During the Fall 2020 semester, I was on sabbatical leave, writing and revising poems for a new poetry collection. But the central rejuvenating activity of my sabbatical was the chance to read: books on writing and reading, works of literary criticism, essay collections, memoirs, studies on teaching/pedagogy, and considerations of the current crisis in higher education. All of the writing I was able to accomplish above would’ve been impossible to imagine if I had not been able to immerse myself in these works, along with, nearly every day, a chance to read individual poems, essays, studies, and discussions via social media. See the attached photo for a visual of what it looks like when professors finally have the freedom to read work we are not necessarily preparing to teach in a classroom (and send me a note if you’d like the full bibliography!)
What you might notice most from this photo is how many individual collections of poetry I was able to slow down and enjoy. If you are not a regular reader of poetry, I invite you to consider picking up a full collection by a single writer, taking the risk of a slow, patient encounter with one poet’s imagination, language, and experience, the way some of us used to listen to full albums, one side of the record and one song at a time. Simply have the experience you have of the work, not worrying about “hidden meanings” or “solving” the poem.
Here are two recent collections, both by poets I know, that I would recommend:
Miho Nonaka’s The Museum of Small Bones is a study in paying attention to the world through and within language. A bilingual writer, her poems attend to both her Japanese heritage and language and her experience of life in the West. In the collection’s title poem, she describes both a trip to an actual Tokyo museum with a friend and gives away her hope for what poetry might do. She writes,
God must know why our lives are
so illogical. I dreamed of a power
to make small, imperceptible things
perceptible, like the pattern of bones of a bat
in flight. The power to stave off despair.
To make “imperceptible things /perceptible” is one of a poet’s powers in our human quest to push back against despair, and Nonaka is an expert in this art. In “The Production of Silk,” a series of some thirty prose poems, Nonaka considers her family's heritage as skilled artisans or shokunin. “Of all the ways I reassure myself,” she writes in one poem, “I am most comforted to remember that I come from a family of shokunin. I never believed that the self is a project of one’s own making, and having a specific role assigned to me is, paradoxically, a form of freedom.” We are saved from ourselves, or from despair, not by “magical encounters” or “charisma but by “small works I am equipped to do, tasks that require faithful use of my hands, shaping things for someone beyond my immediate reality.”
Those small tasks ground the poet/shokunin both in her body and in her community, the people beyond us. Each of these poems is such an attentive act of care and creation, not merely for the writer but for readers, as the collection’s last poem ends: “It’s you, waiting to be translated.”
In American Wake, Kerrin McCadden also calls for us to pay attention--to place, to loss, to abundance--and then enacts just how hard it can be to see any one thing, person, experience, word as only itself. The poems shuttle back and forth between Ireland and Vermont, between the time before and after her brother’s death. As the book’s publisher reminds us, “an American wake is what the Irish call a farewell to those emigrating to the United States.” It is of course also what we call a mourning party for the dead when we share tales of the dead. And a wake is also what we can be caught up in when we are in the water and a ship passes by, or when life’s circumstances catch us up and set us down someplace unexpected.
What I admire most about McCadden’s poems is the sheer energy and abundance of them, as well as her endless playfulness with structures and forms. Some poems are sonnets while others are lists, or dictionary definitions, or even a choose your own adventure riff. In each case, she is pressing on all the possible meanings of any given word, as in “Passerines”, where she returns again and again to the phrase “I want to tell you” while she considers this name for a kind of bird. But of course that desire to pin down meaning is as impossible as holding a bird in one’s hand forever, or of knowing the future:
Passerine, I thought, Passerine—
a more future verb tense for to pass, a tense I can’t
know yet—a passing I can’t understand.
At the heart of any wake is loss, a deep reckoning with a passing too hard to understand. And McCadden’s poems about her brother’s death show all the ranges of anger, grief, celebration, incomprehension, clarity, and consequence that come from a loved one’s death by drug overdose. In “When My Brother Dies,” McCadden realizes in the first few lines: “It happened already. It has happened five times / and will happen again.” Death from addiction, the poem shows us, happens many times before it happens:
“Which death are my parents crying about /now? I wonder if it’s motorcycle death, or locked / in jail death.” And so on goes the list. And so on go the poems, including one titled “reverse overdose.”
If you read McCadden’s collection, you will also come to know that “wake” also means coming into consciousness, to awaken, and that is another gift of her poems’ relentless refusal to accept easy comfort: “This morning I bramble toward waking,” she writers in a poem that also includes these lines:
Somewhere,
someone finds me phenomenal--I stand
so tall and keep the future as a pet. Together we swim
the headwaters like children who don’t know
the rules.
Someone, somewhere does find us phenomenal, invites us all to awaken to the layered possibilities of attending our worlds through language, swimming together until we are fully aware of what we know and what we don’t, a waking that McCadden and Nonaka both offer us in their poems if we’ll take the risk of reading them.
The Museum of Small Bones by Miho Nonaka (2020) is available to borrow via interlibrary loan and for purchase via Ashland Poetry Press.
American Wake by Kerrin McCadden (2021) is available for purchase via Godine.com.
