By Abriana Jetté
Sayvreville, NJ, USA
It occurred to me that I have not spent enough
time in this column discussing the intricacies of craft. For the majority of us
poets, the process of creation does not occur in one fell swoop; in fact, for
most writers, writing is rewriting. I can only speak for myself, so I’ll share
with you that the first step of my poetic ritual comes from the gut – whatever
it may be – disgust, love, empathy, hopefulness, despair – my work must begin
in my core. This is how I am able to distinguish what form I should put my
words in: prose or poetry. When it is coming from my gut, when just the first
few words printed already serve as catharsis, I know it’s poetry. If the emotional
urgency isn’t quite there: it’s prose.
It’s no surprise that the shape and form of our
words influence our readers first. Just like how we eat with our eyes first,
we, too, (obviously?), read with our eyes. But I don’t mean in the obvious way.
I mean we see, glance over, gleam the poem like a piece of art on a wall before
we actually read, pronounce the words, and swallow the rhythm (it might not be
until the third or fourth reading that we actually fully grasp what the poem is
about).
The only way of knowing if our words fit the
form we’ve put them in is to play around with the way the poem looks. Because
writing is rewriting, during one of the early revisions, I sometimes create new
line breaks, move words, phrases, and punctuation around, maybe even introduce
symbols and spaces that were not originally there. Sometimes I read the poem
backwards, sometimes I start from my “favorite” line and play around from
there. Sometimes I turn nine stanzas into a sonnet, sonnets into cinquains. Play,
really, is what I’m telling you. I play with the poem. I must. I can’t forget
to play because more often than not that newly crafted semantic placement or
use/misuse of punctuation, that spark of irregular and unexpected, is exactly
what the poem needed.
A few years ago, former Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera termed this playfulness – this necessary risk in language and space on the page – The Wild Sister. I was listening to him give a craft talk on voice and he urged this of us, his audience, to find our Wild Sister.
Who – what – is the wild sister, we wondered. Well, he said, it certainly was not us, sitting, well-behaved in the audience; the wild sister was the one throwing rocks at the window telling us to get out and play. Herrera’s theory of the Wild Sister has been the single greatest influence on my work.
This New Year, I resolved to pay more attention to my Wild Sister, and I promised to find more of her in other poets whose work I admire. It didn’t take much searching. This winter, I hope you feel freed by the wild sister in Nathan Spoon, Christine Gosnay, and Emily Vizzo.
A few years ago, former Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera termed this playfulness – this necessary risk in language and space on the page – The Wild Sister. I was listening to him give a craft talk on voice and he urged this of us, his audience, to find our Wild Sister.
Who – what – is the wild sister, we wondered. Well, he said, it certainly was not us, sitting, well-behaved in the audience; the wild sister was the one throwing rocks at the window telling us to get out and play. Herrera’s theory of the Wild Sister has been the single greatest influence on my work.
This New Year, I resolved to pay more attention to my Wild Sister, and I promised to find more of her in other poets whose work I admire. It didn’t take much searching. This winter, I hope you feel freed by the wild sister in Nathan Spoon, Christine Gosnay, and Emily Vizzo.
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The very fiber of Nathan Spoon’s poetic
mission aims to expose the beauty of the wild sister. Above all, his work honors
an underrepresented community within Poetics, and in doing so raises the
attention we give to Autistic poets. While the literary world is trying its
hardest to offer safe spaces and places for minority voices, we still have a
lot of work to do. As a poet who was recently diagnosed, Spoon has taken the
job of representing the clout of Autistic poets into his own hands.
Spoon’s wildness is meticulous. His rhythms succinct and commanding over our tongues. His images are at once complex and easy to imagine. Consider the start of his poem “A Handful of Jacks”:
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| Nathan Spoon |
Spoon’s wildness is meticulous. His rhythms succinct and commanding over our tongues. His images are at once complex and easy to imagine. Consider the start of his poem “A Handful of Jacks”:
“When
carrying your house through water, it
helps | to be water or | failing this | to be air or
helps | to be water or | failing this | to be air or
the
root of air | and why shouldn’t nonsense
be
a reasonable launchpad for |
Failure”
Upon first glance of the poem, I am reminded of Alice
Notley’s precision and genre-bending work. Like Notley’s masterful use of
symbols and space, Spoon’s use of the vertical bar carries multiple effects.
First, it can instruct readers when to take a breath. I’m particularly fond of
this use as the rhythm of the poem would then begin quickly; the first line
offers a slight pause with the comma after “water”, but the enjambment then
steadies our eyes downward to end on the exhale of the plosive “p”. This sound
enhances the inhale readers will take after the introduction of the vertical
bar. Essentially, with the “P” we inhale: with the “ | ” exhale. In the poem, even
the silence commands.
