Quietly Between: Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler, Lori Anderson Moseman and Sarah Green

 

with texture and light
with words sunk
skin hoarding electric

my relation to scarcity
to extended touch (lack)

I tell you stories I tellno one
that they were just names
whispered from ash    a collection
of coin without reprieve(Megan Kaminski)

I’mintrigued by Quietly Between (Fort Collins CO: A Viewing Space, 2022), aquartet of solicited poem sequences and photography  by American poets Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler,Lori Anderson Moseman and Sarah Green that each respond to the same veryparticular prompt. As the original prompt, included at the back of thecollection, opens:

15-25 images/cards (combinationof text and image).

Begin with place andtime.

Place(s): where youare/were. Both text and photos could be of your present place. Or one elementis, and the other draws from something else.

Time: some element oftime is incorporated into the project. In the film All the Days of the Year,Walter Ungerer returns to the same place in Mount Battie, Camden, Maine everyday for one year. He sets up his camera, and takes thirteen, ten second shotswhile turning the camera clockwise.

Curiouslyenough (at least to me), three of these poets are above/ground press authors,with the fourth, Sarah Green, being a name entirely unknown to me before this. FromLawrence, Kansas, Kaminski writes “this wide open heavy”; from Fort Collins,Colorado, Vogler writes “Ceremony of Knotted Songs”; from Provo, Utah, Mosemanwrites “(t)here now soon new”; and from Joshua Tree, California, Green writes “HoldingGround.” I’m fascinated by each contributor’s approach to the serial poem and thepoem/photograph interplay, as well as to the poem-as-document, an echo of how Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay termed her own particular exploration through thetradition of the Canadian long poem, “the documentary poem,” or even to Lorine Niedecker’s own simultaneous explorations examining geography and languagethrough and against each other. “My project documents a deep listening and akind of answering,” Megan Kaminski writes, to open her “PROCESS” note at theback of the collection, “as well, to the human and more-than-human persons thatcall us into relation and into the specificity of place through their whispers,songs, and histories. From the Kansas Ozarks to my backyard in East Lawrence,to First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach where I sought refuge as ateenager, to the daily bike rides to the Wakarusa wetlands on the edge of town—likethe oversaturated spring and summer soil, my embodied experiences and thesepoems soaked up all that fed them.” Each of the four poets have short ‘processnotes’ at the back, offering insight into elements of their thinkings andresponses to the original prompt, and there are interesting echoes that ripplethroughout all four works of attention to small detail, and how each poet respondsthrough landscape to their individual landscapes and how they see them. As LoriAnderson Moseman writes: “I wrote poems not about the images but through them:snapshots became magnets that drew emotions, experiences, ideas to them. I wouldrevise words as more photos/life events joined the sequence. The most dramatictransformation came after a conversation with Brad Vogler. He challenged me tonot limit my vision of our project: one postcard does not have to contain justa single landscape.”

Kaminski’s“this wide open heavy” offers a kind of unfurling across sixteen short lyricbursts, providing one step and then a further step. “to enter into a clearing,”the opening poem writes, “to bathe in gray April light / not-dying not quiteemerging [.]” Vogler’s “Ceremony of Knotted Songs” is a sequence of sixteennumbered poems, and there is such delicate thought and placement to his shortlines and phrases. “I keep going back // here              there,” he writes, to open thesecond poem. Or as the third piece begins: “pillowcase curtains / season with/            wind [.]” I very much likethe way Moseman’s “(t)here now soon new” writes around and across herparticular landscape, spacing out the lyric across the varying and individual pointsacross her view. Her particular lyric offers a kind of accumulation ofindividual points across a wide gesture. “dear cottonwood,” she writes, “I cannothear you / from the far jetty // your roar fell last fall [.]” And for Green, her“Holding Ground” is the first I’ve seen of her work; the effect of each poem isakin to setting down one playing card after another, each card shifting themeaning of what came before, each poem self-contained in a kind of tethered rowof lyric moments.

Viathe poetic sequence, each of these four poets offer their variation on thestretched-out lyric sketch, allowing this collection to emerge into a bookabout being present in temporal and physical space, each poet blending lyricand photographic attention from their own particular American corners, across aquartet of American states moving straight west from the Midwest to the Coast.

mother left a letter
of
    naming
(home) tree – sassafras
here ash

for you

walking
         walking
unsettled
leaf at (the) river lip
    loosed quietly (lost)
        (on its way) away (Brad Vogler)