Katy Lederer, The Engineers: Poems

 

MUTATIONS I

We had been organisms mostly, as we slung our legs across the plain.
Observed, we were observable. Before we saw, we closed our eyes.
Before we could become ourselves, we had to name the animals;
successive in our shortening, unable to extend our lives.

Observed we were observable. Before we knocked, we closed our eyes.
Late-acting, deleterious, we saw by death we would be had.
Successful in our shortening, unable to extend our lives.
Contemplative without our tails, we knew we’d say what could be said.

Lactating, deleterious, we saw by death we would be had.
What seeking unobtainable, pursuing prey, we closed right in.
Contemplative without our tales, we knew we’d say what could be said.
What knowing was unknowable, without our eyes we might have seen.

What seeking inexplicable, pursuing prey, we closed right in.
Before we could control ourselves, we had to name the animals.
What showing was un-showable, without our eyes we might have seen.
As organisms mostly, we would sling our lives across the pain.

For a while now I’ve been anticipating New York poet Katy Lederer’s latest collection, The Engineers: Poems (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2023), a collection that incorporates several poems from her chapbook The Children (above/ground press, 2017). “Sometimes, in the middle / of the night,” opens the first poem in the collection, “FETUS PAPYRACEUS,” “our children will / insist that we tell them a story. / In the story, after heavy / rhyme and insistent inculcation / of our customary ways, / our children will look down / at our apparent missing limbs, / which remind them / that they should not touch, / and, if they do decide to touch, / that absence will feel presence.” The author of a memoir, Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), as well as three prior full-length poetry collections—Winter Sex (Verse/Wave Books, 2004), The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008) [see my review of such here] and The bright red horse—and the blue— (Atelos, 2017) [see my review of such here]—the poems of The Engineers: Poems offer lyric narratives that wrap and coil around and through rhythm and repetition, offering an examination of the history of the human body, running the gamut from the abstract to the deeply and immediately intimate. “We can look into the tissue,” she writes, as part of the poem “INFLAMMATION,” “can examine the fine gradient. // We can speak in foreign languages, the language of the internet, / or maybe in the language of cell death. // Have we reached the site of injury? / We have been injurious. // Have we served well on our jury? / We have juried. We have jured and jured. // We are sad. / Sad as a parent.” One might suggest this a book entirely set through and around the body, a book-length suite of poems offering insight and commentary into physical limitations and requirements. I’m intrigued at how her poems echo, even loop back into each other, playing with repetition and shadow, curling back across a collection of poems interconnected at a rather deep and subtle level. Is there a better word to describe any part of this collection, whether in part or whole, as sublime?

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Strauss, Lederer, Hubbard, Boughn, Dowker, Larson + Haldeman

Anticipating the release next week of the twenty-first [FIFTH ANNIVERSARY] issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the twentieth issue: Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson and Lauren Haldeman.

Interviews with contributors to the first nineteen issues (over one hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming twenty-first issue features new writing by: Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, rob mclennan, Amanda Earl, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon and Trish Salah.

And of course, copies of the first twenty issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? And don't forget the fifth anniversary subscription sale, which runs through to the end of April!

We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

new from above/ground press: Caple, Lea, Robinson, Nilson, Schmaltz, Blades, Archer, hanna, Lederer + Touch the Donkey,

The Appetites of Tiny Hands: Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Natalee Caple
with a new afterword by the author
$5
See link here for more information
 
Touch the Donkey #15
$6 
See link here for more information

Nervous System
by N.W. Lea
$4
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Pattern refuses to repeat itself
= is divine
[Rothko Chapel]
a suite by Elizabeth Robinson
$4
See link here for more information

IN MY EAR CONTINUOUSLY LIKE A STREAM
by Geoffrey Nilson
$5
See link here for more information

Trips from Here to There: Poems from the Dreamachine
Eric Schmaltz
$4
See link here for more information

Tribeca: Twentieth Anniversary Edition
by Joe Blades
with a new afterword by the author
$5
See link here for more information

upROUTE : The Language of Plates
Sacha Archer
$5
See link here for more information

dark ecologies
natalie hanna
$5
See link here for more information

The Children
Katy Lederer
$5
See link here for more information

CAN YOU BELIEVE I'VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR NEARLY TWENTY-FIVE YEARS?

