Contemporary Poetry

: a web symposium  |  Spring 2006

Jenny Boully’s The Body uses footnotes to create an interesting perspective not before seen in poetry. Boully uses the detachment of footnotes as a critique of both her own life and of those who criticize the works (and as such lives) of others. By never showing the reader the text, but only the footnotes, Boully challenges the idea that the reader truly knows anything about the authors and poets, which those who write commentaries and annotations claim to know so much about. The reader here knows literally nothing of the text, other than that it seems to be a memoir of Boully’s. Boully herself is the speaker in many of the footnotes, while in others it appears to be an editor who is apparently a scholar on Boully’s life and works. Boully is also making a statement on the difficulty of originality, as the footnotes are constantly comparing her unseen work to other, more famous works. While this is certainly an old topic in poetry, it is written in, ironically, such an original way that it casts an entirely new light on the subject.

Boully’s use of multiple speakers creates an interesting dialogue between the author’s footnotes and the editor’s footnotes. There are many instances in which a footnote could have been written by either of these speakers, but there are certain spots in which we see clearly who has made these claims. It is in these footnotes that the reader can see the personalities of the speakers, and where one can best get an idea of the tone of the unseen text. The reader also is made to feel the awkwardness inherent in the editorial footnotes, as they several times correct the author herself as to what has occurred in her life. “Ms. Boully must have been confused as it was actually ______, not ______, who uttered “ ___________________________________” and thus became a symbolic figure in her youth;”(p.12). The reader is forced to consider where the line is between filling in unintentional gaps by the author, and altering the story altogether. While the editor may have known the passage to be incorrect, what they can never know was whether this was an intentional omission on the author’s part or not. Boully is highlighting the foolishness of many scholars who piece together lost manuscripts and multiple editions to try and create a comprehensive text of a work which they did not create and can never fully know. The Body takes this concept to a literal level with its unusual structure, as the reader can be a part of the work up to a point, but they can never fully capture the author’s feelings, as the reader has only part of the text.

The editor, in a sense, knows more about the author’s life than she does, as he has access to information about the people she was close to that she would not have had, such as their journals. However, Boully indicates that being well versed in the subject does not, in this case, enhance ones reading, but detracts from it, as it erases the authors intents and emotions for cold hard fact. The footnotes which are written by the author, on the other hand, are concerned very little with fact, but more so with moments from her past which have stuck with the author, or with musings a passage has brought about.

I thought about it late and then early again this morning, why it is that we lay the book down in the middle of reading it (or else clutch it to us) and stare off as if to assimilate the beauty found there and integrate it within here – to keep it here – to make it, so to say, real (footnote 41, p.25).

The author’s footnotes provide the closest thing to stand alone poems in The Body. Often times what appears to be a single line of poem will appear, such as “I was the lonely tripod. I was empty cup of tea left behind”(footnote 35, p.21), or “She liked to think he was somewhere in the trees”(footnote 150, p.75). While few of them can be seen as individual poems, after reading the book once through the reader can begin to see connecting footnotes which together make for cohesive poems, or a poem and its echoes. The example of this that hits the reader most clearly is the frequent editorial mentioning of others who have lost their bikes, with a footnote towards the end stating, “By the time the bicycle was completely reconstructed, from various parts found here and there … the original bike, its chrome shiny and sparkling in the moonlight, showed up on the front doorstep, somehow, overnight; however, when the protagonist spied it, she no longer wanted it, saying she preferred the one that she had constructed”(footnote151, p.75). This particular quote provides an excellent reminder that while there is much meaning to siphoned from Boully distinctive setup, there is still poetry to be seen and xperienced within the book.

The very idea of footnotes without a text brings many different ideas to the mind of the reader. The purpose of footnotes is to clarify the body, however, they are not inherently necessary information. All texts should be able to be understood without footnotes by someone, even if it is only the author. That is to say that the body does not require footnotes; footnotes require the body. To force footnotes to stand alone is to force the reader to embrace that there are things in literature that they cannot grasp. Boully is challenging the reader to step back from the word-by-word interpretations that have become so common when reading literature, especially poetry. Boully makes the reader see that since they are not the author there will inherently be allusions that slip past them and words that do not mean to them quite what they mean to the poet. This is highlighted cleverly in footnote 153 “62° 17' 20", 19° 2' 40" and 37.29 N, 79.52 W respectively” (p.75). An author could not reasonably expect someone reading a book to see these coordinates and know to where they referred. It is not of any great importance to know what places they indicate (the first set is in the middle of the Gulf of Bothnia near Sweden, the second is just outside Roanoke, Virginia), it is merely Boully showing the reader that there is not need for intensive interpretation of every line of her poetry.

Boully’s book also contains in it magnitudes of other fascinating themes, as well as interesting word play and even some poems that can stand alone outside of the context of the book, or with a few other footnotes. One of the joys of this book is the ability rearrange it in your mind, making connections between footnotes pages apart and imagining how the text has carried you there. The ambiguity created by the lack of text is there not merely to confound the reader, but to allow one to think behind and between poems in a way that was not previously possible. Boully’s book challenges everything that reading a book is, and makes reading all the better for it.