& to & such a
pretty bird. this is
the first sonnet for
the third baby. if
I sound prepared for
that, I am not.
let me know you’re all
right in there, would you?
Kevin says : I dreamt
it was a boy.
my brother says : your
favorite presidents
cannot be F D R &
Jefferson—
that’s illogical.
Emmett says : when I
was pregnant with you,
that was a tough week too.
Asher says : seashell,
voilà. & the third
(having outgrown a
perfect, fragile world)
baby ( bird from brid OE from unknown
origin) “because he was crying
I like him most of
all,” says my son. (“x y z & &”)
Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s sixth trade collection is Quiet Book (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2016), a collection focused
on domestic patter and patterns, writing on home and children, mothering and
everything in-between. Constructed out of three sections—“x y z & &,”
“notes for clothespin” and “genre scenes”—the poems in Quiet Book follow McCarthy’s previous poetry books—bk of (h)rs (Apogee Press, 2002), Verso (Apogee Press, 2004), Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (Apogee
Press, 2010), Marybones (Apogee
Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Nulls (horse less press, 2014) [see my review of such here]—for
their formal invention and innovation, focus on women, mothering and the body, and
themes of Medieval artworks and archives, armed with her fierce and fiery intelligence
and an evocative musical cadence that sings through every line. As she writes
in the short sequence that sits in the centre of the collection, “clothespin”:
“the kiss is domestic is / domestic is kiss monumental // breech upon which /
so much pinch [.]”
Originally produced as a chapbook in 2015 through Ahshata Press, “x y z & &” is a
suite of thirty-three poems that explore and extend her work in collage and
accumulation, stitching together scattered notes on parenting, language,
nursing, childbirth and babies. McCarthy magnificently articulates the anxiety,
distraction, exhaustion and bliss of parenting small children, as she writes:
“I had four hours in a row alone / to work & I looked at photos of them /
& remembered the limitless mistakes / it was possible to make with the
piano.” And the structure of untitled poems composed as a suite also means it
is possible to begin on any page, and read in either direction. In a 2014 interview at Touch the Donkey, she briefly discussed the suite:
I have a chapbook called ‘x y z &&’
coming out in the fall (Ahsahta Press)—it’s a sonnet sequence I wrote after my
third child was born (I wrote a sonnet sequence after each child was born). One
of the epigraphs is from Anselm Berrigan’s poem “Looking through a slant of
light” : “Sending his mother to the typewriter / To type a poem that would embarrass
him / Years later.” That’s my preemptive action on this front.
There are things related to the children that I
do not write about because they are invasions of privacy, sure. It was harder when
they were infants/toddlers because it doesn’t seem as though they have privacy
when they are so little – it doesn’t feel like I have privacy during that phase
either.
[…]
Obviously, I think they are brilliant &
funny & clever—it would be impossible to resist them getting in the text.
The
third section, “genre scenes,” explores the depictions of women in a variety of
domestic situations and labours throughout Medieval artwork. A selection of
fifteen pieces appearing previously as fifteen
genre scenes (eth press, 2014), the twenty-four poems that make up “genre
scenes” study historical depictions such as “woman nursing an infant with a
child feeding a dog,” “& child, with apple tree & bread & doll” and
“a woman scraping parnsips, with a child standing by,” that riffs off Nicholaes Maes’ 1655 painting “A Woman Scraping Parsnips, with a Child Standing by Her,”
as she writes:
bring the knife toward
the body toward the body
watch now watch me
bring the knife toward
plane the woody surface
a sharp parallel knife
keywords food people vegetables child woman
young
vegetable kid person
adult female lady two people two
two two persons indoor
domestic scene scenes homely inside
indoors interior
interiors vertical preparing sitting sit sits seated
domestic parsnips
parsnip scraping basket knife house home
tags woman child cap basket knife jug skirt
apron ewer bodice some things
women do with their
hands working by a window
the girl is beautifully
grumpy & learning something
boil the parsnips until tender
boil the eggs very hard
So—with Quiet Book and thinking about the
domestic—the poems in “genre scenes,” I mean I didn’t know very much at all
about seventieth century Dutch painting, but I was a little bit in love with
the idea of writing about those paintings while I was writing these poems about
being pregnant and giving birth and having a newborn. Genre paintings—you know
in the ranking of the French Academy of Fine Arts—it’s the middling genre,
right. It’s: history paintings, and portraiture, and then genre paintings and
the domestic—and they are small and not serious. So there was something perhaps
perversely attractive to me about these paintings of people plucking ducks and
deboning fish and nursing babies, and doing all this work inside the house.
While I was writing these poems, I kept thinking about how we are sort of instructed not to take that seriously—‘mommy
poems.’
There
have been quite a stretch of poets writing on and around the domestic in
intriguing ways over the past few years, allowing the small and smaller details
of home and children as material for more language-centred writing, from
Canadian poet Margaret Christakos to American poets such as Dan Thomas-Glass,
Julie Carr, Rachel Zucker, Chris Martin and Farid Matuk, who’s chapbook My Daughter La Chola (2013) also
appeared with Ahsahta Press. Given that home and children are so much a part of
the days of certain writers, it seems almost impossible to not wonder why more
poets don’t include such details in their own work. As McCarthy herself says in
the interview, it was important to write “mommy poems” in such a way, despite
knowing that the genre itself repeatedly gets a bad rap (despite so much
evidence to the contrary). McCarthy provides material beyond the ends of the
standard alphabet and into every parents’ movement into new and unfamiliar
territory, writing the confusion, exploration and small and large discoveries
beautifully, including two poems on the sometimes exhaustive and
all-encompassing stretches of nursing: “milk fever cluster feeding witching
hour / cluster feeding milk fever witching hour / witching hour milk fever cluster
feeding / witching hour cluster feeding milk fever.” (“x y z & &”). Anyone
with a small child or two, who is also interested in the language of great
poetry, should be reading this. Or should I say: everyone.
suppose the
clothespin spring-
loaded for clouds see
also & see
through
weathering its
backbends
bellies attractive domestic
practical &
monument I want to walk
around & around
& around it until
William Penn fits in
its pinch
genre : common
artifacts & its
significance (if
any) is unknown
the gaze of the
clothespin
falls on itself (“notes
for clothespin”)
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