by Nathan Moore
Most Wanted, by Jeff Encke
“Most Wanted is a multifaceted animal. It has many heads. It wears many hats.”
For this installment of Just One Thing, I asked Jeff Encke about his collection Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse, which I find both intriguing and beautiful. The work opens up so many questions about the nature of a collection of poetry and about chance and reading.
Most Wanted is not your typical collection but instead one presented as a deck of cards. As such, word and image are married in a unique way. Why did you decide to present the collection in this manner, and what are your thoughts about how the reader might approach the work, what reading process they might employ?
Spinal Liberation: A Manifesto for Chance Operation
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000
Every poet who compiles a book-length collection faces a figure of this magnitude. Most Wanted consists of 52 poems. One can order 52 poems in exactly 8.0658 x 1067 ways — the factorial of 52, or 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 … 52. A group of 104 poems presents an even less imaginable total of 6.5044 x 10135 permutations. If each distinct arrangement represents a different possible book, then the work the poet would have to do to identify the best book from a group of 52 poems (assuming such a thing exists) is equally inconceivable. If the überpoet in question had the manuscripts printed and arranged ahead of time and could read one per minute, the task would still take 1.5346 x 1062 years. It’s probably safe to assume that our überpoet wouldn’t live that long. Even if Knopf published the collection.
Few poets I know see their work in terms of set permutations and probabilities, but most are familiar with the agoraphobic anxiety of infinite possibility — that perilous angst the artist in John Ashbery’s sestina “The Painter” feels as he tries to get the sea to sit for a portrait. An intimate recognition of and respect for infinite possibility has defined the work of many modern poets, inspiring them in varying degrees to embrace the futility of authorial intention, abandon narrative and write what Ashbery once called “hymns to possibility.”
For most, though, the consequence of uncertainty is a struggle against continuous failure with respect to self-inflicted notions of mastery. When sitting down to arrange a manuscript, a poet typically assumes that there’s a right way to do it. Certain poems belong together. An inherent natural order should be respected. While we can argue endlessly about what the specific principles of arrangement entail, the ethic of aesthetic perfection persists. If it didn’t, institutions like peer-edited journals, MFA programs, poetry prizes, state laureateships and genius grants would cease to exist.
Certain arbitrary impositions of order simplify the poet’s task. A subset of poems may share some common characteristic. You may decide, for example, that six sonnets belong together, and since there are only six, you’ll probably overlook the 720 ways to arrange them. Or perhaps you’ll decide to frontload the manuscript with the 10 best poems; even the 3.6 million variations of this subset are less daunting than the alternative (8.0658 x 1067). After months of rearranging, when you’re certain you’ve exhausted all the possibilities, you ultimately close your eyes and take the plunge. It’s called trusting your gut. Toss a pinch of salt into the pot and call it done — you don’t count the grains. You taste the soup and, like a little god, decide it’s good.
One’s comfort level with that ineluctable moment of arbitrariness — that surrender to chance operation — is what defines poet. No matter how much formal, psychological or narrative control the poet attempts to exert, writing for an audience is always a gamble. Each poet defines the stakes. When I consider the risk of writing, and the concomitant reward of complete freedom, W.S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman” always comes to mind:
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’tyou can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t writeIn their 1992 study “Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair” (appearing in the Annals of Applied Probability), mathematicians David Bayer and Persi Warren Diaconis famously averred that it takes seven riffle shuffles to randomize a deck of cards. On those rare occasions when I read Most Wanted straight through, I always begin by shuffling the deck seven times. I could do this for the rest of my life and probably never reproduce the same sequence.
I was recently invited to give a reading at a liberal arts college in Eastern Washington. When I came to Most Wanted, I decided to read from the freshly randomized deck continuously, as if it were a single poem. The natural symmetry and flow of the card order caught me by surprise, and I stumbled a few times as I read. I casted each card into a disheveled pile on the lectern, as if I were dealing a 52-card hand to eternity. During the post-reading Q&A session, a perceptive student asked me how I felt knowing that I would never read all the variations of Most Wanted. I answered that the thought was depressing, and the audience laughed, but I had meant it.
