Kent Shaw's Blog, page 6

“Narcissus,” by Jay Deshpand

Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what Jay Deshpande means in his poem, “Narcissus” (found in Iterant 10), when he’s explaining to the reader, “that field goes moon / and winsome.” Something about a field under the moon, something so calm, appealing. Like maybe an investigation into desire as impulse, and the nature of that impulse, and the feeling when that impulse leads you to pursuit. And with Deshpande, the desire has modest beginnings. I like modesty, because I like thinking about how many different ways a calm desire might be initiated. A desire for the beloved. An ache. And in Deshpande’s poem, it’s “that field goes moon / and winsome every time my / eyes turn to its grasses.” Such a friendly invitation. Not even as sharp as that Robert Duncan moment in The Opening of the Field but still knowing about the effect of a calming pastoral field and stationing the reader beside it. And, for Deshpande, it inspires him to list-making. Or, more precisely, to be “mired in list- / making.” What would go on a list like that? Something imaginative. Youthful. That’s how Deshpande is desiring. Where there’s a “sweetness of light upon her.” The poem has that feeling like when you say “low-key,” but even as you say it to yourself, maybe to center your desiring outlook, your low-key is swelling to something more. Something “all // of us who wake / on the same road / slurring our songs” might experience!

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“The Remnant,” by Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes‘s poem, “The Remnant” (from Kenyon Review: Spring 2023) positions his reader in the horrible middle of the Anthropocene, or the horrible middle of life when you’re entering the Anthropocene. And I recognize there are many poets of his generation (Vievee Francis and Jorie Graham, among others) who are writing so directly into this subject, or this location, or this temporality—I’m not entirely sure how to encompass the Anthropocene as something that enters the poet, and accounts for its position as more than just subject. And full disclosure, I’ve been very much in the middle of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects book, so all I can think about is a lack of language to address something so large it lacks definable boundaries or shape. Because that’s what Morton argues. A rain that is not only gives the impression of rain, but also the feeling of each raindrop as it falls on your body—its size, temperature, and angle of force. To read poems in mind of hyperobjects like the Anthropocene, then, is to know that I will always lack the language for describing the poem’s underlying concern, which, incidentally, is the experience of reading any really good poem. It might even be an ongoing irony.

So when Dawes’s “The Remnant” opens onto a scene of debris scattering, it seems like a gesture to mere circumstances, like he’s noting various circumstances that are part of the current world. But this all transforms with his move to the second stanza: “This is a myth.” Or is it a “biblical calamity”? A new world imagined by the artist to train others’ attention on the apocalypse that will be coming. It’s a big reach connecting the two. But for my reading, the poem’s most salient moment is the associative connection bringing the mythical vision back down to the current world. How Dawes connects “the deafness that is left” after debris has settled this world deep underground and “the space beneath the freeway.” How the poem can inhabit that transition so it contains a great deal of import is where I find a centering. It stresses a paradox between the “myth” he wishes to depict and the freeway he proposes as the setting feels instrumental to the poem. And, for me, it’s this juxtaposition and Dawes’s appeal that in the midst of these two things we “hold ourselves intact” is where I find the most poetic pleasure.

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“When Absence Becomes a Form of Presence,” by Chelsea Dingman

I came across this poem in Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week from the beginning of this month. And I have to say my first reaction is water, what the feelings around postpartum might mean to water, a human body immersed in water or consisting of water, relating to water in a meaningful way, especially when being held to some sentiment or idea (framed in the poem as water being “held down.”) Dingman makes water such a feeling, an instance that I imagine with no beginning and no ending, just instancing each subsequent thought while mourning a father—a father I imagine occupying a complicated relation to the poet (as opposed to what might be considered a “relationship with” is what I see). And yet the poet has named her son with the father’s name—a gesture that itself should count for something. The poem is filled with so many circumstances, and they together build a remarkable constellation of concerns. But where the poem really breaks me is when the poet talks about her body producing “miracles,” and they’re accomplished “despite me, despite // my greed, despite shame. It is late / in my body, & I haven’t done many things / right.” I could inhabit this moment in the poem for a long time, as it registers how endeared the poet is with her child, recognizing the child is of her body, and recognizing how this can happen whatever the poet’s feelings of just being present in her body. It’s a remarkable the human frankness of this all!

