Judy Grahn means death
who keeps us from / our
lovers
the black man she leaves on the bridge
the women she didn’t hold didn’t kiss
the one with a knife she didn’t want
to sleep with—too fat too old too ugly—
she’s writing this in 1974
this woman is a lesbian
be careful
this lesbian, separate from men
so it’s a big deal when she leaves him
on the bridge when she writes
as I have left so many
of my lovers
that he should be counted among them
in 1974, Judy Grahn knows who the enemy is
six big policemen
who her lovers are
and the wind
could blow them all over the edge (“Pet
Sounds”)
The
latest title by Oakland, California poet and editor Stephanie Young is Pet Sounds (New York NY: Nightboat
Books, 2019), an accumulated sequence set in three increasingly long poems:
“CONGENITAL,” “AVE │ VIA” and “PET SOUNDS.” Riffing off the infamous 1966 album
title by The Beach Boys, the bulk of Young’s Pet Sounds is made up of the title poem, as the first two poems are
but two and seven pages each, respectively, making it seem as though the first
two pieces exist as a kind of warm-up into the main event. Weaving across and
through fragments, threads and short scenes, Pet Sounds rolls, sweeps and riffs on love and coming out, lovers
and exes, animal captivity and a variety of names (from basketball players
Steph Curry and Andre Iguodala to poets and activists Pat Parker and Judy Grahn
to Troilus and Cressida), as well as criticism both general and specific on
music. Really, Young’s poems, at least throughout this collection, are very
much engaged in both music and sentences, moving out of one love, and one sense
of self, entirely into another. At the end of “AVE │ VIA,” for example, she
plays off the lyrics of a particular song by the Talking Heads, writing:
a prairie, or a swamp
after the money’s gone
wholly lost and gone
since missed the right way
into the blue again
I do not even like that song
Change
can be terrifying, and this entire collection articulates and shapes an
evolution, both allowing and realizing a series of shifts in awareness,
politics and sexuality. “I can’t tell what’s going on there,” she writes, deep
into the title poem, “in the song, I mean // you remind me how it ends / lovers come and go // yes but did his
one true love leave? is she dead? / or with him, and all the others // left, or
died / flown away // it feels very true / to the feeling // regardless / either
way [.]” In a short note on the collection’s second poem (where you can see the
whole of “AVE │ VIA” online, also) for The Poetry Society of America, Young wrote:
The first version of “Ave | Via” included an
epigraph from Jenny Holzer and a lot of sentences. The sentences were about
foreclosure, development, student debt, and adjunct labor. About feeling unable
to write poetry; about living in a neighborhood I could no longer afford. And
yet I did live there, had for a long time, even as rent rose around us like
water. I felt like a zombie. I felt like the epigraph I later removed, a line
from poet Wislawa Szymborska as projected by Holzer: So you’re here? Still dizzy from another dodge? Close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through? I wrote about turning, in a
kind of despair, towards Caroline Bergvall’s poem “Via,” constructed from the
first three lines of Dante’s Inferno
as translated into English forty-seven times by forty-seven different
translators.
Which is to say that “Ave | Via” is the
absolute opposite of Athena emerging fully formed from the head of Zeus, it's
more like going back into his head (already split open by someone else) in
order to retrieve something you forgot, or forgot how to do, so that you can
think about uneven forms of life in the neighborhood. A little bit diving into
the wreck, a little bit Orpheus. I love the sound of Bergvall’s poem, the
circular condition of waking up again and again lost, and listened to her
reading it on repeat. At some point I typed up “Via” and dumped the language
into a spreadsheet, a familiar form of self soothing. Then sorted it
alphabetically. I was looking for patterns which were of course all around me,
old, and violent.
Writing this poem brought me back to music
again, as halting and rough as it felt. And then music became central to Pet Sounds, the long poem that followed,
eventually forming a book this poem is part of. So too the refrain: what is it we even wanted in the woods / a
little house?
