Karen Solie, The Caiplie Caves

NO 59981 05825; 56.24324° N, 2.64731° W

Landward, the cave mouth conspicuously dark.

Halfway between Anstruther and Crail,

singular in the vicinity. Prominent

calcareous sandstone outcrop on a raised beach

level, short lengths of passage

and as spectacularly weathered as the coexistence

of good and evil, the earth pigments.

Anchor in five metres, taking care to avoid

the numerous creel markers. At half-tide

a dinghy may be hauled out where the reef buffers

flat rocks, though they are sharp

and landing delicate, if land you must.

Wind may complicate return to the boat. Any visit

is a lesson in how quickly conditions change.

What is immediately fascinating about Toronto poet and editor Karen Solie latest full-length collection, The Caiplie Caves (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019), is how it is built: more than a collection thematically or structurally shaped, but a singular, book-length work constructed around a core idea. As the press release offers:

In the seventh century, on the coast of Fife, Scotland, an Irish missionary named Ethernan withdrew to a cave in order to decide whether to establish a priory on May Island, directly opposite, in the Firth of Forth, or pursue a hermit’s solitude. His decision would have been informed by the realities of war, religious colonization, and ideas of progress, power, and corruption, and complicated by personal interest, grief, confusion, and a faith (religious and secular) under extreme duress.

What becomes interesting about this shift is one of approach, as Solie evolves, more overtly, from a writer who crafts poems into collections into a writer who crafts a collection constructed out of individual poems; becoming, at least for this singular project, a poet utilizing the book as her unit of composition. That isn’t to suggest that her prior collections—Short Haul Engine (London ON: Brick Books, 2001), Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), Pigeon (Anansi, 2009) and TheRoad In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, 2015), as well as The Living Option: Selected Poems (Northumberland UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]—aren’t conceived as or don’t hold together as book-units, but the difference remains on The Caiplie Caves’’ focus on both a historical figure, the hermit Ethernan, and the remote Caves of Caiplie, where he chose to contemplate, situated north of Edinburgh along the country’s eastern coast. As Solie writes of the historically-evasive Ethernan as part of her preface: “A number suggest he was an Irish missionary to Scotland who withdrew to the Caves in the mid-7^th century in order to decide whether to commit to a hermit’s solitude or establish a priory on May Island. This choice, between life as a ‘contemplative’ or as an ‘active,’ was not an unusual one to take up among his cohort.” The poems use the contemplation of that choice, between a contemplative versus an active life, as a way to speak both to what is believed to be Ethernan’s historical context as well as contemporary concerns, asking what, indeed, denotes activity, and examining the unexamined life, as in the poem “ORIGIN STORY,” that includes:

To make our own the righteous anger

that keeps some people alive

feels like doing something

so grief and fear don’t stir

under their blanket, don’t open their eyes.

So survival does not seem merely accidental

to the indecision when to lay down

the earthly burdens, the way a quality is accidental

to a substance —

In an interview conducted by Daniel Fraser and posted September 28, 2018 at The Rumpus, she speaks to the tension in her work between the relationship, as Fraser suggests, between nature and human life:

The Rumpus: I want to start by asking you about what appears to me to be one of the prevailing tensions in your poems: the relationship between nature and human life. More specifically, the sense of nature as a force that lurks beneath modernity and continually breaks through the surface.

Karen Solie: I suppose I see the tension not in terms of forces at odds, but in the belief that human endeavor is separate from the natural world. We are natural creatures, and all creatures alter their environments. I suspect that separating the natural from the “man-made” has allowed us to distance ourselves, to neglect the implications of our technology, to compartmentalize our responsibility.

We can see the surface of Mars now (and leave junk there), but down here our problem-solving has been narrowed by power interests. If human life and nature are distinct entities, it allows us to prioritize. Prioritizing “progress” has served colonial enterprises very well. If we think of nature and the human as each going about its business, we can more easily rationalize climate change as an acceptable cost; or, in an absurd extension of this, insist that it has nothing to do with us, that islands of plastic in the ocean don’t exist. It allows us to treat wilderness as a playground, to exoticize people we characterize as closer to it, who we then associate with acceptable costs.

