Between Tectonics and Lyric: Marjorie Welish on the Poems of Drew Milne

Marjorie Welish reviews In Darkest Capital: The collected poems of Drew Milne (Carcanet, 2017) for Chicago Review this month. "Twenty-five poetry books, chapbooks, and uncollected manuscripts comprise" Drew Milne's book, writes Welish, who begins in the middle. An excerpt:

At the heart of culture is the construction we make of it. It is common knowledge that in Europe, Napoleon’s wars precipitated widespread enthusiasm for the archeological knowledge that this adventuring brought about. Hegel was one of these enthusiasts, and his thoroughgoing analytic treatment of architectural typology in the age of Napoleon, which disclosed subterranean worlds beyond that of European knowledge and inspired study through archeology, has left an imprint in Milne’s poems about the substantially dialectical interrelation of culture and labor. His own concrete poems are not adequately understood, Milne seems to argue, until the social forces within and underneath the surface are revealed. And yet they are poems after all. So, to say that the poems comprising “Blueprints & Ziggurats” are about architecture or archeology as such is not quite right; and with its accumulated terminologies in stacks, a rather better characterization would be that of analogy. Think of El Lissitzky’s “transfer stations,” which referred to a crossing between architecture and painting, to specify this analogy: in Milne’s poems there are incessant transfer stations between tectonics and lyric—between social tectonics and poetry.

In Darkest Capital, organized chronologically, establishes the conditions and quandaries of the modernism to which the anthology is committed from the start. The collection presupposes the poetics, not the politics, of Ezra Pound, which in our collective memory depends on the writing and reading of cantos. Milne participates in an ongoing dialogue with the presuppositions of Pound’s poetics, answering by way of a rich set of artifacts of politics tempered through song.…

More of this rich review at Chicago Review.