Pool [5 choruses]
Omnidawn Publishing, 2014
Selected for the 2012 Omnidawn Open Prize by Cole Swensen
Finalist for the 2015 Oregon Book Award - Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry
Endi Bogue Hartigan’s Pool [5 choruses] takes the reader into a porous realm where singular and multiple voices fuse. In the context of high levels of public noise—reportage on the last decade of U.S. wars, elections, economics, more—the voices of these poems ask the reader to “separate out the chorus from the noise, separate us.” A journey into the accruals, interstices, separations and resistances of pooled and individual song, Hartigan’s poems explore the lyrical voice as a physical stream of sensual sound. How do we distinguish personal cry from choral cry, the “fragile, wet word of the spirit” from an over-lit or collective presence? Where does noise become its own form of silence? What is it to name perception—a local parade, a loved one, a singular shade of yellow—within a continually recalibrating multiplicity? This music moves through a complex intimacy–a world in which a woman’s reflection is never still, and a nation’s reflection is never still—and where the spectral, dizzying stage light holds a familial back yard and a choral shroud simultaneously.
Many thanks to artist Betty Merken and Laura Russo gallery for the image of the painting "Ascent" on the cover of this book.
“Endi Bogue Hartigan’s Pool (5 choruses) reads as a celebration of the common etymology of text and textile, from the overall pattern of calls and responses that structures the entire book to the interwoven repetitions of arresting oneiric imagery at the level of the line. Phrase after phrase jumps out, clear, yet also surprising. Hartigan’s linguistic play is almost vertiginous, constantly on the brink of overbalancing—but she never does, instead landing electrifyingly spot-on every time, creating a gymnastics of the page that is simply exhilarating. And behind it all, always, is her music, making connections deep down at the level of conversant sound and echoed by the choruses that come in and out with their haunting intimations. Rich and yet fired by the pressure of restraint, this is a book that opens additional dimensions with every turn of the page."
— COLE SWENSEN, author of Gravesend and judge of the 2012 Omnidawn Open
"These gorgeous poems are exercises in presence apposed not to absence but to “slippage,” change, diminution, that humming, hymning poverty. In Hartigan’s bold lyric purview, the political is frankly flush with the lush landscape of phenomena: of lily and pine, of camellia, of roses and starlings, any of which might conceal an election or an economy or a war. Pool [5 choruses] emits a polyphonic incandescence that consumes itself by means of its own mordantly exquisite music. It is an extravagant assertion of lyric citizenship in an unstinting world."
—G.C. WALDREP, author of Archicembalo
"A book that performs as thoroughly as it proposes we step back, listen, think, and then step in, think, say, so that we're invited to join in the making up of other choruses, one’s pool lends us to accompany our stories. This is a generous and generative book, it's a thrill to be testing its waters, concerned with its singing collections of words."
—DARA WIER, author of You Good Thing
Reviews (excerpts), interviews
Publishers Weekly review
"As Hartigan's muscular poems wrestle with interchangeability, so too do their innovative structures challenge its boundaries. Acrobatic and playful, the poems turn back and reflect on themselves, daring readers to consider intention and arbitrariness at once. And yet, the book is wary of the total annihilation of individual meaning: "The slippage that we must avoid is a certain blanketing in which/ the delicacy of perception is lost." Hartigan's poems take simultaneity and expose it: "The news is on, the news is on at the same time as the game, sorry, it's on at the same time, I'm sorry." Individual moments are individual for having been chosen—lifted out of the noise—and Hartigan's poems make the claim that the act of choosing, no matter how choral the result, is of the greatest importance."
Thethe Poetry, review by EMILY VOGUEL
"We must be made slightly uncomfortable by endless possibilities before we can begin to discover them and accept the invitation to play, among the poppies and the slippage, where meanings are found, erased, revised, disintegrated, and elucidated once again not in their layering, but rather between the layers. Hartigan’s collection is a must read, if not only for its portrayals of beauty, then for its success in satisfying the thirst of the intellect."
The Small Press Book Review, review by ROB MCCLENNAN
“The five sections that make up her Pool [5 choruses]—“gallop,” “lily tally,” “Lola, backstage,” “yellow yellow yellow” and “office of water”—are built of poems that extend and pull apart the line, composing lengthy linear stretches in the smallest of spaces, writing poems both choral as in the multiple/polyvocal, and in the elegantly lyric. As she writes in the poem “Flurry series,” subtitled “4 choruses”: “The tree transferred choruses / from eaves to branches—from branches to eaves— / in their slippers and gowns, in their suits and linings and cowboy boot / dresses, in prints and in tresses and costumed sounds—[.]” What appeals most about these poems is how much manages to happen in such a small sequence of moments, moving one to the next to the next, each one sending ripples that continue for miles. Where Hartigan shines is in the lyric disjunction, composing poems that work to explore the seriousness of real events and the weight of how the world sometimes happens to be, all while managing a lightness of line and a spark of phrasing that bounces.”
The Rumpus, review by KENT SHAW
What is collective collects among all the things that were collected together, though properties of “collected” should likely include “among” and “within.” Observing, too, the role “without” must carry, so the collective appears more than just an among, or the among amongst what we see. But, of course, the collective is, and then is singularly collective together, but together is problematic. Does this make sense to you? What about a collective modeled from a field of poppies? Could all those poppies, all the activities among poppies, a woman on a horse riding through, people walking through, the look of other poppies up against the poppies that are further out, fit into the figure you call “poppies” or should it be “field of poppies”? How many poppies? 10,000? Would it change if it were 10,000,000? That’s how many Endi Bogue Hartigan starts with in her new book Pool [5 choruses]. So many poppies makes you think differently about the single poppy. It makes you think differently about a collective of poppies.…
…What is a chorus? What are people together? What is this gigantic amalgamation of media that we intake every day supposed to mean as a collective and, simultaneously, as individual bits…
Jacket 2, Iterations and interstices, Endi Bogue Hartigan on fields and crowds and more, interview, ELIZA ROTTERMAN and Endi Bogue Hartigan
“What struck me about her person was a quiet intensity; her work, with its eerie incantatory power, unsettled me. I admired this, found it refreshing in a time when a lot of poetry readings have a light or casual tone — with poets starting out with jokes or stories, or if they are from out of town, something they like about Portland. While I enjoy those readings, too, I was drawn to her work partly because the way she read aligned brilliantly with the collection’s strong aesthetics of muscular repetition and urgent complexity. …”