“Nature” is that which “feeds our souls,”  which seems an apt metaphor. Remember that Simpsons’ episode in which a classroom filmstrip diagram of “The Food Chain” shows arrows from all creatures pointing to the human’s stomach? Once in awhile we are forced into awareness of our place in the system, the fact that we are not the end point in the food chain. As climate and environmental events have demonstrated, we don’t have the last word. The fastest and easiest response to this fact is avoidance or hysterical denial. So, in what little poetry—my poetry, anyway—can do, I hope to keep alive, or at least gesture toward, the tension of complexity, complication, responsibility.

Solie writes of isolation, the slippery structures of human interactions, violence and tragedy, and what might cause both body and soul to retreat. “Hatred is a plotting emotion,” she writes, in the poem “KENTIGERN AND THE ROBIN”: “and gleefully inclusive.” She writes the landscape and weather as physical characters, sometimes violent and occasionally overpowering, but also capable of great empathy, capable of providing refuge. While it is entirely speculation on my part, I know, I wonder if there is a correlation between the contemplative life that Ethernan considered, seeking insight on the role and responsibilities of the individual, especially in regards to a spiritual life, and Solie herself, who has famously participated in numerous residencies and retreats over the years, some of which have been full-on retreats (as opposed to a straight residency, which includes interacting with student writers). [CORRECTION/EDIT: Karen Solie points out that she has never actually attended or participated in a writer's retreat] And to step further into that argument, what becomes the role of poetry and the poet when climate change and politics overwhelm both conversation and the news cycle? Perhaps these questions are unanswerable, or miss the point entirely. Still: when one is removed, even slightly, from one’s normal world, it can be easier to catch the fuller picture of that world, allowing an insight that might have been otherwise missed, as she writes in the poem “THE SHAGS, WHOSE CONSERVATION STATUS IS ‘OF LEAST / CONCERN’”:

On vertebral rock near Caiplie Caves

like shreds of an outline or shadows freed

of their antecedents, they dry their wings,

eyes closed, faces to the sun. Centre of no

universe, they have the run of the great ancillary.

Through likely they loom large in the imagination

of the sand eel whose peripheries

they torment. As their shouting did mine

wee hours in the silt of my own domain before

the chicks fledged, presumably, the parents

moved on. And I missed them then, as we do

the ones loved best when not around.

Beth Bachmann, CEASE

survivor

outside there are street bombs & citizens with guns & farther away war inside we are our own pile of legs two of us are married two of us are falling had two of us are men two of us are man & woman two of us are not alone two of us are mother & father two of us are not fighting two of us are saying I love you I love you I love you two of us are watching two of us are touching two of us are undone two of us are whispering in the other’s ear not war not war two of us are beginning to stir two of us are at the window two of us are parting ‘til it’s just the two of us parting we’re all guilty what haven’t we done lately

Nashville poet Beth Bachmann’s third full-length poetry title is the incredibly powerful CEASE (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), following on the heels of her collections Temper (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) [see my review of such here] and Do Not Rise (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) [see my review of such here]. Specifically writing, it would seem, on the threads of an American culture that have become increasingly complicit in violent action, both at home and around the world, the poems in CEASE exist with an urgency that responds to the fury of toxic contemporary rhetoric. “[T]o keep the peace,” she writes, to open the bookending “wall,” “we need a wall [.]”As the press release informs, Bachmann consciously takes up “Muriel Rukeyser’s call for women poets to respond to war (‘Women and poets see the truth arrive’),” and she does so in a way that is lyric, immediate and guttural. In an interview recently posted at The Rumpus, conducted by Blas Falconer and Helena Mesa, Bachmann responds:

I think if anyone is familiar with my work, Temper is the book that’s more widely read. It’s a book about my sister’s murder and though the poems are not narrative in nature, it seems to draw readers with a “true crime” fascination, which, given the context, can be disturbing. I’ve received some fan mail from prison (one said, in the spirit of Emily Dickinson, I write to you from solitary). When the book came out, I couldn’t even say the word “murder” and had to practice in the mirror before my interviews. Seriously creepy. So book one was a book about this big personal violence and used a lyric mode to relentlessly circle all the things that were constantly triggering me: death, death, death.

