Whether Kevin Holden’s Pink Noise ought properly to be called a collection or a book-length poem is something I’m yet to settle on; better, perhaps, to think of it as a series of fragments that swirl and unfold into something (albeit imperfectly) symphonic and unifying. Composed over a span of about fifteen years, Pink Noise is arranged as a constellation of variegated poems and clusters, ranging from one to over twenty pages a piece, that nevertheless achieve an accumulated power. Holden opens with the sonnet-like “mica,” which functions as a sort of miniaturised ars poetica. He follows with the expansive “riot,” “grit,” “tunnel,” the twenty-poem suite “polytopes” (itself subdivided into shorter units whose titles refer to more and less obscure natural, mathematical, and geometric formations such as “azeotrope” and “dihedral prime”), and then “parhelion,” “grid,” “tunnel,” and “glinting.”

In his stated wish “to think about the natural world / not the polis, / the poles not the polis,” Holden’s work continues the somewhat niche lineage of what one might call the avant-pastoral (Holden has also said he’s been involved with environmental activism). The particular text that it called to mind was Ronald Johnson’s ARK, coincidentally set to return to print imminently. This owes to the overwhelming, central presence of nature within such a queer, avant-garde, late modernist mode of the fractured lyric. Johnson’s metaphysical poem-world, he wrote, “is paradise, / odd words in legion / beating around the veritable bush,” a description that might as well refer to Pink Noise, filled as it is with minerals and crystals; trees and flowers; the conifer forests of Holden’s childhood in rural Maine; botany and geometry and astrophysics; but also the quasi-sublime vastness of data, often all buzzing with a loaded eroticism. In “nephilim”: “[T]he spaces between oh / a raven a crow an owl / show me the backside / of the databarn / 1 Yottabyte of brain / oh come on now/ you would say super / computer cum on my face.” These fluctuations in tonal surface and foci of attention manage to be abrasive and yet sonically pleasing. This is about as far from the quietist or traditionalist “nature poem” as you can get, absent of any nostalgic projection of an idealised (or “innocent”) past as connoted by Bahktin’s “folkloric time.” But I do still mean pastoral, and not least for that mode’s encoding of an apparent withdrawal from the world in order to reflect on it––creating a middle landscape within an internal poetic event, the fragmented, flickering pastoral song––between civilization and nature, at scales that are geologic, elemental, and deeply human.

Such oscillations in scale and intensity, between large and small, closeup and panorama, the micro- and telescope, are leveraged both in terms of the book’s various and varied objects of attention and Holden’s engagement of the page. In “grid” (subtitled with the mathematical formula for the titular pink noise) for instance, dense poetic sentences in the form of rigid blocks of text that fill most of the page give way to what appears to be two short columns, Glas-style, but which on closer inspection are longer lines with spatially enforced pauses to reorient sense and rhythm among all the syntactic compaction.

In an interview with his publisher, Nightboat, Holden claims: “I think that mathematics, music, and poetry, by way of their unique complexities and harmonies, feel (at times) both charged with the divine and also to be lines through or along which the divine, nonhuman, higher, or other might be glimpsed or encountered….” Pink Noise, then, positions scientific discovery and mathematics, and all of their technical vocabularies, as corollaries of poetry, not its antitheses. One can track the push-pull of the angelic or the divine, as Holden calls it, across several epigraphs; the one to “Parhelion” is from Lichtenberg, where he imagines an angelic sentence as “2 + 2 = 13.” “Polytopes” opens with epigraphs from Augustine and Wittgenstein, as if to citationally braid or unify the wonder of science and pre-scientific postures of religious awe, implying other meanings available within the spatial field, remaining out of view. While these radical transitions can feel disorienting, the links between them slowly build over Pink Noise’s pages; certain lines ( “so cold today”) and figurations (the image of a speaker climbing over or behind some structure in order to better take in a vista) recur as anchors, albeit often set in revealing new contexts. The words and concepts that we use to refer to mathematical and natural phenomena are, Holden realises, (like poetry) vertices or axes along which to approach the incomprehensible, to both structure or delimit and expand sense-perception. Concrete and abstract, then, at the same time, in the way that “every flower would overflow a grammar.” Holden has a rare and particular sensitivity to the role that sound plays in this process, how defamiliarising but also musical and beautiful such language can be, commensurate with—yet inadequate to—the phenomena it names or measures: polytope, chloroform, boolean, nanospace, chrysoprase, onyx, oxalis, “palindrome elm glass sphere rebus.” Rather than a project of representation, Pink Noise might better be understood as an attempt to enact “reality,” or the real, in all of its swerves and collisions, its networked complexity. Poet-critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in another context, writes: “Let us call it ecological or echological: the logos of relatedness insisted upon through sound.” Holden’s book’s title likewise refers to one of the most commonly observed signals in biological systems, wherein each octave interval contains equal energy, sounding like a waterfall.

