This time, we chose an epistolary form for our note. Each of us wrote a letter addressed to one another, considering this summer’s season of thought — both individual and collective — about poetry and the poetry of life.
︎Hello you two.
It was a gorgeous day in Iowa City today. I felt freshly alive in a way that I hadn’t for the past week or so. The sun has been very bright recently. I rubbed my arms on these flowers that felt like cat tails and experienced a few crucial moments of feeling beautiful.
I also felt available for reflective thinking, something critical, for me at least, when it comes to the process of writing.
My mind has been drawn to reflecting on this past summer, now quickly ending, and the immediacy of every moment. Over the past year I've felt such a curious and new anxiety. A feeling that everything is happening so much more suddenly than I was prepared for. This summer especially feels to have run by me so quickly. With that is this feeling of wrongness, like I've been placed in a timeline for which I am deeply underprepared. I've been curious if I am alone in this feeling. Do you feel this too?
I want to try elaborating a little bit more. As you both know, I went to Palestine this summer for the first time and stayed with family I hadn't met or talked to in my whole life. Oddly, I felt completely at home in a way I did not expect. I was instantly embraced by second and third cousins without hesitation. We spoke negatively and harshly about Israel, Israelis, the P.A. We did not make room for imagining Israeli or American sensibilities or perspectives. We’d wake up and the Israelis had turned the streets into rubble, abducted family friends, and closed the checkpoint to Ramallah. There was no space to say anything but how terrible it all was.
Hope and belief in a ‘free Palestine’ was a separate conversation, one of great depth and imagination — for the return of visibly shrinking land, access to the sea, more money and security. But there was no quibbling, qualifying, leniency. I did not feel the hand-wringingness of even a leftist America, which has made it so unfathomable to say one supports “Hamas” and not just “the resistance." In this sense, the weird energy of leftist organizing spaces that I had vaguely been inhabiting seemed complicit in this terrible aloneness and weirdness I've been experiencing over the past year.
Visiting family has helped me feel a little more available emotionally as a person than I have been in a long time. That feeling of “wrongness” I referenced earlier still exists. It's perpetual as this genocide continues I suppose. But I feel more like a person than I have for a while. I feel more available in my body and self and more grateful — for poetry, for friendship, for my life.
In putting together this issue of Common Place with you both, I’m curious about poems that find a foothold in a world of ‘wrong-ness.’ In Noor Khashe Brody’s poems “Tupperware” and “Daylight Savings,” I felt this quality of the world take literary shape. For Noor’s speaker, language is restrained and precise. A pace at odds with the sudden arrival of emotion in me. It’s through this contrast that I see the ‘wrong-ness’ I experience expressed. In “Daylight Savings,” Noor writes:
A girl appeared at our doorstep in the rain.
She cut out her thick wet braids with baby scissors.
This couplet both introduces and ends our relationship to the figure of “a girl,” leaving me desperate for news of what has become of her. What are the politics of a girl alone? With baby scissors, cutting her thick wet braids? This summer I spent three nights in the hospital, where nurses patiently combed and then braided my unruly bloody hair. A miracle of God, the avoidance of an unwanted haircut. We do not know how the speaker feels in receiving this girl and her scissors at the doorstep. We are left to deal with the charged image.
The circumstance of a child alone, a child potentially in crisis, necessarily reminds me of the one million children in Gaza currently under threat of or victim to genocide by Israel. Earlier this week, the Gaza Ministry of Health published a sixty-four-page document of every Palestinian in Gaza murdered by Israel since October 7th, 2024; its first fourteen pages are comprised exclusively of infants under age one (OCHA). How do we reckon with the monstrosity of size? Could anyone feel nothing at the weight of something so huge and so terrible? In this poem, the appearance of a couplet — a pair — is perhaps our only solace from the threatening anticipation we imagine. Form provides company.
How does it feel to be ending this summer? Do you find poetry differently than you did at the start of this summer? I feel moments of true beauty in this new part of my life. That helps me imagine, maybe, a pattern of beautiful moments to come in the future for us all.
