Always Erase
Lauren Pope
Blue Diode Press
In Always Erase, Lauren Pope resurfaces residues of surrealist thought. The collection oscillates between embracing the authorial craft and agency of found poems, but also gives rise to an ontopoetical perspective of the poet, with a particular focus on repetitions in and outside of language.
Rhythmically, this collection emerges as a meditation on recurrence. Repetitions are interwoven not only on a textual and thematic level, but also in the diverse choice of verse forms present in the collection manufacturing a sensory and intellectually rich tapestry of poems. One poem takes the form of an imaginary dictionary entry for ‘REPETITION [rεpɪ’tɪʃ(ə)n]’. It highlights the dictionary’s repetitive effort to find the perfect definition, through reiteration. ‘Petit Socco’ follows a traditional verse form of the Sestina; based on the repetition of the words ‘loops’, ‘through’, ‘riads’, ‘here’, ‘westerners’ and ‘fuck’. Lastly, a poem after Donna Stonecipher’s Model City, admired by Pope, models ‘stanzas that are constantly being rebuilt, changing course, through the language of repetition, repetition at a slightly different register from what came before.’
Thematically, the sister-motive is one of the persisting recurring themes of the collection. The reader encounters ‘the beautiful sister’, ‘the sister with the best marriage prospects’, ‘the sister whom no one has’, ‘anaemic sisters’, ‘little sister’, ‘my sister’. Dedicated to her sister, Pope invites the reader to see the sibling as a variation or repetition of the self (at least genetically).
The eponymous line manifests in the poem ‘Hinterland’ captioned with a disclaimer: this is ‘a compilation of autocorrected and predictive text messages’. The final stanza reads: ‘you are always erase’. This use of automatic processes encourages the reader to see poetry, where formerly autocorrected words were merely interpreted as technical glitches. The poet becomes a receptive vessel, assuming the role of the attentive observer, in line with the philosophical perspective of ontopoetics. Anything becomes fertile for producing poetry: a body, a leaf, an afternoon or ‘the crack in my smile—/’
The word ‘always’ operates as an indication to the self-restoring, concept of repetition: part linguistic tic, part biological necessity. The implication of constant erasure is an affirmation of ephemerality, but also regeneration. ‘Always run’, ‘always threatening’, ‘always imagined’, ‘always be’, ‘always, always’—creates a mise-en-abyme repetition of ‘always’, which in itself is a repetition of the repetition. Nested structures are another reoccurring theme within the collection. ‘The answer is a nest of Russian dolls—keep looking’, and elsewhere ‘I’ve become the doll inside the doll inside of you.’ With this, the poet encourages the reader to question whether we are all just cells circulating in endless replication until ‘we understand that a circle has no end’.
—Lucille Mona Ling