Welcome to Posit 43!
We are delighted to share the rich and varied offerings in this issue: epinicians, sonnets, ekphrases, writing prompts and more in dialogue with sculpture, photography, and painting to utter a range of experience whose coming-together strikes us as a microcosm of the kind of fertile heterogeneity that must be cultivated and treasured now more than ever, when “what was once in vogue // tends to return: neofascism,/ and demagoguery, for example” (Mary Jo Bang, “Code Name: Mary”).
This issue is a special one for another reason as well, our first created with the participation of the newest member of our editorial team: distinguished poet and educator Celia Bland. We are honored and delighted to welcome Celia to our masthead!
Mary Jo Bang’s poems engage heterogenous artworks linked not by date, materials, or provenance, but by a single name: Mary. Bang’s ekphrases vibe like modern metaphysics, spinning conceits that seem to revivify the artworks that inspired her. In “Code Name Mary,” she considers a photo of the Freudian analyst and Resistance hero Helen Gardiner, pseudonym Mary, and leads us from Gardiner’s evening dress to a skewering of today’s currencies, “neofascism, and demagoguery. . . both/of which love to dress up in religion.” Yoko Ono’s Fluxus-era instructions for the collection of images of women named Mary inspires “Portrait of Mary.” Bang, a modern-day Gabriel, hails women — Ono, the Virgin Mary — “who can outlast / . . . the gun blasts.” “Mary Holding an Open Watch” leaps away from a luxe Gaultier timepiece featuring Mary on its dial, and pits “that little-to-nothing container that could/disappear anytime” – that is, the mind – against the day’s passage into night, “sucking this / and everything else into its fuckwit mouth.”
In Charles Corriher’s photographs, backgrounds dominate foregrounds. The camera’s eye blisters and blinks, seduced by sunspots, refractions, and the mundane, exhausted, and tacky. Corriher revels in quizzical harmonies. “Neighborhood Damnation” tracks rectangles from business signs to strip mall fascia to plate glass windows before focusing on a billboard’s message of God’s retributive wrath. In “Chippy Misses Everybody,” a dog turns from its master to pine for his reflection. And a refrigerator’s open door proffers a composed chaos in “Confirmed Bachelor Pad.” But it’s “Doom Sunset’s” backlit tangles of autumn leaves that bring a pause. Autumnal colors fan across the sky, casting reds as rich as Notre Dame’s stained glass.
In Lisa Corinne Davis’s precise and intricate compositions, difference and multiplicity generate lush and energetic harmonies. Their multi-layered complexity choreographs vibrant unions, rather than unities, of form, line, and color from crowds of disparity, evoking a passionate and ultimately optimistic vision of heterogeneous collectivity. The profusion of fine, waving lines and airy (or watery) spaces in these paintings evokes undulating nets, windblown skeins of fabric, or thin slices of multicellular tissue. These waves of interwoven threads are layered over and under abundant and colorful communities of forms both geometric and biomorphic which suggest plastic shards, confetti, puzzle pieces, and primordial organisms. All are incompletely divided – or are they linked? – by heavier linear gestures that bring to mind fragmented rivers, roads, veins, or fractured cartoon outlines. Davis’s use of color is also defiantly inclusive: her unexpected combinations of plastic and flesh-tones, neons and pastels, as well as ‘clashing’ hues are a further gesture towards the rejection of categorization in favor of the breadth of possibility. In these canvases, everything is in motion, and everything is arguable. Davis’s project is not only synthetic but generative. Her transformation of the modernist grid into these irresistibly pulsing, flexing, undulating heterogeneities brings even the objective and geometric to life. As they hatch and break free, we are encouraged to do the same: from the oversimplification of received ideas to Davis’s inclusive vision of collectively interactive emergence.
With a hint of the formal flavor of classical odes, and a persevering wit through (perhaps gods-given) trials, Cristina Perez Diaz alerts the reader to the challenges and victories of everyday life. A subtle distance in addressing the beloved is a recognition, perhaps, of “the sense / of international frontiers within” even our closest relationships; but there is also the welcome intimacy of the present: “We’re a family now, meaning / a tiny pink sock on / the kitchen counter,” and, in what might be a modern myth, ordinary objects like the remote control for the ceiling fan, misplaced and “missing for days,” have a mischievous life of their own, “suddenly showing up at / “a demure angle from under his piece / of clothing.” The poet limns joy in the dailiness, “every surface / losing its brim, overflowing / with laughter.” As expected, the gods make their appearance. As usual, they are to be feared. “ A neighbor full of envy whispered / That the gods had sliced you / Limb by limb in boiling water / And passed morsels of your flesh / Around the table.” Since it’s always wise to be cautious in our dealings with the divine, “I can’t call the gods / Savages; I disavow the report” but somehow we humans remain sublimely protected: “Midtown was full of small deities / Cherishing our every step.”
