Endless Nameless
by Glen Krisch
Reviewed
by Anthony Servante
Glen Krisch in his new poetry book, “Endless Nameless”, explores language and its fragile interpretation of emotion. With a series of poems that rely on comma manipulation and mimetic representations, that is, art imitating life, Krisch searches within his own purview to exemplify this mimesis.
Wow, you must be thinking: What did you smoke, Anthony Servante?
Allow me to defend these highfalutin words. When Glen Krisch sent me a reader’s copy of the book, he said, “I've attached a pdf of Endless, Nameless. It's pretty atypical [my italics] from what I normally write, and it's quite personal.” Therefore, I will not concentrate on the personal subject matter of the poems but rather the objective structure of the poetry that exemplifies the importance of his subjects.
As I’ve read Krisch’s horror stories, I ventured into his poetry with the word “atypical” in mind. The first thing I noticed was his use of commas to infer double meanings. For example, in “Closeness”, the opening poem:
“Until it was gone, expired,
a time come to pass, imperfect
a connection needing to breathe
today and every day, gone” (pg. 11).
The word “expired” is offset by commas, isolating the term to not only include time gone by but a time lost. Then “imperfect… everyday” is also isolated by commas, expanding of the nature of the time lost, a moment that needed to breathe but was in a sense suffocated. The final word, “gone”, separated from this lost time with a comma serves to echo the initial use of the word, accenting the first meaning of time passed. Thus we have the framing device: Time gone, time lost, time lost, time gone, two views strung together by the center line, “a connection needing to breathe”. Notice the absence of the narrator, the “I” who relates the moment. “You” appears in the opening stanza and closing stanza, framing the two views of time. This ambivalent framework allows the reader to see the narrator without seeing him. He is lost to time.
But, Anthony, isn’t this the poetic way of writing poetry, to put the words above the narrator. No, because in the next poem, “Waiting”, Krisch opens with the “I” narrator in his description of a forest. The exclusion of the narrator is necessary in the first poem and necessarily included in the second. In "Closeness", the subject matter requires language that leads us there. In "Waiting", the narrator escorts us through the subject matter, that is, the forest.
“It travelled upon the air, tonight,
last week, the month before,
unknown, unseen, insinuating” (pg. 21).
We immediately note the separation of words and phrases with six commas. Note also that this is only one sentence. Each term is accented with this comma usage. The virus, never mentioned, is referred to as “It”, and then articulated in a staccato fashion, pausing the reader to take in each term individually. By this means, we can understand the absent narrator’s frustration with being isolated over a long period of time. Thus absent, the reader must take his place to fully appreciate the poem. We experience the two narrators, Krisch and us, the readers.
We see this playful use of language and grammar over and over throughout the poems. This is a poet who knows what he’s doing and knows how to reach his reader without bashing us over the head with heavy emotions. We get the double meanings without his having to spell it out for us.
