Cedar Sigo, Siren of Atlantis

 

Ode to The Hi-way House

OK calm down, let’s also say
there is no need to write anything down for a while,
Let’s think back on all the poets that may have flirted in this room
or fucked or tried to or met often, in semi secrecy several times a week.
For now, I feel silenced by the everyday I have already told you,
diseased and purposely kept form new love and old.
And then Margaret dreamt that she and Barbara
drove back-up through the desert 900 miles
to leave cooked food in front of room 217. I call Lydia to say that Kazim
is teaching a whole Naropa summer course on Yoko Ono.
I hope this means a retelling of the Chambers Street
concert series with Jackson Mac Low.
This constructed attempt at poverty so chic I can forgive.
Especially if real poets were there as specimens taking part.
Any other poets that may have collapsed halfway down the hallway
of the archive? The ones that barely made it.
They make the rest of us smell so sweet; it becomes unreal.

The latest from Lofall, Washington-based poet and member of the Suquamish nation, Cedar Sigo, following titles such as Stranger in Town (San Francisco CA: City Lights, 2010), Language Arts (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2014), Royals (Wave Books, 2017), All This Time (Wave Books, 2021) [see my review of such here] and Guard the Mysteries (Wave Books, 2021), is Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025), a collection assembled as an ongoing accumulation, akin to a day-book of lyrics held together across a particular stretch of attention. “I toss my stencils / to the neon fire and begin to build, / stacking obsidian dust,” he writes, to open the poem “STRANGER (FULL TEXT) #2,” “a text that betrays the shape of a tone, / a semblance of pitch, / the opposite of rubbing down / onto a headstone.” Referencing poets such as Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, Wanda Coleman, Joanne Kyger (Sigo edited Kyger’s There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera for Wave Books back in 2017, don’t you know) and Kazim Ali, Sigo composes a book of echoes and of the everyday, keeping a regular writing practice of his immediate, from his reading and recollections of mentors and the immediacy of his peers, dystopian peril and climate crises, and a very present and particular sense of time. “Lay my figures bare / and give them no rest,” offers the short poem “THE LIFE OF SUN RA,” “I can relate to his premise, that he was born on Saturn // and must be getting back soon, // that the earth is a failed planet, // that rehearsal itself / becomes a ceremony.”

Part-way through the collection, Sigo introduces the following pages with a note that begins: “I suffered a stroke in late July of 2022. As I was reentering my body, I decided to try writing poetry again (I was still endlessly flipping fragments in my head and reorganizing them.) The following poems seemed to come out as a series of exhibits, a naïve garden that I forced myself to connect into something larger. It is a gift to be reintroduced to your practice.” It is interesting to think of the journey, the distance, the author travelled to compose these pieces, held in similar foundations to what I’m already aware of his work. One might suspect that the experience, as he suggested in his note, forced a return to the foundations of how he approaches writing, and approaches the poem, something that perhaps someone far more familiar with his ongoing writing should probably delve into with more detail. Either way, these poems are remarkable, and deeply grounded, held in the hand as a bird might trust to light, while able to take wing at any moment. As one of the poems that follows his short note, “MEMORIZATION SONNET,” begins: “The common vernacular is our movement / and should never be reduced to echoes of voice.”