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September-November 2017
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each
[see the prior list of above/ground press publications here]

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by: Matthew Johnstone, Alyssa Bridgman, Valerie Coulton, Andrew Cantrell, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Rachel Mindell, kevin martins mcpherson eckhoff, Adrienne Gruber, Eleni Zisimatos, Stan Rogal, Amish Trivedi, Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez, Jennifer Stella, Michael Martin Shea, Kate Siklosi, Sean Braune, Edward Smallfield, Dennis Cooley, Lise Downe, Jon Boisvert, Stuart Kinmond / Phil Hall and probably others (most likely). And there’s totally still time to subscribe for 2018, by the way (to start immediately!).

Katy Lederer, The bright red horse—and the blue—

Overthrow the Event

He creates the event—

I am one of those—

The impression by me—

Usurping the feelings of others—

Creating the event—

Sick toward whom—

Creates the event—

Anguish to him—

Some are

Overthrown by it—

He visits—

Escapes it—

So say now the

Said it—

The author of two prior poetry collections and a memoir, American poet Katy Lederer’s latest collection, The bright red horse—and the blue— (Berkeley CA: Atelos, 2017), could also be considered her first, given the bulk of the collection was composed in the mid-1990s, well before the publication of Winter Sex (Verse/Wave Books, 2004), The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008) and Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003). In the “Afterword” to the collection, she speaks of the original composition of the work, and her eventual return to the manuscript:

Three years ago, after having my children, I felt a strong urge to organize my life. The poems from my twenties had been transferred from one computer to another, placed willy-nilly in documents and emails, and many had become impossible to access. I decided it was time to gather everything together in one place, and, in the process, I rediscovered the poems here. Over the course of several days I worked to revise them. I could finally see them for what they were, which were beseeching lyric prayers: fierce, sad, quizzical, angry, tender, and bereft, and I wanted to release them from their blocks into an open form. I was no longer the frustrated young woman who composed these complex poems, and I felt for her, her pain and rage. I also admired her, the powerful muscularity of her music and the sophisticated raiment of her dashes, which, to me, represent so many things: parries and thrusts, bars (as in a prison), invitations, suffocations, breaths, and lashes of the heart.

When I first showed the series to Lyn [Hejinian]—twenty years after she and Travis [Ortiz] had asked for a book; twenty years after I had composed it—she commented that the poems read as “in the beginnings of emotion.” This was a beautiful characterization, generous, sunny, and loving. But I believe that in fact the series exists at the end—the end of pure emotion, of youthful innocence and love. They are the record of a heart being broken. I remember then, when I wrote the poems here, not comprehending the transformation that was happening to me, unaware that I would never be the same. And I recall a few years later, once the passion had abated, understanding, finally, that ubiquitous expression: “a broken heart”; like a horse that has been broken. After that first heartbreak, one is, in some sense, mastered—by the knowledge of and avoidance of pain, and by the empathy for all the other people in this world who have been broken.

The staccato of the short-lined poems is interesting, deliberately breaking a lyric rhythm in such a way as to become a rhythm in itself, and provide a curious counterpoint to the work she’s produced since, exploring the possibilities of the space of the lyric sentence. In comparison, the poems in The bright red horse—and the blue— exist as single, extended thought-structures, broken up through the staccato of the line break and em-dash, which suggest both the aside and continued narrative line. What becomes interesting, as well, is to see how Lederer’s trajectory might be impacted upon moving through a manuscript from such an earlier period in her own work. Might her writing in the months and years ahead remain in the same series of directions, or might this engagement with her juvenilia (so to speak) create a blending of forward-and-back into some other kind of aside?

