So What So That

Thinking through jazz as a form of modernism, this is poetry in kinetic, musical, spatial relationship to the page. Marjorie Welish uses the page—not as a surface upon which to buoy language, but as a core construction of the poem, in visual and kinetic relationship with text. Here, her spatial acuity is tuned to the rhythms of jazz, and that art form’s relationship to modernism. One of our most challenging and rewarding poets, the pleasure is to simply marvel.