In addition to handling the rhythm of the line
and thus our breath, the use of the character diverts from the ordinary – it
tells us that we are not to go into this poem with any expectations; that
standard rules don’t apply. These effects, paired with the vertical bar’s
function as a mathematic symbol, expand the poem’s interpretative qualities.
The vertical bar – a small symbol – a short line on the page, but a sure glimpse
of the wild sister peeking through.
And that’s just one aspect of “A Handful of
Jacks”. Of course, we have to consider the language – the content of the poem. Readers
enter into a world in which we are able to carry our homes through water, and
we leave on the image of clouds as low-cut necklines. It is fantastical,
ethereal, wild, and during our brief tenure in the created world we dart back
and forth from image to image like the “bobwhite” who “moved a-/way”, for the
“open space” triggered “too many dreams.”
When I read “A Handful of Jacks”, I find at its
core a concern for failure, a crippling need to get it right. In addition to
searching for the right word – (“improbability | or / is that impossibility”),
the speaker organizes and beautifies the property only to result in the bird
flying away. Nothing works. The speaker wants it to work.
Such anxieties – to notice it all and
get it all right – also appear in “Splitting a Stump”, a short, 12 line poem
that offers readers a speaker who openly questions his own authority, wondering
if the tree were “picked clean” by / a stranger or neighbor”, who is unable to
discern the difference between fireworks or thunder in the sky. The world
around is chaotic and disorganized, so the speaker creates his own universe –
one that is celestial and sublime. The poem ends on images of consumption and
the universe:
As the
As the
hummingbird
swallows | its throat
faintly
pulses. To
me
she carries a
bucket
of stars.
These final words makes tangible for
readers the delicacy of the cosmos. In a way, this is what much of what Spoon’s
poetry does, reveals the intricacies of a mind both fascinated and distracted.
The voice of his work is one of detachment touched with sentimentality, a
brilliant balance of language and space.
Nathan
Spoon’s poetry has been endorsed by poets as different as Naomi Shihab Nye (who
describes it as "Delicate and precise and elegant and intriguing!")
and Bruce Andrews (who says, "Everybody is looking for the next thing: is
this it?") and has appeared in Oxford, Stanford, Yale and Durham
University publications, as well as mainstream publications like Poetry and experimental
publications like X-Peri.
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I like a poem that makes me dizzy. A good poem
conjures a vertiginous linguistic spell – it captivates and captures. It
scares. It weeps.
“Strangers” by Christine Gosnay does all these
things. The poem is a twister of semantic reiterations in which words are
repeated, but images are never reused – with each new utterance the addition of
something new. For example, when the speaker lays “a wooden spoon on the white
note / on the desk”, readers are told of the consequence, a “stain on the clean
note”, immediately after. The mostly paratactic syntax of “Strangers” is sharp
and concise, but not short in mystifying. Enthralled by the litany of
“somewhere”, “happening”, “road”, “bed”, “white”, “orange”, “purple”, and
“strangers”, words that appear and reappear throughout the poem’s narrative, readers
are whooshed in a romance of textual playfulness. Similar to a Gertrude Stein
piece, the repetition that occurs in “Strangers” is hypnagogic and opens the
imaginative trajectory. For example, the second stanza of the poem reads:
Somewhere things are happening. Marvelous orange
and purple things. Flooding rivers at dusk, wheels threading
roads in the desert. Strangers. Strangers. Sea.
And the last stanza reads:
Somewhere things are happening. Marvelous orange
and purple things. Flooding rivers at dusk, wheels threading
roads in the desert. Strangers. Strangers. Sea.
And the last stanza reads:
Somewhere, things are happening. You are
lying in the white bed
beside the sea with coffee. I am lying in the white bed.
Tremendous strangers. Blind roads in the sea.
beside the sea with coffee. I am lying in the white bed.
Tremendous strangers. Blind roads in the sea.
The
juxtaposing images of the sea and the bed (the travel, the rest) and the wheels
that thread roads (the journey again) create a narrative of longing. The pops
of color enhance the contrast of liveliness and dullness, and offer concise
detail in a poem that hinges on the uncertain – the something, somewhere. “Strangers”
is a web, a patterned masterpiece, the poem carries with it tones of silk and
mystery, it hums to the noir, and offers cinematic transitions of melancholy
and sentimentality. Throughout the poem, Gosnay lets the wild sister have her
way with words, moving and reusing them, trusting us to listen to their echoes.
