Katie Naughton, The Real Ethereal

 

the question of address(elegy: apartment)

with you I have reached
the limits of reason withyou
described the trajectory
you had two chairs andmine
was never close enough
at breakfast I want toyou
close to you be to you
I tell you everything I see
the kitchen every day I map
my heart the morning foryou
the cat circles us liesin the sun
the large room at the top
of the old house
everything I said to youfailed
it my self and the limits
of what I could know I felt

Followingchapbooks through above/ground press and Dancing Girl Press [see my review of such here] (the second ofwhich is folded into this current work) comes Brooklyn, New York-based poet and editor Katie Naughton’s full-length poetry debut, The Real Ethereal (FortCollins CO: Delete Press, 2024). Set in four sections of staggered, staccato lyrics—“daybook,” “hour song,” “the question of address” and “the real ethereal”—Naughton examinesfragments, frictions and accumulations, allowing individual points and posits togather, cluster and group into larger structures that reveal themselves slowly,as the forest through the trees. There is something of the collection thatoffers itself as a single through-line, a single, extended thought or lyricsentence that runs the length and breadth of it, from one moment unto the next.“the billowing bright day is gone we did not / have the money to keep it,” shewrites, as part of the opening section-sequence “day book,” “the picture taken/ upstairs the light and heat coming through / the window then the house / torndown the waste mass / of drywall plaster and beams that was the most / money I everknew and so much [.]” The accumulations are layered, and propulsive: one line andthen another in sequence.

Iwould presume that Naughton would be well aware of the implications of composingsuch an opening sequence, especially writing from Buffalo (where she has been adoctoral candidate in the Poetics program, only recently relocating to Brooklyn),as an echo of the late Robert Creeley’s infamous A Day Book (New York:Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). While it has been more than fifty years since thepublication of that particular work, Creeley’s shadow looms large across contemporarypoetics, after all, and nowhere more than Buffalo, where he taught forthirty-seven years as Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor ofPoetics, from 1966 to 2003. “the image world shimmers in our neighbor’s windows/ the vacant house,” she writes, “and who left it / pink hearts and red a sugarcrystal glitter / in winter [.]”

Naughtonbegins this collection with her “day book” poems, suggesting a movement throughtime, but the poems of The Real Ethereal hold to an immediacy, aperpetual moment across the American present through parsed and penetratingshort-form lengths. “morning takes me take the street traffics / daily timethrough me though morning,” she writes, to open “my love in strange places,”the poem that begins the second section, “comes already strange and I leave /the choirs of history and their small bells [.]” Her lyrics really do propelwith their expansiveness, their ongoingness, offering a simultaneous, infiniteand open-ended present. “dawn is not mine day still breaks yellow,” begins thepoem “warming ending what it may you persist.” Naughton seeks questions of elegyand address, between what is real and what is less than, and what makes thedifference, striding the line between concrete and abstract. She seeksquestions around the complexities of ethics vs. capitalism, and what can beheld, or held against; seeking answers to how not only to be present, but tosomehow survive. As part of the sequence “a second singing,” set in the finalsection, reads:

Some days are my inheritance
gray and November I want
to see out of them andalso
to be inside them though
the endless dissipation thebody
turning to heat to wastepass
or spend a life itsimagined
or remembered textures. Somost time
stopped to rememberhappens
in an empty room with theinternet
the flat word of thescreen
standing in for someother place
where something happens.The
news is who stays poor in
the necessary roomswaiting
for dinner. I’m in somethreshold
looking through twodoors.
The rooms are empty butfeel
like weight   like world.