Claire Marie Stancek, Operating Moon

 

This is the place. May basket rhymes. Bluntly identified the words.
Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving. A sterile
bandage was applied to the entire record. This is the song of the
wave! The mighty one. influence of natural objects. It is good to be
out on the road, and going one knows not where. It was Tommy
who said. This document contains Claire Marie Stancek. Findings: 

“A was an ape.”

That Holy Thing
The infant 

off waiting
and the incision where
out of the wood I watched them shine. See Haunted 

See the operating
bloom, when tulips of all debris (when we) See

The latest from Canadian-born, Philadelphia-based poet, editor and publisher Claire Marie Stancek [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], following MOUTHS (Noemi, 2017), Oil Spell (Berkeley CA: Omnidawn, 2018) and wyrd] bird (Omnidawn, 2020) [see my review of such here], is Operating Moon (New York NY: Pinsapo, 2026). And did you know she already has two further poetry titles—WHO IS THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE (Omnidawn, 2028) and Double Life (Omnidawn, 2027)—as well as a collection of essays, Rhyme Between (Essay Press, 2027), forthcoming? As the catalogue copy offers, Operating Moon is a collection that “[…] explores the fractured relationships between body, institution, and agency. Some of the poems collage Stancek’s own medical record with an index of children’s poetry in a visually simultaneous, bibliomantic fugue that constellates maternal care with bureaucratized and medicalized care. […] Feminist and experimental, personal and political, Operating Moon sings through and alongside a maternal line, while engaging the complex violences of care systems.” Stancek’s use of medical records is intriguing, following a lineage of other poets over the years working same, whether American poet Katie L. Price through the chapbooks Sickly (above/ground press, 2015) and BRCA: Birth of a Patient (above/ground press, 2015), Vancouver poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s Trauma Head (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], or Colorado poets Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman through their collaborative NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2018) [see my review of such here]. “The patient was taken to the operating room where spinalanesthesia / was found to be adequate” she writes, close to the opening of the collection. “The patient was taken / identified and entered / to the underlying layer // separated in the midline / and the incision extended // with the scalpel and carried through [.]”

Expansive, explorative and declarative, Stancek’s book-length sentence, book-length lyric overture, stretches out the details of the author’s medical experiences within an intricate collage of text and footnote, overlaying elements and threads in an expansive patter. There is something intriguing about her simultaneous use of her medical records as building blocks, offered as elements towards a larger structure alongside her use of structure to be able to articulate something larger and ongoing around agency and body, cut and stitched together in such a way that it couldn’t have landed at the same place. Stancek has been, for some time, a poet engaged with structure, offering blended fragments and leaps both cognitive and through language, but this collection takes those intricacies further than where she’d been before. Her intricacies around small details of precise language provide such wonderful levels of sound and fragment, footnotes that thread out into further connections, and a pattern that would be impossible to replicate without this appearance of scattering. “a hundred other           mothers in the beginning” she writes, two-thirds through the collection, “held you and sang                            sang the same songs [.]” There is something choral and unusual in the way Stancek structures her notes around archive and agency, tearing at the body to reveal something else, something staggering. As part of her extensive “Notes on the Text” at the back of the collection, she begins:

In the first section, “operative note (statuses as of),” there are two types of poem: index poems, in which a column runs down one side of the page; and double sonnets, in which a wide mid-line caesura divides lyrics of fourteen lines. Each of these two types are heavily citational, but in different ways. The index poems are collaged; no word of them is “mine,” but mine are their arrangements and re-(or de-)arrangements. The two sources I appropriate are my medical record with the University of Pennsylvania Health Systems and the Index to Children’s Poetry: A Title, Subject, Author, and First Line Index to Poetry in Collections for Children and Youth compiled by John E. and Sara W. Brewton, published by The H. W. Wilson Company in New York, 1942. The citational practice of the double sonnets is more organic, following what Jed Rasula in This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry describes as a “nosing into the compost library,” which I learned of through Brian Teare, in his “Notes” to Companion Grasses. I provide the following bibliographic information with the acknowledgment that these sources are something more than sources; they are inspirations. They are a chorus of mothers whose voices sing through mine in ways I cannot fully account for, other than to say that they form the conditions for my song.