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“When Absence Becomes a Form of Presence,” by Chelsea Dingman

I came across this poem in Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week from the beginning of this month. And I have to say my first reaction is water, what the feelings around postpartum might mean to water, a human body immersed in water or consisting of water, relating to water in a meaningful way, especially when being held to some sentiment or idea (framed in the poem as water being “held down.”) Dingman makes water such a feeling, an instance that I imagine with no beginning and no ending, just instancing each subsequent thought while mourning a father—a father I imagine occupying a complicated relation to the poet (as opposed to what might be considered a “relationship with” is what I see). And yet the poet has named her son with the father’s name—a gesture that itself should count for something. The poem is filled with so many circumstances, and they together build a remarkable constellation of concerns. But where the poem really breaks me is when the poet talks about her body producing “miracles,” and they’re accomplished “despite me, despite // my greed, despite shame. It is late / in my body, & I haven’t done many things / right.” I could inhabit this moment in the poem for a long time, as it registers how endeared the poet is with her child, recognizing the child is of her body, and recognizing how this can happen whatever the poet’s feelings of just being present in her body. It’s a remarkable the human frankness of this all!

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Rejecting Immersion Through Multiple Voices

For a long time, I have felt unequal to writing anything in response to Valerie Hsiung’s To Love an Artist. Because I keep trying to find the wording sufficient to account for what I see happening in the first half of the book. There’s my experience as reader looking for a solid entry point, and there’s Hsiung’s intention to quadrant-off my experience as a reader (as it’s something she’s already considered). And then there’s how these two reading situations relate to Roland Barthes’s notion around “literature” as a kind of writing. Namely, a piece of literature must have at least two different readings with all readings in concert with one another during the reading experience. It’s confusing. And challenging. Because I want to juxtapose Hsiung’s work with Barthes’s notion of literature. But the situation of the book with Hsiung including the reading of the book as part of the situation makes it a challenge to fully account for my fit into this reading experience.

What are the motives for opacity in poetry? Or, in Hsiung’s situation, I’ve termed this a rejection of immersion. Because I like thinking of reading, or my reading experience, in terms of how I might immerse myself in a text. I would argue Hsiung is aware this bias to be immersed in a text exists for many readers. And maybe, the book could be implicitly stating, there’s a limitation to immersion. Like even as I’m writing this, and I think about the many issues at work in Hsiung’s book, I’m aware of how difficult it would be to account for a life dealing with the simultaneous existence of these issues, and the semi- or unconscious self-interest to keep these simultaneities compartmentalized.

Consider, for instance, just a few of the issues addressed. At one point, Hsiung’s book situates her among a group of friends, but they can only ever partially understand her and are likely to misunderstand the signals she’s giving. How being a woman in the contemporary culture would be so different from the lives women historically lived. And yet the difference between these two still doesn’t exclude how women are currently treated. How urban living could undermine people’s health. And all these ways urban living influences or physically and chemically affects an individual’s life could be connected to something so invisible but also insidious as climate change. Hsiung negotiates a chaos of vectors, and registers an eagerness to explore a new vector when it’s introduced into the book, and then to stylistically or literally express the conflicts new vectors pose to other vectors. How is someone supposed to tell the story of a life except through a simultaneity of voices?

And, thus, I resort to Barthes’s definition of literature in S/Z, where he determines at least two readings exist for literature, and that’s what sets it apart from other forms of writing. But I also feel Hsiung is doing something additionally to this. Where the “additionally” in that previous sentence is intentionally modifying “doing.” And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten to explain what, for Hsiung, the additional readings really look like. What it means to intentionally reject a reader’s immersion into a text, and to explicitly notify the reader they will be rejected from, or left in a tentative state of immersive-like reading, as they move through the book. What kind of additional reading is that? It’s what I would like to write about, and I keep trying to find a foothold for.