Do Not Rise grew directly out of Temper. One decision I made early on in Temper was to keep the violence violent to honor the magnitude of it. I fell in love with Chris Abani’s Kalakuta Republic and the poetry of Wilfred Owen for the intensity of their depiction of violence. I found a companionship in Owen’s poems about post-traumatic stress that echoed my own experiences; Do Not Rise is really a book about violence as a recurring present-state, so the title is in part a command for all the horror to stand down, but of course, it inevitably keeps coming back anew.

CEASE is an extension of that command, but I think it makes room for the idea that peace is a possible space, even if it’s only temporary. That’s a big step for me! I’ll take it.

The bulk of the collection is constructed as an assortment of prose poems, bordered on either side by two extended poems, both titled “wall,” each of them composed with words and phrases loose across the page, akin to unconnected brick, its mortar a resonance of explorations on truth, connection and the body that holds the whole together. In CEASE, the poems seek and demand a simple slice of peace, however temporary, through an increasing sense of both madness and terror, asking: how do we hold ourselves together through such threats to our health, safety and well being? This is a powerful work, one that presents itself as slant, before charging full-force directly at the heart of her subject matter.

the wall after all made of water                       the gulf

a blue we could      touch on both ends

given clearance to return what’s left of the bod now

bridge simple arch geometry of the circle spanning come

cool my tongue    this light-well opening internal space to

the space that opens into it wind eye the flood

made our bodies       a levee earthen gnawed away (“wall”)

sam sax, bury it

POEM ABOUT WATER

i get it. your body is blah blah blah percent water. oceans levitate, clouds urinate on the ground that grows our food. this is considered a miracle – this is a problem of language. i could go on for days with facts about the ocean and it will always sound like i’m talking about love. i could say: no man has ever seen its deepest trenches, we know less about its floor than the stars, if you could go deep enough all your softest organs will be forced out of your mouth. you can be swallowed alive and no one will hear a sound. last summer three boys drowned in the sound and no one remembers their names, they came up white and soft as plastic grocery bags. i guess you could call that love. you’d be wrong.

The first I’ve seen by Bay Area writer, editor and educator sam sax is the poetry collection bury it (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a follow-up from his debut, Madness (Penguin Books/National Poetry Series, 2017). sax’s writing is both casual and visceral, accomplishing a taut precision alongside a comfortable looseness, with a blend of stark straightforwardness that can’t help but lyric across its own unique melody. “it’s not that we’re all born / genderless, though we are.” he writes, to open the poem “ULTRASOUND,” continuing: “rather, once we were all small / women inside our mothers. / something about science / & sex organs & hormones / & god.”

As the back cover writes: “sam sax’s bury it begins with poems written in response to the spate of highly publicized suicides of young gay men in the summer of 2010.” bury it, as this suggests, works to acknowledge and name those losses, while composing poems that celebrate life as much as meditate on death, grief and incredible loss. “i’m interested in death rituals.” he writes, to open the poem “BURY.” “maybe that’s a weird thing to say. / when i say interested i mean, / i’ve compiled a list.”

& just like that the first boy i ever kissed is dead / dress lifted

off a mannequin to reveal nothing / man who becomes only

the space he’s left / a puncture wound in the upholstery

of my youth / i’ve arranged his pictures around my bathroom

sink & shaved my face in the dark / trying to make his shape

appear / as it was then / now in my mirror / first boy

i wanted who wanted me back / taught i was worth

such a simple thought as hunger / that lust could be a word

used to describe my own saturnine skin / what is dead

can never rise from bread / what is owed can never be repaid

/ instead this debt / i’m too small to shoulder / maybe this

is my hand’s inheritance / to hold / my grief / a pair of gloves

i reach into space / trace the ghost waistband / hear

his voice gasp out from the dark (“KADDISH”)

There is such a fascinating combination of rawness and pure craft to these poems, comparable to the work of Toronto poet Marcus McCann for sharpness and raw punch, or the work of Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes for writing both directly and elliptically around sex, death, queerness and politics. As sax responded last year, as part of an interview conducted by J. Mae Barizo and posted at The Rumpus:

I come from a long line of white queer Jewish writers who do a lot of work avoiding writing about the parts of their identities where they hold power. So it feels important to me to be intentional about all my various identities, to write honestly about whiteness and queerness and gender and class and mental health and addiction and Judaism at once, recognizing that I’m bringing all that to the page whether I address it or not; to try to historically and politically situate myself within my poems.

