for Kasischke – where the structure of the book has a lot of call-backs not just to previous poets like T S Eliot and Sylvia Plath but to the Book of Revelation, to the end of everything. For instance, there’s a poem called ‘The First Trumpet.’ The title is a pun. Kasischke is overhearing a beginning trumpeter – perhaps a middle-schooler – who is practising taps and learning to play; but it’s also the first trumpet of the apocalypse… “Kasischke overhears a trumpeter – perhaps a middle-schooler – who is practicing; but it’s also the first trumpet of the apocalypse” She’s always got multiple moments and multiple recollections in her poems. They’re so conversational and so apparently spontaneous and yet when you go back and look at them, there are just so many sonic as well as psychological patterns that hold them together. No, she doesn’t. The New Thing as a potential school might be over. Some of its poets are still writing and still very good. For instance, everything Joseph Massey writes is worth reading. But that was a set of poets who wanted to make small, hard, definite, concrete, almost but not quite impersonal, poetry. Yes, she’s the opposite. Kasischke is very much oriented for voice and character. She’s a prolific writer of prose fiction and, honestly, an uneven one, but her best novels are wonderful. Her work as a maker of characters and situations and her thinking about individual lives very much informs the speaking voices in her poems."