Genevieve Kaplan Erases Virginia Woolf into Poetry

“Nothing was simply one thing.” Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. If you opened Genevieve Kaplan‘s chapbook Settings for these Scenes (Chicago: Convulsive Editions, 2013) and didn’t know how her poems were made (and you wouldn’t know that until you got to the final page), her first poem might appear to be more or less straightforward, perhaps informed a bit by Imagism. Even the space surrounding the words doesn’t look all that strange these days. But start turning the pages and the syntax in the remaining poems starts to disintegrate. The phrases get shorter and the space between words expands. There are barely any punctuation marks, but some intriguing word repetitions start to appear. One poem of twenty-four words in length repeats the word “in” eleven times to make its point. Another somewhat longer poem uses “in” fifteen times. The grammar of these poems (such as it is) has an occasional sharp corner that might suggest there is something unwritten that we are not seeing. Kaplan’s…