Devin Gael Kelly's "walking poem"

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Here I am fondling the particular mode of a poem 
that feels like a walking poem, feeling Devin
Gael Kelly's "Self Care in the Land Of A Thousand 
Horses", wherein what holds us or creates 
stillness is pace, gait, the pitch of the step-breath, 
precise pauses signaled by syntax so that  
I may be walking and thinking about onions
until fire hydrants remind me of lace – of that slip 
I must have left or else lost in the year I was losing 
everything, or else using a dash to press 
my face against the glass of a bakery 
where two women argue over cupcakes, 
using their hands, raising their hands to 
push away words, and how hands always 
fall into birds when one cannot hear 
them, when this one woman catches a bird 
in the air & kisses the less expressive 
lips & everything stops for this moment's
raw reconciliation, the scent of later sex
& cupcakes—though I am still moving.
I am haunted by break-ups, faking, lost
cats & earthquakes who keep secrets
if only to surprise or deflate us
like this thing in my ex said about forgetting, 
or how I'd already done it, before the 
chicken and the egg scenario nothing 
came first, he said he couldn't imagine 
me ever having children & this is when 
I knew his imagination was suffering 
or gutted by performance anxiety & 
I can imagine him now taking off shoes 
in a room with big windows and rising 
to greet a woman who can't imagine him 
not imagining her in stilettos. And 
I am using these sharp shoes to bring you 
back to the street, back to the surface 
of asphalt where we are walking and 
thinking about one thousand horses.

Addendum: I think the ampersand makes it move faster?



On "Every Atom" by Erin Coughlin Hollowell

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1. The loss of memory in poetic subjects

There are many ways to lose a mother. Alzheimer’s is a particularly difficult journey of loss, a grief that begins before the death of the body—a loss that demands reconciliatory gestures from the poet, as James Meetze’s Phantom Hour has demonstrated.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s Every Atom begins in relation to those ghosts, or to the empty, unremembered spaces. Dan Branch notes that Hollowell’s mom’s mental capacities were declining as Hollowell wrote this book. And she did not write it from a distance—instead, Hollowell gave up a writer’s residency in Washington State to assist her father in caring for her mother. The book is dedicated: “In memory of my parents, Leonard James Coughlin and Mary Louise Coughlin".”

Although the poems place the mother in landscape, or navigate her absence by landscape metaphors, the tone often wanders into the ethereal, which is to say that ethereality might be a coping mechanism in poetry: how language of presence is displaced by language of absence.

Most interesting to me was the role played by metaphor, imperatives, and conditionals across the breath of this collection.

From the outset, we know the narrator is trying to relate to ghosts, or finding a space for them in ordinary life. See “The last scud of day”:

I brush away the hours
like the smear skids of eraser
left over from a project that went
from unwell to undone. Words
scrawled over the ghosts of others
and then rubbed away again.

We suspect the work of finding meaning requires a relation to hieroglyphs, to reading the signs in surrounding objects, as in "Night of the few, large stars," which ends with the poet trying to make sense of constellations:

Three stars:
a king, a shadow queen,
a child who is lost on purpose.

It is images and metaphors—rather than people, loved ones, stories—that provide mooring in these poems. And Hollowell’s images are powerful; they are hinges for the poem, spaces at the threshold of something opening or closing. I held my breath midway through "The palpable in its place and the impalpable in its place" when I came across this image:

The window blank with light.

And because I find complicity more compelling than innocence, I valued the way the poet unpacks (or carries) guilt in these poems. It is a complicated guilt—a human one. "Waits by the hole in the frozen surface" begins with waiting for a memory, evoking the absence of both memory by implying a sort of loose complicity in the narrator's inability to remember. O reader, you must remember this book is about a mother losing her memory and dying—but we are also standing on a frozen lake, somehow, waiting for something to explain the hole in the ice:

I remember kneeling before my brother's coffin
but of my mother's grief there is a hole, as if

I've taken scissors and neatly cut her from the day.

Hollowell returns to this metaphor, to this hole in the ice of the lake often, as in "Life whenever moving":

Imagine your mother
was a turtle. Her great
three-chambered heart

beating between two
hardnesses. Her legacy
a sandy hole or a shade

on a riverbank. And you,
left in a leather purse
of an egg.

This poem moves through imperatives to imagine--to imagine the mother as turtle, oyster, cicada, to fill in the whole with an image---and then to relate to it, to find meaning about the daughter in relation to that image. And I keep thinking how the imperative can, in poetry, serve as a vehicle for incantation, a spell the poet wants in order to inhabit the raiment of liminal space.

