“A Partial Solution to the Problem of Recognition: Hair, Sound, and Time”

 

Review: "Problem Solving"

This poem operates as both detective work and meditation, capturing the moment when observation becomes understanding. Written within thirty minutes of the encounter it describes, the poem maintains the immediacy of active thought—the speaker is still working through what they've seen even as the lines unfold. Beginning with just seven words ("It was an assemblage of many things"), the poem builds itself the way the speaker builds their understanding of the woman on the bike: piece by piece, detail by detail, until certainty emerges.

The structure mirrors the content brilliantly. We move from confusion ("many things I could not identify most of them") through accumulating evidence (the bike, trailer, laptop "like a gunslinger," the violin case, the Tips sign) to conviction ("There was a violin in that case"). The repetition of that line—first as question, then as statement—marks the poem's central transformation from uncertainty to knowledge. But the real problem being solved isn't just "who is this person?" It's something larger about the abundance of unconventional lives, about timing and recognition, about what we notice when we're ready to see it.

The poem's geography grounds it specifically—campus district, theater district, University Circle—while the emotional geography is more universal: the experience of recognizing a kindred spirit across a generational gap. The final couplet, "I was but a few decades late / Somewhere a grand assemblage awaits me," reframes the entire encounter. What began as street observation becomes personal prophecy. The woman with her purposeful, serpentine path through the city becomes a signpost, a reminder that odd is abundant, that the speaker's own "grand assemblage"—both the life they're building and perhaps the odd companion they seek—is still ahead, still possible. The title "Problem Solving" reveals itself as layered: solving the immediate puzzle of the stranger, yes, but also working through larger questions about connection, timing, and hope.