In a moment that recalls (another avant-pastoralist) N.H. Pritchard’s Mallarméan wish to join or produce a “revolution that involves the transformation of the book itself,” Holden writes: “What if it were all abstraction but I had put a page within the cover not a frontispiece but in its place what if I had put as the second or third page before the poems started a page of FUR so you could touch it & rub it & look at all the textures all the living complexity.” He goes on: “you could maybe rub your genitals against it see the sounds & striations… you could read the poems & hold them & feel their thought.” This felt and sought tactility of language animates much of Holden’s poetic ecosystem. Its experiments with the sonic and the visual/typographic mark out a terrain for Holden’s poetry that is contrary to ordinary ideas of reading, just as the relation to nature it thematises is other to ways of knowing and being that are, finally, analytical or exploitative. The relationship of the reader to the poem is not one of possession, but of fascination and concentration, and we might here recall Fredric Jameson’s definition of the pastoral as distinguished from the utopian: “This kind of idyll or fantasy, in other words, is, unlike Utopia, precisely a representation and musters its narrative resources in order to impose the fullness of an image of a different form of life, an image the fascinated contemplation of which includes both anxiety and longing within itself.”

At the same time, this redraws focus to the socio-cultural contingency of definitions of (un)acceptable noise, particularly when applied to different populations in the shared space of the city. (One could plausibly imagine “pink noise” being wielded euphemistically in a complaint from a landlord or developer in a gentrifying neighbourhood about, say, a nearby queer bar; “the norm cannot,” Holden writes, “compete with that color.”) In other words, I don’t mean to suggest that Pink Noise is, as it were, pure noise. “Riot” includes sections that are more discursive, narrativized, and apparently personal. Not coincidentally, this is also the poem that most directly evokes queer desire in the face of an oppressive normativity. “When I was younger I wore only one color. My boyfriend liked to fuck in parking lots. We used to go to these reeds by a lake. He was kind of punk but had the most beautiful sweaters.” The speaker and his lover at one point get “beat / up for / holding hands.” This poem introduces an antinormative poetic terrain to proceedings, filled as it is with images of teargas and police brutality. Yet these bursts of concise clarity get jammed or interrupted by far grander and stranger registers, unsettling any sense of a strict adherence to the autobiographical or a poetics of transparent self-disclosure (“twelvetone to him his sugared root / as rock or quartz or smoke hung with / branches, golddust rund with sunshafts”). What’s at stake in these ruptures is no less than a schematisation of the problem of a poetics that would refuse or foreclose the same. Alternately to quiet or to louden, to speed or to slow, compress or release, to let ring out or to suspend, is what gives music (or noise) its rhythmic intensity and emotional force. Holden’s inclusion of contradictory material, wild tonal shifts, and multivocal surfaces force his readers to generate their own spatial rhythms of association and thought, wherein “tear gas cascad[es] in rainbows across their bleary eyes,” as well as “over endless mesh and identities / strung in deep sound or hope / and/or / long talk at empire’s close.”