Emily Pettit, Blue Flame

BLUE FLAME

Actresses in their dressing rooms,

ambassadors. Undoing distinctions

between body and environment.

A woman standing in the bath.

A woman drying her feet. reading

after the bath. A lion in the pan.

Not giving a damn about your

demons. Or loving them. Naming

them. Try it with your mouth,

to make a better sound and another

better sound. You start doing it to

stop feeling so much and you keep

doing it to keep feeling so much.

Given how much I enjoyed American poet Emily Pettit’s debut, Goat in the Snow (Birds, LLC, 2012) [see my review of such here], I was pleased to hear of her second collection, Blue Flame (Pittsburgh PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2019). A few years ago, I compiled an informal list of contemporary American poets I’d noticed who were composing tight, observational lyrics, many of which were composed as mid-length lines in poems often less than a page long, and often set as a single-stanza block down the page; poets such as Emily Pettit, Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Emily Kendal Frey, Sommer Browning, Anne Cecelia Holmes, Matthea Harvey, Natalie Lyalin, Dorothea Lasky, Amy Lawless, Anne Boyer and the late Hillary Gravendyk. My list is, as most are, rather arbitrary, even as one can see each of them composing first-person narrative lyrics on attempting to navigate the world, some of whom use humour, but all of whom who utilize subversion, distraction, discomfort, comfort and use of the straight phrase, and a blending of lightness against dark. “I tried to tap into the old bitterness / to see if it could teach me anything / about the new bitterness,” Pettit writes, in the poem “AFTER VISION,” “but it was / a wall. A wall is not worth looking at.”

The poems that sit in the first two of Blue Flame’s three numbered sections are composed as single stanzas, composed of mid-length lines and line breaks hard and soft and sometimes jagged, writing elusive and allusive to a point that might sit at the end, sit mid-point, or even beyond the horizon; writing towards an idea, like a thesis. There is a clarity to her thinking that moves across and into unexpected places, but moves in such a way that one immediately trusts the author, even if you, as a reader, might have no idea where you are headed. Her journeys contain wisdoms, uncertainties, anxieties and wrong turns even as lessons are learned. Her poems are sharp, confident and quick, even as she’s reaching through uncertainty, anxiety or restlessness. As she writes in the poem “ALL OF THE ANIMALS WERE THERE”: “I keep my fire in the fire. Except / when I don’t. You learn a pattern. / You learn another pattern. We’re talking / imaginary practice. We’re talking / secret parades.”

AN AGREEMENT REQUIRES

AN OFFER AND ACCEPTANCE

I came here to get you excited.

We have an accidental stare down.

No bees, no money. No one says this.

I am so frightening. No one is impressed.

It’s all, a duck’s quack doesn’t echo

and no one knows why. You think

you are whispering when you are not.

We are experts at distributing distorted

information. This is how it might feel,

take hold of something between

your finger and your thumb and twist it

sharply. Make a slight adjustment.

A logical consequence appears

to arrive, a bar, a partition, a stick.

I am hitting rocks with a stick.

What do you believe to be important

points of convergence? Vegetables.

Electricity. The extremely challenging

sky. To show adoration with the eyes.

To say something necessary. I avoid

my eyes. I think I mean it.

The third section is structured as an entirely different entity: a tonal shift as well as her shift from poems set as a single-stanza into a longer sequence of fragments, shifting and stretching her thesis into one more abstract, built out of furthered and accumulated moments.

I look up contrition. It’s up in the air like

legs. I moved my legs, moved my legs,

moved my legs.

Look at how you are moving your legs.

And look

almost maybe nothing

was said.

Composed entirely of a single poem, “HANDS LIKE LIGHTERS,” the sequence appears as a more lyric lyric than the poems throughout the rest of the collection, employing shorter lines and space, a different kind of breath, and a different kind intimacy, both through smallness and the narrator discussing the possibility of becoming truly vulnerable for the sake of an open heart. There is an openness to this poem that is quite lovely, one that ruminates across a new distance; her poems already contained multitudes, and this piece presents an entirely new flavour, one of breath, space and possibility, writing:

I love words.

I thought I hated bodies.

I didn’t know I could love

a body.

I didn’t know I could let

somebody love my body.

Sommer Browning, Backup Singers

I saw many many clocks, the clockman said of his first day. As the butcher cuts meat, the architect hides the sun; hesitancy blooms urge. Tonight, there is a horse in the painting above your bed. Tonight, a mole on the back of your love’s hand. At day’s end, the grocer pulls shutters across the glass complicating the thief’s anonymity.