In “Let It Rot Fugue,” Kathleen Hellen wields punctuation with an intention matched only by her poetry’s powerful consonance. Form is elegantly policed by colons and periods; an ellipsis becomes the calm center of a maelstrom. In “lilacs,” love and plunder, acquiescence and aggression are placed in opposition as carefully as if upon a stage. Emotional excess is framed within a lyricism jolted by Rolling Stones lyrics and military argot. “in English most of he-be” mines a Wikipedia entry on the “Most Common Words in English” and renders the common autobiographical, creating relationships between pronouns and individuals, verbs and velocity, building a euphony that stuns.
For evocation of the physical, societal, and emotional complexity of place, Seth Kleinschmidt’s three sonnets in this issue are inimitable. Every line seems to have been dug up from earth like “the fawnchested flicker pounds out another grub.” In “The Assumption of the Crop,” the love of home, specifically the geography and human history of midwestern cornfields “parceled out to men,” is felt on a gut level so profound that a description of farm equipment in action becomes both erotic and sacred: “I would like to kiss one of these behemoths / thread its needle, crouch, make some masa in a hole / for an offertory.” The familiar features of a sonnet become newly compelling by way of Kleinschmidt’s stunningly visceral images and a linguistic freedom that allows word definitions and parts of speech to shapeshift — as we see in the subtly rhyming opening lines of “Some Bad People:” “One of my friends lost an eye in autumn / one annealed the new kid with lye / he was gonna flake him good / like lutefisk all is meat after all.” As the sonnet turns, the voice and images are as raw as the instincts and emotions of childhood: “in summer the nights are gloves / thickfingered and pressing / gills shut and boyhood / is a side of beef vibrating / on account of worms.” In “Wintering on the Coast” a truly human understanding of home is defined by what we share with every living organism — our own dissolution and decay into the landscape: “our only neighbors jellies on the wrack line / that congress of lice moving in a pall / and a paw washed up at the final noon / from an otter, peeled pink as silicon.”
Aaron Lopatin’s work featured here enticingly reminds us that words (and poems) have more in common with breathing bodies in motion than with static objects and definitions: “A room makes room / for its inhabitants. // Questions that word; inhabitants. / Possessors of the room and its lung.” The poet and the poem move together on a “troublous walk” toward form — “I spend my time in stammer // Like a crane or strand bird, wading; like a sanderling on shore. // Who shakes the droplets quickly through a crooking of its form.” There are hints of storybook rhyme and rhythms in this verse (or of Emily Dickinson?); for despite the troubles of our “outermost times,” Lopatin’s mode often evokes a child’s fascination with play. In “Image: (Five friends writing in a room)” we are launched into a surreal counting game that includes a rocking horse and “parts of hands that feel things.” We share the poet’s evident delight when he sets in motion quick sequences of word play — “the rain . . . those liquid stones — once hidden in a cloud, dissolved; or solved; or uninvolved.” By way of a subtle poetics of rhythmic, linguistic, and sonic patterning we are bid to answer the question “Do we become one unified voice?” But the poet goes much further in his quest for soulful communion: “I // was carried by words like a hearse / to its winter. Like a verse rehears’d / its grave.”
In Pattie McCarthy’s compelling, free-associative poem, “blood/work,” the specific details of the “worst day” remain mostly undescribed, yet every line of the poem resonates with the moment’s emotional weight: “it’s all choke in the moment it’s all choke choke choke.” The poem creates a sense of ongoing-ness as each section starts with the repetition of the last line of the previous section suggesting that a certain kind of pain has no beginning or end but is embedded in bones, circulating in blood: “a phlebotomist is a blood letter & I spell my / name in gulps of bile & gasp.” A jagged caesura runs continuously through the center of the poem like a wound that cuts language in two. The source of this injury is familial — a mother is cruelly dismissive, “you’ve got a real / smart mouth she said a real fat / smart mouth she said & in it I nibbled // the one mean bone in my body,” and a father is a “great charmer / an adulterer” and racketeer. This daughter knows that “my testimony is an erasure as well as / documentary by definition objection.” She continues to object, if with a sense of having “failed again,” but she has also found potent sites of solace and support. Here is an interiority that operates in intimacy with other writers (Plath, Woolf, Dickens, and Beckett are all alluded to). Dickens furnishes her mind’s “bleakhouse.” The presence of a committed love offers grace: “let’s kiss in our antique fast fashion.”