Yours, Samira
Dear Hannah & Samira,
I'm writing from a train. It’s the simplest place for me to write lately. My brain responds well to the world in this form, passing. A texture that imitates the pace of thoughts required for poems to happen. Required for me right now, I should say. I'm thinking about your phrasing, Samira. To feel deeply unprepared for this timeline, and the wrongness of having been moved into such a timeline at all. Yes. In the face of this, I’m finding some companionship in poetry. Especially poems that face politics by generating it, conversing with the lyric to conjure something actual, dreamy, hard to stomach. Joggling time and history into a more convincing, unsettling form. Poetry that is not just “against genocide” or war, but that is for the existence of what you've called “depth and imagination.” For a free Palestine in the expansive Palestinian context, one that American consciousness must embrace if it hopes to address what you've so perfectly named our perpetual “aloneness and weirdness.” A state of false separateness from elsewhere. We make a horrific error in mistaking this remove for freedom.
Out the train window, trash heaps glow hotly with chunks of silver metal. The world is so shiny. This is the kind of observation I often can’t stand in a poem. As though representing the weirdly sublime nature of trash, horror, decay could qualify as politics on its own. Can it? Maybe… But what I really want is response. Poems that talk back to life without time for, in your words, “quibbling, qualifying, leniency.” Poetry that activates psychopolitical collectivity through a spectrum of expressions, moods, ideas, delights, agonies. Poetry with thoughts, not unlike the common place of the thinking brain and its complicated conscience; aware of its imaginative capacity as well as its restrictions. Lesle Lewis writes: “We use binocular vision to see three dimensions and a third eye to see a fourth. / Our perspectives describe only the things selected.” I love this: the strange capacity of poetry to conjure, at once, both the worldly tools required to see three dimensions and the “third eye” necessary to access a more wavering fourth. And yet, even with this unbelievable scope, we “describe only the things selected.” Lyric perception coheres as both limitless (four-dimensional) and persistently abbreviated. The poem reminds us of this constant tension: reality mediates imagination. And, importantly, vice versa.
In writing this, I'm made to think of a somewhat recurrent conversation I've found myself in since we began and titled our journal, Common Place. The concern: that we risk an unrecoverable cliché, favoring “commonplace” verse that lives “down here” at some kind of binary offense with the ventilated world of lyricism “up there.” That our name signals a preference for narrative or worse, autobiography. Of course, this is nothing new! And there's something pleasurable to me, really, in the eternal reproducibility of this discourse when thoughtful, each time turned over into something of further provocation and use… For whatever it’s worth (and for whatever it might be), I believe in the lyric, loving to write and to read with this glossy tradition. But it's the commonplace potential of that lyric — the happenstance nature of its invention, the daily discovery of curious language — that arrests me. The poem possesses a mind of its own, not always virtuous nor true. Sly and sometimes vicious. But nonethless, it has come to meet with us. Poems might not be “from here” but are certainly found out here, in this mysterious, actual place where we all live. Imagination is real life. Lesle again:
The shapes want to be very exact but not the shapes of specific things we might recognize.
It’s like it’s a drawing of a diagram depicting a nighttime itch.
Rationality and exactness bump-up against the blurry quality of sensory life, comingling in the adaptable poetic line. I love this as an ars poetica: “It’s like it’s a drawing of a diagram depicting a nighttime itch.” Yes, it is.
Sara Nicholson’s introduction to the poetry of Mauritian writer Malcolm de Chazal so wonderfully touches upon this essential thread in poetry’s weird history. She describes Chazal (1902–1981) as a writer who demonstrates a “lovingly eccentric dedication to rethinking perception anew,” at once approaching the world’s materials with a noticing eye full of “childlike wonder,” eager to name what’s there — “The / White / Daisy” — while also refusing the anticipated roles of his noticed natural objects — “The / White / Daisy / Breastfed / The / Lunar / Light.” I’m so grateful for Sara’s careful translations, tugging these curious “whorls” into sight without straightening or fixing their paths. Not to mention her own contributions to the question of what’s up-there vs. down-here; I teach What the Lyric Is every year to my students. They love it, of course. And we get to argue! The playful, affecting nature of her verse and this coy title make it so.