There is an enormous amount of joy that comes with the announcement of a new work by Denver, Colorado poet and illustrator Sommer Browning, and the recent AWP in Seattle saw the release of Browning’s second trade poetry collection, Backup Singers (Birds, LLC, 2014). Given the amount of her quirky and hilarious comics were utilized as part of her first poetry collection, Either Way I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC, 2011) [see my review of such here], I must say that a book by Sommer Browning without comics is unexpected (and even slightly disappointing). Still, there aren’t many contemporary poets with her penchant for tight lines and terrible jokes (Montreal poet David McGimpsey is a rare exception), and the results are absolutely stunning. Constructed in four sections, the first two sections are striking for the fact that they each contain groupings of single-page, untitled prose lyrics, collected in such a way that they could be read singularly, or as a narrative of accumulation, each poem acting and reacting against the ones that sit prior. One could say that her individual poems are also built accumulatively, each phrase and line pushing and piled, allowing for the oddest connections to exist in the reader’s imaginations. The rush of her prose also makes one wonder just how these poems might be heard, most likely as striking as how they appear. 

Goodbye fast-forward, goodbye alphabetical order, so long curlicue of the g’s tail looping on and on into each o and so on, icy line prismed into meaning: Varda on the absolute voyeurism of a door or the way the last drop releases the bottle into peaceful vacancy. Cassette tape roadkilled the DOT. On and on until the bun in the oven explodes golden over the Thanksgiving table, on and on stormy celluloid, on Donner and Blitzen, ontologically beautiful portmanteau Juneteenth, this most personal ecstasy drawing a monster from mythology.

There is a joyful, lively energy to her poems, one that can’t be diminished even through poems that might appear cranky, discordant or just damned odd; instead of wading through the dark, even her poems that work through some darker subject matter or references are radiant with energy (with some poems that rush at a near-manic level of urgency), one that is utterly intoxicating and impossible not to get caught up in. As one poem opens: “I told you he spanked me before work, how weird it was, how nearly non-sexy. Where did you go when I went to work?”

How long does it take to get to a funeral? The windshield wipers crazy across the window, out of pace so one runs over the other until the other careens so far to the left it hooks itself onto the edge of the car, the pathetic machine-sound of it straining to do its job. We pull into the Walgreens’ parking lot to search for tools. Since my first car needed pliers to open the window, I’ve always kept tools in the car. The bandage over the cure. Before this, we were received at an Irish pub by Sarah and her family and friends to celebrate the death of Sarah’s mother. Is celebrate the right word? I convince you to drive us back to New York so I could take another pill at the funeral. In the language of death, I want to say thank you.

Sommer Browning is one of a small number of contemporary American poets composing tight, observational lyrics on how to live in the world, all of whom utilize subversion, distraction, discomfort comfort and use of the straight phrase, and a blending of lightness against such very heavy dark subject matter. And when I suggest a list of such poets, I would include: Emily Pettit, Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Hillary Gravendyk and Emily Kendal Frey. Browning uses terrible jokes more than most (far more subtle here than in her previous collection), but often as a distraction against more serious topics. In my mind, these are a grouping of poets who manage to say an enormous amount through allusion to far darker things; and when they do speak of such plainly, it can catch a reader off-guard, and nearly be missed.

Information

There is a reason

division is an operation.

A reason I know

the math behind the body.

It’s a girl

and the wires she needs

open her hands

before they’re fists.

The third section of Backup Singers is made up of the forty-one part sequence “Multifarious Array,” a space in which she’s able to stretch out and display her talent for composing, point by point by point, across a wide canvas. Part of what appeals about Browning’s writing (and comics) is in the way her unusual perspective and humour allows her incredible insight and observations, as “Multifarious Array” opens with: “A broken Xerox machine dominates the corner. It doesn’t reproduce mistakes, doesn’t allow gradual fade, it’s broken because it forces vividness.” The sequence even allows a perspective into Browning’s own work, existing as an extended lyric essay on the work of an unnamed poet, as Browning writes:

Her poems live between intimacy and devastation. After I read them, I marvel that within each, a feeling welled and filled me, then receded.

Conjured at a different angle, the worn memory becomes the missing piece.

Bianca Stone, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows

What It’s Like

I cannot love like a ninepin. Not

like the lane. Not like the blue shoe.

I can love like a farmhouse, or a grief-

chimney that funnels from the ovens

of my earlier unpopular period. This

is a pond where thousands

of black tadpoles loiter at the rocks.

This is a wooden raft being tipped

by an assembly of teenagers.

And there are no clouds in the sky.

No airplanes. There isn’t even

a sky. And there isn’t even a sky behind that.

Given how long I’ve been aware of her name and her work, it seems amazing somehow that Brooklyn poet and illustrator Bianca Stone’s new Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Portland OR/Brooklyn NY: Octopus Books/Tin House, 2014) is only her first trade poetry collection. If you’ve seen the recent Anne Carson collection, Antigonick (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2012), you’ve already seen some of Stone’s artwork, and one of the only frustrations that I can see with this collection of her poems is the fact that only a single image of hers, gracing the cover, is included. The poems in this collection, organized in three untitled sections, are lyrics of exploration and clarification, constantly seeking out what might otherwise be never understood. Some of the flavour of Stone’s striking straight lines are reminiscent slightly of the work of contemporary American poets such as Hailey Higdon, Hillary Gravendyck, Emily Kendal Frey and Emily Pettit for their subversion, discomfort comfort and use of the straight phrase. As she writes in the middle of the single-stanza three-page poem “Outpost”:

The ancient clouds move

over the alcoholic sky.