Most Wanted is a multifaceted animal. It has many heads. It wears many hats. Among other things, its form was meant to allude to the insurmountable distance between authors and readers (or lovers and beloveds), a distance that resides at the center of Merwin’s youthful self-doubt. My decision to print excerpts from the Most Wanted series on a deck of cards represented in some sense an attempt to free myself from the psychological strictures of literary production, throw off the shackles of the spine, and shift the anxiety of order to my readers. Together we — that is, all readers of Most Wanted — have a better chance, albeit an infinitesimal one, of discovering the best book. That may still be a hopeless cause, but at least the odds have improved.
The full-length version of Most Wanted is currently looking for a spine. Publishers may apply here: jeff (at) matlub (dot) net.
Jeff Encke’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, Salt Hill and others. He published Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse in 2004, through his imprint, Last Tangos Editions, and has since sold almost 2,000 decks to poets, tarot readers, book artists, playing card collectors and special-collections libraries throughout the world. Until 2003, he taught writing and criticism at Columbia University, where was writer-in-residence for the Program in Narrative Medicine while completing his Ph.D. in English. He now lives in Seattle, where he edits for a large philanthropic organization and teaches literature on weekends at Richard Hugo House.
Nathan Moore is community director and columnist for Read Write Poem. In his spare time, he plays with his children and with fire. Never at the same time. He blogs at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.
It’s interesting to me that Encke is obsessed with destroying the possibility of one order for his book (in an attempt to symbolically reject the academic hierarchy forced onto poetry, amongst other reasons) yet, when he was asked by the student how he felt about the possibility of never reading ‘all the variations’ of Most Wanted, he admitted to feeling legitimately depressed. Which to me reads as though, despite his best efforts, he still desires a sense of order and completion in his manuscript, as though finally coming to the ‘end’ of those variations would be infinitely satisfying, would teach him something known and solid. Which is, I think, very much akin to the feeling he describes other poets having when they order a manuscript in a ‘normal’ way, act as ‘little gods’, to borrow his own phrase. His yearning seems to me precisely the same, it’s just playing out a little funky.
Nathan replied:
January 19th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
You raise good points Emily. I think what Jeff does is here is to hone in on that complex moment of artistic creation in which you realize there are no guarantees but we have to act anyway, you know?
What a fascinating post.
I appreciate the angst in his mission and his understanding of the nature of control — impossible to resist the need to manage it. Nice of him to admit it, rather than to hide it.
I have just acquired a huge crush on Encke.
Thanks, Nathan, for putting this one thing together. Made my day.
Deb Scott replied:
January 19th, 2010 at 11:41 am
I may use “it” no more today. Passed my lim-it.
Nathan replied:
January 19th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Thank Deb and a big thanks to Jeff for his generous response!
I picked this up at the AWP bookfair (in Austin, can’t remember what year–2005?). I remember asking Jeffrey Encke, “What’s this smack?” at the table (ha!). The joke was on me. I keep the deck in my top desk drawer in my office, and I sometimes pull them out when I’m thinking. They are beautiful, provocative, and not at all the smack I thought they were. Sorry for misjudging you, Jeffrey!
Thanks for the comments everyone, and thanks to Nathan for putting this together!
I’ve been spending a lot of time with *The Praise of Folly* lately (for a course I’m teaching on Menippean satire in a few weeks), so I’ve probably developed the impression that cognitive dissonance is a virtue.
You’re either with us or against us! No, I wasn’t talking to you.
Lindsay… I don’t remember your calling the cards “smack” (Austin, 2006), but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have known what you meant. Is smack a bad thing? Boy, I loved Austin.
