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Camera Lyrica

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If Charles Olson was an archaeologist of morning, then Amy Newman is an epistemologist of morning: she wants to know where the knowledge starts. She is Wallace Stevens's inheritor in the depth and precision of her investigations of the interrelation of mind and world, the imbrication of perception and conception. Her poem "Travel Diary" speaks of "An apprehension in the ascending lid,/deciding proportion, engraving./The eye knows plainly inside, outside." Much of her work hinges on the double sense of the word `apprehend', to grasp, which is both to take hold of a thing and to understand a thing. In Amy Newman's work we see (and sight is a vital sense in her work, both essential and fully alive) that to know something we must touch it, feel it in both senses of the word, and to touch something we must know it, know of it. All of her work "proposes/to engage the physical world" ("Realism"), and knows that such engagement is always propositional if not suppositional: it is contingent, an aspiration, a "desire for the real world" ("Flesh"). In this sense, apprehension is the anxiousness to get the world as right as one can. In the words of "A Note on the Type," Amy Newman's is "The calculus of symbol/and the move to the real."

For Amy Newman, ideas are always embodied: all her ideas are in things and all things are bright with idea. This embodiment is not only in the images but in the words of her poems, which have a body and substance felt on the tongue and in the ear: "I promise you something/you'd shape a sound on,/white as a page but full," and the promise is kept. Her poems are not simply comments on the world of things but additions to that world: as she writes in "Darwin's Unfinished Notes to Emma," "The world this morning is wide as this sea,/and full of potential." Amy Newman's poems realize some of that potential for us all.