Melissa Ginsburg, Doll Apollo

 

Craft Day

Scissors cut
through the snowflaked

morning. Dolly
sharpens her edges.

Trims herself, gives herself
fringe. Makes more like her.

Sisters, clones. She scissors
their slick

magazines, girlskins
sleek as blades.

She hones her scissors
On sandpaper. She will marry

that abrasion. Make it
scrape her. She’ll

feel it. She’ll unfold
garlands.

Mississippi writer and editor Melissa Ginsburg’s second full-length poetry title, following her debut, Dear Weather Ghost (Four Way Books, 2013), as well as the novels Sunset City (Ecco, 2016) and The House Uptown (Flatiron Books, 2021), is Doll Apollo (Baton Rouge LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2022), a collection described thusly on the publisher’s website: “With lush imagery and surprising syntactical turns, the poems in Doll Apollo merge mythology with close attention to the patterns, colors, and contours of the material world. Through the figure of the paper doll, the hoax conspiracy surrounding the Apollo moon landing, and lyrics embedded with violence and beauty, Melissa Ginsburg’s feminist ecopoetics weaves the domestic and celestial into considerations of female identity, desire, spiritual yearning, and doubt.” Ginsburg is a poet I first discovered through an issue of FENCE magazine back in 2015 [see my review of such here], and her Doll Apollo (which doesn’t include the work from that issue of FENCE) is a book-length lyric framed in a reference to the Ancient Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo; of the nymph pursued, and finally, transformed for the sake of protection. “halted mid stride / un-nymphed as mayflies,” the opening poem, “Daphne,” offers, “laureled & wreathed [.]”

While the examination of working and reworking updates of mythologies through the book-length lyric certainly isn’t something new—there is something here reminiscent of Gale Marie Thompson’s own second full-length poetry title, Helen Or My Hunger (Portland OR: YesYes Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], offering her own lyric study of language and beauty, but on the mythical and multiple retellings of Helen of Troy—Ginsberg, on her part, utilizes less a retelling or reworking than allowing that particular myth a kind of loose framing to the collection, able to open up poems riffing off further directions, whether of paper dolls or stories of how the moon landing, via Apollo 11 in 1969, was actually faked. “doubt has been married so long to the altar,” the poem “When Doubt Comes to Apollo” ends, “each star a tribute doubt hunted and placed // on a plate [.]” As the collection opens with the singular poem “Daphne” and into a triptych of lyric sections: “Doll,” “Apollo” and “Toile,” Ginsburg swirls her references and narratives around that central core of Greek myth, writing out beauty and female agency, the stories we tell (including those we tell ourselves) that get altered, shifted and even twisted, and of space travel. As much as anything, this is a lyric of perception and doubt, and how perception shifts, shimmys and twists, even to the point of disconnect. As the second half of the poem “The Bench” reads: “We were figures // in a sketch of a cold deer path. // I did not expect to survive // such flattening. Then you said look // for a perfectly straight horizontal line // and under a mound of blue snow // such a line appeared.”

I find it curious, also, how she utilizes poem-titles in her work, as Ginsberg’s lyric distillations each unfurl from each singular point, utilizing titles almost as subject headers before launching into her examinations, often offering a closing line or two to satisfy a particular kind of closure to that singular moment. “I waited,” as she writes, to close the poem “One Cannot Read Oneself without Great Difficulty,” “quaking under ink // wanting the fingers and the eraser                  the eyes / of the circulars                           variously glossed [.]”

Fence magazine #30 (Winter/Spring 2015)

Vienna

You keep your cities

in the water. In the wood

stand islands and clearings.

You are running

with the jewel box by water.

Your dreams

provide the key. Your ocean

awaits. It waters your dreams.

Enter the thatch you old

suck-a-thumbs. Enter

the boat. Wake up. Eat

this shattering pastry,

exotic unreachable

hysterical girl.

A girl, a plan, a canal:

Vienna (Melissa Ginsburg)

I’m always gratified to see the new issue of Fence magazine. The latest issue of the semi-annual poetry and fiction journal Fence is issue #30 (Winter/Spring 2015), and has so much writing in it that poems are included on the front and back cover, and the author biographies are only available through either scanning the code through your phone or writing the journal directly (which I understand, logically, but simply find annoying as a reader). Either way, it is remarkable to see a journal inventive enough to include the two poems by John Ashbery on their front and back cover instead of inside the issue, thus solving the frustration of lack of space. I really can’t think of another journal that has done such, although I know that the text of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987; Coach House Books, 2004) [see my review of such here] was constructed (and produced) to begin on the front cover, and end on the back cover.

One thing I’ve always appreciated about Fence is their adherence to publishing the work of any writer only once over a two year period; coupled with their strong editorial mandate, this has meant that one of Fence’s ongoing strengths is the ability to introduce even their long-standing readers to a wide variety of new writers. Some of what leapt out at me included the unapologetically open-heart cadences of Tina Brown Celona’s three poems (“now to sing / so that even you // will stop to listen / in the moonlight // we walk in / I’ve never seen such whiteness // where poetry is the only language / and the only speech we hear”), or the striking staccato of Wong May’s three poems, that include:

How could I cross you

      The only way you would go?

      You shall take my hand

& I will close my eyes,   assisted

      Or assisting

We shall step   —   like so,

Into the traffic.

            Thank Heaven,

You are not blind. (“Cold Heaven”)

And have you read Mary Flanagan? Oh my:

Desire is Rarely Fulfilled

The fur of gorilla is as misunderstood

As a mistaken desire

The palms that are gorilla palms

Are not of fire

The woman standing near the gorilla

Is there by accident

The stairs behind and above do not

Enable gorilla transcendence

Scratches made by the nails

Mark the rolling wine barrel

Blah blah

Blah       peril

As usual, there is far too much to discuss in detail, but the new issue includes some familiar names included as well, including Chris Martin, Carla Harryman, Bin Ramke, Joshua Ware, Seth Abramson, Andrea Actis, Ben Doller, Maureen Seaton, Jeff Hilson (I haven’t seen work from Hilson in quite a long time) and Rick Moody, as well as an extended section of Julie Carr’s remarkable “REAL LIFE: AN INSTALLATION” (a work-in-progress she discussed last year at Touch the Donkey), that includes:

%

Consider for a moment images of the divine, and the ban placed upon them. Since in what I’ll call my tradition there are no such images we depend entirely on language and the body. This means there are many songs, many prayers, some rocking, and much ritual. Children are at once glad and annoyed by this. If we were to construct an image, what would it be? A mother? A goat? A tree? Impossibly, we’d have to have all three, which would return us to something that precedes us, throw us back to fathers who never once knew we were truly theirs and so fed us reluctantly, counting our morsels. Everything we’ve forgotten how to do, any ritual unpracticed or unknown, remains like a residue on the table. Stroking the wood, we retrieve these forgotten things.