Readers enter a space of memory, both its recreation and loss. Because the
centralized theme of the poem reflects on the past, the repetition of Gosnay’s
unrhymed tercets is necessary. The mind that loses its memory requires
repetition. The poem refuses to forget.
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| Christine Gosnay |
“Red
Cap” also concerns itself with the order of words. While “Strangers” whirls
readers in memory’s reverie with a cast of characters with few props, “Red Cap”
offers readers a fairly straightforward narrative, though not so much
Princess-style, more Aesop’s-fable-like in its darkened atmosphere. In fact, it
begins, for me, as downright haunting:
“When the family all were seated
and the fowl were dead, a woman crept up to it
and said, I know you’re only sleeping.”
“When the family all were seated
and the fowl were dead, a woman crept up to it
and said, I know you’re only sleeping.”
With
the soft internal rhyme of “dead” and “said”, and the soothing liquids of
“family”, “all”, and fowl”, the stanza, rhythmically, prepares readers for a
comforting scene. A family gathered around a dinner table. Nothing we all
haven’t seen. The lull is interrupted by the verb “crept”, both unexpected in
its physical description and in its sonic disruption- the rhotic “r” forces our
teeth to get closer together. When the woman shares her observation, her
knowledge, her truth – “I know you’re only sleeping” – we are at first not
sure if is a statement of fright, innocence, or hunger.
The woman turns out to be a magic woman. She lives in the ribs of the bird. She is sad, leaps “out of the corpse”, she whispers, she knows you are only sleeping. When the language shifts, so does the reader’s peripheral awareness, and in this poem which focuses on the family on the bird and on the woman, multiple perspectives maintain reader curiosity and narrative drive. By the end of the poem, the woman and the fowl are united as one, “awake and sleeping, two gray stars.”
I happen to be so taken by Gosnay’s work that I find it difficult to write about. What happens most after I read her work is the overwhelming desire to pay more attention to language and to write my own poetry. This is not to be taken lightly. Gosnay’s poetic charge – her energy and rhetorically awareness – is contagious. Her work demonstrates the wildness and delicacy of language.
Christine Gosnay's first book, Even Years (2017, Kent State University Press), was selected by Angie Estes for the Wick Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The Poetry Review (UK), Beloit Poetry Journal, Typo Magazine, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Third Coast Magazine. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, she has lived most recently in Israel and California. The poems discussed in this feature are all from Even Years.
The woman turns out to be a magic woman. She lives in the ribs of the bird. She is sad, leaps “out of the corpse”, she whispers, she knows you are only sleeping. When the language shifts, so does the reader’s peripheral awareness, and in this poem which focuses on the family on the bird and on the woman, multiple perspectives maintain reader curiosity and narrative drive. By the end of the poem, the woman and the fowl are united as one, “awake and sleeping, two gray stars.”
I happen to be so taken by Gosnay’s work that I find it difficult to write about. What happens most after I read her work is the overwhelming desire to pay more attention to language and to write my own poetry. This is not to be taken lightly. Gosnay’s poetic charge – her energy and rhetorically awareness – is contagious. Her work demonstrates the wildness and delicacy of language.
Christine Gosnay's first book, Even Years (2017, Kent State University Press), was selected by Angie Estes for the Wick Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The Poetry Review (UK), Beloit Poetry Journal, Typo Magazine, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Third Coast Magazine. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, she has lived most recently in Israel and California. The poems discussed in this feature are all from Even Years.
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The wild sister unleashes the structure of a
poem in regards to form and language, and it breaks free the confines of
silence and shame. After a reader and writer have been graced by the presence
of the wild sister, both feel inspired to experiment. The wild sister
verbalizes the inarticulate, says what we want to need to but somehow just
haven’t yet said.
Emily Vizzo’s
“Swan Prayer” categorizes its narrative into numbered sections. These sections
vary from fantastical (the retelling of Leda and the Swan, the notorious story
of Zeus’s rape of Leda, who then bears Helen, Queen of Troy) to realistic (the
speaker’s understanding of how to protect herself against perpetrators). Vizzo
handles these difficult narratives through sharp, matter of fact statements
that reinforce the poem’s authority. In connecting the speaker’s experience
with Leda’s, the poem transcends time and offers a history of the feminine
experience from the Greco-Roman era onwards. For as long as we have been
telling stories, women have been compromised. The speaker and Leda find
themselves in similar situations, and it is through the actions of rape,
assault, and dominance that their narratives merge. Section 1 of the poem
details the speaker voyeuristically observing what appears to be a man with a
swan “in his lap”, “pinned and repined”, from her car window. But, she snarks,
you already know
it wasn’t a swan. I was 14, he was a stranger & I never
told anyone.
you already know
it wasn’t a swan. I was 14, he was a stranger & I never
told anyone.
