Reframing the Scholar
by Asa Drake
A Review of On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies by Jennifer Nelson’s
“Surrect” has been used twice in English. Once in 1692 by Leonard Plukenet, the English botanist, in a letter to John Ray, also a botanist, comparing Polygonum minus candicans supinum to Paronychia hispanica. (“Which is a more surrect plant,” Plukenet asked his friend.) And this year, when Jennifer Nelson writes in a “Statement of Future Research Plans,” “Please surrect that person.” I don’t imagine the reference is accidental, but an invocation. Nelson’s is a work of poetry built adjacent to their academic work. Conversing with ghosts, who are numerous and loving, Nelson’s fourth poetry collection (and sixth book), On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies,proposes the possibility of scholarly work as a secular lineage and legacy–an inheritance of ideas, each treasured like the friends who share them.
In “Condition for Retention,” which opens the first section of the collection, Tenure Dossier, Nelson invokes a plurality of work essential (and extending) from the self: “Do not put my name / in the essay on the cult of ends. / I will miss our words when we’ve won.” The “we” in Nelson’s statement, “we’ve won,” reflects a cumulative effort and companionship which, even if victorious in one’s pursuits, likely ends as a result of victory. This sentiment is echoed in the following poem, “CV,” with the question, “Why are you so afraid / of loving failure, loving loss, if you know the opposite’s / bad cheer.” If victory, too, is an ending, how might one perpetuate the intimacy of collective action? The self and her name is not a foil to the collective. Not a unit but a union as the “CV” makes clear:
The dust around me grew brightest as the sun disappeared. I wanted to give us better names. I asked my friends who are always with me what my name was to them. One of us smiled for the rest. Then someone said, You’d have to abolish time, which would mean to abolish use. Where is this realm beyond use? I said.
So often we describe the academic in opposition to labor, but Nelson’s collection is candid about university structures. They make clear the institutional framework so that it may be addressed. On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies engages with ekphrasis while remaining attentive to the structures surrounding art. We are presented with the scholar’s documentation of their own merit alongside the work within the museum. It’s intentional, that Nelson introduces their second section Ekphrases with a “Frontispiece” which addresses the structure of the museum itself: “Supremacy’s binary, print and white.” A “witness of all sides,” they frame the speaker as a scholar with agency and the ability to reshape institutions through their work (and the work of their peers). In “Condition for Retention,” the speaker makes clear, “ In this museum / I brought a knife / to sabotage the famous / triumph of death.” The knife is both the product of research, pulled from source material, and the tool of restoration, a way back to what museums preserve–not the grave but the ghostly archive worthy of communion. In the next poem, the speaker connects the knife (her tool for restoration and sabotage) to the frontispiece of the Boxer Codex:
Why write an essay here. For the first time I notice a bundle of rods like a fasces dim in the sea, against its weave, and a CHamoru person diving after: this is iron,the only good CHamoru people wanted from the Spanish, the point of the coconuts, the watergourds, the fish, the thing that’s most amusing to the profiteers: the different market, that a stupid knife would fetch more goods than gold
The Boxer Codex is a manuscript from the 1500s produced in the Philippines, likely commissioned by a Spanish governor during occupation. Nelson’s own scholarly work describes the codex opening with the frontispiece as an illustration “belying the colonial project it introduces, [it] promises an easy connection across cultures.” When readers arrive to Nelson’s own “Frontispiece,” they, too, must acknowledge the colonial framework which marginalizes some cultures and not others (“at the edge of the arch / is the head of someone not / human”). Before approaching the possibility of restorative practices, we as readers must pass through “the arch.” Like the Boxer Codex’s anonymous author, Nelson offers the possibility of engaging with art despite “Supremacy’s binary, print and white.” As the speaker asserts, the scholar’s identity may now be acknowledged to allow multiple vantage points:
And because I chimera am sworn to complain as the witness of all sides
Hybridity–a refusal to “commit me / to words”–is the tool through which we may enter. The long lines of “Writing Sample: The Boxer Codex” allow Nelson’s book to take on the elongated shape of the manuscript she describes. When the speaker asks “Why write an essay here. For the first time I notice a bundle of rods like a fasces dim in the sea,” they are repeating the work of the Boxer Codex, the way any sufficiently detailed description of an object renders the object before us. It is not a surprise, then, that Nelson’s speaker states “in this museum / I brought a knife.” The knife is already present because the Boxer Codex, too, replicates the object–“a stupid knife,” the iron tool which was the point of trade, though its use varied in each user’s hand.
Nelson’s collection engages with the conditional nature of information, of history and of time. They explore a conditionality which may be applied to “all time-things.” In the aptly named “In Practice,” Nelson describes a history “unbound” through collective effort:
but what I’ve learned is one all time-things exist unbound collucent in us and in the world accessible by labor at all points and two what’s happened changes and endures changes so endures endures and changes in the transitive especially on fragile nomad paper
“Collucent” means something alight, ablaze together, and while the Oxford English Dictionary may list it as defunct, last used in the 1700s, Nelson’s collection demonstrates how language as a time-thing “endures changes” and is made accessible through our own labor, our own desire. They consider the potential of expertise. How does one interpret without simplifying an image or a concept?
Throughout On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, Nelson gestures towards the world and the lens through which we view it. In the cheekily titled “Danaë Danaë Revolution,” Nelson writes of the scholar interpreting the painting of golden rain: “I’m the one / who shapes its killing / technology / in honor of the world.” Elsewhere, the speaker acknowledges “The world is dying, / and I would rather bathe in the disorganized / paint that clumps into discorded seeds.” In “The Prize of Québec,” they bemoan “Scholars misinterpret / images for a living, call them / worlds.” To enter the dark ages, an era which rejects expertise and the scholar, would that mean to lose worlds then? The world, as large and solid as it is, is still conceptual. We understand the world through the rendered image (or we engage with a secondary source, a world digested through the interpretations of others–scholars and pundits and algorithms). This same poem that teases how “[s]cholars misinterpret images for a living” ends with the small isolated moon “that is still there almost beside the world,” on which “ruined flags point back at us.” We know a painter from the 1700s does not imagine a human flag on the moon, and yet it is essential that the poem traverses one colonial conquest to consider another. And perhaps the speaker’s ability to provide context is more essential than the painting itself. After all, the “Prise de Quebec” is a painting that may not exist except through annotations.
It isn’t that the world is not enough, but that it is too much. The world is both what we can see and everything we cannot see, so how does one create agency in the sensory overload of existence? On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies ends with a section called Primordial Tide Pool where the poem, “The Relief,” advises that “relief is knowing agency / isn’t just effect and fault.” We don’t get relief from the distillation of information, but from the world, or more precisely, our detailed attention to its many parts, an attention that constitutes “freedom / to wander” and to “err.” In this final section, Nelson asserts that beauty is insufficient, but our encounters with the beautiful (or perhaps, the awful, the inexpressible) are opportunities to engage. In art and in language, the speaker acknowledges “how totally harm befunds / the beauty that builds tolerance / of harm, that even pushes worship / of its pathos.” And yet, despite the propaganda that “builds tolerance / of harm,” we the artists, the poets, the scholars replicate an earnest need for the world.
ASA DRAKE is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. Her chapbook, One Way to Listen (Gold Line Press), is the winner of a 2023 Florida Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems can be found on The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, and Poetry Daily.