Ivanna Baranova's ​Confirmation Bias

Reviewed by Carl Watts

(Metatron Press, 2019)

Much has been made of contemporary poetry’s residence in the academy and related institutions. For all the accuracy of those charges, however, poetry critics are often themselves guilty of focusing on verse that is institutionally ensconced at the expense of that which in some way remains defiantly outside this ecosystem. The oversight is especially glaring given that this kind of poetry is, at least in theory, well positioned to reach toward a larger writership (if not really a true readership of the sort whose absence we so often bemoan).
 
Montreal’s Metatron Press embodies this potentiality to some extent. It publishes young, Canadian as well as international, often only tangentially academic writers; while it has some avant-garde resonances, it just as often skews toward the accessible and the confessional. Its eclectic approach is nicely encapsulated in its name: seemingly a vaguely technological buzzword the stylized vacuity of which matches the vaporwave aesthetic of the press’s website and many of its books, the moniker is also that of a recording angel who appears in apocryphal Judaic texts and Islamic scripture. Whatever depth exists (or doesn’t) in specific collections, Metatron is as focused on the contemporary, youthful, and irreverent as it is (with its consistent focus on intersectional identities and a range of lived experiences more generally) anchored in a deeper cultural tradition.
 
Ivanna Baranova’s Confirmation Bias captures this of-the-moment eclecticism in several respects, and it most certainly has an eye toward accessibility. Immediately noticeable is its use of very short lines, including even single-word entries that draw the eye quickly down the length of a page. Individual poems sometimes use this feature to their advantage, such as when “aloe,” with sequences like “translucent / heaven” and “low gleam / in this eternal / rhinestone / aptitude,” separates the products and affects of late-capitalist consumerism into gauche units of half-meaning.
 
The brevity of Baranova’s lines also emphasizes the interjectory qualities of phrasings that would, as part of longer lines, seem more like mere shifts in mood. (In its first stanza, “overture” moves from the indicative “melodic contact / tends to prioritize / the implosive—” to “the self-directed fuck / fuck fuck.”) She can be good with endings, too, like when changes in pace give way to prosaic confession at the conclusion of “funds”:

sliding my card
into the chip
reader too
fast too
fast
too
slow
trying
again and
again and
saying
to the cashier
i’m so sorry
i know
there’s money
in my account

And yet, those brief lines and halting, arbitrary, or even transgressive line breaks beg comparison with a figure who is as infamous as she is notable for bringing up poetry’s sales numbers: Rupi Kaur. Kaur has been treated with indifference or snobbery, but there are already signs of recuperation. Souvankham Thammavongsa has recently stated in a conversation with Dionne Brand (in Rob Taylor’s What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation) that she likes Kaur for “what she means to poetry”: “Everything I had ever been told about it, she proves it’s not true, you don’t have to be that or go that way.” Perhaps the most recognizable feature of Kaur’s poetry (and likely part of what Thammavongsa is talking about) is Kaur’s haphazard conception of the line break, that convention that is barely acknowledged as much as it is astonishingly consistent—a phrase, a breath, a unit of meaning, a sequence that ends on some especially notable word, and so on.
 
In circumventing such a universally accepted convention of lyric poetry, verse like Kaur’s or Baranova’s could alternately be seen as either consciously breaking rules or, less charitably, just not caring (or knowing) enough to understand them. The end of “flash” could indicate any of these possibilities:

i’m sorry
for the things
i said
 
i went
for a walk
 
and now
i feel
better

The passage definitely challenges the rules of lineation, however foggily they’re defined. But there’s no way around the fact that most people who write or read a lot of poetry have to some extent internalized these conventions—or that reading the poem in accordance with them makes lines like this sound a bit comical.
 
Likely for this reason, the poems here are better the more syllables they have per line. “somatic,” for example, gets closer to line-as-breath doctrine. As a result, it’s mostly free of that halting element while also retaining a clipped syllable count and, by providing blank space between its lines, coming across as visually minimalistic:

today passes through
 
and nothing
 
in the affirmative settles
 
 
            to exalt me in the right ways
 
            is a task whose criteria
 
            gets lost
 
           
talking it through doesn’t help
 
but apparently this is how
 
feelings gone unfelt
 
gateway grief

​Another interesting variation is “algorithm,” basically a one-line poem arranged vertically:

the habit
always
dies
before
the
impulse

All of which is to say that there’s definitely variety here, as well as both knowledge of accepted poetic techniques and the willingness to disregard even the most fundamental examples of such. The latter characteristic may mark Confirmation Bias as an example of poetry that reaches beyond the form’s supposedly limited readership, breaking rules as it says what it means. In doing so, it may also provide some affirmation for those who are interested in poetry but (to paraphrase Thammavongsa) are uninterested in being a certain thing or going a certain way—even if its disregard for the line break will be a sticking point for many who already are.

---

Carl Watts holds a PhD in English from Queen’s University and currently teaches at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His scholarly articles, book reviews, and poems have appeared in various Canadian and American journals. He has also published a poetry chapbook, Reissue (2016), and short monograph, Oblique Identity (2019), both with Frog Hollow Press; a second poetry chapbook, Originals, is forthcoming from Anstruther Press.