On Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson’s Rendered Paradise

My review of Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson's collaborative Rendered Paradise (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2024) is now online at Seneca Review.

Barbara Tomash, Her Scant State

 

the history of her marriage and its consequence died
three years after the grey American dawn of not believing
a word she said

 

 

 

____________________________________________________________
In life there is love, the moment becomes a single, melted together and into
pain. Her hands raised, clasped, slowly moved his face.
                                                                                        “I believe I ruined you.”

The fifth full-length poetry title by Berkeley, California poet Barbara Tomash, following Flying in Water (New York NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), Arboreal (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2014) [see my review of such here] and PRE- (Lafayette LA: Black Radish Books, 2018) [see my review of such here], is Her Scant State (Apogee Press, 2023), a book-length assemblage of erasure poems that focus on Henry James’ 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady. It is curious to think that at least two Apogee-published Berkeley poets have been focusing on book-length poetry projects that rework and even reconceptualize literary works by others, from Tomash’s collection to Laura Walker’s recent psalmbook (Apogee Press, 2022) [see my review of such here] that reworked Biblical text, or even Trevor Ketner’s recent reconceptualization of Shakepeare’s sonnets through their The Wild Hunt Divinations: a grimoire (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023) [see my review of such here]. As Tomash writes in her “Source Notes” at the back of the collection:

Her Scant State is an erasure of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. I kept strictly to word order but allowed myself free rein with punctuation and form on the page. The first half of the novel runs across the top of each page of Her Scant State. The second half of the novel runs across the bottom of each page. “Note” is an erasure of “Note on the Text” in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel. “Face” is an erasure of James’s 1908 preface to the New York Edition.

“The Portrait of a Lady / was in twelve parts / of thousands of small disruptive / processes, classic reader,” Tomash’s opening “Note” reads, “the / significance of some of these / is discussed [.]” Tomash’s Her Scant Suite works through an array of language erasure, description and disruption that flicks between a language and tone from the contemporary to the nineteenth-century, simultaneously existing in neither and both spaces. Through such, Tomash manages to compose an entirely new almost nether-space from which this new portrait emerges. “squandered      gambled      daughters,” she writes, early on in the collection, “a proof modified / by pain // she danced very well // the choreographic circle constituted / the limits of her own power [.]”

Laura Walker, psalmbook

 

 

if i could write down

everything you say would

i,   a tree becomes a single thing

water    inexactitude (“psalm 1”)

Berkeley, California poet and editor Laura Walker’s latest, following swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), birdbook (Shearsman Books, 2011), Follow-Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012) [see myreview of such here] and story (Apogee Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] is psalmbook (Apogee Press, 2022), a collection self-described thusly:

In spare, lyrical fragments, psalmbook channels the Book of Psalms as an act of radical listening, “a spirituality of attention” (Cole Swensen). In these poems, Laura Walker re-inhabits the Book of Psalms, King James Version, to channel the voices she finds there. These psalms plumb desire, faith, and loss, a land of hum and sponge where the necessity of belief and the impossibility of belief hunt and sway. i remember you, the psalmist sings; once/ you walked in this land, and made soft thrumming sounds// once you were outlined in paper.

Composed in short sketched lyrics, Walker’s poems weave a blend of response, extraction and exhumation, offering a different life to Biblical verse. Her numbered suite sit in the collection out of order, set in a kind of jumble, and presumably (but not necessarily) correspond to the particular correlate in the King James translation. For example: the collection opens with “psalm 85,” “psalm 8,” “psalm 84,” “psalm 141,” “psalm 16,” “psalm 102” and “psalm 1.” Walker opens a numbering system that hints at her order of composition, but could be anything, really. What is interesting, also, is Walker’s use of repetition, as certain psalm titles repeat, allowing for loops and patterns, echoes and threads of line and lyrics returning with slight variations, offering new ways through a material already presented. The collection begins with “psalm 85,” and ends there as well, offering a kind of cycle through a swirl of psalms. Walker offers, a lyric of philosophical attention; of points and pinpoints, composing a deep attention arrived at through erasure and excision, focusing not on composition but extraction and repetition. This is a book of reconsiderations, of lament and praise, and what lessons she exposes and composes from an often-worn but still vibrant text. “we tell everyone : we are here,” she writes, to close her second poem utilizing the “psalm 1” title, “we are here : / we weave and stray [.]”