Kevin McLellan’s poems in this issue are attuned to the porousness of daily life’s rituals and disruptions, its quietude and disturbances. In terse, syntactically fragmented lines, an anxious domesticity emerges — the sounds of “dripping faucets” and “gunfire outside” — in which repeated actions can easily become strange: “& maybe this too: (after) / one hundred leg lifts / the closest (I felt) / to being a four-legged creature.” In “Inaction Inertia” a body and the objects in a room coalesce to create a merged perceptual field: “heart / a couch; brain a monitor: watch / the unplanned lean / youthfully forward from an in- //side window; the glare.” The poet invites us into the intimacy of “the body within the body” and its “inner- // most dialogue a sham / like a crocheted blanket comprised of other holes.” In highlighting the double meaning of “sham” the speaker lets it be known he is ready to doubt the truth of his own thoughts — they may be empty as holes. Yet McLellan’s poems develop with an interiority that keeps close tabs on the familiar world. It is an ongoing dialogue, the poet suggests, that allows our days to be subtly, if inconclusively, filled with meaning. With lines of raw-edged music — “the light / alludes & when /astronomical / twilight ends / & sometimes bear-rain / or bird-wind / or deer- / snow…”— McLellan imagines a state of inaction and inertia that provides space for the mind’s ponderings, with their irrepressible drift toward “maybes’ / suspended and impossible question / what will love do / now?”
Paul Potts’s two prose pieces featured here occupy that place where poetry and short short story meet and merge, a territory this young writer has clearly made his own. Memory’s drive toward narrative sets these works in motion, and they are then lit, sentence by sentence, by Potts’s intensely lyrical imagination. In “Two Grasses,” a vocabulary rich in images of family, landscape, and history is alive to the inner world of a particular child: “Recess: a boy asked where I came from, harmless if your body keeps the color of milkglass or limestone or the soft interior of shells, less so when your ancestry thins into fog and slips toward the mountains…” Potts’s lyricism is exacting in its effect, extending the personal to situate us in the racism that permeates even the culture of our playgrounds. In “Another Lesson,” the story of a family home destroyed by storm, a child’s tender reckonings bear witness to masculinity’s fraught relationship to vulnerability: “I thought men weren’t supposed to cry. I thought roofs didn’t vanish. But perhaps we had been living in weather all along, my father’s body only an apartment rented by breath.” Potts’s flexible prose lends voice to the frightened child and, almost simultaneously, to the child’s older self who looks back with existential urgency: “I asked the silence where the walls had gone. Was home a place or a condition? It said nothing, only pressed its damp ear to mine.” We learn from Potts that there is a distinctly human reality in which the body, the landscape of home, and story must be read as inextricable: “Now I’m older, enough to know the land keeps its dead stories pressed into the loam and each time the wind exhales it lifts a little history into my mouth.”
