Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month by Marc Jampole

The Shape of Feeling, the Feeling of Shape


The rhombus, that exotic, italicized quadrilateral, is really, by its geometrical properties, simply a square without any right angles. It’s an amusing case of the rarified and the mundane, the complex and the simple, being much closer together than they seem. Fitting, then, that Marc Jampole evokes the rhombus with such frequency in his new chapbook Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month.

The square book (or rhomboid one, if you prefer) itself changes depending on how you look at it. Jampole has combined two thematically self-contained series of poems in one volume, printed back-to-back in a “flip book” format. Each side is in dialogue with a major figure in the history of modernism. Cubist States of Mind translates Picasso’s analytical cubism into a verbal medium, guiding the reader through the broad field of affect visible in Picasso’s oeuvre from “Cubist Anger” to “Cubist Hunger” to “Cubist Uncertainty.” In Not the Cruelest Month, Jampole sketches a turn of Central Park springtime in the style of T.S. Eliot, finding not a waste land but a lively sprawl emerging from hibernation.

The internal consistency of each side of the book make them both hard to put down. Just as soon as each poem arrives at its own rhythmic conclusion, the vitality of Jampole’s words launch the reader onto the next page. In their contrast, the two halves perfectly showcase Jampole’s range. On the one hand, he revels in poetry as handiwork, sculpting prisms that refract and amplify meaning through sound, diction, rhythm, and rhyme. On the flip side, his poems can be emotionally charged, rich with bittersweet personal reflections. Depending on which way you look at it, Jampole offers either life as full of delicately crafted beauty, or art as the simplest possible depiction of truth.

Part of the pleasure of Cubist States of Mind is feeling out the unwritten but unmistakable rules that hold it together as a collection. Jampole revisits an interest in textual geometry from “Pascal’s Triangle” in his book Music from Words, arranged into triangular stanzas in reference to the mathematical curiosity. Each entry in Cubist States of Mind is made up of seven cubist rhombi: couplets with the lower verses indented. Within this firm structure, however, no verbal material is off limits. Jampole evokes Picasso’s crowded canvasses, cramming together sights, colors, shapes both visual and verbal (“Heaven is a circle, Earth is a square), scraps of dialogue, alliterations, rhymes, and abstract visions.

At a time when Manhattan is so busy and overfull, the quiet, intimate portrait of the city Not the Cruelest Month delivers will delight the New Yorker. Unlike in the modular Cubist States of Mind, this series is united by what feels like an implicit narrative point of view. Vignettes take us through street, park, and subway, a diversity of verse and rhyme schemes capturing the city’s vibrant heterogeneity - this shines through especially in “Central Park After Sandy Left,” which tosses words and phrases across the page, uprooting them like the massive hurricane did to the trees in 2011. April is an elusive shimmer Jampole aims to snap a picture of and Not the Cruelest Month fills the reader with the anticipation, both thrilling and anxious, of the beginning of Spring.

If anything is consistent throughout Jampole’s work, it is its semiotic density. Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month can feel like a lightning-quick read from cover-to-cover-to-cover, but begs to be re-read. The moment one closes the book, one has the peculiar sensation of having read it years ago, its contents so intricately layered that memory alone can only render the broad strokes.

Whereas his previous book makes references artists, movements, historical figures, and myths, Jampole has made the bold choice here to work from two overarching cultural touchstones. The result is two series of poems that sit on the edge between the particular and the universal, the everyday and the extraordinary. Rather than searching for the vocabulary it shares with the reader, Cubist States of Mind/Not the Cruelest Month undertakes the creation of a new such vocabulary altogether.

Marc Jampole’s chapbook is available through The Poet’s Haven.

Alessio Franko is a contributing writer to Jewish Currents magazine. He earned his Bachelor's at the University of Chicago and is currently based in Austin, where is he pursuing his MFA in screenwriting at the University of Texas.