PERFECTED OVER THE COURSE of more than a dozen poetry collections, Elaine Equi’s compositions are a door to a lavish commonplace. A staple of the New York downtown poetry scene, her language, casual enough for a napkin, leaves you with the impression that you’ve just been told a delicious, unshackling secret. That old platitude, “deceptively simple,” usually ladled onto art that is merely simple, seems to have been invented for Equi: “The rattle of ice in a glass / is a happy sound / that reminds me of my father / fixing a triple-vodka martini. / Whenever we heard it, / we knew he was home.” The triple martini, as midcentury as burnt-orange upholstery, takes us to a time and place in America. Whether the father is a suave Cary Grant type or a boozy afterwork hellraiser, we don’t need to know: The rattle of the glass is an immutable happy thing in Equi’s sound-bite augury of innocence. The generousness of an Equi poem lets you take for granted its offhand grandeur as it re-enchants the everyday world of sales counters, weather reports, or the act of refilling the ice tray. Even her most melancholy poems are a velvet couch in a purring room.
Equi’s new collection, Out of the Blank, is in part an homage to New York School luminary Barbara Guest’s “Drawing a Blank,” which concludes: “Drawing a blank / permits one to sleep for a minute or so / nodding away and waking to find / on the island a shell with a sound.” The poems of Out of the Blank, each one written with Equi’s trademark brevity, invite us to draw a blank, to arrive at a blissful mental stasis: “I want to find enlightenment / during happy hour / on a side street lit with neon rain / Take little sips, with long naps in between.” To draw a blank is a lost art in the philistine age of doomscrolling and information snacking, and Equi points this out in a more sophisticated way than in her (very good) previous collection, The Intangibles, which overtly griped about technology’s leash on modern consciousness: “but now everyone looks down, / studying their palms intently.” These forlorn homiletic elements, uncharacteristic for playful Equi, are gone in Out of the Blank, which posits: “school is a kind of bondage—a corset made of cruel repetition.” In Out of the Blank, she’s got a “new leash on life.” She routinely peppers the quotidian with the otherworldly—not the sinister underworldly, but the other, bursting fecundly forth. Here’s “Never Have I Ever (for David Trinidad)”:
Never have I ever
seen such a pink skylike the tonsils and gums
of a hippoyawning as we ride
over the bridgewhere a sugar factory
sweetens the riverand tall buildings melt
into the water.
The pink hues and the maw of the hippo lend a vaginal character to the heavens, and the river recalls Sándor Ferenczi’s oceanic conception of the womb, here receiving the sugary discharge of a factory, capped with phallic smokestacks. Other poets, like Theodore Roethke, must descend into settings untouched by human hands to reckon with the primordial; Equi might be bopping over the Brooklyn Bridge at rush hour. Her delightful effortlessness reminds us that so much mediocrity gets ahead in art and literature not because of bullshitter editors and curators, but because simply too few are born with her light, enchanting touch. Even out of context, lines stand alone in Out of the Blank, bewitching as a Sappho fragment: “The name of a soldier grazes the ear / like a kiss evaporating.”
Equi welcomes distraction, rejects modernity’s Protestant prerogative of optimization. For her, poetry is the blank, the naps between enlightenments. One poem narrates watching a movie, then reading a book, ultimately ignoring both. It feels good to buy so readily into Equi’s signature of hovering somewhere near the trite, yet always swerving just around it to arrive at a wry, witty sanguinity. If I have a quibble, it would be that, if anything, she has the routine down a bit too pat. By now, an Equi collection is like a Ripley novel or a Morrissey record: You don’t buy it to track the artist’s latest self-reinvention, but rather for the warm bath of what you know you’re getting. This wasn’t always exactly the case: Revisit her career-spanning collection, Ripple Effect, and you’ll find her earlier work palpitating with strangeness and surprise that are less present in the swoons of her recent output. Still, in the domain of lean, madcap understatedness, there’s no one better. At her most successful, she unmasks hidden affinities in the disparate, her work an impossible blend of “Aaron Copland’s optimism / muddled with Bernard Herrmann’s / dark obsessive throb.”
