essays in the face of uncertainties

Someone tweets a report of a brawl breaking out at an East York, Pennsylvania Red Lobster, due to the three-hour wait times. People are this close, someone else responds, to losing it. My mother-in-law forwards us an article from CTV News, as Ontario-based owners of cottages in rural Quebec are voicing their frustrations, unable to visit or even check in on their properties. It is suggested that local residents in the area are reporting cars with Ontario plates to the police. What choice might they have? Out-of-towners entering a rural community and potentially utilizing what little medical resources such an outpost might hold, if they were to develop symptoms. And as Christine reminds, Montreal is still considered a hot-spot. The numbers out of Quebec are higher than the rest of the country.

As Charles Legere writes as part of the poem “The Coppices of Pleasure,” in the latest issue of FENCE magazine (36 Winter Early 2020):

I can’t recall the sensation of pleasure, only the context, which I would have to tell as a story.

I am thinking about time, and how one can’t help but comprehend this temporal stretch as a formless mass. In her memorable Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity (2004), Toronto writer Kim Echlin offers: “My own memory of giving birth is of how time and space disappeared at the end of my labor. I was the still centre; there was nothing but pain and breath. The threshold between life and death receded. The helping voices and tending hands around me seemed disembodied and remote. Through my own body I was both instrument and agent of nature. It is clear to me why certain women want to have many babies and why many women take new direction after childbirth.” Christine returns from an errand later than I might have expected, having accidentally spent half-an-hour on the phone with our friend Shannon, who is home with newborn twin boys born four pounds each some two or three weeks ago. They are all fine, by the way, despite the quarantine birth. Christine hums at the excitement of meeting them, although we have no idea when.

Slipped inside as a folded book-mark in my copy of Echlin’s book-length essay, I discover the print-out of an email I received from Vermont poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely, along with a poem she attached to the email, “Love Poem to a Stranger.” “I spied eleven lank deer in one evening,” her poem begins, “feeding on different lots.” The email is dated January 7, 2008, which seems an entire lifetime from here, from now. Curious as to where the piece may have ended up, I eventually locate the published version of her poem, nearly intact but for some minor tweaking. She re-titled the poem “Misery Trail,” and the poem lives in her second full-length collection, My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer (2012). Hindsight suggests there is something of a place-holder aspect to the earlier title, but still, I wonder: how does one move so far, from the suggestion of a more wistful longing into something darker, over the span of some four years? Both versions of the fourteen-line poem ends with the couplet:

            So I walked, uncharacteristically slow.

            You couldn’t know how slow I walked.

There. So there is such a thing as time.

 essays in the face of uncertainties

Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Dolefully, A Rampart Stands

Shine

My reputation when I stand beneath the stars

is one of tolerance.

It’s dark out. No one can see me.

I make the shape of a woman standing

in a shed. How many of you can say the same?

Billions and billions served.

I want to impress the stars: carry

a bundle of sticks affixed to a strap

across my back. Walk 4 miles

or no miles at all.

At dawn, I will make a fire. No

biggie. Just another miracle

I may have had a part in.

The stars do not eat my breakfast.

A man eats my breakfast. Like the stars

he cannot take care of me very well.

But oh does he burn.

So I draw the water from the tap.

I draw the tap from memory.

Peekskill, New York-based poet and self-described generalist Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s third full-length poetry collection is Dolefully, A Rampart Stands (New York NY: Penguin, 2019), following In No One’s Land (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2007) and My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) [see my review of such here]. Set in five sections (including the sequence “Book About A Candle Burning In A Shed,” which appeared as a chapbook through above/ground press in 2011), her lyrics are dense, dream-like and filled with a knowing that often emerges from deep hardship, such as the last third of the poem “The Grandmothers,” that reads:

The beatings are located in the basement or shed

when they used to be out on the prairie, reddening

the sky, little dust drops children ran their toes across.

Whose tears made these? The beatings don’t say

in the dark. The beatings scuffed into the wall

of a newly remodeled home. For each one,

10 more hard miles of trail leading east—

no fires at the campsite, no advice from older women

who have been that way, no map.

