The Sleep That Changed Everything

Reading American poetry after the death of Allen Ginsberg, it is possible to forget that writers have been known to transform the world from time to time. Not that younger poets have forgotten to put "reimagine life" on a to-do list-Lee Ann Brown even made it something like the title of her second book, The Sleep That Changed Everything.Private cheek pressed in pillowbook damp and red tender tetherTypewriter up and workingSnow is falling on New York ("The Sleep That Changed Everything")It's a beautiful title, dramatically promissory even, and that the poem prefers not to disclose what everything, what change, or even what sleep it refers to makes no difference: in the expectation of one poem, another poem arrives. It takes place. It is lively, real; it sounds good, it has meanings. It may be enough.In the vexed and mainly irrelevant arena of allegiances to teachers and predecessors, Brown has pioneered a refreshing indifference to the rivalries between, say, Beats and New York School poets, or New York School poets and practitioners of projective verse, or for that matter between the language poets and the rest of the world. Collaging her influences from all these groups, collaborating with them, trimming her work with declarations that her attraction's more than textual, she is a central figure to many groups of younger poets. Born in Japan, raised in North Carolina, taking two degrees at the school that shares her name, and settling down in New York, she comes to her rejection of categorization honestly. Among younger poets, her absolute refusal to accept limits on what is permissible has given her something like political power.So many recent books of poems are interrupted every twenty pages by a Roman numeral, the same styles and subjects picking up where they left off-intermissions disguised as changes. I imagine these poets surveyed their books the way Caesar did Gaul-divided into three parts, the starting point for empire. Brown, on the other hand, organizes her uncommonly long books into sections that differ from each other the way rings in a circus do: present beau hymns to the muses go here next to the N+7 operations on familiar allegiance texts, precisely observed miniatures hover in this corner, Steinian meditations make frequent flagrant rendezvous with the recognizable vulnerable world here at the end. No Roman numerals. Her first book, Polyverse, collects these diverse chapbook-length series under a contraction of Freud's term for the undifferentiating sexual experience of infants: polymorphous perversity. What one sees, though, is a compound meaning "all poetries." The word verse derives from the Latin word for how a plow turns as it makes furrows-that is, the labor of making lines. She has a taste for making as many turns as she can, as well as for Joycean allusive puns ("Wake up-Atalanta's burning!") but Brown's better when she wears many meanings lightly, and best when she lets love and mistakes make the poem go as far as it ne