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 epistolary.” “Even in her work there is this sort of terrible restraint — if anyone was going to figure out what this script meant, it was her, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to do that. It required a risk-taking or the possibility of error that was too dangerous to her.”
The cover of the book makes reference to Kober’s obsessive pursuit—there are, in fact, eight different covers, each branded with a different letter of the Linear B alphabet as scrawled by Kober herself, the designer having traced them from papers in her archive. While covers of many contemporary books can invoke resentment toward the graphic designer’s incompetency and a corollary shame at the thought of reading its misrepresented contents in the public eye, the cover of The Grid makes judging the book by it feel good, even righteous.
Inside, Mandel’s writing integrates unique typographical quirks: certain paragraphs are set in short leading, so that individual lines slightly overlap. Another paragraph is a manically indecipherable amoeba of lines rotated at various angles. I ask Mandel about the thinking behind the architectural quality of his work: “People don’t tend to think of books as being shapes, but they are shapes, and I wanted to think about all the different shapes that books could take outside of the usual way they’re delineated. There’s something architectural in the work you have to do [to decipher a text], it’s kind of like being a draftsman.”
Allow me to engage in a bit of transference myself: I find the idea of my therapist operating as poet behind the scenes extremely chic. (She doesn’t, to my knowledge.) The thought that I could be used as reference material for her meditations on the human condition pleases me. Before I leave, I ask Mandel if any of his patients are in the room with us right now. “I don’t think so. I hope not,” he laughs.