This morning I woke from a dream in which I read aloud a long poem to my best friend and her husband. We had been in just such a configuration seven years ago when I read aloud parts of my now-dispensed-with novel (practice!), and they read aloud parts of their now-happily-published books. Only a few lines of the poem have stayed with me:
Smoke ascends on the lowlands
Descends on the highlands
Smoke rises on the Mer du Lac
I don’t speak French, and “Sea of the Lake” makes no sense nor does it exist, but in the dream-poem with dream-characters, my incantatory poem captured the attention of my friends. My fragmentary effort sent me back to Inger Christensen’s long book/poem alphabet in which she interrogates nuclear power, its waste, and the ravages of ecological devastation. A Danish poet, Christensen proceeds through the alphabet, from A to N, itemizing the beauties of the world. She also uses the Fibonacci sequence structurally in the poem—A has one line, while N has 610. Ending at “n” demonstrates a precipitous conclusion to the planet.
Here are two sections from the poem:
3
cicadas exist; chicory, chromium
citrus trees; cicadas exist;
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cere-
bellum
4
doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death
Notice how toxins gradually infiltrate the poem. Christensen published the book in 1981, and because we have delayed the inevitable, her work is even more relevant today. There’s no escaping how nuclear waste, microplastics, and environmental damage have impacted humans, animals, and the planet. Climate futurists say we have entered the “trans-apocalypse" period, when, according to reporter Elizabeth Weil, "Our lives are going to become—or, really, they already are…—defined by 'constant engagement with ecological realities,' floods, dry wells, fires. And there’s no opting out.”
Perhaps poetry means only what it can mean: a way to awaken from the spells we are under. Poetry calls out–in its own incantatory ways–what we don’t see, what we refuse to see, and what we have to awaken from. Of course, there’s no better spell-breaker than Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The wake-up call is in the first verse: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Like Whitman, we must begin first with our own experience. Your song of yourself, in details, will vary widely from mine– and yet that’s the only way into the bigger unearthly experience of oneness.
Johannes Göransson’s Summer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022) puts us right behind his front door as the sirens (syrenerna) begin their efforts to entrance him. The book-length poem begins:
I can’t hear you
the lilacs are in bloom and the underworld
is slow I’m slowly listening to girls
sing about the rabble in syrenerna
they’re at my door pöbeln
the girls are in the lilacs syrenerna
I can’t hear them
Throughout the poem, Göransson interjects his native Swedish into the English–so that the lines have an unarticulated heaviness and obfuscation that forces the reader to follow the emotional thread of the poem rather than each line’s syntax and meaning. By page 33 of the book, he writes:
Follow my voice my voice follow
my voice I follow your voice
into syrenerna I follow the rabble
the voices the birthmark on
your torso: a puncture wound puncture
wound a wound is a sign
Now the reader becomes the entranced, following the sirens and the “rabble of voices” to the puncture wound that is the painful center of the speaker/poet’s tragedy:
for you my daughter doesn’t [sic] have
lungs has a hole in her lungs
where the dragon flies swarm
out where the toxins leak in
to her DNA ribbons we are in
the afterworld her after
world…
The world of the poem is a damaged and unrelenting world– rife with rioters, garbage, hissing snakes, and a haunting revolver.
Göransson says in an interview: “The ‘Summer’ of this poem is not so much a season as a site of intensity, poisoned by the world…Similarly, my daughter’s death was caused by some (not known) toxin that made its way into her mother’s body and caused a hole in her lung-diaphragm. I wanted the poem to be poisoned.”
Such realities are not soothing; but, “sites of intensity” are upon us, infiltrating even a child in the womb. Göransson’s work speaks to the ruined innocence of our contemporary times. To charges that his poetry can seem “gratuitous” and does not pacify the reader with easy epiphanies, the poet says, “But poetry must run counter to good taste, which is antithetical to true art. You have to find that ecstatic, intensive space where everything chimes.” For me, that last line speaks volumes. Where is your intensive space where “everything chimes” as an incantation should?
In April, I attended writer Nina McLaughlin’s excellent workshop, sponsored by lostintheletters and held at Oakland Cemetery. Her big takeaway that I follow as I work as well is this: “Discipline is not just at the desk. What you are trying to do with your writing is to cast a spell.”
Here are some of McLaughlin’s specific techniques to dive into those intense spaces in your work:
–Drop into your actual surroundings (whether through a daily walk or commute)
--Do some work with your hands to give release from the active mind
–Consider how to integrate bodily sensations into the work
–Allow for the irrational
–Trust that your writing does not have to make perfect sense
–Pay attention to charged bodily senses as you write
–Move away from language, and then back to it
To a spell-binding summer for all!