A Close Reading of Jane Huffman's Poem "[I found a sequence]"
It's not a long poem, but still it manages to contain an inner vastness and think about enormous cosmic questions.
This month’s What The Universe Is reading will feature
and Patrick Donnelly:
Both Jane and Patrick are exceptional poets, and both work with and against formal conventions and constraints in innovative and exciting ways. They’re also both lovely, humane people, and I know this reading and conversation will be perfect for National Poetry Month. You can easily register at bit.ly/WTUIApr2025!
Jane’s poem “[I found a sequence]” first appeared as part of a folio of her work published online by Changes. This poem isn’t found in her book Public Abstract, which won the APR/Honickman First Book prize, but it’s a poem I enjoy wrestling with for reasons that are about to become apparent:
[I found a sequence] I found a sequence in my way idea Where there was no idea before And plucked it up as if it was already Mine an interruption like a sequin That fell off my sleeve in childhood And through the sieve of time
At just six lines and 42 words total, this is not a long poem; it’s certainly more Dickinsonian than Whitmanian in energy and scope, though I might suggest that it moves more towards the compression of both late Celan and late Merwin in its clipped and cryptic way. The lack of punctuation — or at least of punctuation marks — also reminds me of Merwin, who famously eschewed punctuation because it “seemed to staple the poem to the page.”
In this poem, while the absence of commas and semicolons and full stops is an absence that might cause grammarians to froth and sputter, the lack of such marks enables the poem’s syntax to be slippery in a way that serves the poem as a living document of one person’s interiority. Just look at the first line: “I found a sequence in my way idea” isn’t something easily parsed when encountered as a line. Is “in my way” intended to be read as “obstructing my path” or is it meant to be understood as “according to my habit or custom”? It isn’t until one turns the corner (as it were) to the second line that “idea” begins to connect to something; the fuller context being “idea / where there was no idea before” — suggesting that the “sequence” represents a novel idea encountered by the speaker. The syntactical completeness of the second line acts like a full stop at the end of that line, completing the thought initiated in the first line.
The third line’s “And” builds on that completed thought: “And plucked it up as if it were already” — the “it” being the idea, the sequence — and while I want to find more syntactic closure at the end of this line, instead it turns the corner and delays that cognition, placing “Mine” on the following line. Though, without any punctuation after “Mine” there’s the possibility of reading line 4 as a possessive statement about the “interruption like a sequin” — “Mine” can be seen as a fulcrum in this poem, a point where the weight of meaning shifts as the reader progresses along the line. It reminds me a bit of “The Red Telephone” from Love’s 1967 album Forever Changes, in which Arthur Lee’s vocals are multitracked and layered with different words at certain points in the song — a song that has some interesting tensions already between the lyrics and the rhythm, with Lee’s diction (is it called diction in singing? I should probably learn whether or not there’s a different term for it…) feeling clipped at times, not entirely unlike the speaker in “[I found a sequence].”
Since I’ve given us a modest digression to music, it seems like a productive time to talk about the sonic elements of Jane’s poem. Give yourself a minute or two to read it out loud to yourself (and remember, this is something I always recommend doing when you encounter a new poem!)
I’m sure you noticed that “sequence” and “sequin” are pretty similar, though they’re not etymologically related at all - “sequence” was, according to the OED,
< late Latin sequentia, < sequent-em, present participle of sequī to follow: see sequent adj. and ‑ence suffix. Compare Old French sequence (13th cent. in Hatzfeld & Darmesteter), French séquence, Spanish secuencia, Portuguese sequencia, Italian seguenza.
