Mycological Studies
by Jay Millar
Coach House Books, 2002

Reviewed by Ben Lyle Bedard

" ‘To mushroom,’" Canadian poet, Jay Millar, writes in his Preface to Mycological Studies, "means literally ‘to develop explosively,’ surely a fine way of thinking about a desire to write, a sudden urge to commune. Writing as an ongoing process, living in the letter, might create a general slowdown in the process we understand as life". To read Mycological Studies is to experience another rhythm of life, a slower, more careful, more communal existence as Jay Millar seeks to grasp the tones of another mode of living on earth: the one of mushrooms. One of Pound’s first poems, written for his then sweetheart, HD, tantalizes the reader with the thought of the imagination of a tree, of the lessons one derives from such an act of the imagination. "Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood/And many a new thing understood/That was rank folly to my head before," Pound writes in "The Tree." What those lessons were, however, is an enigma left romantically unexplored. (It being Pound, however, one wishes he had remembered his education better.) In Mycological Studies, Millar investigates this trans-species communication, finding communal ground between the fungus and the human in the process of writing.

"Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?" asks Thoreau in Walden. "Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?" The act of stepping out of one’s skin into another’s perception is a common tactic for the poetic mind. In 80 Flowers, Zukofsky had the imagination and the courage to imagine the vehicle for this motion outwards to be language, the concrete ability of words to create connections, not only between the reader and the writer, but between the writer and reality itself, the world of stones and flowers and mushrooms. Millar’s project in Mycological Studies is an investigation of the world, using not only language but both process and page to "commune" with the fungal world:

who thinks they’re trying to communicate?

who communicates to trying their thinks?

Millar writes, "it is the possibility of language offered by appearance/in the present that fascinates". This relationship is the propulsive energy of the book. Divided into three parts with an appendix, Mycological Studies offers different pathways in the investigation of our relationship to the natural world. The first part of the book is written in conventional-looking lines, with the use of bold text to give the surface a texture that undulates with an ethereal fecundity, as if these bold letters were spores waiting to erupt out of the fertile earth of the book. When the second book opens, the reader is pleasantly shocked to see the world of the book exploded into white space. The affect is beautifully organic, as if we were watching the quiet but pervasive action of growth and realizing it as a process of creating identities, each with its own margins, its own white-bounded integrity.

imaginary sprouting somewhere with nothing

This line appears at the head of the page while the bottom ends it with the following line, after a chasm of aching whiteness:

the language to tell you where you are

What is sprouting here is not just words, or even language, but the page itself as a communicative form. Or, as Millar puts it in his poem "Being There," "what was going on was nothing/put into words." The meaning sprouts from Millar’s care with the space of the page and a sensitivity to its ability to be expressive. Unlike Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, Millar is not captured by language or bounded by it. The page itself is just as expressive for this poet than the words themselves¾ perhaps, at times, more. The use of the page in the book seems to offer as important a groundwork as the mushroom’s experience of the earth itself. The page becomes more than just a passive vehicle for meaning, but a connection of itself, another method for the study and appreciation for another species on the planet.

The appendix of the book demonstrates the full capability of this kind of interrogation (or cooperation) with the world as it exists about us. Called "XXVI Fungal Threads," one for each letter of the alphabet, the poems mimic first shape, then meaning in a wonderful pairing of poems. The top poem, using only letters, draws out a fungal thread while the bottom poem articulates those letters into words and poems. The relationship acts as a metaphor of the poet to the object, giving the process meaning, and further complicating the nature of such a project. Visually engaging, these threads operate in relation to each other as a process of the mind, a mind searching for understanding, true mimicry that has nothing to do with mimesis.

Millar’s theme of absence of language as a viable conduit for meaning, continues in his work, both old and new, though in Mycological Studies it seems to reach an apogee. In his 2005 collection, False Maps For Other Creatures, published by Nightwood Editions, Millar writes, "so many/landscapes exist/to push through//the foliage and grasp/a natural absence/of words//caught like a leaf/when it falls/the structure understands". In his poem series "Some Notes on Bird Song," from his 1998 collection, The Ghosts of Jay MillAr published by Coach House, Millar identifies language as both a method and a way of seeking connection:

Because Language is the bridge between bodies, (a light swoop upon the air)

that hoop which houses the mind, it is a bird house, whose sexual wings are

perched upon those branches. It should be made clear that this language cares

nothing for orientation, gender, age, species, or race. It is exactly like what it is like

to be with another person. If you call the right notes, someone is there who can

answer.

Millar’s preoccupation with both the permeation of language in our lives and the seeming absence of it in the natural world explains the diversity of Mycological Studies. On one page, only a sentence may appear, or the poem may exist under a temple’s weight of white space above it. On another, the eye is struck by a wall of words, a deluge of articulation as Millar grasps another set of tools and tries again to create those ephemeral connections which only poetry can provide us.

The third part of Mycological Studies, "Unidentified Species," is an example of Millar’s comfort with words, his eagerness to use it. The third section offers us a block of justified text in which we delve into the dark world of fungi. Here, careful and slow, Millar moves into a world we cannot know, using the imagination of language to push into a realm wholly foreign to us:

elongation roots yuppie action roots dimpled honest elongation

roots honest elongation roots rigid imitation glimpse

honest tells elongation yuppie elongation on dimpled

doorway therfor how real our wind sleeps logic united

The rhythmic qualities of the work seem to suggest growing (elongation) while the use of ‘imitation’ and ‘honest’ bring to mind the fractal quality of the organic world, its method of growth being one of replication, making all things the same, like, Millar tells us with a smile, a "yuppie action," wearing the same clothes, driving the same vehicles, and using the same words. With these worlds as tools, Millar offers us insight into the fungal world¾ and into the nature of our relations with the natural world of landscapes, birds, and mushrooms.

Millar demonstrates to us that if we are to learn to question the nature of our relationship with the world, we must learn the process of communing with the inarticulate, or, to put it differently, the alien articulations of other species, the song of bird, the opening of flowers, or the growth of mushrooms. Science has discovered the language of bacteria and has taken pictures of wavelengths of light invisible to the human eye. What science cannot do, however, is the kind of work that Millar does in Mycological Studies. Science has no interest in the relationships which poetry uncovers, precisely because it is otherwise inexpressible, found only by the desire and sympathy to create connections between ourselves and the world that created us. Science needs its utterable facts. Only poetry understands that it is the moment of connection that reveals to us the uncompromising complexity of the world and how, for a moment, we may comprehend our part within it as in Whitman’s spider-like soul, "Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,/Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,/Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul."

Poetry, Millar demonstrates, is satisfied with nothing at all. A page gone absolutely, articulately blank.

Ben Lyle Bedard grew up in Maine, studied creative writing first at the University of Maine at Farmington where he later served as acting director of Alice James Books, and then at Mills College where he received his MFA. He is now pursuing his doctorate at the University of Buffalo. His poetry has appeared in BlazeVOX, fhole, Damn the Caesars, Yellow Edenwald Field, and P-Queue. His adaptation of the Ugaritic epic KRT appeared in Ninth Letter. His reviews of poetry have appeared in Artvoice and Jacket.