Dorothea Lasky's Milk Bewilders Old Meanings

At Boston Review, Dorothea Lasky's fifth book, Milk (Wave, 2018) is thoughtfully reviewed by Nathaniel Rosenthalis. Proclaiming the work the "fullest manifestation of [her] poetic persona yet," Rosenthalis also notes that "these poems gain their power from how they handle their materials with a matter-of-factness that resonates between the voice and the page in ways that break the pieties of both." Further in, a logic is seen:

Lasky’s use of internal associative logic performs by deferring the rational correspondence between image and metaphor. If we look to an early statement of poetics by Bernadette Mayer, one of Lasky’s most important influences, we encounter useful ways to reframe Lasky’s use of this associative logic. In “The Obfuscated Poem,” Mayer makes an off-the-cuff case for how a poet “learning how to write” can create a poem that “may have to...reflect in its meaning just the image of meaning,” channel “real energy in training,” while it works to configure “something that isn’t learned or even known yet,” ideally giving “hints of great illumination” (see Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry). More than reiterating the trope of poet as perpetual beginner, Mayer’s staged position of poet-as-student articulates “the obfuscated poem” as “a study” that “bewilders old meanings while reflecting or imitating or creating a structure of beauty that we know.” Mayer’s theorized poem includes an array of motivating reasons for disconnecting from daily world sense, including poetry as an “experiment conducted by a person (who may have something to hide).” The radical openness of Lasky’s poetics discounts this particular interpretive possibility, but there is, in Lasky, the same commitment to experiment that refuses to abdicate its devotion to what Mayer calls “the forbidden sublime.” We can see glimpses of Lasky’s iteration of poem-as-accelerated-learning-space in “The School” in which the speaker declares her desire to start her own institution for learning:

Dear Elizabeth, you sit in a room

You are teaching me to be gold

Unbeknownst to the number 41

Where it was summer by a lake

And I said, this is it

Where in the middle of the ocean, I drowned

But by then some miracle

The one green crowning left itself for me

And the moon was bright and I could see my way backwards

To when I had jumped from the boat into the blackness

The School was supposed to be for poetry, not greed

I said to anyone, but no one cared

It’s not that people don’t care about greed

It’s that, is that so surprising

And well, don’t you have your own?