Sealey Challenge Day 12: Your Kingdom

Oracle

I first learned of Eleni Sikelianos’s work by listening to an excerpt of her long poem, “Your Kingdom,” on Poetry’s audio poem of the day, and loved the rich language, the conceit of our bodies being an archive of all life forms.

In reading the book (which is 157 pages, plus a glossary!), and assigning myself the task to write about it, it’s a bit like drinking from a firehose and trying to describe the taste. The poems feel very organic, almost unformed, and the book, with its graphics and borrowed lines, feels like a notebook of sorts, as if it’s not quite “finished.” This is not a criticism, but an observation of what (I think) is a strategy that fits the subject matter—tracing our lineage back to protozoa and salamander, recognizing in ourselves all the traits of all the species we tend to “other,” our phylogeny. It’s language pre-civilization, so it flows across the page, branching and vining in ways that resist what we’d call form. (I assert this after reading it for a couple of hours, but reserve the right to change my opinion if I had more time with it).

The experience of reading it feels like deciphering runes, or an oracle’s riddles—the speaker is wiser than I, possesses a vast wealth of knowledge, is sharing it—and I am inadequate to master it. Her subtitle to section one sums it up: “That’s How Dumb You Are.”

But this is also part of the point: we are utterly ignorant before the infinite variables of plant and animal. In this way, the book mimics the sublime, reminding us how insignificant we are in the cosmos, how marvelous is the cosmos.

The disorientation of language and endless array of biological terminology provide me with seeds of thought for jumping off into my own poems and notes. (Is it wrong to read this way, not merely to experience the language, but to ask how I might use it? Or is it homage?)