Stacy Szymaszek, Essay

 

            The sunshine hit in such a way
            meticulously tracked since the 1600’s
                       on that May day recovering from food poisoning it was brighter
than my own flame and ushered in an awareness of eternity the
            light on my face within the Victorian house now in our care
touched in its duller burning days the faces of poets philosophers farmers actors
                                     I tried for weeks to say even this much
                                                 to find a tone to live in for a while.

The latest from Hudson Valley, New York poet Stacy Szymaszek is Essay (Krupskaya, 2025), a book-length sequence of twenty-five extended observational lyrics—twenty-four numbered journal-poems, each titled “ESSAY,” along with “EPILOGUE: COW PARADE”—that ebb and flow across daily rural musings and other activity. “I drove through valleys of fog day after day,” begins “ESSAY 13,” “in the El Niño winter Catskill Creek overspilled its western bank / by over 200 feet swept away an elderly woman in her car / who drove around the road flooded sign / people are surprised by how easily water can overpower us / this is what my dad said followed by advice the trick / is to roll down your window before submersion / otherwise you’ll never get the door open [.]” Composed in a style familiar to regular readers of Szymaszek’s work, Essay records the details and nuance of daily activity, thinking and movement, composing a book-length poems on and around cows, as the author spends time in a Victorian house on a working farm. As the first poem offers: “A former student thought I was a farm / hand but mine is an office job on a small fairy farm right next to the milking / barn I visit the cows to stretch my legs and rotate my neck / to address conditions brought on by decades / of sitting at a desk.”

The publication of Essay follows numerous trade collections and chapbooks by Szymaszek, including austerity measures (Fewer & Further Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], JOURNAL STARTED IN AUGUST (Projective Industries, 2015) [see my review of such here], Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], The Pasolini Book (NC/NY: Golias Books, 2022) and Famous Hermits (Brooklyn NY: Archway Editions, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Szymaszek’s book-length poem flows and moves intricately, slowly, casually and meticulously across meditation and first-person interaction, including relationships the author maintains, from their partner to extended family, farm-hands and various of the animals (mostly cows). The focus is reminiscent of Lydia Davis’ own chapbook-length short story, The Cows (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], or even Michael Ondaatje’s early poem, “As Thurber would say – C*ws” from his debut collection, The Dainty Monsters (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1967), a poem previously seen in Raymond Souster’s infamous anthology New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: Contact Press, 1966). The former farm-lad in me might wonder, what is it about cows that attracts the attention of these urban writers?

There is such beauty in the movement, in the pacing, of these lines, providing echoes of New York School poetics, the “I did this, I did that” of Frank O’Hara or experimental journal-lyrics of Bernadette Mayer, but one with the added factor of ethos, writing of the relationships, and the inherent responsibilities, between human and livestock. Within these documented, journaled lines, it is precisely the relationships and their significances that become highlighted, not simply a document of the day or the movement or the thinking. “Two cows were in labor they carry for nine months,” Szymaszek writes, as part of “ESSAY 10,” “‘just like us’ she said ‘yes’ / and then disappeared into a task / with no parting words. I was aware my own womb/ had been up to some crazy shit all week messing up my / menopause dreams the brain dissolves as the body smarts / in all of this bio harmony with the wombs of old culled cows / in quiescence in estrus which is not menopause / the philosopher’s words like naked slats of wood / the height of the roof in constant flux / the thing is ‘the human form is as unknown / to us as the nonhuman’ (said Bruno Latour) my body is as unknown / to me as the cow’s body as Donna’s body / which I did not eat.”

There was something that caught my eye that Szymaszek wrote as part of their essay “VIVA PASOLINI!” in the anthology Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]: a sense of the poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity between the individual poet and society.” There is something fundamental, perhaps, in that kind of thinking, that kind of approach, and the poems in Essay do seem simultaneously lighter, and deeper, than their prior work; attempting to articulate not simply of dailyness, but of something more weighty, more ongoing. Or, as the first poem in Szymaszek’s Essay closes, with an opening as wide as any kind of possibility:

            I don’t really know how to do the job but I survive
            by showing up everyday as a poet. Sometimes I can’t
believe how silly I am but then I remember I am very young
                        and have so much to learn.

Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone,

 

It was also at Naropa in 1994 where I was introduced to Harryette Mullen and was lucky enough to take a workshop with her. A brilliant teacher, Mullen shaped the workshop around her use of Oulipo-based techniques, folkloric influences, and attention to the demotic and conversational word play. That workshop forever influenced my pedagogy and writing. Likewise, that summer I was first introduced to the work of Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer, and I took a workshop with Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, who gave a panel on their translation of the Popol Vuk and who said that whenever they speak of their experiences around this work, it involved rain: it did. I took a sonnet workshop with the brilliant Anselm Hollo that initiated my lifelong interest in this form and after which I wrote my first mature poems, a sonnet sequence. It was at Naropa that I heard Nathaniel Mackey give his soul-searing lecture “Cante Moro” on Lorca’s concept of duende. That lecture opened a cross-cultural understanding of bent strings, broken eloquence, and the role of dialogue singing, allowing me to make perceptual links between U.S. Delta blues and the Cham-influenced musical scale of south Vietnamese music, which is also composed of a pentatonic scale with flattened and in-between notes. Delta to delta. (Hoa Nguyen, “WHEN YOU WRITE POETRY YOU FIND THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR LINEAGE”)