Originally introduced (perhaps through Old French) in the ecclesiastical Latin sense ( II.7). In this use sequentia was a translation of ecclesiastical Greek ἀκολουθία, which denoted a neume or prolonged succession of notes sung on the last syllable of the Alleluia. When the Alleluia was adopted in the Western ritual, this neume was retained, but it became usual to sing it to a separate form of words, to which the name sequentia was transferred.1
While “sequin” derives from
French sequin gold coin of a type minted originally in Venice (1532; 1400 as essequin), this coin worn as an ornament (1817), small disc sewn onto a garment for decorative purposes (1847 or earlier), probably < Italian zecchino zecchino n. (although this is first attested later).2
I don’t know if you feel this way, but I really love the sonic affinities of unrelated words in English. I know it may make English a difficult language to learn as an adult, but it also allows poets to create this webwork of associative meanings the way Jane so smartly does in her poem. There’s a unifying effect thanks to the sound, even though the poem’s meaning shifts in the distance from “sequence” to “sequin,” and that increases the reader’s experience of cohesiveness in the poem. It’s not disjointed thoughts held together by form (though there’s a place for that in poetry as well); rather, it’s the trajectory of a mind working through an experience and attempting to relay that experience to the reader.
The words “sleeve” and “sieve” have slightly less immediate sonic affinity, in part because it is the terminal phoneme that carries the most similarity. Again, they’re not etymologically related aside from both being Germanic in origin. Here’s the etymology for “sleeve”:
Old English slíęfe, etc. (Anglian sléfe) weak feminine, and (slíęf), slýf strong feminine, = East Frisian slêwe, North Frisian slêv, slív sleeve, related to Middle Dutch slove, sloof (Kilian slooue) covering, Flemish dialect sloove band of wood, leather, or metal, etc.3
While “sieve” looks like this:
Old English sife, = Middle Dutch seve (Dutch zeef), Middle Low German seve (Low German seve, sefe, etc.), Old High German sib, sip (German sieb, also dialect sib, sip, siff, etc.). The stem, which may be ultimately related to that of sye v.2, to strain, is the base of sift v.4
For me as a reader, I enjoy what I’m thinking of as a sort of soft parallelism between the concepts of “sleeve” and “sieve” — both of them are constructed to allow things to pass through; both of them are intended to separate something from something else (what is a sleeve if not the thing that separates your arm from the elements?); and in this poem, they’re linked by the inevitable, irresistible force of time.
Closing a poem with an abstract image is not an easy thing to do; it’s the sort of thing that writing workshops and poetry professors advise against, and I think many of us (perhaps most or all of us) have heard this about our own drafts at least once. I certainly have; in all of the poems I’ve written so far, I think I’ve only managed to get away with ending on an abstraction once. Abstraction is a challenge to even the most seasoned reader of poetry; even if the action of the poem doesn’t resolve neatly (and it doesn’t — and shouldn’t — always do so), the poem itself benefits from having a solid, memorable, perhaps durable final image.
I would suggest that “the sieve of time” is a final image that is both abstract and memorable; it’s the kind of image that might not have received praise in a workshop, but this taut, tiny poem is sophisticated enough that the reader is primed to do the work of imagining and understanding the concept of a figurative “sieve of time” — which I understand to be a quasi-mechanical process to describe the movement of physical artifacts across the passage of time, the way a sequin dislodged from the sleeve of a childhood garment might lie hidden until some combination of movement and attention brings it to light once again. We don’t know — and I don’t think it matters — whether this sequin is literally one from the speaker’s childhood; what matters is the associative leap the speaker makes that allows them to link their own existence across time, to understand the way their consciousness interacts with the physical world and with time.
As I said earlier, this is a poem of interiority — even the use of the word “Mine” echoes “mind” for me, in a playful and oblique way — the shadowy reading of Mind an interruption being both the mind itself interrupting existence without consciousness as well as the sense of “mind” meaning “pay attention to” (e.g., “Mind the gap”) and also “mind” in terms of “be bothered by.” I have no idea if Jane intended that shadow reading; it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if she did, but I also know that reading poetry is in many ways a collaborative exercise between writer and reader, both bringing their own experiences to the process.
I hope you’ll come join in the collaborative exercise of hearing Jane read with Patrick Donnelly on Tuesday, April 15 at 7:30pm Eastern on Zoom. The link to register is bit.ly/WTUIApr2025 — we’d all love to have you there!
“Sequence, N., Etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6819195283.
“Sequin, N., Etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9387771516.
“Sleeve, N., Etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8933267575.
“Sieve, N., Etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2526547459.