Helpful links:

Valerie Hsiung’s Home PageTo Love an Artist at Essay Press

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“A poem to forget one line after another,” by Andrew Dally

Reading through the latest issue of FENCE, Dally’s poem stands out. I like repetition, and how various a repetition-note can play out in a poem. This issue featured five of Dally’s poems, and in the others, his repetition serves as a kind of shift, where the poem moves from one frame of thinking to the next. In “Less than three repeating,” for instance, the “three-word bandname” shifts the poem from perfume-scented email (fun!) to pheromones in the natural world (what turns out to be fun!). In “A Poem to forget one line after the next,” all the repeating piles on top of each other, like they were collapsed cardboard boxes stacked and maybe rotting a little bit in the rain, as all these repeating lines mark a way of looking at a place, but not like crisp, clean lines observing the place, more like getting a familiar look of a familiar place, like one of those old Rand McNally maps that was paged through so often the pages have a grime that’s kind of gross and kind of comforting. And I don’t know if I would feel the same about this poem by Dally if I encountered it singly, without the other poems for context. The collection of poems shows the repetition for him operates in many lights.

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Nicholson’s Ekphrasis

There is a certain intellectual ethos in Sara Nicholson’s April. And it’s hard for me to get a handle on the source for it. Is it the New Lyric style—how it feels conversant with its subject matter? Is it the subjects it approaches? Approaching topics like infinity or archetype? Like in the poem “A Crown for Iris,” she wonders aloud: “What is the infinity in infinitude?” Phrases like this are so natural to the work. She has such ease with complex topics. At the same time, I can read the poem for its light hold on irony, how it plays with infinite-type words and their simultaneously contradictory and complementary positions. I can also read it for its wonder. How it moves into surprise and then through it, confident the poet’s stance will find yet one more surprise to relate. There are so many ways to read Nicholson. And they’re all acting in harmony. It’s like how I wish understanding as an activity was for me. Where I could feel my understanding mind as a momentum and a firmness. And given this overwhelming authority in the book, I was a little cautious coming to the poems that could be read with an ekphrastic lens, especially the poem “The Goatherd and the Saint.”

But, then, I’m never sure I understand what an ekphrastic poem is supposed to be. According to the Poetry Foundation glossary, the ekphrastic poem is a “vivid description” of the scene in a work of art. I’ve also heard ekphrasis could be where the art acts as an objective correlative. What the poet might want to emotionally register about a state of mind finds parallel to the artwork described by the poem. Kind of like the “show don’t tell” method of writing, where the artwork is the “show.” I don’t often find either of these instances, though. In practice, I feel most poems endeavoring to be ekphrastic register the poet’s “response” to a work of art. “I was in an art museum, this art made me think of something, and then I realized something new.” A reductive characterization, perhaps. Or a redirect of Abrams’s “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” Substitute “art” for Abrams’s “nature.” Ekphrastic poems like this might aspire to be Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” but, in the end, they occupy a more casual realization. It’s just a day for poetry in the museum. Maybe I’m too obvious about how unenthusiastic I am for ekphrastic poems. Like many readers, I’m dissatisfied with formulaic poems. But I think I’m mainly reacting to poems that reduce visual art to the poet’s casual realization. Not that I’m looking only for profound ekphastic work. More that I want poems alert to the the playful registers available in visual art. From my reading, the formula-driven ekphrasis seems like a hard habit to break. Once poets have matched their poems to an art work, they can only hold the art in high esteem.

In Nicholson’s poems, however, the art feels dimensional. She is amongst the art, and also observes the art, and also situates the art as an object exhibited in a place, and the nature of that place changes by virtue of the fact that there is art there. For me, Nicholson’s poem “The Goatherd and the Saint” operates using a conventional ekphrastic level. But, then, the authority she had established in other poems carries over. This is the same poet who had endeavored to register the many ways infinity can be considered in this world. What is she going to think about art?

