Review of Beth Gordon’s the water cycle

In the late 1980s, French immunologist Jacques Benveniste proposed the theory that water held the “memory” of previous substances and particles once dissolved within it. Although this idea has not found traction in the mainstream scientific community, it offers an interesting lens to view the essence of water through. I would argue that the memory purportedly contained in water is the same as the memory contained in a word. Think of the word itself, water. As I type it out, every single use of the word converges on the page regardless of my intention or not. Even the most abstract usage of the word water encourages the performance of concrete actions within daily life—actions as simple as fixing yourself a drink to quench your thirst. Whatever a word conveys to you, it still proves its ability to retain meaning and memory across time and space. 

Regardless of whether science demonstrates that water carries within it memory, the word itself, water, has memory, and Beth Gordon’s prose poetry micro chapbook The Water Cycle uses twenty-six individual prose poems to ensure that you recall and remember more than just that single word. Gordon’s newest collection contends that perhaps water and language contain even more similarities through a careful balance of narrative and lyric and an unwavering, recollective cyclicality bent on explicating the meaning, experience, and intersections of time and water.

Formally, the individual poems of The Water Cycle do not lazily leak, and, at first, the prose blocks visually appear to reject any elements of wateriness. However, Gordon’s use of language ensures intentional slippage and reflects the flowing capacities of water. Rather than existing as hardened concrete, each prose block is a sponge, a porous vessel for the poet’s linguistic experimentation and narrative recollection. 

For instance, the first lines of “Hydrology (xv)” read: “My lover is an apostle of indelible ink, flower petals on my chest, a black X for the nipple that was incinerated with medical waste….” Gordon’s use of the sensory is soaked up by the prose construction, ensuring that the language carries itself unencumbered by formal line breaks or multiple stanzas. The prose construction also supports moments of surrealism, such as when the speaker’s ears fill with “turtle hymns” in “Hydrology (x),” or when the speaker recounts, “your mouth destroyed my tongue’s ability to soak paper with saliva shaped like angels.” By maintaining the same formal construction of their titles with very few titular variations besides a single Roman numeral, each of Gordon’s poems act as a container for her language, much like a glass holds water. This similarity draws together language and water and provides an immediate point of similarity between the two entities, a study that continues throughout the entire collection.  

As she continues The Water Cycle, Gordon does not rely wholly on either narrative recollection or lyrical musing. Instead, each “Hydrology” installment contains a multitude of moments that merge both narrative and lyric to illustrate the unique process of the speaker’s reminiscence. In The Water Cycle, which is a text often centered in narrative—that is, the poetic connection of both adjacent and distant moments—lyric refers to Gordon’s keen ability to pause narrative for the purposes of experiencing the minutia and elevating them to a place of poetic importance. “Hydrology (v)” exemplifies this merge:

The second time you almost drowned I wasn’t there to stop you, at the edge of a frog pond while the grownups downed shots of whiskey, stars croaking & water lullabying you with the promise of cotton candy or infinity when you sank like sunlight. The first time you almost drowned, I turned my back to help your sister cross the tangle of crab claws & seaweed & fishing lines to the spot where babies canfloat & when I turned again a yellow circle bobbed against my feet.

Gordon’s narrativity is clear as her speaker begins the poem detailing two different instances of nearly drowning by the referenced “you.” The first-person pronoun of the speaker, however, does not remain in this narrative realm. Through her first-person speaker, Gordon pauses the forward momentum of the narrative to engage in the recollection of memory and detail, including the croaking stars and the lullaby of the water. She expertly weaves together this short narrative with the previously-defined lyric, allowing the speaker’s “I” to function as the individual driver of narrative recollection and the signifier of greater memory that the reader is welcome to share. 

