Sasha Steenson - The family bought a rural plot & planted a garden. The family formed thoughts. Within these thoughts, eggs hatched, animals were born, little wars formed. Each thought said unspeakable things to the other thoughts. As you know, unspoken thoughts rot.

Sasha Steenson, House of Deer. Fence Books, 2014.

Sasha Steensen’s third volume is a lyric inquiry into a personal history of the back-to-the-land idealism of the 1970s, with its promises and failings, naturalism gone awry, and journeys into the worlds of addiction, recovery, and, ultimately, family. “If family is a body, learn its anatomy,” Steensen writes early in the book, immediately before upending all our expectations and giving us new thoughts to think.

"Like the Oppen she takes as her epigraph, Sasha Steensen's is a poetry that feels magically made via both subtraction and building. With language as lush as Hopkins' and then as small and weird as Niedecker's, Steensen tells a story, or alights in and out of a story, all her own. It's an American story, too, with all the bloodiness and experiment that such a thing requires."—Maggie Nelson 

The family bought a rural plot & planted a garden.
The family formed thoughts.
Within these thoughts, eggs hatched, animals were born, little wars formed. Each thought said unspeakable things to the other thoughts.
As you know, unspoken thoughts rot.

Sasha Steensen, The Method. Fence Books, 2008.

The Method is a manuscript of theorems and proofs written and diagrammed by the mathematician Archimedes in Syracuse around 250 bc. The Method is a book of poems by Sasha Steensen. The former is a text that has survived, at least in parts, through a series of processes that includes palimpsesting, thievery, obscurantism, acquisition, and conservation. The latter text takes the former and its history, which has been invisible, overwritten, and requisitioned for use value, as a jumping-off place for her own meditation on the relationships that develop between a person and her historical truth, a person and her writings. Steensen’s The Method treads carefully in the terrain of fact that foregrounds her investigations, and emerges centuries and centuries on in the only moment that remains to us. “I thought:// The Method, so happily recovered./ I am the one who called us all together./ I driven time./ I wars and waves./ I was./ I go over sea-lanes rife with fish./ I did not.// I saw a shadow on the water./ I know this situation makes a perfect poem,/ but I will not.”
“What or who is The Method? Charming, dangerous, love-struck, mistaken—an angle of the human mind. Trapped together in nets of language, geometries of battle, the human words prove themselves cyclical, as centuries feed one another like nutritive springs mid-sea. Somewhere in there, men and women found ways to measure the world’s parts, and these poems show us the forms, as we sit down at the table (set down in this book) with The Method to partake of the ‘bottomless years.’”—Eleni Sikelianos

“If whatever it is that makes humanity so messed up were separable from us and wound itself assiduously through every part of our history, if that otherness could announce itself as orphaned baby or monster or missing manuscript, if our behaviors made it as uncomfortable and unhappy as it made us, there would be Method to our madness, and Sasha Steensen would have mapped it in her latest, which in its wit and dark didactic elegance is going to keep me up at night.”—Catherine Wagner

“It is easier to supply the proof when we have previously acquired, by the method, some knowledge of the questions.”—Archimedes

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: Review of The Method (2013/04/29)
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: Review of The Method (2013/04/29)
REDIVIDER: Review of The Method (2013/04/29)
GALATEA RESURRECTS: The Method Review (2009/12/21)
JACOB RUSSELL'S BARKING DOG: "Sasha Steensen, The Method: Palimpsest of Poetry Over a Dream of History" (2008/12/16)