 

Pattie McCarthy, wifthing

 

margerykempething

not getting any closer to the offing
margery kempe gives birth in a hairshirt
a wifthing par excellence   a female patience
figure in her fourteenth confinement
a comfortably finds a delusion that suits
her status & lets no one come near or else she might
shatter herself into a shardy mess
in lieu of an education   margery
kempe learns her prayers by heart & by rote
& maybe she mums them while chained
up in a stockroom in her postpartum
your daughterthing is sound
asleep your little
girl is sound

It is interesting to see the finished, full version of Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s wifthing (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2021) after spending time previously examining two of the collection’s component parts as simultaneously-produced chapbooks: margerykempething (2017) and qweyne wifthing (2017) [see my review of such here]. What had now been seen as separate structures is now built into a larger, uninterrupted, single-length work: a suite of twenty-five individual poems each titled “margerykempething” that leads into a suite of twenty-five individual poems each titled “qweyne wifthing,” before leading into a suite of thirty individual poems each titled “goodwifthing.” Presented as a single, book-length suite made up of short poems instead of as three distinct, discrete suites, how does one thread bleed into the other?

Throughout wifthing, McCarthy blends contemporary perspectives with Medieval experiences in the terrain of women through mothering, daughtering and the dreaded, dissolute “thing-ness” of how female work, thought, action and birth have been devalued generally and very specifically, cited as little more than the property of men. She writes a dialogue of previously unspoken, unrecorded and unheralded women and their experiences, writing to recover the absences and dismissals of history. “you get what you get & you don’t get upset,” she writes, in an early “margerykempething,” “margery kempe gives birth in a hairshirt / queen victoria in a shift nightdress / gives birth nine times & then her daughterthing / gives birth in same            a braid with & against / the wisp              patience is not her pigeon [.]” Or, as the poem that immediately follows opens: “there were two types of daughterthings     the ones / who purposely stepped on ginkgo ovules / & the ones who picked their ways around them [.]” She writes on female agency, from childhood to marriage; she writes on female desire, sexuality, motherhood and the complications that can arise postpartum. Engaged with deep and ongoing research, McCarthy explores the lives of Medieval women, writing the two sides of the long view: “you are the shape of my midlife crisis / margery kempe             where is your body / the cairn to mark you,” she writes, early on in the collection. As she cited in the chapbook edition, “margerykempething” took its title from the Book of Margery Kempe, the manuscript of which that sits in the British Library. It is an edition that sits as a single copy, giving Margery Kempe the title of “first English autobiographer.” When a digital version of “medieval mystic” Kempe’s manuscript was released online in 2014, Alison Flood wrote in The Guardian:

Kempe lived in Norfolk from around 1373 to 1440. After she had given birth to 14 children, she made a vow to live chastely with her husband, and embarked on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Italy and Germany. Her devotion was expressed through loud cries and roars, which often irritated bystanders, but she became famous as a mystic, and claimed to have conversations with God.

[...]

Biggs said the memoir, which has just been digitised by the British Library, was “perhaps the first autobiography written in English”, and is also “a remarkable record of the religious life of a woman during the tumultuous 14th and 15th centuries”.

McCarthy herself cites the 2000 Longman edition as her source for quotations, but the 1985 Penguin edition, her “undergrad copy,” as her “sentimental source,” writing out the details of Kempe in a line both straight and slant. The second suite, “qweyne wifthing,” centres itself not on a singular specific text or individual, but on multiple, citing David Baldwin’s Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower and Linda Simon’s Of virtue rare: Margaret Beaufort, matriarch of the House of Tudor. McCarthy has worked into and through the terrain of Medieval mystics, women, their labour, tales of mothering, birth and other related topics throughout the whole of her published work-to-date, all of which have appeared with Berkeley publisher Apogee Press: bk of (h)rs (2002), Verso (2004), Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (2010), Marybones (2013) [see my review of such here] and Quiet Book (2016) [see my review of such here]. As she spoke of her interest in Medieval subjects as part of an interview for Touch the Donkey:

I’ve been in love with the medieval for most of my life. This definitely has something to do with attending Catholic school—the art! The syntax of Catholicism, too, led me to studying the medieval. I think that most people are irrationally attracted to certain historical periods. The way medieval literature & art employ narrative—fragmented or episodic narrative, specifically—also the sense of simultaneity, layers of time in the work—it makes sense to me. On a more personal note, the lives of the saints were like fairytales for me. I mean, when I was a little Catholic schoolgirl we learned about all the girl-saints, about Mary—& those stories stuck to me. My school taught us a great deal about medieval women mystics, about Joan of Arc, about anchoresses in their cells, & it was very ‘cult of the virgin’ when it came to Mary (at least as far as I remember). Even as a child I think I understood that those stories all had to do with power, with women’s bodies, with literacy. I think the nuns taught us about the mystics to counteract “woman is a temple built over a sewer” & “woman is defective & misbegotten” & the rest of the church fathers (which I also remember well, clearly). When I walk into The Cloisters or the Musée de Cluny or the medieval galleries at any art museum, I want to sit down & think & be quiet. I feel that way in medieval churches as well—it’s what left of religion for me.