At the beginning of This Holy Room/the great listeners, the fourth and final section of Jennifer Zilm’s 2016 Bookthug collection Waiting Room, the reader is presented with a stand alone poem entitled “Diagnoses.” Originally published as “Therapy” in the summer 2014 issue of CV2, the revised version of the poem does away with the stichic form and rangy lines of its predecessor in favour of a stanzaic structure that dissolves, in measured increments, into increasingly smaller units. The new version of the poem also differs in that all of its opening lines are hard-tabbed, an approach that allows Zilm to begin every stanza with an acronym or phrase that introduces a corresponding behavioural disorder. Followed, in each instance, by a colon, the terms Zilm has selected are familiar enough to readers with only a lay knowledge of psychopathology to serve as practical indicators of what’s to come (i.e.: ADD, OCD, Skin Rash etc.). What we are met with, however, is a chain of desynchronized misreads in what might be best considered the literary equivalent of a willfully introduced parallax.
The enunciative uncertainties of the poem’s reimagined title also add to our feeling of disorientation. As a librarian and word etymologist, Zilm challenges the reader to consider her choices on both a grammatical and phonemic level, and it’s this attention to the politics and materiality of language that codify the poem and provide it with genuine subtextual complexity. The reader’s immediate impulse upon encountering the single-word title, “Diagnoses,” is to fix it as a plural noun (i.e.: more than one diagnosis or attempt to determine how a set of symptoms might best indicate a pathological condition). As the word floats without an attributive subject or object, we’re less likely to consider it a transitive verb, but in missing this potentiality, we close down interpretive possibilities that might allow it greater agency (i.e.: the doctor diagnoses the patient).
With this in mind, we are encouraged, then, to assess “Diagnoses” through a titular lens that is as slippery and decentered as the poem at large. The means of untangling or deciphering what we’re presented, however, is seemingly straightforward, as in each instance the definition we encounter, post-colon, appears to belong to the stanza that precedes it.