From Fence Books comes the latest book from the young poet Sasha Steenson. The Method refers, tangentially, to a text by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, which over the course of time has survived via rewritings, overwritings, and underwritings. The Archimedes text manifests itself in Steenson’s poems as a character, named the Method, which is part man, part abstract idea, and part text.
Whereas many poetry collections in the last few years have fully incorporated a single idea as the driving point of the entire collection, Steensen uses the Archimedes text as a jumping off point. Method ties all the poems together, but it does not override each poem’s unique existence for the sole sake of keeping the series consistent. Steensen quickly moves beyond a mere versifying of remnants of the Archimedes text and creates a world for Method that is resonant:
            Each angle Archimedes draws
            ends up in an orphanage
            where it is stolen at night
            and scattered.
            Like a good son before he becomes bitter
            The Method lets Archimedes linger.
            It’s like having Archimedes’s brain in a box
Steensen in similarly deft fashion takes on the profession of the poet and the act of writing without seeming didactic or merely appealing to other writers. Her verse goes beyond the workshop and beyond the bounds of the academy to make itself relevant to any reader. She draws the connection between the act of writing and every person’s daily task of making sense of their own life:
            The complete sentence
            is lionized.
            The fiercest beast
            in the jungle
            is complete.
            Without one.
            When we see one,
            we halt.
            we waltz.
            I’m utterly.
            I’m completely.
            In love
            with the sentence.
            I will serve it
            gladly.
            You should
            Serve it
            completely.
            Otherwise.
Steensen includes periodic untitled bits of verse, which are more aphorism than poem. They contribute to the idea of the book as an amalgam of texts from various times by various writers for various purposes:
            road, come pass
            with me terrors
            by the side
            of seas & easterlies
The collection reaches the height of its power during the fifteen part prose-poem “The Future of an Illusion.” The poem references Freud, Pound, Scarry, Herodotus, and others, yet does so in a gentle, seamless manner that draws depth and inspiration from its sources without sending the reader running to the library:
            There is no reason to return home, even though my home is now
            bigger than it once was, being a ranch with not a single cow or horse.
            Method realizes others must have the same thoughts, but their parents
            busily distribute missing person posters and their police scour the
            fields and rivers. Ultimately, there is no place like it, but saying it will
            not get you there.
Beyond the locus point of Archimedes and the theme of writing, Steensen touches upon a vast range of other issues. Many of her settings are in Constantinople or contemporary Istanbul, which provides the backdrop for the writer’s photograph; pregnancy and the creation of the new; Islam; and difficult love. What ties all these together with Archimedes and the Method is code. The letters that make up Archimedes’ text, the mixing DNA that creates a new human, the word of God written in the Qu’ran, the attempts to converse with the lover and understand what is beyond the outer skin.
Near the end Steensen leaves readers with a call for multiculturalism, understanding, and the power of poetry to cross boundaries:
            It is hard to hate a people,
            Method chants,
            Saba, Savva,
            old man,
            fiih,
            when you’ve read
            their poetry.
Steensen’s verse is poignant without being didactic. Her poems touch upon both timeless issues and contemporary issues, while still creating lines that are interesting, beautiful, humorous, and desirous in their own right as pure art. - Andrew Wessels

Morrow-Hearted Method Dreams
 

Every little whale-thought waits

awhile, then dives deeper

into sleep.

  

Once awake, blowing hard

for air, The Method dunno

what he saw

there.

Ganging to remember

how he ate stars

how his liver escaped out his anus

and the sun rose through his genitals

or, how his eyebrows,

the two parents, or two sons, or two partners, or two spouses

or two handmaids, or two proxies

became bushy and beautiful, then fell out.

Only now,

beached on the Cape,

driftwood stuck and nudged

into each side

by curious vacationers

does he know how every object

that looks like an object

will be destroyed

finally.

After Centuries of Mistreatment
 

Each angle Archimedes draws

ends up in an orphanage

where it is stolen at night

and scattered.

Like a good son before he becomes bitter,

The Method lets Archimedes linger.

It’s like having Archimedes’s brain in a box,

pushing his way

past security

ticker, cutter,

Method in hand,

hand in air, as the plane

creeps

past us,

papyrus,

you

little

coward.

Sasha Steenson, A Magic Book. Fence Books, 2004.

Winner of the 2004 Alberta Prize

The poems in Sasha Steensen’s splendid A Magic Book offer a feast of paradox—deceptive yet honest, funny but frightening, simple yet mysteriously complex, otherworldly yet wryly quotidian. Her sources are antiquarian archives, seventeenth-century journals, nineteenth- and twentieth-century magic acts, what has been saved and lost and saved again. Wandering the American landscape is her method for moving among materials of our checkered pastmagicians, changelings, George Washington, séances, Cotton Mather, the Davenport Brothers, W. C. Williams (Paterson), the spirit of Charles Olson. Through imaginative exorcism she brings back into our perception the experience of the invisible dead.—Susan Howe

INTERIM MAGAZINE: A Magic Book Review
RAIN TAXI REVIEW OF BOOKS: A Magic Book Review

Errand #1

 Make it the land of a thousand dies.

Make it colorful and unmatched.

Make it there and make it home.

Do not make it your own.

Make it in the manner of the old.

Make it only with the well-known.

Make it boast of its self.

Pliny indulges in lamentation for “the maner of the world in these our daise”:
“Full well I know, that I for my part also, shall have but small thanks for all my paines taken in writing this history of the world and Nature of works: Nay, I am assured that I make my selfe a laughing stocke, and am condemned of them for spending and losing my time in such a frivolous piece of worke as this is.”

In these our daise

do we know full well that it makes itself to boast of its self

or that we make it to boast of ourselves

or that we make it to boast of it

or that it makes us to boast of its self

or that it makes us to boast of ourselves,

and if so, could we safely say

we are still sages and wizards and witches?

Cuckoos or Davenport brothers. Boys from Buffalo.


Correspondence. with Gordon Hadfield, Handwritten Press, 2004).