immesurable divisions?

Anemone nemorosa. Frome, 19 March 2021.

When we poetry readers move between different poems, there's a kind of leakage across our readings, they're not insulated. I came from thinking about Sir John Davies' 1599 poem Nosce Teipsum, a philosophical account of the soul, and my questions about the distinctness of personal identity seemed to proceed uninterrupted into the dramatically modern turbulence of what I picked up next:  

Place :

                Is a

   dis-place-meant

                    in the means of

location

                A singlular

               locale [isn't/it?]

                                                    Are numbers of years spent

                                                    to account for :

               [opt out

               or into :]

                                         immesurable

                                                        divisions ?

That which is rent from one

In this movement

separrejeuvenation

a cultural-linguistic

                                                   promise

                                                   name     home

                                                   plane     schlept car

                                                   shipped to walk

                                                   stop

                                                                                      --and then

locate the "exile" in "reconciliation"

of frontiers and calculable numbers

of words available in each of her tongues

un-cross-stitched from what one was / is          

the average

trans-     

               stamp thumped on a block of papers

               declares her                        Hearing

                                                                          is in

                                           a quieter tone:       this

place of all echoes

                                           the palimpsestic

                                           singular

This is the beginning of the first of a group of five poems by Jennifer K. Dick in the anthology women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (theenk Books, 2017). My thoughts still ran on Sir John Davies' soul: is it both single and singular, or does it only appear single by being singular ("singlular")? Or single by virtue of appearing to be only in one place; but are places meaningfully distinct from the soul's perspective? 

But tonight I read the poem more as about migration, about humans in different places. (Jennifer K. Dick was born in Iowa and lives in Mulhouse (France).)

But still, there's a questioning of singleness and demarcation that's deeply ingrained in this text. Words aren't just words, they are activated words. They are constantly being marked as quotations, italicized, capitalized, parenthesized, question-marked, energetically spaced across the line, creatively misspelled, multilingual, and conversing with each other by meaning (meant, means), rhyming (meant, spent, rent) or partial repetition (schlept, shipped; exile, reconcile). Stop jogging my elbow while I'm trying to read! That's what I imagine a traditional reader protesting (and I still have that traditional reader buried inside somewhere). This writing interrupts the flow, it asks us how the word reached us, about intention and control. It says that words conceal as well as reveal. That, after all, reality is outside the words, we might need to look past them and not just through them. 

The quotations are from a book by Erín Mouré, so Jennifer's poems are building on a practice that´s already inclined to multivocality and multilingualism. Like when we build two towers of bricks and then try to put one on top of the other. It courts a collapse of what separates one from another or inside from outside. Which is a recurrent image in her poems. As here in the fourth poem,  

the lost, regurgitated sandstorm

grit on windowless windowsill

a poem that considers ruined buildings and Alzheimers and "wherein our particulars vanish..". 

Or

Sure, you left the newspaper articles, fragments of
windows to be replaced, the beige sawdust coating the blackened
broken cement, the shattered café front.

from What holds the body, in a section that considers explosions as well as balancing on a tightrope (Sourced from here: http://www.dcpoetry.com/anthology/25 ).

Some say that the first fundamental of primitive life was the cell wall. Only when there's separation can life exist, evolve, create. And that's how most of us think, most of the time. To write a poem you start with a new page or empty screen, you paint on a blank canvas, you make dinner when you've wiped down the sides, you begin to build a home by laying down a clean foundation. This is poetry that wonders what's at stake in these ideas of infection and apartheid, and whether we can think it differently. 

There's a good amount of Jennifer's poetry available online, and a good list on her website. Or rather, two lists:

Poems in English:
https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/poem.html

Poems in French: 

https://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com/p/fr-poemes.html

*

I'm currently reading the long extract from Enclosure here:

http://www.bigbridge.org/BB16/features/28poets/28jdick.htm

I'm not sure if it's part of ENCLOSURES (2007), or part of Lilith: a novel in fragments (2019), or neither. It's grounded on Ovid's Echo and Narcissus: echoes and reflections and eyes. Here are two extracts:

She is within her                       a repetition,                       a mirror, silvered-over

                             surfacing,                       mirage

leaden,                                     lead,                                     to be leading

