Sealey Challenge Day 10-11: Dear Specimen + Dark Traffic

Fossil and Decay

Dear Specimen

In contrast with some of the other collections I’ve read for this challenge, W. J. Herbert’s National Poetry Series prize-winning collection takes a quiet, more elegiac approach to addressing past species, interweaving her experiences as a mother and grandmother, experiences with her own failing body, with apostrophes to various species preserved in jars, or those she encounters in nature. She pays reverent homage to each of their bodies, a voice speaking almost from the dust; and then at the end of the collection, she does, describing herself as remembered, as a specimen, preserved in this book:

you haven’t answered my questions
and now I’m here, preserved

and catalogued
while Sarah stands over my stone

I love following her thoughts through the close turns and associations of millipede, nautiloid, water scorpion. I love where she takes us when she addresses the deer in “White-Tail,” marks how her ears, “such big dishes / they must hear whatever / excuse God is giving you.” Or in “Tipping Point,” the music of how she arrives at a poem’s denouement:

Time’s short, you say. From gorge to overlook,
Earth’s angry, now, no longer on her knees
and, still, we decimate with each degree:

black rhino, blue whale, leatherback, chinook.
No rainbow, just a grim trajectory.
Marvels archived in dust’s dissympathy.

What is reaffirmed in me from reading her work is how it’s possible to sit in the stillness of an image, to not overwork it (which I feel prone to do at times). Yet I also feel an affinity for her style, the simplicity of her rhetorical positioning: the poet observing what’s before her. The language connecting us with the observed world.

Dark Traffic

In contrast, I read Joan Naviyuk Kane’s collection yesterday, which left me scratching my head. The strategies of language are much more obscure, harder to determine context or speaker, the syntax often leaving thoughts just out of reach.

Not one to give up, I ended up Googling quite a few of the references, along the way learning about the abandoned White Alice cold war sites spread over Alaska, a history lesson I appreciated, as well as her resistance to give too much context, requiring me to put forth effort. I’ve often struggled with just how much work to do for a reader, considering that many of my workshopping audiences have wanted more context. Yet I heard once (on a podcast I don’t recall, but I believe it was Nate Marshall speaking) that Rita Dove advised poets to “never explain yourself.” I suspect one has to evolve past “emerging” to get away with this.

Despite my struggle reading Kane’s poems, I wondered how the linguistic choices were influenced by her post-colonial stance: as a Inupiaq writer, I wondered if she was pushing back against the way English has colonized the way we make meaning, perhaps calling attention to the reader’s expectation of how to arrive at “what it means.”

Curious about this, I found a great conversation between Victoria Change and Dean Rader discussing Kane’s work, which I won’t reproduce here, but which partly confirmed and elucidated this strategy. (Also, it helped me feel less like an idiot to know that even Victoria Chang had a hard time interpreting some of the poems.)

I loved one of her explanations of the strategy behind Kane’s obscurity: “It seems like Kane clearly has subject matter within this book, but she’s presenting it in a way that doesn’t spoon-feed the white gaze. In this way, I think Kane is subverting traditional notions of suffering and voyeurism.”

As one who tends to eschew deliberately difficult poetry and learn towards accessibility, this helped me not just appreciate Kane’s work, but also draw attention to my own methods of reading as positioned in a socio-cultural context. How often have I given up on a difficult poem because I brushed it off as esoteric? How much of this is due to my own class paradigm and the preconceptions about language I bring to the poem? Questions like these are what good poetry provokes, even if its meaning, at times, remains a mystery.

There’s plenty to work with though—a wealth of new terms to invigorate the experience, and enough context to infer the upshot of her message. Consider the indictment at the end of “Wellhead”:

[. . .] Oil oozes from the abandoned pit
and pock drilled by drone—toolpusher, roustabout, motorman,

whatever—his axe and lone glove thrown under the flawed
cement plug he once poured in weather too cold for any of it.
More than one well shack swells with methane, profane lumber
juts and jags. It remains. I don’t think they made a map so much

as a plan to send their pennies down a tight hole. Kill the well
to stop the spill, they say. Contain, bury, comply, and walk away.