Warm wishes,
Jeff
i love this idea! but freaked out a bit by the fact that i thought of doing something similar but thought the logistics and cost of printing it might be too much
Jeff Encke replied:
January 21st, 2010 at 1:38 am
Hey Jessie… The printing costs and logistics probably are too much, sad to say. You can’t do this for less than $10-12K in the U.S. (assuming you want playable, plastic-coated cards). I’m happy to put you in touch with the printers in New Delhi if you’re interested in a quote. Jeff
Jeff:
I’m curious what would happen if you found a publisher who wanted to put a spine on this. Do you have some kind of ultimate order in mind? Or would you shuffle seven times and go with it?
I love the cards, by the way. At the writing center I work for, we’ve got a deck sitting on the living room coffee table.
Thanks to you and Nathan for a great post!
Beth
(from Hayden’s Ferry Review)
Hey Beth,
If I find a publisher, I get to cop out. The full-length poems each correspond to specific cards in the Iraq’s Most Wanted deck; the titles of the poems are the names of the individuals, so they’re arranged by suit and value by default.
But maybe you’re onto something there. Maybe I should randomize the order…hmmmm. I leave that decision to the hypothetical publisher.
I gotta get down to the Piper Center some day.
Don’t give it a spine! It’s perfect the way it is.
Jeff, I had no idea you were so into numbers and probabilities and all of that. I thought you would answer Nathan’s question very differently. I was certain I knew just what you were going to say, and then you pulled all that math out of your ass.
I have a lot of math lurking in my ass, Dana. Trust me.
I bought a deck of Jeff’s cards some time back, well, I think I bought 10 packs, and gave some to poet friends as gifts, and keep a pack on hand in my briefcase to use for in class writing prompts. I’ve used them for prompts myself, both the cards as well as the images. They’re are beautiful, delightful and thought-provoking together as well as individually. The math of it all just goes over my poet head, but many of the poem fragments and images have stayed with me. Thanks to Jeff and Read/Write/Poem for a great column.
Thanks, Dorianne! I’m humbled.
Jeff–
Woo doggy. I’m interested in this idea of control– the idea of giving it up by giving up the order poems are read to the responsibility of ReaderX.
In a way, by giving that control up, you’re mainting that control, right? I mean, you can put a book of poems in any order,but who really reads the first poem first? I usually jump right to the middle, then read one at the end, then read cover to cover. And then with rereading, I rarely read cover to cover. And consider the blog post on Harriet by Anselm Berrigan here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/11/reading-habits-part-i/
Really, this is an issue of erotic/reader triangle.
Erotic: a) lover, b) beloved, & c) the thing that comes between
Reader: a) writer, b) reader, & c) the text that comes between–
No matter what happens, no matter the form the text arrives in, there’s no absolute answer. No right answer.
So by letting go of the illusion that as poet you do have any control over the order ReaderX reads in, you actually take the only amount of real control that’s available: control over your own perspective.
Well, now you’ve really gone too far, Amber. Solipsism. Sheer hermeneutic solipsism. Shame.
ambydexterous replied:
January 27th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Alas, see… this is why I usually don’t participate in these sorts of things and instead I sit awkwardly in the corner & listen (read to everyone else. I always go too far… I’m that kid.. the one that goes too far.
But you asked, so I came, I saw, I went to far…
Jeff,
Since I’m all the way into order and mastery–precisely because it’s utterly elusive in poetry–your post makes perfect sense. To write well a poet has to stare into the maw of eternity, for starters, where no one, and I mean NO ONE cares what the poet writes. Then the poet has to slowly destroy her or his identify as the craft moves him or her sometimes gently but often abruptly and at a screaming rate straight out of known emotional territory and out over the cliff of certainty into the ether of uncertainty. All while sitting at a desk or in an armchair somewhere, often in public. One of the best kept secrets about poets is they’re all emotional and intellectual adrenalin junkies. At least that’s my take on the whole order and mastery thing. The perverse inverse relationship between mastery and being completely out of control at the same time.
“One of the best kept secrets about poets is they’re all emotional and intellectual adrenalin junkies.”
Hey, I can quit anytime!