122 contemporary poetry
and interrogated... In this sense the lyric mode itself often makes
strange and operates in an uncanny way’.^49 Fagan, in commenting
upon the poetry of Hejinian, draws further attention to the sense
of poetry as an encounter with the world. She comments that for
Hejinian a sense of encounter can be read as a movement between
‘abstract nomination (an encounter), and a process of acting or
becoming (to encounter), between noun and verb’.^50 Importantly
Fagan’s understanding of ‘encounter’ places an emphasis upon
ideas of movement and mobility: ‘Emphasising fl ux, they remind
us that encounter-discoveries such as those specifi ed by Hejinian –
aesthetic, political, ethical – are always mobile, and open to further
meetings or happenings’.^51
In ‘The Waste of Tongues’, Fagan declares that ‘A writer cannot
inherit an instance / To dwell in the arrangement of things’ (p. 105 ),
suggesting that writing cannot merely be a commemorative act,
but needs to respond, to perform in relation to the world around
it. In this poem she writes of poetry as an accumulative act: ‘news
that absorbs news’ (p. 105 ). Advancing on Ezra Pound’s famous
dictum that ‘poetry is news that STAYS news’, Fagan insists upon
the poem’s mobility and that its actions are dependent upon the
world.^52 This responsiveness to the world as a breaking down of
boundaries is described as wanting ‘to touch the drifting matter’
(p. 105 ). Following through from this phenomenological reading,
the writing of the poem marks ideas of change. In writing ‘relativ-
ity’ on a blank page, the speaker notes how ‘the way your i has
changed over time, / a swift equation forming, i / time’ (p. 89 ).
This understanding of the relationship between poet and per-
ceived world comes to the fore in another poem from this collec-
tion, ‘Sentience’. Here Fagan performs an anatomy of description
upon the act of enunciating: ‘this sound breath makes’ as it forms
‘a lifting of bone to meet bone over the long reach of a sentence’
(p. 85 ). The focus upon breath’s mutability is clear in its division
from the sentence as ‘lust / emerging later as light’ (p. 85 ). Fagan’s
‘Sentience’ reads the situating of relations in the world, an erotic
performance where ‘a sense of sudden visibility drags / an eye from
point to point’ (p. 86 ), where the subject of the scene is attempting
to ‘interpret erotic scenery’ (p. 86 ). In this schema, things become
permeable and the impetus towards description is described by