Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists

Laynie Browne’s fifteenth collection of poems, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists, adapts its title from Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues by poet C.D. Wright, Browne’s late teacher, to whom the book is dedicated. Browne’s collection consists of six collages and more than 200 pages of numbered list poems, each titled with a date, beginning with “12.16.15” and ending with “5.23.16.” Many of the numbered items are thematically independent, and read like instructions, epigrams, or Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms,” for example: “9. Transport is always a question,” or “4. Numbers don’t keep anyone safe.” Conversely, sentences or themes often spill across multiple numbered items, as in Browne’s metacommentary on the book itself:

1. In considering the form of “the list” doing is surrounded by thought.
2. While I began with the notion of translating “to do” lists into oblique commentary, I now see dissolved momentary movements.

In “12.30.15,” Browne reflects on the decision to reimagine her “to do” lists: “7. It is not the items on the list that are paralyzing, but thoughts surrounding the actions I must take.” Though the poems are awash in the quotidian—buying gifts, planning travel, filling out forms, child care—they read like the textual record of a sensitive mind working through the “thoughts surrounding” the daily demands that make up a life. Such thinking, for Browne, is tinged with an acute awareness of our inevitable mortality:

9. All bodies are subject to disappearance. 

and later in the same poem, 

21. Every item on this list is number 9.

Browne’s attunement to life’s fragility also finds expression in her grief for Wright (“19. I am inside the death of my mentor and friend”), and lends gravity to her gloss of the titular “lilies” as a symbol for life’s flourishing:

9. Translation of thoughts, or lilies, into lists is coping with finitude.
10. I say lilies because the reproductive parts are most delicate.
11. We value our own flowering and then the bloom of generations.