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If Lucy Biederman’s myth-making, and myth-denouncing (in lieu of the wingspan of "truth") chapbook The Other World, deeply engaged with the tropes of creation, and, to quote Anne Carson, decreation, had a soundtrack, it would be an open-air live recording of the Velvet Underground as an opener, followed by the Cowboy Junkies. The fifth sense in the rondel of mind and body (after sight, sound, taste, and hearing), is touch—this allocentric mode of perception structure’s Biederman’s text, which implicates a distant listener. “He’s not listening,// He’s not listening. He does as he pleases,/ Watches the nation’s drag races rage/ Wild behind the marquees.” The age-old conundrum of why we are here (to love and feel ourselves beloved, according to Raymond Carver), becomes, in Biederman’s steadfast grip, and keening voice, that of what to do, as a speaker, in the face of silence from the beloved or other (perception of alterity at the foundation of Biederman's ethics of form). Moments and poems of fluency (Keats’ “full-throated ease”) abound in The Other World, this untitled poem as an example: Sunset. If he loved me I’d bend Yet, the collection’s pathos is generated not by poems of desire for wholeness - reunion with the Platonic double - but episodic poems of brokenness, pictorially framed as a lamp without a mirror, in Renaissance painting, a traveler without a compass, tilting at windmills, or (the actual situation) a speaker without a listener: a bard without a lyre. What to do, this poet asks, but hit the lyre harder and at greater pitch, with the visual symbol of linkage or addition (the ampersand) stitching together the speakers’ paratactic anxiety? Bang the busted instrument. All night I called Past memories of event and the cumulative bank of sensory knowledge are all, in a sense, the speaker has: possession, here, is rendered valuable not as lyric or material possession, but the comfort of another, posited here, as a future gain, on the long stretch of highway between the American imaginary (dream) and its distilled future (reality): I remember everything, even the things I’ll have no one but you The Other World pieces together, as travelogue and memento mori, the body of the shepherd from whence issues a duet (melody, and cadence), as well as (in a camp adjacent to irony, rather than posterior or anterior thereto), a fierce poetic not immune metacognitive ploys, or other squirmy ineffables (chivalry, metaphysical hope, the lyric poem), but the means of their recontextualization, as music (love child of Steeley Dan, PJ Harvey, and Wagner), in time. Also by Virginia Konchan:
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