Not surprisingly, the poem is especially interested in composition versus focus. Like the infinite that might be observed in the infinitesimal, the detail in a painting can be analytically exhausted and still not have one meaning to settle on. The compositional focus in a Fragonard painting, one of her examples, can point directly to a sentimental meaning, but think of the type of people in this painting, who you, reader, might be in relation to them, how people from the time when this was painted would or (more likely) would not identify with them. As with “A Crown for Iris” and its measured investigation of the infinite, Nicholson’s ekphrasis is not about finding conclusion, it’s about her thinking and how when you’re thinking you can feel yourself being led to conclusion, but, as I think her poems would caution you, don’t take any conclusion as a final conclusion. More thinking is more pleasure. Yes, when I read her poems I feel the might of understanding, its firm, established state of mind. But think, conclusion would effectively withdraw me from that state of mind.

Of course, art need not exist for art’s sake alone. One of my favorite moments in “The Goatherd and the Saint” is when the poet considers herself looking at paintings in the Frick, the wealth that established the Frick, her complicity in sustaining that wealthy position with her $22 ticket price, and then the surprising coincidence that wealth is being represented in each of the paintings she’s writing about. And like the infinite in the infinitesimal, why wouldn’t anyone have thought of that before? It’s the substantiality of something that feels so indisputably evident, and, at the same time, it feels the poet was the first to discover it. That, for me, is Nicholson’s magical treatment of the ekhprastic.

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“The No Scent Story,” by Basie Allen

In the book review I wrote for Basie Allen’s Palm-Lined with Potience, I tried to convey an enthusiasm for the book. Its poetic energy. Its voice so present on the page. Like that way my fellow grad school classmates would read Frank O’Hara, and me with them, and it would feel like a baptism. This is what voices in the New York School sound like. And what I’m registering here is the challenge to write about almost any New York School poet. How do you say, “I love how near the poet’s voice sounds,” then quote the voice, without essentially suffocating the voice beneath your subsequent analysis? All I ever want to say is that every time I hear one of those New York School voices say something, what I hear is a straightforward declaration: “I’m a poet!” And it’s infectious. We all feel like poets, because the poems put us inside the poets’ minds. Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Alice Notley. I can never read Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art” without hearing Baraka’s voice telling me poems are bullshit. But I love bullshit poems and serious political poems! Mr. Baraka, what am I supposed to do about that?

I spent all this time in the Basie Allen book review trying to prove the poems are fully aware of their own self-consciousness. And I’m afraid this review merely accomplished throwing a wool blanket on the poems. Or two or three wool blankets. I can barely hear the poem under all these layers. But at least I pinned it down.

I’m so self-conscious “proving” what happens in poems I like. I try to be good at it. Because I think my interest in the poems comes from more than just excitement. Or taste. My close reading of both “parts” for “Both Sides of the Cover” fit the book review’s purpose. Spontaneity in New York School poetry, and in Basie Allen’s poetry (whether it’s officially New York School or not) is an exercise, or a process. It’s a very shiny machination. I have been reading this Ben Hickman article about Frank O’Hara, “Having a Real Day of It,” and I’m interested in how Hickman registers the tensions in O’Hara’s voice. And how no one wants that voice to be saddled with tensions. “Frank O’Hara was carefree!” my grad school classmates and I tell each other while we’re stressed out about grad school. And maybe he was. But when Hickman highlights O’Hara’s working life, what I think is: “I don’t want Frank O’Hara saddled with that life!” But that was his life, even if I don’t want the life for these poems. What a delightful paradox Frank O’Hara sets up for everyone!

It’s a dual position. And many of the poems in Palm-Lined with Potience occupy dual positions. Like “Controversial and Erotic Dream Where the New World Trade Center is the Largest Klansman in the United States and As it Turns Out We’re Engaged.” The poet opens by telling us how cute they are. They’re so becoming! It’s their wedding day! Then they come down the aisle, up to their their spouse, and pull back the “hood.” Yes, “hood” IS the word! And it signals something is definitely not right. Meaning, the poem has led us into a cultural wrong, and the wedding day fun we’ve had on this path only makes the moment even more wrong than you’d think.

