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Abstract
At first glance this book might seem like one of isolation, loneliness. I see it too, as in its language—"Where hand ought, absence” & “the city named after a ghost. As if any other”—and in its overt absences, vast distances, and the other only rarely glimpsed by the camera. If the other does eventually appear, they are just as quickly obscured; “Fire, figure, silhouette,” a backlight obscuring other into outline. The isolation(s) this text writes out of are many. From big picture to small (or from the societal to the individual), these poems respond to the new and rapidly shifting widely experienced impositions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the harder to define isolation(s) experienced by trans women across all spheres, and the specific isolation and loneliness that follows the loss of a romantic relationship amid all these intersectional, comorbid, isolations. There are myriad other influences too. Isolation, it turns out, is the constant condition, loneliness like a ritual.
Toward the exploration of this feeling, I’ve written a central image. This image, the window, shifty and frequently transliterated into variants—the television, the internet, the mirror, the sliver space between sleep and day—presents something of a conundrum. Although its primary function is to let things in—light, view, cross-draft—it is still a boundary, a physically solid half-step between wall and vista. Within this paradigm of isolation, a window suggests a complicated relationship between spaces. In these poems, television (and other visual and digital mediums) presents a possibility for connection, but this it is a hollow and fleeting possibility. The images from the screen, those many hours spent with reality television with its too-loud commercial interludes, still not enough noise to fill an empty room. “These failed mouths;” these television programs washed up on shore, waterlogged. Too this collection’s dissatisfaction with the passive encounter.
However, though these poems are woven out of the logic and the language of loneliness, as I worked to revise the poems into a cohesive whole, I encountered a collection that was less isolated than I may once have suspected. In the later drafts, the poems revealed their company to me, a loose collective of friends and lovers, animals and plants. But perhaps more than any other, these poems are joined by their influences. These influences are many, and I suspect that I am still not aware of all the works that have in some way accompanied me in the writing of these poems, but there are several main figures that bear naming. Perhaps more than any other, the poems owe a debt to the serial poets of the mid-century, George Oppen and Charles Olson. I first encountered Oppen while an undergraduate at the University of Montana, in an undergraduate independent study with poet, Prageeta Sharma (the author of Undergloom, another hugely influential text). I recall my delight in reading this text, how in it something clicked, but it was only in the past couple of weeks that I read it again. In this return I encountered a poem that must have provided much initial, if near-subconscious, influence for the second poem in this collection The Little Hesitation. Like Oppen’s, this poem considers the question of “we”, thinking through the condition of the individual, the collective, and the permeable boundary between the two.
If Oppen’s influence was sub-conscious, Olson has been a very active participant in my writing since reading the bulk of The Maximus Poems with Julie Carr in an independent study of open field poetics several years ago. In Olson’s Maximus I encountered a twisty and surprising exploration of both the poet and his place, Gloucester. To that end, Olson capitalizes on the serial form to write a many year project through the journalistic, the political and the historical. These poems shift without warning from moments of stringent lyric attention into poems that dally in the dull, pulling extended chunks from the Gloucester archive to tell the story of the fishermen who have lived and worked and died in that community since the colonization of New England.
