Review: Alchemy and Magic in Tiff Dressen’s Of Mineral by Edward Smallfield
I want to begin with a confession: for me, poetry lives in the language. Tiff Dressen’s Of Mineral is so many things: a meditation on the issues of our so complicated historical moment, on gender, on sexuality, on climate change, on a pandemic. Of Mineral is also a book of walking around poems, a book of poems in conversation with other poets, a book of love poems. Before everything else, though, Of Mineral is pure poetry, written in the alchemical language of a poetry that can’t be translated directly into prose.
“Theirs” is the first poem in the book, and the most important thing for me about the poem is that it’s beautiful. Or perhaps the most important thing is that the poetry is so pure that we can talk and talk about it, but our talking will only break the poem into fragments. Will we understand the poem a little better after we prose it? Perhaps. For now, though, I have no desire to explain this poem—I just want to take a moment to reflect silently on what it is.
Of Mineral is not long, and the book needs to be somewhat short. Each poem communicates at a high level of intensity (not at an equal level, which isn’t possible or desirable) and there is always just enough and never too much. The diversity of the forms of the poems never feels show-offy—look at all the ways I can write so beautifully—each poem has the form it requires, and the forms and the meanings are inextricably linked.
It's tempting to try to organize the book by talking about different kinds of poems—meditations, walking around poems, skinny poems, poems that spread out across the page, poems for or after other poets, elegies… But that would be a mistake. The book is an integrated whole, and breaking it into parts is an impediment to understanding it, not a help.
A good example of the methodology of Of Mineral is the poem for Alan Turing, “Fugue: a poem for multiple voices.” With Alan Turing we immediately arrive at a personal tragedy—all the more painful because the tragedy is the result of Turing’s benighted moment (so like our own)—and at Turing’s brilliance as a mathematician and his importance in the computer revolution. But the epigraph from Man Facing Southeast takes us in a third direction.
Very early in the poem we encounter the word “hagiography” with a new meaning. Much of the poem consists of breaking down boundaries: the mathematics of Turing is also the mathematics of music which is also the mathematics of the universe, what was once called “the music of the spheres.” Of Mineral is old school in the best and most profound sense—it connects Turing with Pythagoras. The mathematics and intellectual power of the poem make the elegy much more profoundly human and moving.
“Fugue” shines with so many beautiful lines.
Earlier, “the instrument” was the thing the composer writes for, the musician plays. Here the speaker is the instrument—the ancient idea that the poet is an instrument played by other forces (whatever we chose to call them).
Is there conflict between being “transponders” and being “corporeal/collaborators”? Is it our nature to be both?
As is so often the case in Of Mineral, we can wonder who is speaking here. The poet? The many selves of the poet? The voices that speak through the poet? Of Mineral is a book full of mysteries, and it would be mistake to understand it too quickly.
The first poem in Of Mineral (which I’ve already quoted) is “Theirs”: we enter the book through the door of the non-binary. Gender is perhaps one of our most deeply engrained binary concepts—so much so that the concept of “non-binary” with regard to gender seems incomprehensible to some and drives others into a rage. Because the binary gender concept is so deeply ingrained, so unconscious, it is perhaps the most difficult binary concept to deconstruct. (Non-binary is the natural state of the universe—the binary emerges when we try to order the world by naming.) Perhaps poetry is the best (or the only) vehicle (in language) to deconstruct the binary notion of gender.
In the title of this review, I used the words “magic” and “alchemy.” Those concepts flow naturally from the concept of the non-binary. (Historically, the most ancient form of magic, shamanism, is explicitly linked with the non-binary, with androgyny and sexual ambiguity. This connection persists in some figures in Greek mythology—Tiresias, for example.) Magic is the breaking down of boundaries, of seeing connections that do not exist from a narrow binary perspective. As Of Mineral repeatedly implies, the edges of modern science—the quantum realm and interstellar realm—feel more like magic than Newtonian physics. The same thing happens when we begin to think about ecosystems and the biosphere (and Of Mineral thinks a great deal about ecosystems and biosphere). We have a very popular cliché—“I couldn’t see the forest for the trees”—that represents a false dichotomy. Conceived as an ecosystem, the forest doesn’t consist of trees and “plants.” The ecosystem includes many things (things that are essential to its survival) like fungi and bacteria that are too small for us to see. Conceived as an ecosystem, the forest represents a kind of magic—something beyond our understanding—which brings us back to the world of folk tale (with its ancient roots).
Of Mineral is deeply engaged with the project of making the broken world whole again. (…“there is no space left in America,/ there is only distance…”) Wherever we turn in the “real world”—whether we call it “mathematics” or “physics” or “nature”—we find the non-binary (…can we predict/quantum/restitution/call it karma…).
Of Mineral is such a powerfully intelligent and insightful text that it is easy to get lost in a conversation about the ideas in the book, and to forget that Of Mineral is a book of poems. And the language of poetry is something, in itself, a singularly intense and cathartic experience that can’t be translated into a language other than its own. All of the poems in Of Mineral are real poems, and have to be experienced as such—in their own language. Returning to the short lyrics can be a useful reminder of how truly intense the language is, and of how many explosions happen within just a few words. These lines are from “Poem for April 2014 (after Frank O’Hara)”:
···
Earlier, I talked briefly about the formal diversity of the poems in Of Mineral. Organizing a book of poems that includes diverse forms is complex. (And isn’t complex because of our binary habits of mind—why shouldn’t a book be full of diverse poems?) Of Mineral resists the easy temptation of grouping poems by type—of putting the longer poems together and the shorter lyrics together. As with everything else in the book, the organization feels deeply intuitive, and perfectly right.
The last poem in Of Mineral is “Abecedary: in four parts (for Inger Christiansen).” It’s fitting, perhaps inevitable, that we end with a formal construction. With “Fibonacci’s grace” we return to mathematics and to the universe that mathematics describes, which we often call “nature” or “the natural world.”
The “nature,” the “world,” the “universe” that we are always part of, whether we choose to recognize that, or not.
The book ends with the following lines:
Everything is here. All of the boundaries are broken: between the personal and the public, between “the world of nature” and “the human world,” between the ancient and the modern. Yes, quantum restitution is karma, but we have to open our minds to disparate traditions (usually kept apart) to begin to understand that, and to feel it.
More than anything, I haven’t wanted to lose the sheer beauty, joy and lyricism of Of Mineral.
Of Mineral is about so many things, but it most importantly is something, something unique and beautiful.
To purchase Of Mineral, please visit Nightboat Books
Read an interview with Tiff Dressen by Della Watson
To purchase Tiff’s book Songs from the Astral Bestiary, please visit Small Press Distribution
Edward Smallfield is the author of to whom it may concern, equinox, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (a book-length collaboration with Doug MacPherson), and The Pleasures of C. He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently a journal of the plague year from above/ground press. His poems have appeared in Barcelona INK, Denver Quarterly, e-poema.eu, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Páginas Rojas, talking about strawberries all the time, Touch the Donkey, where is the river: a poetry experiment, and many other magazines and websites. He is a coeditor at Apogee Press. He’s featured here on palabrosa, with his chapbook night void messages and his translation, Joan Brossa made me.