Many of the book’s poems occupying dual positions are explicitly addressing issues of race. In another poem, “The No Scent Story,” Allen is out in nature, enjoying it in a literal solo-sexual way, when his reverie is interrupted by a white man dressed in fatigues and carrying a shotgun. Like “Controversial and Erotic Dream,” the threat represented by this face-masked man is exaggerated (a) because everything leading up to his appearance was idyllic, and (b) by the fact the poet was in such a vulnerable position (”[his] pants still handcuffed around [his] ass” while the white man addresses him). And while I definitely feel the poem’s duality relates to the many aspects of racism—the poem assuredly accounts for the poet’s peace in nature getting interrupted by this white man’s appearance. Close to this is a corollary statement about how impossible it is to escape the reach of white culture’s watchful, surveilling eye. But I feel that the central duality relates to what the white man thinks he’s “saying” when he’s dressed in this aggressive outfit and he comes across another man out in nature. Is the poet supposed to read the white man as a threat of violence? Or should the poet see the hunter as one man encountering another, and a “manly response” would be appropriate, because it’s just a conversation between two men?

Reading the poem’s duality in this light, it concentrates the power dynamic squarely with the white man. Everything depends on his choices. And, meanwhile, every signal from the white man plays a double speak that’s common with men like him. I mean, why would someone be scared? Camouflage, a face-mask, and a low hanging visor is what you wear when you’re hunting. It’s his way of being in nature. And the shotgun? When I was in the Navy, three of the guys in my work center carried shotguns through the lobby of a Hampton Inn one weekend, and the manager had reported them. And according to them, he was stupid. Because it was “their right.” I won’t pretend to understand the motivating logic of situations like this, except how they evidence the power felt when you are a menace to others. When you can assert your dominance in a situation, and any possibility of peace comes from your good will alone. But even as men like this might refrain from doing anything violent, they’ll play the ambiguity to the very end. And if you’re at the receiving end of this ambiguity, everything feels precarious.

Allen’s poem plays that ambiguity out. He and the reader occupy this space between “playing it cool” and terror for his life. The story, then, portray the poet as the fool. He’s going to try acting like a bro. Yeah. Everything’s cool. He’s just waiting for his friends, the “really big frat dudes.” They are “literally on the way.” And it’s hard not to find the poet endearing in his clumsiness, and his bravery. Because even though the white man thinks we don’t know him, and our ignorance should be more forgiving, where we don’t worry about him, he’s still playing into the ambiguity by pumping the shotgun while talking to the poet. And everyone knows what men like him are like. We’re in suspense to see whether the poet makes it. And at its most innocuous, the threat is merely to the poet’s masculinity. How to be the man who can comfortably talk to another man who’s holding a loaded gun. But then the poem’s clear understanding that being the black man in a situation like this speaks to a whole history of racism and lynching. And it’s unclear the white man would willingly own up to seeing himself in this role, but it’s impossible to think he’s oblivious.

Thankfully, the poem ends with relief. Nothing happens. The white man essentially gives his blessing to the poet as he walks away from the scene. But even in the palpable relief expressed by the poem, racism exists as the inescapable fact. This poet, This Charming Man who listened to The Smiths while writing many of the book’s poems, filled with wonder at nature and ready for every possible pleasure, will always have the radius of his charm measured by this cultural menace. That, I would argue, is how the white man’s duality is imposed onto the poet. Palm-Lined with Potience presents a very active perspective on the menaces and delights of American culture.

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“The New Abandon,” by Mark Anthony Cayanan

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Moses putting a hot coal to his lips, because Moses deserves a more complicated story. I grew up hearing about a “Moses” who wasn’t supposed to be complicated in that hey-he-murdered-someone, oh-and-he-maimed-himself kind of way. He was supposed to be a hero. A spiritual leader. And every fall, the Episopalean priest at my middle school would step us through the mythos of this man and the promise he represented. What a thrill later in life to discover this Moses, who was guided by an angel to put a hot coal to his lips. And the speech impediment that made talking with Pharaoh so difficult.

I like religion that’s more than just some set way for viewing God, or understanding God or even thinking about what the stories around God are really saying. Because I don’t think God is so simple that He (or It or She or They) could really fit one description. God is literally beyond human understanding. That’s comforting to me. Or it’s a real discomfort.