Hannah, when we released our First Spring issue, you quoted Alice Notley over email to our contributors: "Poetry is so common, hardly anyone can find it." It's the task of finding it that I've felt most taken with as we've curated this small selection of summer poems. That the commonplace activities of reading, speaking, and thinking could provide an occasion for encountering the poem’s transmission... what special attention this merits. In "Poetry and Abstract Thought," Paul Valéry writes:
I have, then, noticed in myself certain states which I may well call poetic, since some of them were finally realized in poems. They came about from no apparent cause, arising from some accident or other; they developed according to their own nature, and consequently I found myself for a time jolted out of my habitual state of mind. Then, the cycle completed, I returned to the rule of ordinary exchanges between my life and my thought. But meanwhile a poem had been made, and in completing itself the cycle left something behind (57).
What jolts us from the ordinary Earth to the truly extraordinary world of verse is, put simply, “some accident or other” (Valéry 57). I hear Noor again: “Tell me, how much debt we owe to accident?” For Valéry, we might owe it everything. The habitual state makes its way to the loopy “poetic” state through the highly common act of a misstep, the surprising bend of one’s “walking legs” becoming “a very subtle system of rhythms” (61-2). The inverse of this matters too: the lyric imprints reality, “[leaving] something behind” (57). Our work is in learning how and when to pay attention to the arrival of this state, and deciding what to make of it.
That we leave something behind here in our conversation matters to me. It fills me with a rare sense of peace and a common sense, love. I love both of you and miss you terribly. Samira, you look beautiful in front of the sun and soft plants with your intact hair. I’m thankful for your lives and for poetry, too. I'm attaching an image of my world right now, the neighbor's cat resting against my arm. In lieu of a name, his collar reads "I'm outside because I want to be." Kind of beautiful.
Love,
Scout
Dear Scout and Samira,
Today I took a small ferry to Outer Island, the outermost island in the Thimble Islands archipelago. I swam in the Long Island Sound with a new friend, and we sat on a slab of pink granite that gradually let into the sea. A glacier made the islands out of hilltops. It compressed the hills. Large boulders, glacial erratics, had been dropped on the slab, balanced like sculptures. Pink granite is bedrock. It seemed composed of small wavelike stripes, alternating pink and gray.
When we arrived on the island, two women began telling us about their lives on kayaks. They had met each other out at sea, and each had become the other’s paddling companion. Suddenly our day seemed to be organized around this pattern, like the “couplet” Samira mentions: pairs of women, or companions, traveling together on the ferry or paddling out to sea. One of the women was grieving the loss of her previous kayak partner. I loved that these kayaking women had found each other in the expanse of sea. Each had found in the other a collaborator, someone with whom to receive this clarifying work the sea passively transmits. The sea was working on me too. The Sound, a new part of the sea to me, has its own “depth and imagination.” But I imagined coincidence on its surface: noticing a pattern, in pairs, was also my intention. Like a painter deciding on paints, I decided what patterns to see. I saw coincidence in the boulder, its random placement, and in its shape, an artistry. Valéry describes “poetic” states as coincidental, but nonetheless “realized”: a poem is born and made. Coincidence has “jolted” me toward poetry. And just like coincidence, poetry happens to me just as much as I will it to happen.
Yesterday was Friday the 13th. Another coincidence: I happened to watch a film with a narrative centered around Friday the 13th, but a Friday in 1934. This old Friday arrived yesterday. Elizabeth Bishop, in an essay titled “Time’s Andromedas,” wrote:
If you’ve seen boys dive after pennies you know how the coins sink shimmering to the bottom at unequal rates, and the diving boys sometimes pick them up halfway down, or even get there before the coins do. Why should the days behind me retreat systematically — Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday — and not any other way? why not Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, if they seem that way to me? (659)
Here the falling coins turn to days, passing out of sequence, but at their own speed, the way they “seem.” Here she asserts her own order, more proper to experience. In another essay, “Dimensions for a Novel,” Bishop writes of delayed emotion: when emotion arrives much later than the emotion’s occasion. The apparently random or coincidental arrival of this emotion, for Bishop, is no coincidence, as the present necessitates its arrival. The emotion isn’t recalled but rather arrives, is at long last felt. So too can an emotion arrive early. Bishop writes: “If, for example, I have a “feeling” that something is going to happen, and it does, then the feeling proper to that experience has come too early — its proper place was afterwards” (659). I find the most common place for this “early” arrival in my poetry, where so often a past emotion arrives before I have felt that emotion. Sometimes too in dreams, or in the middle of the day. Bishop’s writing reminds me of what you described, Samira, when you wrote about the “wrongness” of time, summer running faster than you had expected.
