Transference Poetry

On a frigid night at Printed Matter St. Marks, a Changes Press editor Kyle Dacuyan introduces The Grid, a new book by poet and psychoanalyst-in-training Eli Payne Mandel, as “an exercise in methodical unknowing.”

David Velasco, formerly of Artforum, takes a different route into Mandel’s work: “I’m not a poetry scholar, so my interest in the book is as a beautiful work of art,” Velasco admits. Through a series of archival fragments coalescing as a prose poem, Mandel meditates on Alice Kober, a neglected scholar and architect-by-training that devoted much of her life to deciphering a rudimentary writing system called Linear B. Velasco notes the recursive nature of this work: “You’re deciphering her in a way that is not unfamiliar to her, as she deciphered Linear B.” Mandel seems to regard Kober as his posthumous patient. Outlining his feelings of countertransference toward her, Mandel explains that in his work he sought to “escape from the confines she set for herself.” Kober lived with her mother and never married — “her life,” in Mandel’s words, “was mostly epistolar…