Aline Soules

            In her preface, Ullman gives the history of the Oblique Strategies created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, but what is more important is the purpose of those strategies and how Ullman chose to approach them. For Eno, who has survived Schmidt since 1980, “the strategies evolved when he felt creatively stuck,” when he forgot there were “tangential ways of attacking a problem that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach,” a way of “lateral thinking” that broke through barriers and surprised him. Ullman used all 110 cards as titles, opening herself to paintings and concerts as well as her own writing and thoughts. She pared down what she wrote and offers this collection as a “reminder of that most interior and resilient of freedoms—the impulse to fully inhabit and bear witness to an inviolable inner life.”

            In the prologue, “Just carry on,” that oh-so British phrase, Ullman is “Half-way through the grid-work of oblique” and wonders if she can “carry on” or, more accurately, “grope” her way or “fling herself” through the rest of the obliques. Then the poem takes an oh-so human twist: “I want the hill.” She wants “the entire tree.” She wants what the obliques offer.

            After this poem come three sections of time: “Floating Time,” “Left-hand Time,” “Back-beat Time.”

            In “Floating Time,” she begins with listening: “Listen in total darkness or in a very large room, very quietly.” Yet, she demands the gifts of the obliques. “Come first the words you’ve always / reached for.” “Come surrender; come drift.” “Come the music of your breath.” “Come dreamed flint.” These demands are at odds with listening. She has not surrendered. She has to demand even surrender, which shifts the word “come” from demand to a plea for the whole tree of gifts.

            In “Disconnect from Desire,” she “imagines every hunger / swept aside” and continues with “like this morning, spring-wet snow having erased / branch, asphalt, sunlight.” This is deeply lyrical, the “world / muted and packed with gauze,” the loss of electricity and Internet. She builds this non-world until the turn of her poem, when

a flare—a string of notes

catching hold, a phrase

to be followed—and desire

has nosed its way

in, because all along

it craved the disconnect.

            That is what she strives for—the space and the oblique where creativity breaks in and this is what the poem achieves.

            In Part II, “Left-hand Time,” her choice of cards (the titles of the poems) speaks of disruption, for example, “Abandon normal instruments,” “Into the Impossible,” and “Change instrument roles.” Again, the goal is to deviate from the norm, come at the world obliquely. In “Imagine the music as a chain of disconnected events,” she references musicians who perform uniquely, Michael Wolff “working” two keyboards at once, one in front, one behind, or Keith Jarrett who “lost himself / over the keyboard” because that was “the heart” that placed him between “control and loss.”

In “Twist the Spine,” a concrete poem that twists down the page, she lets one image slide into another, the cat that “slides / as though his bones were / of river” leading into the river which flows into the next image until, at the end, “two skewed / vertebrae align / like a sentence finally / completing / itself ….”

            In Part III, “Back-beat Time,” the obliques continue with headings like “Do nothing for as long as possible,” “Infinitesimal gradations,” and “Mute and continue.” In “The Inconsistency Principle,” words stagger across the page as she explores the miracle of the flying buttress that is both “airborne” and “stationary.” It meets the oblique because it forced the need for windows in the crypt-space that

let in the light of the world

…

from & to

load-bearing stone

and did so by pushing it sideways.

The contrast of “from & to” with “sideways” is exactly what spurs the oblique and the source of creativity.

            “Fill every beat with something” could easily be considered the opposite of “Do nothing for as long as possible,” but it is not:

Each time I face the nothing

of the not-yet made, of aimless thinking before a thought, I type words

one by one into the silence as though threading gemstones on a string—

…

for the pleasure of juxtaposition free

of meaning.

This could be the mantra of any creator. In the next stanza, she offers tiny images of what she finds in the garden, “a world without / speech.” She observes the “silvery swish of mice / moving through fern” and the “wind blowing shards / of lowered sky.” In the last stanza she comes into the house to hear “the vents breathing” and feel “my blood return / to my fingers.” in the end, “the house / flared around me.” She ends on this burst of expansion, the metaphor for the creativity that emerges from such close sensory observation.

            Her last poem, “Work at a different speed,” begins with the idea of what “could” be done: “You could go as O’Hara says / on your nerve.” These opening words, “You could” soften the insistences into suggestions, but she does not repeat those two words in the next two sections. As the ideas continue: “Or wander outside. Pull weeds” (second part) and “Or wait. / Be cathedral space” (third part, hearkening back to the flying buttress), it would be easy to lose the opening “You could” and consider these exhortations, not just suggestions.”

            The subtlety of these poems is breathtaking, as is the idea of using these oblique strategies to explore what it means to be creative. Ullman has done this masterfully. This work will resonate for a long time.