to not understand what is said to you

It’s interesting to read a piece in the form of a written work with the understanding that it is or was intended to be performed. For instance, the following line has a poetic repetition which, standing alone, could impress a crowd: “there’s a miniature bagel, in the hand of a miniature husband, reading his miniature New York Times”. But the fact that it had been constructed alongside a film scene makes it more confusing, especially the fact that we, the reader, do not know which scene it is relating to. Could it be a CEO in the coffee shop on the bottom level of his building? Perhaps Young chose an average scene and decided to mix things up by dubbing everything “miniature”. It could be that two young sisters were playing in the toyroom with their dolls, one of which was a man in a suit sitting at the kitchen table. The secret possibility of this project is enhanced by the limits and opacity of a printed page. 

A beauty of the page is not knowing who the speaker is, or will be. I picture multiple readers, alternating lines or paragraphs (stanzas?), but at the same time I can hear it in one voice. It’s a plethora of possibility! There is a She, a Her, an I, a We, an Us, a You. Were the entire book riddled with “I” as the narrator, I should consider it a fluid lyric. But the We’s and Us’s bring in faceless characters, sometimes named but mostly not. I like the we, personally, because as a reader I feel enveloped in the description like Young is telling me a memory to induce my own; I can feel myself sitting in the church basement, I can hear the poetry being read to me and my surrounding audience. 

The photographs obviously mixed up the genre here, but they added some kind of definition to the instances being portrayed. I never would have anticipated images among the pages of confusion, though the piece is titled Picture Palace; and when I saw them it was illuminating of the circumstance. The facial expressions, paired with the tagging lines, gave me an interesting view of the words I had previously read. “to not recognize someone” is paired with a sideways, confused glance. Lips parted, the name tries to force its way out of a mouth and a tongue encourages it within. Why do we look to the side when thinking? Eyes on a diagonal route help lose focus of the physical and revert to our mentality?