Which is exactly where I feel Mark Anthony Cayan’s poem, “The New Abandon,” exists. Discomfortable! At least I’m discomfortable reading it. Because there’s “a new prophet,” and there’s a priest whose cathedral contains the smell of roses. And, big surprise, the two men are at odds! And the lovely smell of the cathedral’s roses? Well, they’re not inspiring sensually good thoughts in the priest! For him, the roses are in contrast to how corrupt all these people are for liking the spiritual world of “a new prophet.” Haven’t his priestly duties been spiritual enough for this town?

…the priest who doesn’t possess the angel’s tongue opens the cathedral doors and lets out the scent of roses. He sees the town lurch toward the new prophet and feels the wraith-breath of their corruption, feels it pronounce his years. May the prophet sinking into prayer be the one corruption the faithful love together. May their flesh be invaded by pains borrowed from the seasonal workers, pains the great design that outlasts us

(from “The New Abandon”)

Poor priest, bereft of an angel’s tongue! How is he supposed to compete with this new spiritual presence? How come the scent of roses doesn’t allure the people? And I wonder about that moment in the poem where it shifts from a third person account of the priest to a series of commands (“May the prophet sinking into prayer…”). I wonder who is doing the commanding. These seem like orders or condemnations the priest would be giving, but maybe they’re not. Maybe it’s the poem’s speaker listing off circumstances that will transpire for the priest’s personal benefit. How does this “May…” really operate? I don’t think the poem wants to answer that for me. Which makes me very happy! Yes, I’m inclined to read these in the voice of the priest, who likens the people’s corruption with “wraith-breath” (what a fun contradiction this poses to the “scent of roses” from the cathedral). But I don’t see language to substantiate me reading this in the priest’s voice.

The poem feels like one of those transformer movies, where CGI and mechanical sound effects step you through what feels like a full three minutes of steel plates and gears shifting into place so a VW Beetle can become a robot. Whatever this transition from priest as “he” to some commanding presence “may”-ing curses, the poem moves forward, and I hear the small transformation it wills into effect. The poem poses a much larger transformation, though, in the poetic form. Which moves over five sections exploding the scene. Where the first section poses a nice settled statement about the arrival of a new prophet, and the priest wishing to bring him back down to earth, subsequent sections represent what might be described as a serially timed explosion of description, filled with condemnings and other voices and social commentary and circumstance. The quote I’ve included above is from the fourth section. The fifth section is even longer! It’s a complicated situation! And it spells out trouble. “Because redemption precedes ruin…” it intones.

And what I appreciate about this formal gesture expanding and expanding on the scene is how it deceives the reader, or it reveals the priest’s Godly motivations, as well as his human ones. He should be drawn into the prophet’s world, as they are both Godly men. But he is a human with jealousy and a confusion that only aggravates his jealousy further. In Roland Barthe’s S/Z, he talks about the inaccuracy of portraiture. There are a limited number of fixed points the portrait can reasonably consider as it creates a person’s likeness. And the more paint committed to rendering those fixed points, the further the painting gets from including any other fixed points. It’s stuck just trying to be accurate with the limited information it can be accurate. It’s like Cayan’s poem comments on this, establishing its own limitations with the first section’s brevity. And then, commenting on limits by unfolding the details of the scene, by expanding on the identical statement that had appeared in an earlier section. What is the humanity behind holiness? The poem seems to ask.

Helpful LinksFonograf 1 issueWhere Mark Anthony Cayanan is right now!

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On Genevieve Kaplan’s [aviary]

I originally started this point wanting to write out my thoughts on Genevieve Kaplan’s poem, “They trail there, they trail.” But it’s difficult to write about that poem alone without setting it in the context of the overall collection, [aviary]. The poem stands on its own, of course. How it singles out some specific yellow “thing” without actually telling the reader its source. “[I]t was the one yellow thing in the gray-green / world,” is one of the moments I especially admire. Like seeing a goldfinch out of the corner of your eye, so you’re not sure you saw a goldfinch, but it’s unmistakable you saw something yellow. Maybe the poem’s yellow is that peripheral sensation, how you “must have seen” something yellow, and, suddenly, your margin of sight is your focus. Maybe it’s about seeing some unmistakable yellow flower (with “narrow curling tendrils,” to pull from how poem describes the flower), and its yellowing intensity is so loud it takes over your vision. And, for the sake of this single poem, I end it wondering if I need to understand the kind of yellow it is? Are there ways to describe a specific yellow that reaches past just calling it “yellow”? And what about the simple fact that that yellow contrasts to all the gray-green of these woods? And how the sensation of yellow feels like entirety, but it’s not the entirety of the scene.

