Like An Integer Divided by Itself

Lewis Warsh’s posthumous collection Elixir, put out by Ugly Duckling Presse, is like walking downtown the morning after you’ve slept not enough, and not well, and you walk the avenue and you think: Vlad used to live above the wing joint, I got into an argument there on that bench by the dog park in Tompkins, a didn’t a gas-line blow up that building on the corner? There used to be a bookstore there. In Delirium New York, Rem Koolhaas argues that verticality in NYC is a secret eddying—such that the catacombs below spit forth noontime ghosts to walk among the living. We are there with Warsh as he writes, in the eponymous poem I see the faces of friends everyday.

I write this review from the Rose Reading Room of the NYPL. It is the only library in the city that has any Warsh materials, outside of the NYU Fales Collection. You’re telling me I can’t get Alien Abduction at the Brooklyn Public Library? Warsh started Angel Hair with Anne Waldman, which ran for six issues from the spring of 1966 to the spring of 1969. Angel Hair also published many poetry collections during the decade following. He co-founded and edited United Artists with Bernadette Mayer from 1977 to 1983. He taught workshops at the Poetry Project, Queens College, LIU, SUNY Albany, and countless other institutions. In 2020, I went to the book launch for Warsh and Mayer’s collaborative book Piece of Cake, published by Station Hill Press, where I briefly served as an assistant to Sam Truitt.

Elixir begins with “Night Sky” which serves as sort of proem: this book is a book of the night. Tercets weave, extend, elongate, before snapping back to reframe the situation, which is our only situation:

Night-life in the country, night-time in the parking lot, night-life in the baggage claim.

There is a conditional nature to Elixir—statements are posed in the hypothetical: “Someone’s mother might be calling you home to dinner.” [Emphasis mine.] Potential problems are introduced and quickly flung away:

What of it? What is there to do when you have changed as we all must and do? Not much it would seem. Warsh is not nihilistic, or hopeful—he just concluded that there might be more important things going on. At this dead-end, around which entire bodies of work have been built, Warsh zooms in to the particular:

What I am most fascinated by is the structure Warsh conforms to in “Anything you Say,” “Single Occupancy” and “Elixir”: double-spaced single lines, which occasionally continue onto the next line in this paperback edition, which sometimes continue their thoughts, expand, focus in, veer, refute, or completely ignore the content of the previous line. I think of Walter Benjamin’s idle inquiry in One Way Street: “But when shall we actually write books like catalogues?” Like Benjamin’s Arcades Project, these lines, Warsh’s verzetteln, scraps of a poetic and lived life, are assembled into some new elixir.

Whereas another poet, Ashbery for example, might use conjunctive adverbs like ‘therefore’, ‘however’, or ‘nonetheless’ to connect two lines, the connections between these lines are lost in the blank white space between them. The function of the line as an independent unit of thought and meter is blurred by their vertical relation—i.e., the fact that one line is situated below the previous one implies some sort of narrative connection, or at the very least, some accumulative result, as in a geometric theorem. And yet, they do connect—pissing in the street is quite enjoyable; a bit more like living with risk than collecting your thoughts self-critically, with nothing to show but an attempt to erase them. But there’s no judgment here, or more accurately, admonition—just the facts of the matter where you eventually, walking, end up in the place Warsh begins “Elixir” with:

The double-spaced line allows for a shift not only in thematic or narrative concerns, but in mode and register. Warsh switches from the bisected compacted idioms of “what matters most” and “my friends are gone” to

to

Warsh begins with the personal: his friends and community are dead, and he knows he too will die soon. Then he moves into the Marc Antony-esque imperative: bear witness to them, “see their faces.” Bear witness with this line—which is also the funeral procession—into the third person dialogic—who is “he”? Warsh, the Warsh-Narrator, or some other? In this way Warsh’s lines ripple outwards beyond “I-remember.” The art is in the arrangement, in repetition and swerve.

I wrote an imitation of this poem, “Elixir,” to try to better understand how Warsh moves from line to line, in the same way that Anselm Berrigan wrote Primitive States—and felt a kinship between this process and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s, Lisa Robertson’s, Anselm’s. I showed my friend Maddie what I did, and told her what I was trying to do. She said that maybe when you’re older this way of writing by line seems like the “right” thing to do. It was not an entirely successful attempt. Even so, I discovered that this double-spaced variable line, which is the visual and sonic unit of measure, and is the unit of a thought, of time and space-making the internal machinations of a poem visible without caesura or enjambment; as Philip Whalen writes, “Showing the mind thinking.” However it’s not entirely non-narrative. Warsh maps these constantly shifting interior and exterior modes in the purest and simplest expression of it: the unit of the line. It is a witnessing of the shapeliness of a mind that contends with the inevitable decline in the shapeliness of his city, of his people, and of his body, of