There has long been a mythical quality to Ackerson-Kiely’s poems: in dream-like scenes of occasional violence, loss and longing, she composes narrators/characters that both alternately and concurrently fall apart and unspool, attempt to lose themselves and keep themselves from becoming lost. “But the anger will surface once families get home,” she writes, in the poem “Folding Chairs,” “kick off their boots in the mudroom. I am afraid // I will continue to burn the supper. I am afraid / I have not made enough for everyone.” Touching on elements of the domestic, the pilgrimage and even pioneer settlers, her poems are grounded in her corner of rural America, and one could almost describe her poems as a kind of lyric New England gothic: exploring the deep beauty that emerges through and despite the darker elements. This is a striking collection, one that contains a rich tapestry of subtle multitudes. As she writes in the poem “Meadow Redaction”: “The boat is a crescent of silver birch / I punch my body into.”

above/ground press backlist and rarities : list #28 + #29

After a bit of a delay/distraction, I'm still discovering above/ground press titles (over the nearly-twenty four years and 820+ items of publishing) I thought either completely out-of-print or very close. For a few months now, I've been working to offer (or re-offer) various titles to the public, simply to see what might appeal (scroll down here to see the list to date) and have managed to list nearly two hundred individual titles, including two new lists of titles by kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Ken Norris, Max Middle, Greg Kerr, Eric Schmaltz, Jason Christie, Nicholas (N.W.) Lea and Lisa Robertson, posted here and here.

 

Amy Lawless, My Dead

Sometimes a slew of elephants die,

And you’re dealing with what is called a massacre,

When three thousand die maybe you have to just

Watch a movie.

It reminds me of biology class in eleventh grade.

The combination of math

And chemistry were too much and, boy, I gave up.

Mourning a grandmother is one thing.

Mourning three thousand someone’s child is too much,

But we do it anyway by

Watching some DVD until it’s over

And then letting it sit on the coffee table for a week

Until you can get out of bed and look at it

Not recognizing that this cultural artifact will always be the thing I did

Instead of watch news that day in September.

I’m absolutely floored by the work in Amy Lawless’ second trade poetry collection, My Dead (Octopus Books, 2013), a follow-up to her first collection, Noctis Licentia (Black Maze Books, 2008), from the first poem I read, flipping randomly to catch the piece I quote, above. Constructed out of four poem-sections—“Elephants in Mourning,” “One Way to Write a Sonnet is to Number the Lines,” “Shadow Self” and “The Skull Behind My Face”—there is a sharp and sassy brilliance to the poems in My Dead, a cadence of rough work and a brutal honesty in the way she carefully and precisely bares some pretty raw emotion. As she writes in the first section, an extended lyric sequence of short fragments: “Sometimes a man dies and his people gather around and eat chips and / laugh about the things the dead man would do and say. His house was his / crib and he never left it. His house was his African plain.” There is a way Lawless writes about loss, grieving and her many dead in a careful, open rage, a flailing precision that blends to become something quite powerful. 

This is the hind elephant foot tapping at the carcass. This is the lover rolling the body over to bring her back to life. This is the head lifted toward the sky trilling its trunk. This is looking at photographs of you and your grandparents trying to find a string between you. Here’s a newspaper you can’t read. This is what happens here on Earth and I don’t need a bible. The sound I make dying is the sound I make when I was born. Shaking and pink, I last for ages.

In the second section, she composes eight sonnets each with the same title as the section itself, playing with the form and too-often sincerity and seriousness of the sonnet, and the idea of numbering (literally) the lines. The final poem of the section opens: “1. Fuck off: I’m a poet. You ate my / 2. emotional energy like cipher beetles / 3. down my neck.”

PORTICO

You drew me onto a portico and said This is for you. It was a beautiful necklace—rock hanging below cardinal numbers zero through nine. I held it and Thank you. You sat on a bench. Walls closed around us like in a car. It felt better than kissing some people but worse than kissing others. You can do whatever you want, you said. This was an explicit reference to your penis. I held it and said This is bigger than you’ve led me to believe it would be. You can do whatever you want with it, you said. I stroked it, your eyes appealed. First, I picked off a fine piece of crust.

The third section plays with longer lines, longer stanzas and a deeper density, stretching to see just how far her cadences might extend. As she writes to open the longer poem “Barren Wilderness”: “see the world for what it is / maybe the subtlety                 of the dry branches reaching to the hawks / with bony hands[.]” Or the opening of the title poem itself: “The car exploded for some political reason / I saw a monkey falling asleep in the water / a monk meditating and praying / a girl doing laundry[.]” Lawless’ My Dead contains a clear eye, wild energy and emotional rawness paired with a straightforward narrative thrust in poems that seem almost dangerous, akin to works by Heather Christle, Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Bianca Stone for their formal care and emotional edge. There is something magnificent going on here. Pure and simple.