In a transparent sentence

Laura Mullen, author of three fascinatingly alert and varied books of poetry, The Surface (University of Illinois, 1991), After I was Dead (University of Georgia, 1999) and The Tales of Horror: a flip book (Kelsey Street, 1999) has published a smart, funny piece in the latest Iowa Review. It is called "Torch Song (Prose is a Prose is a Prose" and is an trans-genre piece about forest fires, love and other burnings, including language and how it is used. It is in the form of "Memos" ("Re:Vision" for instance)," "Questions for further study," "Story" (lines?), and other misleadingly strict and straight formal tags. It begins with a little bit of found text: "That's the way fire does, it don't have no rules on it." (Anonymous firefighter, summer 2002). Along the way one of the pieces that make up the work, is entitled "Discussion Topic: Technologies and Gestures" and it says: 'In a transparent sentence the subject sees and comes to knowlege and then action, though the imbalance of verbs as well as the syntax (note the distance of the "I" from the final, failed effort) alerts us to her sense of powerlesness. Before she got there, the fire, before anything---before the speech it sparks, or the writing she'll later claim started it---kindled by a person unknown." "I saw the fire": "I" is a shifter. Do you see her seeing (a face at the edge of the frame, registering---in slightly too-lurid color--shock and increasing dismay) or do you see yourself in her place? "I tried to put it out." "I tried."' Repeat at least 2,500 times." This is both an indictment and an attempt at sympathetic identification. The piece has a lot to say about news, the press and the real.