Questions like these, in particular the ambiguity surrounding what should be something specific (like the yellow “thing”), is part of Kaplan’s operating mechanism in (aviary). To refer without specifically referring to, say, birds. “They trail there, they trail” might identify “the one hummingbird shooting past,” but, generally, the book leaves out kinds of birds in favor of what it means there are birds around us. That people have ready access to birds. Their habits and behaviors. Their actions. And, it seems to me, Kaplan would encourage people to watch how birds watch nature. Like rather than poems that delight in the particularity of a certain bird, reveling in the bird’s specific features, or its presence, or its stature, Kaplan places the poem amidst the birds, and how the world around them forms. And, remarkably, how language might express this.

the boundless animals over
short twigs, picking up the short twigs and carrying them along
in their short arms, short beaks. who drift in patterns, in waves
of sound, and echoes and cannons of them, the sirens
that (in effect) have been surrounded by (the dull roar of yellow) the only lacy
thing, the only fine thing, the only petaled thing the gray
path slowly curving to the right, to the left, curving away, the only
only soft thing

(from “They trail there, they trail”)

And how Kaplan can develop this perspective on birds over the course of the book is one of the larger pleasures of reading through (aviary). There is an undeniable intention to teach the reader what bird-perspective might be. Or I think of it as a bird-perspective, because I’m not entirely sure what to call my reading. Like what is the book’s destination? Kaplan’s language is doing something; it’s easing me into something. A way of seeing? A way to be aware while in nature? I might argue, this is what language might look like if it were voiced by a bird’s perspective. Whatever the something Kaplan is doing with the language in her book, its indecipherable origin is kind of like the “it” in Ashbery’s poems. Whose antecedent or referent you feel like you should know (and in a generous reading you’re pretty sure you do know, or maybe you just “know”). Whatever the state of knowing Ashbery puts you in, you learn to accept the “it” as something interesting enough to write a poem about. And in Kaplan’s situation, what I might call the “it” of the book has definitely localized to a kind of animal, and that informs the lens I apply to her language. At the very least, the book is concerned with birds. Consider the title of the book. Consider the many references to birds and nature. Consider what I would argue is a sequential shift in voice from human-ish observer to bird-ish observer—a shift establishing an overall arc for the book.

With the book’s first poem, “The birds had taken over,” the poet is simply observing the birds that appear in her yard. It’s a straightforward scene from her dining room window.

and that was enough pleasant talk
a chirp, there
a peck and a scattering of seed
and they get smarter by the hour, defined
by the sun and the shadow

(from “The birds had taken over”)

The poet reports on the birds’ actions. Their chirping. Their haphazard feeding. There isn’t the doubling back, like how “thing” keeps reappearing in the second half of the above quote from “They trail there, they trail.” The book’s first poem doesn’t have the chaotic details from nature. It feels focused, or framed. The poet finishing her breakfast, or whatever the occasion for this “pleasant talk,” and now the birds take center stage to that domestic scene.

It reminds me of Jennifer Chang’s poem, “The Innocent” (found in Best American Poetry 2022). For Chang, the elaboration of a family is more explicit. They observe a pair of robins who have set up a nest inside a neighbor’s honeysuckle. And, as a pandemic poem, the poet’s family has nothing to do but watch the eggs’ hatching. It’s a recursive image serving both for occasion (watching how deadly the cycle of nature can be, and all from our window!). It also serves as an analogy to the lockdown. What hope or continuance felt like while we were all trapped inside. And what both Chang and Kaplan touch on is the state of mind while watching birds. It’s a certain kind of temporality. Realizing the bird might be in your domestiic space, but it’s not a domesticated animal. And both poets stylize the language in these poems so the birds are included in a scene that feels familiar. And for Chang’s poem, the unfamiliar is something to resist, like the less familiar part of nature where a robin gets killed by their pet cat, but she’s going to keep that fact outside the familiar arrangements. Consider how Chang minimizes this event, and how that minimization fits into her reflection back on that time of the pandemic.