3. The poetry of titles

So many questions lately in the poetry community about titling poems—and how titles work best in a collection— Hollowell’s titling is haunting; the titles can be read on their own, as a poetic mode. Titling does the work of conveying tone in this book. Notice how she does this rare thing, namely, enjambing the titles, allowing them to stretch across the page and then break, as in:

“For the fourth-month moon showers have, 
and the mica on the side of the rock has”

which begins with a powerful image, and it’s relation to imperative:

shine, glisten like that sleek lick
of damp left behind by a snail. 

These titles are conversant with the poems, rather than nominative—they do not name what will happen so much as present the conditions under something could occur. They describe a mode rather than a theme.

4. Hollowell’s conditional mode

Also: this sense in which the metaphors, themselves, are imperatives for the poet.

And how close these metaphor-imperatives come to the conditional form, or how the conditional, itself, is implied in them—though also evoked directly, as in “Perpetual payment,” which begins:

If you could unlock the box
within the box within the fist
of meat that beats to its mechanized
meter, you would find my father.

The poem progresses through six quatrains to end in a reversal, a resistance to both the father’s explanations and, in a sense, the stories themselves:

My father’s stories built the house
we set on fire and fled from. My father’s

stories built a plucky woman on a train
that none of us have ever met. Somewhere
the bear is still bleeding. Somewhere
that mother is still riding the train.

Maybe stories are not helpful. Certainly metaphors and conditionals seem like more significant terrain for this particular grief, this attempt to live with a loss. Rather than construct a new mythology to assuage grief, Hollowell remains restless, eyeing the hole In the ice, the moon, every atom—eying them loosely, tenuously, as possibilities rather than explanations.

I love this. I could say more—o I could burn the day with details—instead I rest in this interesting approach to what is not quite elegy, or what edges lament without settling for the narrative that allows lament to grow its iconographies. What if mom was an oyster? Who would her daughter be, then?

Lit mag cento: The Florida Review Vol. 43, No. 1

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I expected the darkness
mid-revision, full of hints and pretty visions
fire-singed and thinned.
Whoever said getting older
to clear what can’t be cleared. I’ve started drinking
draining one thing, filling another, sometimes
the bullfrogs. No one keeps score
but the winners know—I touched
her pinkest helmet for luck.
And the warp of shadow.

I mean the tender
for you to take home, for you to
feel known and divided by fifty-six
millioned panes more and
there’s more that’s the formless
from the mind’s mud-gas
gushing like lust from the tank. I’ve dug
in the terroir-based knowledge,
like mass: all ritual & communion.
Outside, the sky, a soi-distant
dickhead before the walls of Jericho
and the warp of shadow.

[Amanda Hawkins, Dylan Weir, Lillo Way, Lyn Lifshin, Nicole Stockburger, Owen McLeod, David Rivard, Gerry LaFemina, David Rivard, Carl Dennis

Amanda Hawkins, Dylan Weir, Lillo Way, Lyn Lifshin, Nicole Stockburger, Owen McLeod, David Rivard, Gerry LaFemina, David Rivard, Carl Dennis]

Lit Mag Cento: 32 Poems, Fall/Winter 2018

Some say no one can predict the rain.

In every interval is an archive,
or a revolved named after a snake
you notice only when you look away.

Of God’s determination to keep quiet,
it’s the garden spider who eats her mistakes.

That bird I thought was an insect was a bird
watching you being then, just then:
the surface pines and a damp June wind.

Bell-skirted, ruffled, pouf-sleeved
I overthink therefore I overam
this tempered halt,
its alien script across the sky,
the version of me you love is only
patched.

Unfilled wolf,
take yourself out of some context, an A sharp as
piecework.

Night:
come back.

I just like having someone there in the dark
and confetti, with torn moonlit
spinnerets,
shivering.

[Laura Sabbott Ross, Makalini Bandele, Hailey Leithauser, James Davis May, Eric McHenry, Traci Brimhall, Alessandra Lynch, Robin Myers, Emma Hine, Anya Silver, Eric McHenry, Robin Myer, T. J. McElmore, Emma Hine, Bobby C. Rogers,, Hailey Leithauser, Makalini Bandele, Bobby C. Rogers, Gina Franco, Bobby C. Rogers, Michael Bazzett, Hailey Leithauser, Amit Majmudar, Robin Myer]

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This is a part of a series of centos in tribute to lit mags I have to give away for lack of space. I wanted to imagine these poets in a room (though not limited to a stanza) and put the poems in each issue in dialogue with one another as a way to save what touched me. Formally, for the most part, I have kept the poets’ original line breaks.

You can support this journal by subscribing and sharing their work.

"Brink of Life" by Khashayar Mohammadi

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Today I am fascinated by Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem, “Brink of Life,” published in his chapbook, Solitude Is An Acrobatic Act, (Above/Ground Press, 2020). Because I am fascinated, I want to peer closer. So I will.

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1.

Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born Toronto-based writer and translator. He is an immigrant who misses his first language enough to return to it, to keep it alive through translation.

