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’t

you 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 write

In 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.