My writing day : Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Given I did one of these a year or so ago, I thought it might be interesting to see what may have changed in the interim. Or remained the same. Might it all be the same? 

8:08am: everyone wakes late. By at least ten or fifteen minutes.

Around 5am, Rose complained for her mother, loudly, so she and I switched places, leaving her in the master bedroom with Christine and Aoife. I slept in Rose’s room, sans clock. I finally woke, wondering the time. Panicked. Woke everyone else.

8:12am: Ablutions. Coffee. Prepare oatmeal for preschooler as baby rouses. Turn on Ane Brun. Set both children down for breakfast. Check email. Christine prepares for work.

8:17am: Prepare lunch for preschooler. Pack towel, extra clothes. Today Rose in a swimsuit, as her preschool has ‘water days’ today (the day prior, also). Sprinkler, water table, etcetera. It meant, at least for yesterday, she returned home in soaking wet sandals covered in sand (but she had fun).

8:20am: collect newspaper from the front porch. Set it aside until tomorrow (there is no time for it this morning). Rose requests a second bowl of oatmeal.

Send out weekly mass email for the “Tuesday poem” series I curate over at the dusie blog [see link here to sign up for such]; this week: Sarah Cook (author of an above/ground press title announced last week). Field three emails from exhibitors for this Saturday’s semi-annual ottawa small press book fair.

8:31am: daily blog post posts. I change and dress the baby. Slip a dress over Rose’s swimsuit.

Christine nurses baby and brushes preschooler’s hair, covers her in sunscreen.

8:45am: leave for preschool with both children (Christine leaves a few minutes after we do). Rose has been at preschool five mornings a week for the full year, with the Tuesday and Thursday mornings extended to full days on February first. Given she begins junior kindergarten this fall, we worried about her being one of the younger kids in the class (she turns four in later November). At least this way, she gets used to full days in a familiar environment, and gets a little bit of French in the afternoons. The teachers keep telling me that she is completely ready for school.

Preschool: which actually ends next Tuesday, making this her last full week. I’ve already a local teenager I’m bringing in as ‘mother’s helper’ two mornings a week to watch both girls so I can sit at my desk, otherwise I would get nothing at all done.

I don’t need much, but I have to get something.

9:10am: land in basement with baby. Already I know she won’t nap at her usual time (9:45 or so). Which is fine, given Rose in a full-day preschool.

Read Aoife some stories. Attempt to answer some outstanding emails as she plays on the floor.

10:13am: random phone call from my father. Apparently an older woman named Carol called him this morning, insisting we were related somewhere along the McLennan genealogy. He had no idea, and seemed not convinced, but passed her name and email along to me so I could check my files. I’m not convinced either, given I’ve never heard the name, and we aren’t really related to anyone (in six or seven generations, we’ve many who didn’t have kids or simply vanished). But I’m curious to see if I can figure out where she connects. I’ve a 350+ page document I’ve been constructing since the early 1990s of McLennan/MacLennan genealogies throughout Stormont and Glengarry Counties with some forty or more unrelated/unconnected (so far) families.

Honestly, given she apparently told my father that her family came from Scotland around 1800, that wouldn’t be us. We were far closer to 1840.

10:30am: begin to attempt baby down for her nap.

10:49am: refresh coffee, and move myself and laptop from basement to desk. Hit “refresh” on the same Tycho album I’ve been listening to for months.

Carol is nowhere to be found in the genealogy file I’ve built, so I send her an email for further information. I’m almost certain she isn’t one of ours, but I’m wondering if I might be able to connect her to one of the other families, at least.

