Since my first encounter with Paige Webb’s poetry, I have been struck by their original relationship to language. Like some of their favorite poets—Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Emily Dickinson—Webb finds in poetry a technology of consciousness, following language through its intricate interactions between self and other, between I and environment. I recall having the sensation, after reading one of their poems, that I saw the world differently—that “I” and “world” suddenly seemed more connected, even entangled. It is Webb’s poetics of permeability, their poetics of embodied corelationality, that made that happen.
Having dealt with a serious medical condition that caused them temporarily to lose function of their arms and hands and that required them to relearn how to use these, Webb, in their recent poetry, intensively explores the limits of the “I” in the face of the sublimity of the ocean. In a letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland referred to an “oceanic feeling” akin to “a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling of being one with the external world as a whole.” Freud thought this oceanic feeling was a mere vestige of some infantile state. Webb feels otherwise, doubling down on the wonder of corelationality, of our sublimely simultaneous smallness and infinity. What is identity in the face of eternity?
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