Today, Hannah tended the fire while her granny slept nearby in a sunny patch.
Today, Scout treated a headache.
Today, Samira thought about the Brooklyn Transit Museum.
We’ve been lucky to receive beautiful work from four poets this season, all of whom think differently in poetry about how the poet might find models for their activity: in other artforms, like a movie or a play, or in sites of language that refuse the status of “art” altogether. The subjects of these poems—birds, lakes, bananas, breast milk—seem to make the poem as much as the poet does, positing a dynamic relationship between the writer and their materials.
In Brenda Coultas’ “Two White Shirts Drying on the Mantel,” experience, language, artist, and reader are tugged into relation:
Despite the pleasures of making sense
Must be how a STOP sign feels
Always consistent
Even without
an audience
Coultas’ poem questions a normative fantasy: that the achievement of poetry could be found in its ability to behave like a speech act, enforcing a singular interpretation, and ensuring a certain effect, “even without / an audience.” All cars come to a language-directed halt in the face of the sign’s red language. STOP. A poem that privileges its own legibility might reproduce the imperative form of the stop sign, designed to avoid puzzlement and concern, though also, interpretation. The question of whether or not poems can make or direct a world, in the manner of a stop sign, is somewhat auxiliary to Coultas’ inquiry. Some try to, and some don't. But in choosing legibility and consistency, what gets lost?
A poem might instead point to the shaky boundary between its own written language and the plural meanings that language generates when read. We might describe that boundary, in Kai Ihns’ words, as varied and layered, like “agate.” In “ALL BLISS MUST END” Ihns writes: “Brown stones rubbed smooth by water / Action / Lying there like dead.” Activity and inactivity cohere in the stone. For a stone, “Lying there like dead” constitutes action. As does erosion, a kind of evolution achieved through disintegration rather than accumulation. The slow, delayed activity of erosion mimes the manner in which the poem alters its images. The poems recede as they advance. In “OH DO NOT ASK “WHAT IS IT?”” Ihns describes a “hot banana” through repetition and recursion, shifting the meaning that gathers around it:
Hot banana
Finger hots
Yellow hots
Hot banana
Jalapeño
Banana hot
The banana returns. The shifting relationship between the banana-image and the poem’s syntax allows the meaning of the banana, at the symbolic register, to remain ambiguous. The poem behaves, per its own instruction, “In a way not supposing / Any ground / To give these actions meaning.” The hot banana’s common absurdity is maintained.
The speaker describes themself as “a certain kind of bird” who lives “on the ground” rather than above it, refusing a readerly compulsion to keep forcing that banana to “mean.” Rather than pose this refusal as victorious, the dangers of the bird’s groundlessness remain. The poem ends with the question: is it “fine,” to live like that bird, “Not being very safe / Not asking “what is it”? A bird might simply eat that “hot banana,” not caring if it were a pepper by another name.
Where Ihns’ speaker finds their foil in a bird at the beach, the speaker in Yun Qin Wang’s “Star Sequence” turns to the lake. Wang writes: “Let’s say the real artist / is the lake.” In writing with the lake, the poet’s imagination labors in collaboration with the scene they encounter. As opposed to locating meaning in the world’s predetermined arrangements, the poet organizes parts of her environment to better comprehend them: “I’m placing this scene next to the lake, / so I understand the lake.” The shared labor of the poem and the lake finds its synonym in the collaboration between artists described in Wang’s “Going Fragile”:
He will throw ice
across it, and his partner,
on the other side, will make harsh noise
out of the mixer connected to the floor
as the cubes drop, clanging.
It is not the artist alone who makes or controls his sound, but the attendant figures of partner, mixer, and clanging cubes. The sounds peripheral to the stage also contribute: the “footsteps of the front row audiences” permeate the performance, becoming a part of it. In reading the poem, we too become audience to Wang’s described show, inflecting the scene. Unlike the univocal stop sign troubled by Coultas’ poem, the performance in “Going Fragile” functions because of its marginal elements — audience members, footsteps, melting ice cubes — rather than in spite of them.
Our fall issue houses another theater. Cleo Abramian’s “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” borrows its title from Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 Taiwanese film about a movie theater’s final screening of the 1967 film Dragon Inn. Abramian describes a speaker who watches a movie about a movie: her own moviegoing activity plays out before her. “I push my face against the screen,” Abramian writes, calling our attention to the medium through which we receive art. In turn, the poem’s own “screen” is pointed at. We’re made to ask what might be “offscreen” from the poem’s page, like the movie theater’s “hard rain.”
While certain utterances from beyond the poem come to bear on its terms, other sounds are pointedly left out, or find themselves transformed beyond legibility in entering verse. Abramian’s “Inner Ear” plays with both transfiguration and redaction:
Digging my head into the moonflower
I blah blah dream of breastmilk
mugwort colors
my belly button square
“I blah blah dream...” The phrase “blah blah” at once mocks language and excites its descriptive capacity. “Blah blah” is speech deemed boring, beyond or without meaning. And yet, what escapes meaning finds a form in blah blah’s iterative construction, maintaining the preverbal site of both dreaming and breastfeeding. “Blah blah,” in saying “nothing,” says it all.
Thank you to all four poets! We hope these poems provide company for winter’s arrival, and for fall’s close.