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.