Abstract

Ragtime for Beginners is a collection of poems concerned with questions of space--the space that not only separates people (through distance or time), but also divides the self. It examines what separates a husband and wife married twenty-five years, and conversely, what brings together a woman and the Jehovah's Witness at her door; and it explores the seismic shifts of the self, how we assemble and disassemble our own lives. The collection pivots around questions of perspective; it considers the difference between something and the image of that thing. It seeks to understand the value of fiction and metaphor in the face of loss; it attempts to distinguish a pomegranate, for example, from a picture of a pomegranate. The five "diptychs," approach their subject matter from two directions--from two voices, two places, or two moments in time. Many of the poems are concerned with memory. They ask, what does one do with a memory? Can the past be made concrete, saved, held in one's hand? In "The Velvet Jewelry Box," the speaker attempts to "unpack those memories like stones, build a road...." In "What Days Remind You Of," the speaker wants to "gather them...like sheets billowing on a clothesline." The collection oscillates between prose (with its enjambment and speed) and lineation (even, at times, metred couplets or quatrains). In every instance, these are self-conscious poems. Like Anna H., in the collection's long poem, they examine the language available to them, searching out similes, questioning images.