I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” The list of contributors include Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nicole Brossard, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Coultas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tonya M. Foster, Renee Gladman, Carla Harryman, Erica Hunt, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky, Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, KPrevallet, Evelyn Reilly, Trish Salah, Prageeta Sharma, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Monica de la Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman and Rosmarie Waldrop. “First I had this impression of Leslie Scalapino bouncing outside of language poetry,” Eileen Myles writes, to open “ACCIDENTAL SCALAPINO,” “like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan) though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as ‘a weirdo,’ a phrase they reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection.” There is such a richness to this collection, one that explodes across a constellation of names, threads, writing communities and commentaries, both a heft of information for the experienced reader and emerging writer, allowing the best of what be possible across an anthology of poets and poetics. Every essay within this collection is exceptional, each articulation on how one begins, how the poems begin, how one establishes relationships to writing, writers and thinking across writing. “What can it mean for a woman,” Rachel Levitsky offers as part of “PUSSY FORWARD POETICS, OR THE SEX IN THE MIDDLE: READING AKILAH OLIVER AND GAIL SCOTT,” “for radical marginalized women, for a Black woman, for mothers, for a poet, for an experimental prose writer, for a poor woman, an aging woman, a queer woman, a woman who holds no fixed idea or surety over the meaning of the category ‘woman,’ therefore a theoretical and theory-making woman, a nonbinary woman, a trans woman, a trans man or masculine who was once called upon to be a female or a woman, a no-longer-cis woman, a poet and artist, solitary woman, a gazed-upon and scrutinized woman, a dreaming woman, a desiring woman, a traveling woman, a reading woman, a homebody, a woman of autonomous intellect, a friend, to perform freedom or more free-ness amid such conditions?” And then there is Stacy Szymaszek, writing in “VIVA PASOLINI!” a sense of the poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity between the individual poet and society.” Further on, writing:

            Civic poetry is gnostic in its intelligence and shows an uncomprosmising fealty to language. It gives me an ability to intervene, to refuse, to create a more just reality, to rewire the brain into making better sense. These are not new concepts, although they are new in the way that old poetry can be eternally new and new poets can be possessed by old poets.

One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed. As the editors offer as part of their introduction:

            The poets in this collection found their ways to their own poetics, identifying their contexts and lineages unbounded by the strictures of their schools, work, and established literary institutions. As Audre Lore states, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This community of writers resists labels: they invite nuance, error, slippage, and even messiness. They take the terms feminist and avant-garde, claim them, and make them uniquely their own. They know deeply that canons change, that inspiration is subtle, that the path is not so easy or clear. This collection is only the beginning of an evolving dialogue, an opening to a new generation of feminist avant-garde writers to connect to, collaborate with, and support each other. ultimately, it is our vision to gather feminist avant-garde poets who engage with language as a point of contention and potentiality.

 

Stacy Szymaszek, Famous Hermits

 

New York was hell on earth today
              trash fire on the F track    a black substance    perhaps
mastic asphalt oozing from vents along the C/E
                            but I’m only reading about it    I slipped
on the ice    down to one knee    they don’t believe in salt
or plows    and I forgot the chains for my feet    “At Night the States”
              closes with Montana    a word I have always liked    the state
grows on me    like adulthood    still I confess I hate hot
                                        cereal out of a pot    at midnight    and it tasted
like and was the same color as the rug in here    so when a glob
fell I left it there    so I wouldn’t lose my thought    it was Marlowe’s
birthday    yesterday and I heard the ground hog
insinuated    early spring    my love cares to visit the pleasures
              of going down on me    like a vine
I spiral all over the house (“CENTURION FACE”)

The latest from Hudson Valley, New York poet Stacy Szymaszek is Famous Hermits (Brooklyn NY: Archway Editions, 2022), following more than a half-dozen trade collections, as well as numerous chapbooks, including austerity measures (Fewer & Further Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], JOURNAL STARTED IN AUGUST (Projective Industries, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], as well as the more recent The Pasolini Book (NC/NY: Golias Books, 2022). The eleven poems that make up Famous Hermits extend Szymaszek’s engagement with a variation on the day book or lyric journaling, furthering a thread of New York School poetics (I’ve been reading and rereading Bernadette Mayer lately, so can really see the linkages) across lengthy lines and sentences in an expansive and even continuous ongoingness (think, also, of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert, although it seems less likely Szymaszek aware of his decades of work, or elements of Fred Wah). There is something compelling with Szymaszek’s use of personal material (whether actual or otherwise), and one might even see a way how her books could fit neatly against each other across an autobiographic spectrum; it would be interesting for someone to more closely examine the length and breadth of her published work to chart the evolution of her particular variation of the lyric journal. She utilizes the details of reading, living, responding and being as the building blocks through which her poems emerge, propelled by language and rhythm, a cadence that flows easily across and down each page. “in the sloppy middle of life,” she writes, to close the three-page poem “STOP MAKING PEACE,” “is a dialogue          in view of Santa Catalina // I woke to find // an elder woman selling her soap /// mine has more / pine tar / in it / because frankly / I am / a master // of my trade [.]”

“I am I because my landlord is my accountant,” she writes, as part of the poem “CENTURION FACE,” “he knows me / in the tyranny of paperwork gesticulate over a plank / of leather [.]” Szymaszek stitches together her poems-as-collage, travelling across an expansive distance of daily offerings, deep reading and language; hers is an exploration as much temporal, writing personal space both internal and external, rippling well beyond the immediate into wider considerations of city, landscape and culture. In certain ways, this is also a collection coming to terms with relocation, moving out of a lengthy period of New York City for the Hudson Valley, offering a journal on and around such an enormous personal and professional shift; one that feels akin to hermiting, perhaps, which is why she invokes so many across the text. As the back cover offers: “The concept of the famous hermit is born out of a desire to experience integrity, to not go forgotten, yet with a fierce need to separate from liberal ideas of what poetry should publicy perform. She invokes other kindred artists such as Dante, Bob Kaufman, Tina Modotti, and Jean Seberg as guisdes as she writes her own statements of renunciation and ultimately of middle-aged self-love.”