It was easy
to mistake the bared skeletal pinions
as lawn clippings, old leaves. That circle
in the grass, a massacre of feathers. That
terrible cat. It was easy to lose my mind.
One neighbor said, let’s not tell the children,
why know the world as always fated
toward remnant.

(from “The Innocent”)

Maybe I shouldn’t say Chang is minimizing here. But it feels like that to me. How quickly she moves past each of the details. “That circle / in the grass, a massacre of feathers. That / terrible cat.” There’s an unmistakable violence to be inferred from these descriptions, but the poet isn’t dwelling on it. She’s more moving past it quickly. Kaplan’s quote uses a somewhat similar strategy, quickly moving through impressions, “there / a peck and a scattering of seed / and they get smarter by the hour.” I’m interested in how both Chang and Kaplan can be so brief with their impressions, and yet the language still involves me in that moment. And I’m not entirely clear how it does that. Is it the domestic scenes I’m all too familiar with? How I’m reminded of the breakfast table I sit at every morning, looking out at my backyard? Do I linger because I feel like I know these moments? Or is there something in the style?

However it is, it’s significant to me, because I want to argue Kaplan’s [aviary] pushes the style in each of her poems from thick to much thicker as she moves to what I’m calling a bird-perspective. And that thickness is part of how she sees birds seeing the world. It’s a mimetic take elaborated on through a slowly shifting style that changes from one section of the book to the next. So that eventually the poems account not only for how the birds see, but where they would see. The poems move from the poet’s backyard to a more pastoral setting, where “pastoral” is not equivalent to nature, more that space between nature and the domestic. It evokes the natural world but in a contained, bordering on curated, fashion.

When I was in grad school, I argued with a professor about whether pastoral poems could occur in a city. I was using a lot of nature in my poems, and thinking particularly of the logic implicit to the natural image. For instance, in a life that feels chaotic, the cycle of seasons can feel stabilizing in their regular occurence. If there was a tradition of nature poems, I wanted to participate in that tradition. Or I wanted to think more carefully about how the details of the nature poem might be thought through further. It seems, however, that nature is not really essential to the pastoral poem. Meaning, the natural setting shouldn’t dictate the single lens for reading the pastoral poem. I understand the pastoral is also a social situation, so the reader recognizes “the people in this poem are going to act like we were all with each other in nature,” a kind of togetherness. Especially when people are together under ideal conditions. Perfect weather. A softened setting. And so maybe the pastoral is just about a group of people gathering, like when people isolated together during the pandemic. And you were just so grateful you could sit in the backyard with other while listening to birds.

And what I see in Kaplan is that “together” here doesn’t really feel like people being together, and definitely not a shepherd boy and his shepherd friends sitting around listening to the main guy tell stories. Instead, it’s the poet and her companions, who are all birds. And the poet’s special gift is to put language to how she sees birds observing and existing in the world. Like she was pulled into the bird world first by simply observing their movements while she ate breakfast, and then as her watching was more sustained, her perspective broadened, so she was looking at the birds as behaviors or life habits or the continuous series of choices a bird makes in its life. Which compelled the poet to follow the birds. Until the pastoral space she shared with them moved from her backyard to a city park to one of those patches of woods that border a city park. Something forest-ish, but not entirely forest. A place where the poet could be taught by the birds how to look, what to attend to, what an animal needs, how an animal survives or feels entertained. Or what is it animals do? And I like this as the question Kaplan’s book leads to. Because animals do so many things. And her poems, especially where I see them reconstruing what an observation is, makes what animals do feel like a sustained activity that is so different from the human explanations I project upon them.

Further ResourcesGenevieve Kaplan home pageVeliz Books

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