Lisa Olstein’s Dream Apartment

“The Dream Apartment is no Barbie’s Dream House. It is rather an abode of opaque and backlit, sometimes hard-edged reverie.”

W.B. Yeats wrote that “we make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” In Dream Apartment, her 2023 book of poetry from Copper Canyon Press, Lisa Olstein does exactly this. Our country breathes an atmosphere of ceaseless rhetoric, in which the distillation of dirt-stained thought into a purer language feels ever more difficult, if not impossible. We are buried in words, most of them rhetorical. That fact is a renewed call to the importance of poetics to cleanse the ear, thus the mind. Strangely, too many poets believe their first duty is to say something significant in the public sphere, specifically pronouncements that are social, racial, ethnic, gender-relevant, political, thus important and in that “quarrel,” the status of words immediately gets degraded to a mere vehicle, making poetry like every other kind of writing, essentially rhetoric broken into lines and studded with images as decoys. The steely sharp scythe of poetry gets dulled to a blunt instrument. Or it becomes the equivalent of downloading stock photographic images from Google and uploading them to your document.

If that rhetorical impulse led to the heroic couplets of Pope, or the epic stanzas of Derek Walcott’s Omeros, one might agree more easily to this declamatory urge. These days, however, lyric mode is being dragooned too often into service for grand, noble themes of identity and social consciousness far beyond its innate capacity for how to represent a thing. Poets seem more concerned with words pointing straight to what they represent. Further, every image is automatically conscripted into service as a metaphor. It is hard to tell the difference between a blackbird on the wing and a drone sent to destroy a housing complex. Here is where the Romantics had it right, in their focus on lyric poetry as a moment of vivid perception, shimmering with polyvalent detail. No amount of cerebral experimentation has changed that necessary aspect of lyric. We go to poetry to experience first, think after.

Into this surfeit of mind-numbing meaning comes Olstein, clear eyed, to restore the dignity of the quarrel with oneself. Olstein is a nimble post-modernist, afraid neither of the couplet nor the broken line on a scattershot page. Clarity and half-meaning both have their prerogatives in her poetry.