Since Christine returned to work in mid-April, I’ve been focusing my writing time on short poems and reviews, awaiting the fall to return to longer prose. I haven’t worked on short fiction in a few months, and would also like to be able to return to that larger novel I set aside a few years ago, for the sake of completing a possible draft of my short story manuscript, “On Beauty,” as well as my post-mother creative non-fiction title, “The Last Good Year.” Given both those manuscripts are now floating around the ether as submissions, I would really like to return to “Don Quixote” [see my 2010 essay on such posted at Rain Taxi here]. Oh, to be able to finish that, if only to see what might come next...

While I think some of the short poems I’ve been working on lately are quite strong, there is something about fiction that feels like an entirely new set of possibilities for my work. I should be writing more fiction. I’ve had the feeling the past few years that prose is really where I should be focusing my attention, but such is near-impossible while I’ve such small windows of time and attention with which to work. I need something longer, more sustained.

Until then, I’ve nearly one hundred short prose poems in the manuscript “the book of smaller,” begun back in December. I’ll keep adding to the file as new poems complete, perhaps see where it is as a whole later in the fall. Unlike most of my poetry collections, I’m composing with no sense of order or sections, but simply adding finished poems as they complete (I’ve some twenty or thirty pieces in various states of incomplete, most of which might never be). Once the manuscript is “completed,” I’ll worry about removing the weaker pieces, and re-ordering, much in the same way I composed my short story collection, The Uncertainty Principle (Chaudiere Books, 2014). I am deliberately not being in a hurry with such. I write when I can; short, single stanza collages.

I accept poems by Marilyn Irwin and Sean Braune for upcoming issues of Touch the Donkey. I send a first interview question off to Suzanne Wise for same.

I return to a short piece I’ve been working on for Ottawa Magazine, on being a writer home full-time with small children, and how I manage to juggle writing and children (short answer: poorly and breathlessly and constantly). After feedback from the editor yesterday afternoon, I finally manage to return to the piece, tweak it a bit, and send off another draft.

I poke at design for forthcoming above/ground press chapbooks by Sarah Dowling, Stephanie Bolster, Buck Downs and Valerie Coulton. Field a couple of author emails.

Yesterday I poked at a review of the new Gary Barwin poetry title, and managed about a half hour’s worth of flipping through poetry books in the backyard, as the children played, but don’t manage to get anywhere near reviewing today.

11:52am: baby wakes. We lunch. I empty, refill and start dishwasher.

I package up the two loaves of banana bread Rose assisted with yesterday, for eventual distribution. Perhaps I’ll give one to jwcurry at the reading on Friday. Since I can’t support him financially in the way I would like, I can at least offer him some of my homemade banana bread. He seems both enthusiastically appreciative of my baking, and always, just a wee bit, confused that I keep handing him loaves of bread, so, really: it’s win-win.

Pull loaf of brown bread from the downstairs freezer. Clean cat barf discovered in sunroom.

Clean counter. Wonder what the hell dinner is going to be.

Roused by a thumping, I discover a City of Ottawa crew slowly creeping north along Alta Vista; I have no idea why. I see the pile of detritus left at our curb by yesterday’s hedge trimmers has started to blow across our front yard. Nice.

Check the many gendered mothers email account; nothing new. I retweet a few items from the mgm twitter account.

12:27pm: clean and change baby, including her outfit (covered in strawberry stains). Put away clean cloth diapers Christine re-assembled. Head back downstairs with baby, laptop.

We play quietly. Read through a Richard Scarry picture book. She plays the drum.

This morning was last night’s The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Meyers (his “a closer look” segments really are spectacular), and now we enter last night’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The Late Late Show. Conan.

1:23pm: upstairs, Aoife gets a cookie and we collect the mail. Some very cool new books by Katy Lederer (I’m doing a chapbook of hers soon), Daniel Handler (I realized a couple of months ago that he was an above/ground press subscriber circa 2008) and Tom Stern, as well as a couple of copies of her first book that Brynne Rebele-Henry was kind enough to donate to our eventual many gendered mothers fundraiser.

