I Love Information by Courtney Bush (Milkweed Editions, 2023)

The title is honest: Courtney Bush does love information, which here replaces revelation as poetry’s source. In the “Seraphim or Nothing,” she asks that we be more honest about the fact that poets no longer take dictation or fill a priestly role:

Winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023) takes place in a fictional world somewhere between Sparta and a shrimp festival, where everything otherwise unnamed goes by “Katelyn.” The point is to figure out if poems could be thinking, even if they cannot quite think. Earlier in “Seraphim or Nothing,” Bush puts a line from Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms” (the song was also performed at her book launch) into the past tense: “I didn’t believe in an interventionist god.” In her poems, as in Cave’s song, atheism can be temporarily suspended by experience, producing an “if-then” faith that keeps divinity always discomfiting, half-ironized.

My favorite line is “I read the Wikipedia page for Vaslav Nijinsky once and for all.” Learning is a settled matter: before that line’s present tense, she lacked information about Vaslav Nijinsky; after the line, finally, absolutely, she knows something or other, and there’s no returning to Eden or to Kansas. But the eponymous information does not become the work’s direct material. The poem where this line appears, I mean—“Baby Blue”—does not regale its reader with appropriated examples of the collectively written biography of Nijinsky. By tracing Bush’s steps, I learn Nijinsky was known for breaking gender norms by being great at dancing on tippy-toe. Bush represents the love of information, rather than information itself, where “to love” means “to organize.”

The book is organized into 26 poems (realizing this makes me briefly hallucinate a new alphabet), nine of which take the “Katelyn” title. The next most common title takes the form “___ Voice,” e.g. “Rilke Voice,” and “Cassandra from Agamemnon Voice.” I think the source of each poem’s “voice” is whatever information the aforementioned subject would like to have. The book opens, for example, with “When You Get to Sparta Voice,” which introduces the main narrative event of the collection, a speaker in the process of generating a tentative thesis. Bush often approaches a subject that might normally be a matter of prayer—here, “entering sacred time”—only to recoil, on the edge of understanding, and fall back on something like humor: “In summer I arrived at the idea of entering sacred time recklessly / as it regarded the way men interpreted the behaviors of my friend Jessa and me.” This language is strange, awkward, the misplaced “as it regarded” undercutting the former line’s promise, what will be one of many of Bush’s vertiginous falls from high register.

I hear an echo of it later, “Concerning the bartender Jef with one f / It was like the Middle Ages and I was like the angel / Talking to Molly who was trying to work / I’m back I said.” These out-of-place participles suggest a way of ordering the world around logical missteps (it’s not Jef himself who was like the Middle Ages, but that word “concerning”). Bush’s manner of concerning—i.e. regarding, relating, tying fact to lie or detail to desired observation, or establishing networks of semantic relation—is medieval, I think, to the extent that it esteems the imagination as a faculty of apperception that uses bewilderment to understand. In Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World, a “unifying theory of marvels across disciplines, languages, and cultures,” Michelle Karnes begins with a study of the imagination, which she says has no proper home in truth or fiction: “As a faculty, imagination . . . heightens qualities like vividness that might belong to both,” and its main task is to generate “phenomena that resist easy categorization.” She draws from Averroes’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, noting (positively) that imagination can destabilize by making figures too like their references:

A few lines further down, we’ll learn that the moments of linguistic nonsense are fragments of children’s speech, as they learn new vocab. Here, though, at the poem’s opening, they seem to represent the desire for information itself. My first attempts to interpret them, that is, repeating the syllables, pom e gran ate dove pom e gran ate dove—while I research stone-sharpening strategies, search for sources—dissolves into the image of the actual fruit and the actual bird, until that too unravels, becoming the readerly desire, “I want to know what pomegranate dove means, here,” finally joining the speaker in her experience of desire: now I too just want to know how to build the tabernacle. The astral pomegranate, its suspension between a word that might refer to something and pure sound, becomes too like the fruit, and all language briefly refers exclusively to the desire to know.

Searching for the line “when you get to Sparta,” to understand what that poem’s voice might want to know, I find a translation of Lucian of Samosata’s satirical Dialogues of the Gods, where Aphrodite reassures Paris that he does not need to understand her plan: “When you get to Sparta, Helen will see you; and for the rest—her falling in love, and going back with you—that will be my affair.” Paris, alas, wants information he cannot have and does not need. He does not let it go. Bush’s speaker keeps at her questions, too, which leads her in addition to arriving at the idea here, to a number of deflated epiphanies:

Bush maintains a clear distinction between ideas—what one begins to slowly see or know—and revelations, which come on all at once. The latter come as evidence of poetic experience, but they are a lot less satisfying than the former, and they do not prophesize. An important refrain of I Love Information is the speaker’s being able to say that she has received two “revelations” before the age of 30. As elsewhere, what might look like loose language turns out to be precise: it is the new ability to “tell everyone” about them that matters, not the ways she will take up some revelatory teaching in life, or in the poem. After each, she claims (in a repetition that proves its own lie), “I have received a revelation, I will have no other worry” or “I have had a revelation / and I will have no other worry.” In the post-revelation glow, the poet forgets about the organizational work ahead. In the first (only in terms of narrative chronology, since it appears second in the book, in a poem titled “Poem After My First Revelation”), after hearing Marjorie Welish note a student’s bare feet, the speaker comes to understand that everything is a choice. The second, coming from a dream, was “not a novel idea” either:

The poem goes on to clarify that she does “not love the revelation,” as it apes the adult presumption that it is possible to experience or replicate childlike thinking—those who assume “every kid likes the Beatles,” overlooking the fact that “We make our own music here,” among children. This is a mistake Bush, whose book jacket says that she works as a nanny, would never make. To this end, she treats discovery grumpily, as a part of the poet’s job description, perhaps something one should be sure to avoid having outside of working hours. What is revealed might not be new, trustworthy, or beautiful, whereas “information,” on the other hand, is sturdy, pleasurable, abundant. Here, the poet’s job is to decide what information to receive, and what to share, rather than to address angels, who are themselves unenviable (“I would not want to be an angel / of the lower orders / so assigned the role of guardian or worse / property angel / I think I’d quit that job too.”) Bush is demonstrating the difficulty of distinguishing poetic epiphanies, especially the end of lyric flight, from cliché, since the only angelic orders poets can now address are the lowest. By pulling back from the epiphanic false promise, though, she lets poems be forms of informational organization that still get to brush against the thrill of mysticism. For Bush—though it is too late to receive hallucinatory visions, too late, even, to write Rilkean elegies lamenting the muses’ lack of cooperation—the divine recusal from mortal life leaves a vacuum to be filled by the imagination.