I have seen the grey beards

of Northern Florida,

swum with the sea cow.

I have listened to the brief

troubles of the old, black cat.

I saw my mother flume

toward the abyss and draw back.

And I, who was half asleep

for my one earthquake,

now merely a fragment

looking for the center of the earth.

There is such a sadness resting behind so many of these poems, coupled with a particular kind of fantastic observation that couldn’t be achieved any other way, akin to light shining through a deep dark. Hers are long passages that accumulate strikes and quirky lines and the collision of emotional highs and lows. There is a distinctive and oddball charm to these poems, whether the poem “Because You Love You Come Apart,” that opens with “Your hair is wonderful today. / This is a microscopic caress at a party.” or the poem “Elegy,” subtitled “with Judy Garland & refrigerator,” with lines some of which strike as hard and deep as a punch: “I take out my collection / of tissue and listen to Judy Garland / sing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, / her voice like some wildflower / absorbing into the crimped human mind / an infinite medium of grief— / this human brain that cannot assume / the trust position.” How does anyone manage such forceful writing from a first trade collection? Perhaps as the daughter of poet Abigail Stone and granddaughter of poet Ruth Stone, she had the advantage of a particular kind of education, or perhaps her innate attention to detail and the line was all she required. And there is a deep attention here, to a life as it is lived, and to the quirky thoughts that so often quickly pass, and those dark places we aren’t meant to visit, let alone attempt to understand.

Isn’t it hard, monsieur, to speak

of anything except the moon anymore?

Like the room we just now

are leaving

like our mothers

refusing to blow a single fragment

off the ground

only when we look away

things flutter (“Monsieur”)

Emily Pettit, Goat in the Snow

HOW TO LOSE LOST OBJECTS

 

This is the memory of a house, so no one lives here.

Here we like our emergencies savvy, ravens

flying low, close to our witness. Try standing

and watching yourself disappear. A new way

to see things is kaleidoscope style. When you walk

past a certain kind of light, you can cast

six different shadows all shaped like you.

One wakes every fifteen minutes. One waits

for a specific series of noises. The walls here

hold wind, whether you believe it or not.

Hey house, how come you terrorize with anchorage?

We would like to disprove the watched-pot-never-boils

theory, though our waiting chore seems on the verge

of destruction. Any not staying lost with the lost

thing feels like a betrayal. House full of tumbleweed.

Mouth full of tumbleweed.

What immediately becomes clear about American poet Emily Pettit's first trade poetry collection, Goat in the Snow (Birds, LLC, 2012) is the fact that it would be impossible to not be charmed on sight with any book dedicated to “Rita the magnificent.” Built in three sections of short poems, Pettit’s are poems that turn on their end. Odd and surreally-charming, her pieces stretch logic into something entirely other, and entirely her own, while making more clear sense than you might ever want to admit. As she writes to open the poem “Red Wings Collapsing,” “What do you call a field of black telephones ringing? / A problem? Sometimes I make ridiculous gestures / with my arms and legs, and call it dancing.”

Given that so many of her poem titles begin with “How to,” one might suspect that these pieces have been composed as instructions or suggestions, perhaps, on how to navigate through the world, such as “HOW TO RECOGNIZE WHEN YOU HAVE BEHAVED BADLY AND BEHAVE BETTER,” “HOW TO HIDE FROM ANOTHER” or “HOW TO HIDE AN ELEPHANT.” There are lessons stretched across these narratives, small truths buried deep beneath other truths, each one a bit more unusual than the one before, and the shades of her surreal gaze are reminiscent of the poems of American poet Sommer Browning, or the landscapes of writer Stuart Ross. How could you not want to live within the fields of Emily Pettit’s poems? The beauty of such a collection is not in her illogic, but what she does with logic, creating her own spaces, and her own worlds where her logic makes the most sense of all.

HOW TO START A FIRE WITHOUT STICKS

Get up. get up and pretend that your head isn’t full

of tiny broken sticks. It will be worth it to walk

through the door such a complicated mess,

crazy to such purpose. One way to torture a person

who is sleep deprived is to pretend the house is on

fire. Look very serious and say, Fire! Fire! Fire!

Look very serious and say, Water! Water! Water!

Look very serious and say, You built a better body

of water. Yes you did. Where did you find such a

stunning embankment? Pretend you put out the fire

with the better body of water. Pretend you are

a medium to large marine mammal. I will be

a fly on the wall dressed as a person, a person who

has complicated ideas about what constitutes a wall.

No doubt I’m a little faded, dejected, incognito,

noncommittal. I only do practical things.