I suspect that poets who translate have a different relationship to language than poets who do not. Sometimes I suspect the number of words a poet uses diminishes in direct proportion to the amount of time they spend translating other poet’s words; it’s as if each word becomes heavier or carries more. Or maybe it’s the opposite.

2.

The title of Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem begins on the brink of something—the brink of life—and we expect the poem to develop this, which also links to defining life somehow. You can’t be on the brink of something undefined. The word “brink” designates an edge, a boundary, a cliff, a limit.

It is a short, one-stanza poem—everything is given to us in eleven lines—and this compactness makes its structure visually significant. The architecture stands out in a way that it wouldn’t if this were a longer poem, if it asked more from the eye, if it were busier, if it spread its energy across stanzas.

There is no punctuation, no period at the end to denote closure.

There is one capital letter at the beginning, and the word “Children” is the only word that receives this sort of visual attention.

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject an unwanted body

Right away, one senses the motion will blur the end of line from another, and this, in turn, will make it hard to distinguish which body is the subject. —And I love this. I love this. I love that the line doesn’t read “Children are delivered like parcels” because the absence of “are” is the absence of an equal sign, or an equivalence.

It’s amazing what the tiniest verb (or its absence) can insinuate. This absence shifts the weight of the address from a first person witness to a mystery. The speaker is there and not there. The speaker is thinking, and delivering images which connect.

The motion from the first line to the second line is seamless, but something happens in the middle of the second line: a tiny crack opens up, and the poet’s decision not to use a comma is (I think) a decision to keep the motion blurred, to keep the equals out.

Read it with a comma. The comma clarifies, or serves a sorting function:

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject, an unwanted body

The poet’s lack of punctuation is accomplishing something here—it is making it hard to tell which body is unwanted, or what part is a parcel—it is blurring the container and the contained.

3.

Mohammadi disorients us again with the next line, an image that pulls away from life but indicates time, indicates simultaneity:

while dolls await in triage

He doesn’t say the babies are like dolls—he posits the dolls alongside, or in the same poem-space, as children and bodies. Just when I think he is going to clarify or make a distinction, the poet swerves, shifts into swift anaphora, piling metaphor atop definition:

a child as a gift leased from the hospital
a child compounds interest daily
questions questions questions

I linger here. I know that the brink of life is not going to be the line I expected. I realize that the motion enacted by the poem is actually altering the form of a brink, curving it, turning it into a circling motion.

figures abstracted in privacy glass
mirrors are ashamed of reflecting
no longer show the woman her body

I realize that the mirrors have more agency, more power to verb, than children.

I also realize that the dolls had a similar agency—the dolls could wait. The inanimate surrounding objects could do more, or act with more volition, than the children or the child or the unwanted body who are acted upon.

Even in the woman’s relation to the mirror, it is the mirror who can show—not the woman who is looking. The poet doesn’t tell us that she is looking. The poet tells us what the mirror is doing, or not doing, namely, showing.

And so I am at this brink, where life is not something which seems to belong to the human subjects, but to the surrounding objects.

I know the poem is almost over. I know I am further from an edge because there is no line, no delineation. Picking up where the poet left off—“her body”—I read through to the end:

a soul cemented in language through names
a life nestled within life in language

Here, her body is defined as a soul cemented in language through names. Her body is defined as a life nestled within life in language. There is no reference to fetuses or babies or children—it is the woman’s body who is centered in this final, circling motion (which the repetition of life in that last line helps to accomplish).

5.

I love this poem for the way it withholds comfort somehow. I love the way it leaves us alone, separate, and yet bound by a life which names us. I’m not sure if the poet intended a larger point about the role or importance of names—and I’m not sure I need that from this poem in order to feel it does important things.

“I want my poems to keep someone company,” Mohammadi said in an interview.

I suspect many of us live in that loneliness—in the relationship we build into the poem, and the hand it stretches across an invisible room, asking to be read, to be of use, to be felt.

This is the cover image from his chapbook. Because solitude is both titular and transcendent in Mohammadi’s work, I tried to see if it speaks to this “brink of life,” and the tension in that relationship. There is a man pushing a single tree a top a hill. Or the tree has fallen over and the man is trying to plant it or re-root it. There is something that wants to stay and someone that is doing unclear things related to roots which could go either way.

There is no brink, quite. But there is the aloneness. There are two forms of life, and each as alone as the other, and maybe this, itself, is the relationship.

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You can follow Khashayar on twitter here or read his incredible translations online. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

"Voice" by Jennifer Horne: Wondering towards a mother's voice.

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Today I’m fascinated by Jennifer Horne’s poem, “Voice,” which can be found in her chapbook, Borrowed Light (Mule On A Ferris Wheel Press, 2019). Read it slowly.

Voice

For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.

Waking to sunlight, the smell of last night’s bonfire in my hair.
You left my dream only moments ago.
If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?