                                               Some part or point of

voice bleeding                          over,                                     into paper

                             scratches                against,                     she scrapes

This is like a gasp

                             she says

                                                She wants to say

                                                                                            to be saying

----

A sleight for stored eyes        a staff to unsever her deprived by thankless Athens

In her mind's lyre            in the wind's mire opposed to the twilight of her trial        perceptive

Rail        immediate        redolent        mind her eye or vigilance kept contagion

if this were catching     she should advise he keep a sharp        look heed ahead out the

mischievous signs "o mine tie, thine..." tapered to, knotted        were she but one-sighed or

willowlike a cypress-Cyclops mounting with aramisapians—if time should prove to be

so sure as seeking with half a fly-on-the-wall      peek though the needle      spin

her waifish body suddenly perceived heavily-handed         as a camel's two-thump inability

to pass through eyeing the spire of the storm         screen-hurricane periphery

casting a sheep's, a glad, an open   

---

aramisapians -- transforming Arimaspians, a legendary one-eyed tribe of northern Scythia. 

*

Two poems by Jennifer K. Dick on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog. "Boundary" and "Timber Hitch" are from an in-progress project called Shelf Break that uses a lot of nautical terms. (Somewhat ironically for an Iowan, as she notes.)

http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2020/01/jennifer-k-dick-two-new-poems-from.html

Here's section 2 of "Timber Hitch": 

median of misconceptions
misanthropic
mesopelagic tropical
amoebic dysentery
diatribe or troubled
waterways:
spindly motors,
mortar, cracks,
fissures, figments
glint atop the gangway
gate or plate
schlepped up on
deck the
chained the
hauled the
cratered cargo
hold
ruinporn ornamentation
a lapsus
“next to baroque mermaids”                                DA, 58
Neptune
narwhale
Nebuchadnezzar 

["DA, 58" references a quote from a translation of Demosthenes Agrafiotis.]

*

But now those mermaids and the troubled Mmms of that opening are drifting this post and me off to another kind of mermaid, another melting of separation, the half-shark half-human Girl of Lisa Samuels' Tender Girl (Dusie, 2015). This current debate about definition and singleness has many aspects and many contributors.  

In the following extract Girl has found some books/barques.

Having decided, Girl moved there. She was clawed in time with barque masks. She collects herself for a while, herself several damp examples leaning on the pulpit by the end of the rented hall, and she would give them up next time she felt herself leaving town. But the hall was comforting, it was renewable and unlikely, her slapping feet from one end to the next. 

The hot wine drunk down her throat. To be alone and yet populated with exemplars was an aim she was learning to adopt alongside books with lists of names, one anchored to the next and the next, one heaving according to time, another according to license or locale, another simple alphabetic comforting. She had these by her strange eating, piece by piece, piled thin. The sniffing of the skins of the books taught her how to think and speak here. 

(Tender Girl, p. 46)

Anemone nemorosa. Frome, 19 March 2021.

Wood Anemone (Anemone nemorosa, Sw: Vitsippa). Throughout most of the British Isles (our only native Anemone). Throughout southern half of Sweden and more sporadically up to Jämtland. It also grows a long way up the Norwegian coast, about as far as Bodø. Anemone = windflower. Nemorosa = of the woods, shady places. 

The Swedish name Vitsippa means White Sippa. "Sippa" is a Swedish flower-name given to various attractive Anemone/Hepatica/Pulsatilla species in the Ranunculaceae, and also to the unrelated Dryas octopetala ("Fjällsippa") in the Rosaceae. The others are: 

Blåsippa (Blue Sippa): Hepatica or Liverleaf, Hepatica nobilis. Beloved early spring flower in most of Sweden. Not in British Isles except as garden escape. 

Gulsippa (Yellow Sippa): Yellow Anemone, Anemone ranunculoides. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles except as rare garden escape.

Tovsippa: (Tuft Sippa) Anemone sylvestris. Big white flowers, rare on Gotland and Öland. Not in British Isles.

Nipsippa: (River-erosion-sandbank Sippa) Pulsatilla patens. Rare in Gotland and Ångermanland. Not in British Isles. It occurs across Russia to Kamschatka and also in NW America (ssp. multifida).

