In Public Abstract, Jane Huffman demonstrates a steely commitment to an aesthetic vision. For Huffman, form—inventing it, bending it, subverting it, putting it to novel use, especially if working with forms passed down through time—becomes content: not merely expressive vehicle, but heraldry loaded with meaning.
Form in this book is also feeling: tonally cool, the repetitions and hard turns at work in these poems express with passion. They can signal uncertainty, anxiety, skepticism, inquiry, and a wish for revelatory knowing. Huffman accentuates lyric poetry’s elemental qualities, where feeling is primary and the events and situations that incite feelings secondary. This, coupled with their inescapable focus on form, makes the poems in resistant to the question, “What’s this poem about?”—a question that prefers explanation to experience, and one that often seeks an origin story. Huffman is more interested in the question of
