Orlando White’s letters
the first page of Orlando White’s Bone Light is an ij, a little higher than the center of the page. large, two letters take up more than half. they are letters carved into the page, cut out of the page, they have their form from the absence that has been made from carving down. like multiple pages were stacked and then the shapes of these letters were taken from them to show the letters in blankness. it doesn’t seem like an attack, there are no extra cuts, or violent rips. it is obvious that ink on the page was not enough here. where most poets have a quote from another poet, or a dedication he has chosen these two letters drilled down, as the page needed to be skinned first before anything else could be done.
it is a scan, it must be, it is beautiful! I would love to see the original. why ij? there is some about these letters throughout the book: a poem called The i is a cricket, and lines: Push the i: its head will not move…Dot without i, period without sentence. and a series of poems titled: Lower Case i and j, i Without j, i Next to j and the poem i-j that starts with Skeletons shaped like two letters. She holds a comma. He holds a black dot. and ends with you will see two lovers shaped like i and j kissing with a hyphen.
these two letters, in this book, are not just letters, they are bodies, alive because of their broken ness. but, doesn’t he want us to re think all the letters and words in general, so why start with the i and j? I begin to think it is because of their physicalness. the way they each have a part that hangs separate from the main body but is necessary for the letter to be recognized for what it is, for it to be legible. he brings my attention this closely, this zoomed in, not to what the letters can make when arranged with other letters, but, what the letters are themselves, what they are by themselves or in this case what is i next to j, separate and together?
in this book there is much more attention given to the O: write the letter O; see the straight-line curve one end into the other…an O bends its knees…shake the O until white appears…Write the O. Dip skull into bleach. but it is not the O that starts this book carved into paper stacked up. It is this ij. it is the nature of the O to be contained, that it does hold that obvious amount of the blank page within it, and that there is no way for that white space to escape. and this makes it inappropriate to start the book but fruitful to linger on throughout the rest of the poems.
written in the gaps, with gaps intact, gaps being the inspiration for writing. this first page with these two letters (that can’t be random?) that have been carved out of / into the paper, so much so that their layers have shadows. it might be these shadows that entrance me so. flat letters made into a substance that must be reckoned with, without being a word. I am used to reckoning with words, I am not used to reckoning with letters on their own, or in this case as a partnership that makes an unsure sound in my mouth. to see that these letters can hold up on a page, tall, or deep enough to have shadow, to be their own sculptures, their own beings.
so far this choice, of the ij, is not obvious to me. I like that it is unknown. if it was obvious to me, wouldn’t some of the mystery be gone, isn’t it this mystery that attracts me to this opening page and then drapes this mystery over the rest of the book like a magicians curtain, not sure what will appear or disappear once it has been moved.
there are clues through out to the way Orlando makes letters, and the words they make, physical. it is called Bone Light after-all and I am confident letters are bones here to make the broken/working body of language. As for the white sheet / of skin. // Wring it out. // Hang over the skeleton // of a letter. Let dry.
side note: for sake of what I am deeming legibility I did not stay true to Orlando White’s line breaks, except for the last quote, in the writing of this. and I would be a fool not to state how beautiful and careful his line breaks are, how much they make the letters, and words, as bones, as bodies, as individuals. there are too many for me to copy into this piece and not the exact goal of my writing today. you must search this work out for yourself. not everything can be brought in at once.