Mosippa (Sand-heath Sippa): Pale Pasqueflower, Pulsatilla vernalis. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles.

Fältsippa (Field Sippa): Pulsatilla pratensis. Rare in S. and E. Sweden to Uppland. Not in British Isles.

Backsippa (Hill Sippa): Pasqueflower, Pulsatilla vulgaris. Uncommon from Skåne to Uppland, formerly more common. Uncommon in S. England, mostly Cotswolds/Chilterns.

Fjällsippa (Mountain Sippa): Mountain Avens, Dryas octopetala. Local in the fells, Jämtland and north. Very local in northern British Isles (e.g. the Burren, N. Wales, Scotland). 

Donna Stonecipher

Painting by Kyli John

[Image source: Collision at the Herrick Gallery, Piccadilly (April 2019). Artist: https://www.instagram.com/kyli.john/ .]  

Model City [1]

It was like slowly becoming aware one winter that there are new buildings going up all over your city, and then realizing that every single one of them is a hotel.

*

It was like thinking about all those empty rooms at night, all those empty rooms being built to hold an absence, as you lie in your bed at night, unable to sleep.

*

It was like the feeling of falling through the 'o' in 'hotel' as you almost fall asleep in your own bed, the bed that you own, caught at the last minute by ownership, the ownership of your wide-awake self.

*

It was like giving in to your ownership of yourself and going to the window, looking out at all the softly illuminated versions of the word 'hotel' announcing their shifting absences all over the city.



*


Donna Stonecipher is another poet I've discovered via the anthology women: poetry : migration, ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (2017). (DS: born in Seattle, lives in Berlin.)

I suppose it's OK to quote this poem in full, as it's already on the Internet at least twice. It's the first of the five in this anthology, and also the first in the Shearsman book Model Cities (2015): an elegant, romantic and comfortably sleepy prelude to a book in which "ownership of yourself" becomes questionable and in which the city comes to be seen as an accretion of commodities.  

(Jennifer K. Dick's review of Model Cities is helpful: https://jacket2.org/reviews/urban-interior-exterior-ideal .)  

There is plenty of Stonecipher's poetry on-line, and plenty of writing about her too. This is a detailed review, by Bonnie Costello, of her most recent book, Transaction Histories.

http://bostonreview.net/poetry/bonnie-costello-limits-cosmopolitanism

I particularly like the Berlin Lyrikline site, where you can read a number of Stonecipher's poems in English as well as in translations to other languages. (On the same site, she has also supplied some of the English translations of work by other poets.)

https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/transaction-history-3-13371

*

             1.

            He travelled to Japan but he didn’t see any geishas. He travelled to Kenya but he didn’t see any giraffes. When he opened the book, he was surprised to find inside it another book. After a bad night in room 536, the hotel pool swallowed him like a square blue mouth swallowing a sleeping pill.

  

            2.

            It is hard to rip up a photograph with a face in it. In the tiniest torn-up piece, the face is still intact. The face lies smiling up from the bottom of the wastebasket, and then smiles as it falls out of the garbage truck onto a lawn, and then smiles as it drifts slowly across the city back to your door.

             3.

            Young people from the less powerful country came over to study the language of the more powerful neighboring country. The questionnaire found that, within a small margin of error, such-and-such percentage of women prefer to be on their knees while performing such-and-such sexual acts.

              4.

            She felt like crying when she read in the paper that déjà vu was a chemical reaction in the body and not a magical window into existences previous and future at all. The oval mirror hanging by a black ribbon above the mantel reflected part of the dark sofa and the smile on the porcelain geisha lamp.

*

This comes from "Inlay 7 (Franz Kafka)", which later quotes that dedicated public servant in The Trial : "What you say sounds reasonable enough," said the man, "but I refuse to be bribed. I am here to whip people, and whip them I shall."

https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/inlay-7-franz-kafka-13372

the smile on the porcelain geisha lamp

Donna Stonecipher

[Image source: https://stadtsprachen.de/en/event/parataxe-presentation-the-dung-donna-stonecipher/ . At a reading with fellow Berlin poet Thế Dṻng in October 2018.]