When I returned this summer to Brighton for the first time since my family moved, sixteen years ago, the present transfigured the past; it made the past finally arrive. In a park my siblings and I would play in every day, I found two statues I had forgotten, both of which had been inexplicably erased from my memory of the park, a place I had often returned to imaginatively. But not to the statues. Once I found them, they were obvious to me — obviously forgotten. They are two boys in togas, feminine and handsome. I had known these statues intimately, an intimacy I only remembered as soon as I noticed the most familiar stone grapes hanging from the boy’s waist. The memory lived in those grapes and waited. Leo and I walked from this park to the sea, finding a spot to sit on the pebbles. This beach was uncomfortable. The sun was bright but reflected harshly on the water, and each of us felt a different kind of distress, listening to a difficult music. I felt I was moving through a hazardous present.
Can poetry prepare us for experience, and can experience prepare us for poetry? Poems might be part of that success in the present Bishop describes: conditions that enable the release of an emotion delayed, arriving late but nevertheless in its “proper place.” In a form that can be shared. It was an accident that I wound up back in that park in this particular year, as opposed to any other. I often felt that my return was happening “wrongly,” parts of the past arriving too late or too early, before or after I was prepared. I admire what you wrote, Samira, about poetry that finds “a foothold in this world of ‘wrong-ness,’” especially in the context of Palestine. In the preface to The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James writes,
Tranquillity to-day is either innate (the philistine) or to be acquired only by a deliberate doping of the personality. It was in the stillness of a seaside suburb that could be heard most clearly and insistently the booming of Franco's heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin's firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence.
Tranquility here reminds us of Wordsworth’s definition of the origins of poetry as “emotion recalled in tranquility,” and yet James describes that tranquil “stillness” as in contradiction with the noise of revolutionary struggle. Noise “striving for clarity” as poetry can find its origins in the feeling of “wrongness” you describe, rooted in the contradictions and turmoil of the present.
From contradiction poems arrive. At once, but also iteratively, in the continuous present of composition. In Sara Gilmore’s poems, language reiterates — words and phrases return changed, reconfigured. In different poems, “the green lives” returns. In “Safe camp,” she writes, “By wave the display comes off, into circulation where only, only where sleeping shows how into sleep sleep builds.” Here, the word “sleep” builds more “sleep,” and “sleep” emerges from “sleeping.” This repetition throws words “into circulation”; the poem describes its own “sound circulating.” Words float back up in a network the poems map. Whenever I’ve been lucky to speak about poems with Sara, I’ve felt love for the lively and iterative process of rewriting and rereading. Sara’s readings of poems invite a joyful return to the poem’s language, and her work invites rereading, too. These poems reorder language through reiteration and in doing so make an order — like Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday — of their own.
Scout: when you wrote that we “leave something behind,” I was reminded of the glacier that dropped off those shapely boulders, as well as the statues in which I deposited emotion and left memories behind. In the statues those emotions were kept, though not necessarily for safekeeping. This “leaving behind,” glacial process, the glacier depositing as it recedes, is how I imagine composition. As accidental as forgetting, and as intentional and shaped as feminine statues. Those two statues were companions like our paddling women, companions both to each other, and companions, like you two, to me.
Love,
Hannah
Bishop, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, Library of America, 2008.
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint l’ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed., Vintage Books, 1989.
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Humanitarian Situation Update #218 | Gaza Strip.” The Humanitarian Situation Update no. 218, 16th September 2024.
Valéry, Paul, et al. “Poetry and Abstract Thought.” The Art of Poetry, Princeton University Press, 1958, pp. 52–81.
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