But she tells us. We listen. In the
following sections, the speaker shares that she was taught early the “best way
to hold keys.” Instead of holding her keys between her fingers so they can pose
as knives, she just goes out to buy a knife to carry instead. The poem poises
itself in the practical, perhaps to make sense of the tragic. She offers advice
from the Smithsonian Magazine on the
best way to stop an attacker (go for the eyes). But as the poem nears its end,
the language becomes more experimental. Words are revisited. Sentences
shortened. By its conclusion, Section 10, readers are left with these few
words:
10.
The knife, the neck.
“Swan
Prayer” reveals that swans are more dangerous than sharks. It grapples with
violation. It says what has never and should always be said. Because of its
structure, readers experience repentance, confession, and myth.
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| Emily Vizzo |
Vizzo’s
speaker bears the burden of womanhood throughout much of her suffering. The
objectification, the infractions, the joys. The issues she writes around provoke
imperative conversations between readers and the normalization of violence
imposed on women.
When Vizzo’s
poem “Air Animals” begins “My beautiful friend is pregnant again”, readers
recognize immediately undulations of confession, of release. The poem explores
the pregnancy of the speaker’s 34 year old friend, the same age as the speaker,
which gets her thinking about her own fertility and children. The speaker says:
My children are still
air animals. Things that might or might
not exist. A child is not a concept.
Nor a thing. If I believed in heaven…
My children are still
air animals. Things that might or might
not exist. A child is not a concept.
Nor a thing. If I believed in heaven…
The
doubling of “might” bears interpretative qualities that far extend a trick of
the eye. When I arrive at the stutter of the word, it gives me the impression
that there is hope for a child somewhere in the speaker’s mind. The “m”, that
nasally sound, also mimics the action and sounds of a new baby, adding to the
mystery of the speaker’s future. While the potentialities electrify the line, the
rest of the poem speaks to me more about fear – that natural, wrestling anxiety
when it comes to the idea of motherhood, which is containment, which is
wildness, which is sharing the body with a person and then setting that person
free. In order to articulate this emotion, Vizzo turns to the celestial,
describing her unborn children as “lofting in snow clouds”, as if they are just
waiting to find a way down. It is we readers who are taken quickly back down to
reality.
In the next
few stanzas, we are in the present. The speaker has no children and is at the
supermarket, where a mother has tied her children to her, one of those leash
contraptions. “Like any pet”, the
speaker observes, “she was collared.” The scene refocuses the catalyst for the
poem: when it comes to the idea of taking care of a child, the speaker does not
know if she wants to “own it or be it.” Because, again, motherhood is
containment and wildness.
The poem isn’t just about the idea of bearing children, but
of living up to societal expectations that often damage our ability to see our
own desires. Vizzo’s poetry puts to words the experiences of identity,
social constructs, and emotional value, regardless of gender.
Emily Vizzo’s
poems have previously appeared in, or will appear in,
journals such as Ninth Letter, FIELD,
North American Review, The Normal School, Blackbird, jubilat, Cincinnati Review
and many other respected journals. Last year she was selected for Best New
Poets 2015, and has previously had an essay noted in Best American Essays 2013.
Poems were nominated for Best of the Net in both 2015 and 2016. She is active in
the literary community, and has volunteered with/volunteer with VIDA, Writers
Resist, Hunger Mountain, Drunken Boat and Poetic Youth.
Previously, her manuscript was twice selected as a finalist for
the OSU/Wheeler Poetry Prize and was selected as a semi-finalist for the Alice
James first book contest, and as a semi-finalist for both the Crab Orchard
first book and open series contests. A second manuscript was recently selected
as a finalist with Sarabande.
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I would like to reiterate again that the idea of
The Wild Sister is not mine, but a theory created by Juan Felipe Herrera.
Links:
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Abriana Jetté is an internationally published poet, essayist, and educator from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals, including the Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, The Iron Horse Literary Review, The American Literary Review, and 491 Magazine. She teaches at St. Johns's University and the City University of New York, writes a regular column for Stay Thirsty Magazine that focuses on emerging poets and she is the editor of The Best Emerging Poets of 2013 that debuted on Amazon as the #3 Best Seller in Poetry Anthologies, the author of 50 WHISPERS that debuted on Amazon as the #1 Best Seller in Women's Poetry and the recently released 50 WHISPERS - Vol. II.