Wraith-smoke. Spanish moss.
Coffee in an old diner mug, heavy as a serious thing.

All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.

“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”

1.

This is the final poem in a chapbook that explores inherited light, or the way in which various forms of light can be an inheritance which shapes and speaks into the present. The poet’s mother appears frequently in these poems—and I think you can feel the way she is both the beginning and the going-forward of the poet’s voice, or what the poet needs to say.

From this chapbook, we learn that a mother leaves multiple forms of light in her wake. We learn that Jennifer Horne’s mother was a poet, a female that lived with unabashed zest at a time when any zest in mothers was suspect. I sense a tension between the mother’s uninhibited spirit and the poet’s, and this is part of the legacy the poet brings to the page to understand.

The poem begins in the middle of this exploration, in a soft repudiation of Moses’ patriarchal visions:

For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.

The poet is sitting in a space where something has burned, and she is looking not to the stone tablets of a male god but to the notebook written by a human mother. The authority of some man’s prophecy is replaced by the words and visions of a particular woman, and her reckoning with life.

2.

At the end of the second stanza, the poet wakes up from the dream and wonders towards the mother’s voice:

If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?

I love how the poet’s voice mingles with the mother’s voice. I love the stark brush-strokes used to depict both dream and waking, to dissolve a clear line between them. I love how the You of this poem is murky, almost incorporeal, and how this contrasts with the heavy seriousness of the coffee in a diner mug. And how Horne tacks back immediately towards the voice and what it asks of her:

All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.

And I think of my own mother—the way she took up space with her laughter and lust for life—and how the things which embarrassed me about her as a child are the things for which I admired her as a woman.

3.

Having a passionate, bohemian mother, or one whose spirit plays a predominant role in the visions of the child, often means that her stories frame the world more convincingly than other authorities, including peers, media, and friends. I recognize an urge to record the world for my mother since her death, to substantiate her stories and warnings somehow, and to keep her alive in this.

Is this what it means to be my mother’s daughter? To keepsake her fascination with life, her insatiable hunger for new experience, her commitment to her sensuality? Am I holding the world for her in what Dan Beachy-Quick calls “the hut of the poem”?

4.

We have reached a point of awareness about agency, and how the words or images or symbols we lay over others may be a form of disrespect. It is easier to have these conversations in the abstract than the particular. Yet, as writers, we struggle with staying in our lanes, or trying to discover which ghost shares the lane with us, and how that intersects with permission to poem them.

What is the line between elegy, tribute, portrait, and appropriation in a context where each person is the sole arbiter of their own life?

Whenever I write my mother, I worry about theft.

I worry about whether I’m recreating her in the way I want her remembered. Or whether I am ruining someone' else’s memory of her by writing my own.

I don’t have any answers or rules. I don’t know my lane when it comes to my mother who was many things to many other humans, each of whom has a different claim to remembering.

5.

I return to Dan Beachy-Quick’s essay, “The Hut of Poetry” (found in his Wonderful Investigations: Essays, Meditations, Tales). He writes notes that a poem doesn’t have to be “funereal in its relation to death.” He continues:

“To read is the most common form of encounter with the dead. The dead on the blank page need not remain dead. Time in the page is different from time in the world….. Death in the poem is only a pause before rebirth. Death is but a delay inside the form.

Language offers a method of experiencing death without dying…The poem on the blank page houses a creative center infinitely larger than itself, than its own lined confines, but a power that has no useful ends without suffering the impossible limit of the poem’s form. The forging of limit through form is the poem’s most fundamental work, and the result of that work is that the poem becomes not a vessel of knowledge conveyed, but a dwelling where knowledge occurs.”

There is a sense in which form is actually what pushes through and re-visions death. I see this in Horne’s poem, in her syntax, in how she builds long lines like trails of crumbs in a forest where every child misses her mother—and all the bad things that happen to a child are linked to the lack of knowing which voice to trust, or what to believe of their own.

6.

In this hut of this short poem, the mother warns the child against fear—against reticence—against holding back from living a “big” life. Notice the role of the bigness here:

“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”

And so the poem ends with the mother’s words, which—when recorded, when heeded, when hallowed—become scripture or prophecy.

The book ends with this poem. The ghost has the last word about the future. Yet the ghost belongs, inextricably, to the daughter’s voice, to its bigness, to its motion forward.

To quote Dan Beachy-Quick again:

“But a home is never the world—a home is a separation from the world. A poem is never the world—a poem is a separation from the world. The world we read, and in reading see, never stays a world. Language’s gift to us is it’s failure. The enchantment of language is superseded in importance by its disenchantment.”

The mothers are gone. Neither the male prophets nor the wolves can help us. The poem is a temporary respite in which time and corporeality are overcome. The ghost is beautiful for this singular, liminal instant. She urges us to use our voice, to make it big enough to hold her—and big enough to wonder alone.