Cole Swensen, _Landscapes on a Train_

I WOULD RECOMMEND that you read this in a single sitting if you can. I did--found it hard not to, actually--and it does have that train-ride effect of a phenomenon that separates itself from all else for however long it lasts, a kind of capsule in time.

A lot of the effect is due to images that recur in never-quite-the-same sequences, as in Lisa Robertson's The Weather or Stein, often in the same staccato cadences as Stein but different somehow... a bit more lyrical lift, a brisker music? I don't know.

I wonder whether the poem involves a dialogue (so to speak) between the static and the moving. While on a train, one feels as though one is standing still, while actually hurtling forward at however many miles an hour; the landscape zipping by in the windows like a continuous filmstrip, its elements repeating with infinite variations and differences, is actually stationary. (Except that it is on a spinning ball in space...)

Maybe it's a cinematic quality--that feeling one has watching a movie, even a perfectly ordinary one, that you are in a self-contained experience suspending time, putting the rest of life on hold, and you are simply going to watch that movie until it's over. Landscapes on a Train is like that. Very unusual for a poem. How did she do it?