Furthermore, by crafting these moments that combine narrative and lyric, Gordon’s poetry is unbound by the constraints of linear time. Indeed, even the stories the speaker recalls in “Hydrology (v)” occur in reverse chronological order, and perhaps rightly so: the water that nearly drowned “you” did not conceive of a “first” or “second” time of drowning. Further, these experiences communicated to the reader are situated so clearly within a moment—thus, a particular, definite time—while also existing in a totally timeless space. Among all of this paradox and pliable writing, one thing remains clear: all that exists without any doubt is the experience. Thus, The Water Cycle further equates language with water. The blending of lyric and narrative results in moments that do not follow the human conception of time as a direct progression.

The similarities between language and water continue, particularly as the collection explores time. As readers near the end of the collection’s twenty-six poem sequence, the speaker remarks in “Hydrology (xxiii)” that they often forget about water because water is always there, ubiquitous and intertwined with all aspects of life. Gordon mirrors water’s entanglement with life through the relationships between language and the speaker and between lyric and narrative. The speaker’s acknowledgement of their failure to recall water—as well as their aforementioned paradoxical explications of timeful and timeless experiences—combines with the poem’s final statement that “a green ocean waits to take [them] home.” The speaker cannot ever totally recall neither time nor water, and thus, they cannot “own” them within their memory. Ultimately, the speaker’s recollections reveal that time and water live in communion together as entities that flow outside of linearity and resist separation and containment. Time and language, then, exist in a similar relationship to time and water. Just like they cannot own water or time, Gordon’s speaker is unable to own their spoken memories and future. And since language itself is necessarily independent and intertwined with all life, language reflects the qualities of water in its relationship to the speaker, to time, and to memory. The Water Cycle manages such sophistication through Gordon’s formal decision to combine her narrative and lyric in each prose poem.

Perhaps the reader’s first instinct upon reaching the final installment of the collection is to believe that we never really end the collection. However, I would contend that we never really started. Just like water, The Water Cycle does not have a beginning nor an end. Consider these lines of “Hydrology (iii)”: “Rain is coming. Today. Tomorrow or next week.” Like the certainty of a sometime-rain, Gordon’s collection simply exists with the knowledge and memories it contains, flowing in and out of linear time with an unwavering liveliness and an unrelenting resistance to ownership, capture, and damming. 

The ending line of “Hydrology (prologue)” reinforces the arguments Gordon makes throughout the entire collection—that is, the claim that water and language contain a great deal of similarities: “We order another round, knowing absence has a shape, tastes more like bourbon than gin. It has a name, like a gray-haired incantation, too dangerous to put onto the page” (26). The speaker’s admission that the true word for absence is a word “too dangerous to put onto the page” reveals the power of language and the speaker’s self-aware inability to contain language’s power. This moment hearkens back to “Hydrology (xxiii),” wherein the speaker states, “Baptism belongs to rivers” (24). Water is shown to own a practice that the speaker recognizes as unable to be contained by anything but water itself, just as they recognize in “Hydrology (prologue)” that only language can contain the true power of the word for absence. As her readers reach the end of her micro chapbook, Gordon ensures that they exit the reading with an understanding of water and language as necessarily connected entities unable to be contained but able to be explored through the combined power of narrative and lyrics.

Readers begin The Water Cycle in a bar and end The Water Cycle in a bar. But did they ever enter? Did they ever leave? Or has the bar always been there? Again, this realization at the start and end of the sequence reinforces the previously stated suggestion that Gordon’s collection does not end and does not start but rather exists in a timeless, uncontained space alongside language and water. A word like water, placed in a virtually infinite number of literary contexts, contains every emotion, every memory, and every moment of life—the condition of every human—one that flows like water, like time. In Gordon’s collection, water itself functions like its word. 

So, though Jacques Benveniste’s hypothesis about water containing memory is not scientifically proven, The Water Cycle renders the theory poetically correct. Ultimately, through a carefully crafted sequence explicating recollection and merging narrative and lyric, The Water Cycle reveals language and water to be similarly constructed, capable of holding memories and nostalgia yet unable to be contained and captured by any individual entity.