Cole Swensen, On Walking On

A WALK ON MAY 31

Cooler this evening, particularly crossing the bridges, where the wind picks up and is making a mess of the surface of the water. People walking, many tonight, and almost in rhythm, as if it were a way of collectively resisting the wind. I stop and look over the parapet, down onto the quay, where five pigeons seem to be marching in step in a single, evenly paced line. I know this is only the projection of a human attachment to order onto random avian behavior, but still, it’s a remarkably straight line and remarkably evenly paced.

American poet Cole Swensen’s latest is On Walking On (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017), a book-length suite of poems engaged in the subject of walking, from her own notes on the subject to her responses to a lengthy list of other works by Geoffrey Chaucer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval, Guillaime Apollinaire, John Muir, Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald, Werner Herzog, Harryette Mullen and Lisa Robertson. The back of the collection includes a healthy bibliography, which Swensen introduces by writing: “This series hopes to honor the millennia-old connection between walking and writing without trying to be in any way definitive. It started with an interest in texts written by a number of writers about walks that they had taken and then branched out in various idiosyncratic ways. Idiosyncrasy, in the long run, became the only principle of both selection and order.”

The book moves from sections of shorter poems (up to six, but as few as two) alternating with sections of longer sequences focusing on specific works, from “ROUSSEAU: THE REVERIES OF A SOLITARY WALKER,” and “SAND: PROMENADTES AUTOUR D’UN VILLAGE,” to “SEBALD: THE RINGS OF SATURN” and “ROBERTSON: ‘SEVEN WALKS’,” a sequence echoing Lisa Robertson’s “Seven Walks” from her Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), that includes:

And thanking memory, we spent every afternoon in a park, hiding

a different century    my guide with the endless peaches, and then

suddenly a fig. Suddenly threw our class affiliations into striking

relief, and disappearing to everyone but ourselves, we let time slide

through us. Yet cannot deny: we felt hands too dragging through

our own, leaving empty. We were not alone. (“The Second Walk”)

As I’ve referenced in reviews of some of her previous books, what I’ve long appreciated about Swensen’s poetry books is the way in which she seems to approach each book-length work as a study on or around a particular subject, having written previously of landscape paintings (see my review of her LANDSCAPES ON A TRAIN), gardens (Ours: poems on the gardens of Andre Le Notre), hands (The Book of a Hundred Hands) and graveyards (see my review of her Gravesend), among nearly a dozen other lyric stretches across a realm of research (a great deal of which centres around medieval history or subjects). In certain ways, her multiple poetry collections over the years have evolved from collections of linked lyrics to book-length essay-poems, even to the point of each title existing as a single, continuous poetic line. On Walking On, also, moves temporally, threading another line through the collection that runs from the medieval walks of Chaucer, through to a far more contemporary walk via Lisa Robertson, allowing each step in the poem to move the collection forward through history and time. Responding to questions from Maria Anderson via The Rumpus in 2016, on an earlier selection of the manuscript (posted as a chapbook by Essay Press) [I also wrote on an earlier, albeit different, section of the same manuscript, here], Swensen wrote:

Cole Swensen: No, I’ve never thought about it specifically, but in fact I neither take anything along nor take anything away. My focus is on the rhythmic relationship between body and ground and the visual relationships among the elements of the always-changing scene.

But yes, sometimes I do have rules, or rather constraints. One I’ve been working with lately, for instance—and it only works in urban spaces—is the single constraint of turning left whenever I encounter an obstacle, something that makes me stop, such as a traffic light or a T intersection or crowd congestion. I’ve been doing a series of these walks this fall, always starting from the same place and always for the same length of time, to see how differently the walk develops. I end up in very different places.

Rumpus: This is a fascinating constraint. Have you ever looked at these walks visually? Drawn them up on a map to see the shapes?

Swensen: Yes! Exactly! I’m so glad that comes to mind! I do draw them out on a map, and in that way, the kinetic experience becomes a visual work, and the perspective that has been linear and time-based suddenly becomes bird’s-eye-view spatialized. I have also then retraced the lines on a separate sheet of paper, thus removing the map and turning the lines into an abstract drawing.