Simone Kearney, DAYS

 

mouth is somewhere else, ant farm, bee nest, little eloping hairs, windows are forms
of escape, off you go like a horse with your eyes swelling to pinpricks, horns that pierce
the fine tunic of road air, I keep getting moved around by strangers’ eyes, or they keep
getting moved around by mine, they have no satisfying angles, no pure margin, I hear
their humid speech, their chameleon words, borrowed, and there are fingers in them,
similarly, gaps in place of the crotch, fog powder, where differences are hard to touch,
unlatch, what is withdrawing, watershed, something pushing like a sun, up, since

The latest from New York writer and artist Simone Kearney is the full-length poetry debut, DAYS (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2021), following her chapbooks My Ida (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) and In Threes (Minutes BOOKS, 2013). DAYS is a book-length line, a singular lyric thread constructed in blocks of text, akin to the thread of Darren Wershler’s The Tapeworm Foundry (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2000) or Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s more recent collaborative art-text, beholden: a poem as long as the river (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018) [see my review of such here], stretching a singular sentence across the length and breadth of an entire book. DAYS could also be read as a particular kind of “book of days,” especially during pandemic-times, as the endless thread, days themselves indistinguishable from each other but for their slow, considered progression. “[…] an idea can have no corners,” she writes, “it can resemble / a propeller in a meadow, no one knows how it got there, but you are sitting in your chair, / only imagining things, an image erupts to compensate, and with talking, despite it all, / the apparatus of them, what you can’t understand or write down is lump in blankets […]”

DAYS pushes its seemingly-boundless sentence as a rush of words, a race to explore and discover the insides of language; of words themselves. “ […] like a memory with its meaning diluted into language,” she writes, early on in the book, continuing the thought on the following page: “like the limit of a digression, baggage we carry, perpetual history, and memory up on / a wall, what we had hoped for, as if we could trap ourselves, definite as background / music […]”

shows us otherwise, spheres of voices, all the spheres of beings, fragile, agile, opaque,
so full, come near, come with me, here, here you are, there, here is all this rich dirt in
which things grow, all the moisture of flowers, all the flowers flooding the atmosphere
with red, blue, and yellow, oily in air, yes, she dreams of entering germs like history
and making agriculture out of it, no logical position can amount for the semantics of
a body, its bones are tiny prisms, chunky light, imitations of knots that keep undoing,
they contain too much of what is more than their size, sudden understanding of words

What becomes interesting, also, is the realization that the book, Kearney’s book-length poem, appears to begin on the opening page the way every page begins: with an ongoingnesss. The suggestion is that the book begins mid-thought, and rushes forward as though the poem was always there, has always been there, pushing and thinking and speaking into and around and through the small cracks and crevices of languages. And yet, the final poem on the final page ends with a period, something I had admittedly not been expecting as I moved through the body of this collection. The length and breadth of her poem articulates the language of endless days, and writes an open stretch of field even as it sets to, if not conclusion, a point at which the poem comes to rest. The poem reaches an ending, and potentially a conclusion, having explored all the points and parts the poem required, as words congealing around an idea. “[…] in light things fester,” she writes, “there / before you, recently I, and all that, but more, and/or, and, door, curtain, open it, into the / other, and out again, I’m so there, all over, with, in, out, off, who, under, or where, here, / there, sea field, big open field, up, dimples etc., place in the field, field, field, more field.” Hers is an open field, but one that moves from the seemingly-endless into a point of boundaries. Her DAYS are plenty, and plenty, it would seem, enough.

 

Ongoing notes: mid-June, 2018

Before he sold it, Jake Kennedy lived in a little wooden house, built in 1948 or 1949. It was typical of the older homes in Kelowna, British Columbia, a small but booming city amid the lakes and mountains of the Okanagan Valley. While a contemporary suburban neighbourhood had grown up around it, the house was just a few blocks from the beach, and it felt a lot like a cottage. Behind wild shrubs, the yard sheltered inflatable pool toys, a kid’s bike with flat tires, spiderwebs. A possum used to come in through the cat door until it was jammed shut with a piece of cardboard. Sure, the house was a bit rundown, but it had everything you needed. And I understand why Jake wouldn’t spend money updating faucets, sanding floorboards, or laying sod. That stuff is just aesthetic—and whose aesthetic is it? It wasn’t his. Instead of a Christmas tree, Jake and his daughter piled his vast collection of books into a pyramid.

I don’t think I’ve felt the need previously to review a review, but Aaron Giovannone’s review of Jake Kennedy’s Merz Structure No. 2: Burnt by Children at Play (BookThug, 2015) [see my own review of such here] is just a beautiful piece of writing, and alone worth the cover price for issue #101 of Brick: A Literary Journal. There are other great parts to the issue as well, as there always is (I’ve been a happy and loyal subscriber to Brick for years now), but Giovannone’s review really is something else (which makes me realize I clearly need to be paying better attention to his prose).

[images: The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour by bpNichol and Barbara Caruso (Toronto: Seripress, 1972), currently hanging on the first floor of the Ottawa Heart Institute (thanks to the Canada Council Art Bank; see their link to such here), where my father recently had triple bypass + valve replacement surgery; he is still in ICU, but improving, slowly]

Brooklyn NY: I am fascinated by Brooklyn poet and artist Simone Kearney’s poetry chapbook My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), an exploration and perhaps even poetic study of Gertrude Stein’s infamous Ida: A Novel (1941):

Dear Ida,

I want to unwrite because writing is a

piling

up on a piling up.

To occupy instead that delay that

writing hollows

out, clears a space for.

With a title that plays off, one suspects, Susan Howe’s seminal My Emily Dickinson (1985), Kearney’s My Ida continues and furthers the blurring of identity and twinning, shifting from I to Ida, furthering Stein’s work even as she digs deeper into the work. As she writes: “How does one make the wound move? How can one hurry it along?” As the online press release offers: “A sequence of meditations on the strange and relentless nature of our longing for completion, My Ida is an elegy to our incompletion. Drawing from Gertrude Stein’s novel Ida, Kearney’s own Ida is both a real and imagined other: a borrowing, a projection, a decoy. Here, the theatre of longing is a theatre of language, where the distances embedded in our relationships, not only with others, but with ourselves, circle around and proliferate a wound.”

I put my face into the jeans of Ida.

I always knew

it would end like this. A cool trail of smoke

coming out from between Ida’s teeth.

One of Ida’s teeth are rotting,

I think to myself. Or is it “is” rotting?

I didn’t know if I wanted to press

my face into the jeans any further. The cerulean

from the jeans made me think

of the other day. I wanted to know

what the cerulean meant.

I just had to push my face deeper into the cerulean.