Katie Naughton, The Real Ethereal

 

the question of address (elegy: apartment)

with you I have reached
the limits of reason with you
described the trajectory
you had two chairs and mine
was never close enough
at breakfast I want to you
close to you be to you
I tell you everything I see
the kitchen every day I map
my heart the morning for you
the cat circles us lies in the sun
the large room at the top
of the old house
everything I said to you failed
it my self and the limits
of what I could know I felt

Following chapbooks through above/ground press and Dancing Girl Press [see my review of such here] (the second of which is folded into this current work) comes Brooklyn, New York-based poet and editor Katie Naughton’s full-length poetry debut, The Real Ethereal (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2024). Set in four sections of staggered, staccato lyrics—“day book,” “hour song,” “the question of address” and “the real ethereal”—Naughton examines fragments, frictions and accumulations, allowing individual points and posits to gather, cluster and group into larger structures that reveal themselves slowly, as the forest through the trees. There is something of the collection that offers itself as a single through-line, a single, extended thought or lyric sentence that runs the length and breadth of it, from one moment unto the next. “the billowing bright day is gone we did not / have the money to keep it,” she writes, as part of the opening section-sequence “day book,” “the picture taken / upstairs the light and heat coming through / the window then the house / torn down the waste mass / of drywall plaster and beams that was the most / money I ever knew and so much [.]” The accumulations are layered, and propulsive: one line and then another in sequence.

I would presume that Naughton would be well aware of the implications of composing such an opening sequence, especially writing from Buffalo (where she has been a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program, only recently relocating to Brooklyn), as an echo of the late Robert Creeley’s infamous A Day Book (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). While it has been more than fifty years since the publication of that particular work, Creeley’s shadow looms large across contemporary poetics, after all, and nowhere more than Buffalo, where he taught for thirty-seven years as Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetics, from 1966 to 2003. “the image world shimmers in our neighbor’s windows / the vacant house,” she writes, “and who left it / pink hearts and red a sugar crystal glitter / in winter [.]”

Naughton begins this collection with her “day book” poems, suggesting a movement through time, but the poems of The Real Ethereal hold to an immediacy, a perpetual moment across the American present through parsed and penetrating short-form lengths. “morning takes me take the street traffics / daily time through me though morning,” she writes, to open “my love in strange places,” the poem that begins the second section, “comes already strange and I leave / the choirs of history and their small bells [.]” Her lyrics really do propel with their expansiveness, their ongoingness, offering a simultaneous, infinite and open-ended present. “dawn is not mine day still breaks yellow,” begins the poem “warming ending what it may you persist.” Naughton seeks questions of elegy and address, between what is real and what is less than, and what makes the difference, striding the line between concrete and abstract. She seeks questions around the complexities of ethics vs. capitalism, and what can be held, or held against; seeking answers to how not only to be present, but to somehow survive. As part of the sequence “a second singing,” set in the final section, reads:

Some days are my inheritance
gray and November I want
to see out of them and also
to be inside them though
the endless dissipation the body
turning to heat to waste pass
or spend a life its imagined
or remembered textures. So most time
stopped to remember happens
in an empty room with the internet
the flat word of the screen
standing in for some other place
where something happens. The
news is who stays poor in
the necessary rooms waiting
for dinner. I’m in some threshold
looking through two doors.
The rooms are empty but feel
like weight   like world.