Aoife has been a bit clingier the past few days, sitting up with me more than usual. For a while she was grumpy, and almost seemed tired, but she refuses to settle into a nap (if that’s even what she needs). She cranks, cranks, cranks. She sits up beside me on the couch for most of our time downstairs.

2:36pm: head upstairs again, to use main bathroom (easier to contain baby in such than in downstairs bathroom) and notice all of our hedge-refuse at the curb is gone now. Weird.

Aoife seems pleased with the introduction of two Arrowroot cookies. We start another episode of Colbert, from last week.

2:57pm: Christine emails, asking for the girls’ social insurance numbers for some reason.

I change the baby’s wet diaper and I change my shirts, covered in Aoife’s cookie-goo.

3:17pm: we leave to collect Rose from preschool. I take the ‘running stroller’ for the sake of a quick post-pickup grocery run. We’re caught in the rain, but only briefly. Rose stops to pick some flowers.

4:23pm: land home. Fold and put away the stroller. Downstairs, I settle the children to snack on goldfish and blueberries. I put away groceries.

Sean Braune sends his bio for Touch the Donkey and says yes to an interview. I send him the first question.

Carol responds, but with not enough information for me to find in my document. “Duncan McLennan” sans dates is impossible. My document, on a quick scan, includes sixty examples of “Duncan.” I request further information, such as birth/death dates and wife’s name.

5pm: my interview with Marcus McCann posts on the Ploughshares blog. I post to social media.

Carol’s mention that she believes we’re related “because she’s read the census” isn’t helpful. I request clarification.

5:05pm: I head upstairs for dinner prep. I empty the dishwasher.

5:18pm: Christine returns home. Dinner.

5:35pm: I quickly shower. I begin children bath preparations and clean dinner dishes and highchair as Christine plays with children in the living room.

5:55pm: Christine bathes children (a task usually mine) while I run out for a quick errand (wine). I’d like to head downtown to pick up the small press fair catalogue to begin folding and stapling, but there isn’t time, given Christine heading out again. Tomorrow.

6:20pm: land home, collect bathed/dressed baby for downstairs, while Christine assists newly-clean Rose with her bedtime snack. We collect downstairs for the sake of their bedtime stories.

6:30pm: Christine leaves for chiropractor appointment.

I somehow managed to convince the children to pick up some of their toys in the basement. Well, not as much as I would have liked, but there you go.

7:00pm: Aoife and I take Rose up for bedtime. Teeth brushing, vitamins, stories. I make the bed in the master bedroom. Aoife is very wiggly and less than (entirely) helpful, but amusing.

7:16pm: Aoife and I return downstairs. Rose’s monitors are on and she is singing. Then complaining.

7:19pm: Aoife and I downstairs again after re-settling Rose. Aoife drifts. I put her in sleep-sack and she floats away.

7:30pm: arrive downstairs from putting sleeping Aoife in her crib. Return upstairs to re-settle complaining Rose.

7:34pm: return to the basement to work on the latest above/ground press mailout – nathan dueck and Sarah Cook chapbooks and Touch the Donkey #14 – for the sake of distribution at this weekend’s small press book fair. Receive first interview answer from Sean Braune and send second question.

I’m tempted to post a couple of “12 or 20 questions” for future blog appearance, but I’m just too damned tired.

I work on the mailout and watch some of my stories. This Hasan Minhaj Homecoming King special is really, really good.

8:50pm: Christine returns home.

9:24pm: we attempt a series on Amazon Prime in which Christina Ricci plays Zelda Fitzgerald (I had added “Zelda” to our wish-list of names, prior to Aoife’s birth; I liked the idea of “Rose and Zel”). We consider the show acceptable, and watch the first three episodes.

10pm: poems rejected by an online journal. Bah.

10:44pm: finally, a response on an interview I wished to post as part of my Queen Mob’s Teahouse deal as interviews editor. After months of asking for a bio from the student for their interview, they respond by sending the interview again. Sigh.

11:01pm: We crash, finally.