In Katharine Rauk’s inventive work, the reader is struck by how aptly the conversational ascends to the level of the lyric as the poet considers the cosmos and our place in it. Leaving a party after an exchange with a boor, “You’re a dick / is what I said / but just to myself” and then looking up “which I try so terribly hard to do” the narrator is rewarded by “the confetti my mind makes / when it shivers the night / into beautiful pieces.” Rauk’s impressive facility for language as wit is displayed in a short poem taken from a line of Sappho, and more extensively in a poem titled “Rumi Says There Are Love Dogs No One Knows the Name Of,” where the poet subtly plays with the letter “x” in both spelling and sound, making a point about our understanding of love, death and the divine: “The thing about a hex is how it could be / a jinx or a screw with six sides.” And in “Ancient History,” delightfully and idiosyncratically footnoted, the poet speaks in the voice of Medea: “A sonnet is a little prison / so /allow me to slip a few words out.” Rauk‘s ‘few words’ help us understand the totality of what we sense as humans: “Listen, it is good / to make yourself feel / small in the mouth / of the cosmos / It’s how I am /full of all the things / I want to say but don’t / know how—”
In this series of dangerous and sensual poems written to a lover, Carole Symer describes both attraction: “In only an apron, then you want me / wild in tongue in a way you can understand” and the repulsion in attraction: “You want me / buried like an old bone in the yard, passing over me / with your lawn mower.” Intrinsic to this work are the wildness and danger of both human relationships and the natural world. In “Self-Portrait as Datura Stratonium,” referencing Georgia O’Keefe’s painting of the poisonous Jimson Weed, the theme of danger in attraction continues: “I was born to startle. / Queen to your desert, / darling. Psyche / -delic trickster / stem & trumpet.” Later, the narrator conjures for her lover the push/pull of love, longing, and bitterness when she predicts that “a gaggle of women . . . will hover over your grave / dredging up your evening voice.” And in a stunning and brilliant insomniac poem that ticks off agonizing hours, she addresses her sleeping partner, speaking their grief at losing a son, the natural world offering an opportunity for outpouring “like a harsh sweep of wind shreds: a nest / then nothingness” and solace: “I find you: letting the water out, carbon dioxide in, a whole tree again from roots / to branches, breathing.”
Olivia Sio Tse’s dense and cryptic lyrics leap with breathtaking muscularity from unexpected image to even less-expected juxtaposition, stitching together strings of surprise to build resonant meditations on the brevity of material existence and the conundrums of identity. There is a wise sensitivity in these poems to the dualities at the heart of even the most ordinary aspects of our lives, shot through with mineral veins of artifice and nature, mercy and cruelty, catastrophe and exaltation. In “How Lucky to Get Flushed,” the unlikely good fortune of life itself is compared to a startling intersection of the sacred and the base: the chance of a “cutaway / of supernal gunk” getting “flushed / from an angel’s eye.” In “What of the Lake, Its Pigment” and “Baby Breaths,” personal identity’s tensions with society and morality play out against a backdrop of contemporary suburban youth, complete with arcades and parades, slinkies and selfies, neighbor kids and chihuahuas. But the harmless comfort of this familiarity is belied by the puzzles of Tse’s prosody and the pall of consequence she foretells for our precarious times, in which “when the water wars reach / we may want to be lakeside for practical reasons and also those of splendor.”
With Steinian elegance, Laura Walker titles each of her poems “Prompt,” thus allowing a single word (and its layered meanings) to dictate the specifics that follow. A repeated “Write a poem that…” seems to sprout varietal shoots — pea green, transparent and milky, “disappeared into the mud” — that practice an Orphic seduction. “Which animals,” she asks, “will soon draw near, and which will lie down beside the poem, twitching softly in their hay-scented dreams?” The lyrical possibilities are multitudinous. And a poem may choose “red when it could be colluding” or expand upon a “vernacular [that] is equally familiar and foreign.” One prompt echoes Hans Christian Anderson’s tales; another drones like a shape-note hymn. Certainly, precarity lurks beneath these prompts, as does the cherishing of what – sodden ferns, missing teeth, memory – so easily goes missing.
How things grow, their roots, their networks, and the necessity of water to living forms are everywhere apparent in Rebecca Welz’s sculpture. The steel forms attenuate, expanding upward and outward, their root systems visible, as if we are peering through water at lotus or perhaps imagining the underground systems that are the work of trees. Other pieces retain their abstraction in pleasing curvilinear shapes that present a complex vitality akin to biological or geological forms. Welz’s sculpted forms have the natural, free feeling of line drawings, and it is remarkable to see how she has manipulated steel to behave as if it were a contour drawing that somehow casts shadows, adding another dimension to the work. The open space and loose, natural dynamism of thick and thin “lines” emphasize the feel of abstract connections to biological processes like networks of mycelia reaching organically to connect with the roots of trees, or the changing courses of rivers over time. Interspersed among these winding tendrils of steel, colorful clay constructions leave interpretation to the viewer; they could be cells, nodes of nerve endings, or parts of human-made debris floating in the ocean. These striking pieces invite the hope that, as some research shows, at least some of our mistakes are being surrounded, absorbed and transformed by the powerful chemical forces of biology into something other, less destructive and more valuable. They also remind us of what we have and what we must cherish, in both nature and art.
We hope you love these works as much as we do. Thank you for being here, and please VOTE!
Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, Barbara Tomash, and Celia Bland