The lure of a title
The starting point for this pamphlet — and its intriguing title — comes from playing with words and listening to where the connections might go. Marc Vicenz builds on overlapping names: those of Albert Einstein (mathematician and physicist) and the near-match with Gabriel von Eisenstein (Viennese man-about-town and protagonist of Die Fledermaus, the operetta by Johann Strauss).
The title of the publication works like a magnet. In a bookshop I’d be drawn to any book with this title, if only out of curiosity. What is the connection?
There’s another nagging question, too. How much background knowledge of Einstein (the man plus his work) and the operetta does the general reader need in order to read these poems?
The Contents page shows the poems divided into three ‘Acts’ — ‘Einstein’s Apartment’, ‘A summer house in the Villa Orlofsky’ and ‘In the prison offices of Warden Frank’ — plus a ‘Dénouement.’ The poems within each section don’t seem to have much connection to these headings. I’m happy to set the headings aside and concentrate instead on how words play out within the poems.
In a mix of prose poem and blank verse lyric, Vincenz sketches links between varying forms of desire and longing, stasis and movement. In ‘A Short Meditation on Birdsong’ (from Act 1), for example, exploring how models of creation ‘were concerned/ with meaning and purpose’, he writes
All the models
of creation are metaphors; all those waves
sweeping space trying to find a melody,
all those words simply a place to put your harvest
Is this a way to bring Einstein’s theories about instability into the circus of poetry? The ultimately unknowable meaning of birdsong makes a helpful metaphor for the shifting nature of reality that is the primary connection between these poems.
‘Dénouement’ closes the pamphlet with an image of migration —
Out in the ocean, birds, whales and turtles migrate,
give birth, until they drift into sleep.
Falling stars flare on the river.
This feels a long way from Einstein and Strauss. Perhaps, after all, the title is only a magnet.