Book Review

Theory of the Voice and Dream refers to Liliana Ponce’s Teoría de la voz y el sueño, the book of poems translated by Michael Martin Shea in World Poetry’s edition and consists of two Ponce collections: Teoría (2001) and Fudekara (2008). Both of Ponce’s books were published by tsé tsé, an influential Buenos Aires press started by Reynaldo Jiménez and Gabriela Giusti. Ponce, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1950, has published four titles after her 1976 debut collection, Trama Continua [Continuous Weft]. Shea has been the primary English translator of Ponce’s work; he published Diary in 2018 (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Fudekara in 2022 (Cardboard House Press).

Theory is divided into seven sections, and Ponce breaks each section down into numbered sequences—something she has done since Trama Continua. Her poems often introduce dialectical tensions between word and referent; creation and creator; and language, dreams, and wakefulness. For example, in “The Somber Season,” Ponce chronicles the act of waking in a lyrically documentary style with lines such as “time, surrounding me little by little” and “The blurry light that widens the borders.”

“Beyond the Somber Season” continues Ponce’s exploration of dreaming and waking states. Regarding dream states, the body is described as a frame “without ropes of blood,” but she insists this is “no corpse.” Instead, dreaming offers an opportunity to investigate the materiality of immateriality and a chance for the speaker to “direct my voice to the depths.” For Ponce, the role of language—especially with dreams—is paramount. The act of naming “complete[s] the dreams / when desire meets the absolute.” In “Knowledge Scatters the Body,” words “[rescue] symbols in times of pain.” Language helps to decode reality even as the words try to become the very thing they’re describing. In other words, the poems attempt to fuse signifier and referent while acknowledging the gap between them. “To lose the word,” Ponce writes, “is the first step / to losing truth— / but you don’t bleed because it doesn’t exist.” Language, the self, and the world are simultaneously symbiotic and separate; they are independent and interdependent in a way that necessitates their discrete existence. In one poem, the speaker even seems to demonstrate this relationship when she says, “To cross the threshold I place the host / on my tongue and let it pass through me.”

The prose poems in Theory demonstrate similar tensions, albeit in a diaristic fashion. “Diary” is a twenty-poem sequence born from Ponce’s daily habit of journaling. The writing here is meditative and unassuming. The second poem begins, “The January sun impregnates the air with arid ardor,” which feels like a casual observation for someone like Ponce to make, and yet, there’s an imagistic density to it that showcases her penchant for crisp abstraction before the next sentence introduces a more confessional register: “I want to start over,” and it’s unclear if she’s referring to the poem itself or something else. Scattered among the quotidian descriptions in the sequence is Ponce’s preoccupation with becoming and unbecoming. “Transform me, my love,” she declares in one poem, “make me grow in the perishable, in the death of my infancy.” Another poem has only two lines and states, “The lunar cycle is the form. I breathe oblivion through your blue eye.” Beneath the conventionality of the everyday is something more cosmic—infinite and finite, spaces where “The human is annulled” and “The future is like a hole, one that has the illusion of being filled.”

Unlike “Diary,” whose sequencing doesn’t clarify the dates when the poems were composed, Fudekara, whose name means “from the brush,” chronicles time with consecutively titled days: “Day 1,” “Day 2,” and so on. In addition to her poetry, Ponce is also a scholar of Japanese literature, and Fudekara “is [her] most famous and frequently anthologized work.” The poems were “Originally composed in 1993 over the course of a 14-day calligraphy class, [and] . . . originate from the speaker’s hand in motion as she traces lines in ink.” “Day 1” begins almost as a musical overture by establishing the self-reflexivity of the work to follow. The speaker explains, “In a corner I sat in the light of the lamp. Already it was late and the others had begun to work,” but even though “There was paper, there was ink,” she doesn’t start writing. Instead, she tells us that her sensei gave her “some notes, and [she] began to read,” to illustrate a learn-before-doing ethos. By the next day, she cultivates “a new space in the mind,” that puts more emphasis on the visual: “Breath will be replaced by the eye.”

Fudekara is not so much a departure from Ponce’s other work in Theory as it is an extension of that body of work. It takes the more confessional elements of “Diary” and the phenomenological tendencies of her other poems to explore the correlation between the self and the act of producing the text. The result isn’t abstract; the poems focus on the physicality of writing, because “In front of the paper,” Ponce admits, her “mind is too tied to the wood”—the handle of the brush, in other words. Fudekara concludes in an almost trancelike state, as she asserts, “I write. I write signs. I write death. I write another. I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.” The lines offer a kind of ars poetica not just for Fudekara, but Ponce’s work throughout Theory, and in our twenty-first century moment, the effect is hauntingly prophetic.