This is another episode of "Poetry? I
just don't get it..."
A series where I post a poem or group of
poems by one author, followed by anything the author wants to say about the
work. (Other poets in the series can be found on the tab above.)
 |
Two Faint Lines in the Violet
(Negative Capability Press, 2014) |
This time around, the poetry of
I was reading her excellent first book,
(a 2014 Foreword Reviews' INDIEFAB Book of
the Year Award finalist,
as well as a finalist for the Julie Suk
Award for Best Poetry Book by an Independent Press),
a book that includes a series about the
death of her father from cancer
and its relation to the toxic waste
leaking from a now-decommissioned nuclear facility upriver from where he lived, and admired how each poem in the book
informs the others, how the personal expands to include a much
larger world.
I immediately wanted to post a poem from the book on the blog, but I also wanted to present the interconnections in the book,
show how the poems work together. My first thought was to ask her for
three poems...
 |
Glass Needles & Goose Quills
(Haley's, 2017) |
It just so happened that she had just
published a new book,
that intermingled prose and
poetry. She sent me an excerpt and it was exactly what I was looking for…
So, instead of posting the poems first and
ending with an explanation or essay, this round is an excerpt from her new
book, where the poems are intermixed with explanations of how the poems came
about.
Lissa Kiernan is the founder,
executive director, and a teaching artist for the Poetry Barn, a literary center based in New York's
Hudson Valley, sponsoring workshops, readings, craft talks, and book arts for
all ages.
 |
| Poetry Barn, West Hurley, NY |
Thanks to Lissa for letting me post these excerpts.
Without further ado:
Excerpts from
Glass Needles & Goose Quills:
Elementary Lessons
in Atomic
Properties,
Nuclear Families & Radical Poetics
Reconciling the
strange bedfellows of poetry and polemics can result in artistic catastrophe
and the protest poem is where they are just dying to hook up. Even Denise
Levertov, the ultimate protest poet, in her 1981 essay, “On the Edge of
Darkness: What is Political Poetry?” wondered whether “polemical content”
can make for good poetry. She observed that prior to the advent of the
printing press, poetry was an oral, communal experience. People welcomed a
poem that concerned itself with politics as a decent way of getting the
day’s news.
By 1620, though,
Francis Bacon could write that typographical printing had “changed the whole
face and state of things throughout the world.” Consequently, lyric poetry—perhaps the most personal
mode—came to be more highly regarded than epic, dramatic, or satiric poetry,
according to Levertov, encouraged by the novel's quickly growing affinity for
the topics with which these non-lyric modes were traditionally concerned.
By 1955, poetry’s
purview in matters of mass communication had all but been absolved, as
William Carlos Williams observed:
It
is difficult
to
get the news from poems
yet
men die miserably every day
for
lack
of
what is found there.
—excerpt from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” Journey to Love (1955)
❧
ATOMS FOR PEACE
Three decades after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident halted all new reactor orders,
President Barack Obama announced $8 billion in federal loan guarantees
to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia.
Five hours into
jury pool, I am burned out
on poetry. What I
am thirsty for is news.
Good. News.
O, MSNBC, guide me
through
this inverted
world, turned back
180 degrees on its
stalk.
Enough of this
crazy heat!
I feel impelled to
speak today
in a language
that, in a sense, is new.
I, too, would like
a plan for clean,
safe energy. One
which generates
jobs, ideally,
since I am now six
paychecks behind.
One that fills
in the pit of
partisanship
with some
sensible, recyclable waste.
Voir dire. To
see them say. False
etymology. I see the
president
say it. His lips,
that is, are moving.
But how do I know
that he believes,
with every atom,
his axiom?
Whether he’s seen
the burning
bush, the worried
wind, the patient
sun? Just one. Who
stands light-
rinsed for the cameras
with the clarity of a star.
❧
Levertov concludes
her essay with the conviction that “whether these poems are good or
not depends on the gifts of the poet, not on the subject matter.” Whatever
poetic gifts I may have then possessed were being put severely to the
test. Possibly seeking emotional distance, I initially chose write my
protests as epistles, aka letters, in an archaic, semi-Elizabethan-era
diction—the mask of a spiritual witness from a bygone era. When I shared
one with my mentor, she told me that, to her ear, the speaker’s voice
sounded comical. Not quite the effect I had been going for.
❧
WHEREAS MY FATHER,
who was rarely ill
in all his life, lay failing
in a bed shrouded
white and verily said unto me:
knowst thou that my
neighbor, too, has a brain sickness?
Wherefore he made
his home a stone’s throw
down shady unpaved
roads. Past the Eagle's
Nest, Salmon
Ladder, and Hairpin
Turn, until at
last a silver filament glinted
beside, more
stream than river, more rill,
at summer’s peak,
than stream. And it was good,
this radiant child
of the Deerfield River.
He would sit atop
a sturdy rock and watch the water
rise. Mark whence
it heaved and whither
it sighed, and
soon, it became habit to bathe there—
blind to what
simmered upstream in sapphire
pools, heating
grassy banks where children
dodged balls,
turned cartwheels, played tag.
Where corn is
tilled and squash blossoms. Milk-
Animals graze on
brilliant greens, udders aglow
in the moon. And
lo — one day my father’s brain-
films cast shadows
and men in white coats
proclaimed: Rightfully,
we do not know
from whence it
came. It is possible it is genetic.
Furthermore, it
may have been trauma.
We suspect,
though, something in the environment.
❧
Nevertheless, I
wondered if humor—intentional humor, that is—might be a way to trick people
into reading political poetry, specifically those poems concerning a
nuclear power plant. I was beginning to realize I could use all the help I
could get. An aging nuclear power plant is not nearly as “sexy” as a bomb.
Ninety-nine percent of the poems I had unearthed in the nuclear canon concerned
themselves with the prospect of nuclear war, not nuclear energy. Any factory,
nuclear or otherwise is, at least to the untutored, the very definition of
routine, tedium, boredom.
❧
ITEMS OPENED,
CLOSED, AND DISCUSSED
—NRC Inspection Report No. 50-029/2003-002
Opened
NONE
Closed
NONE
Discussed
NONE
After
declaring this item "An Official Agency Record," it
will/will not be released to the public.
❧
My found poem
“Items Opened, Closed, and Discussed,” from an NRC Inspection Report issued
in December 2004, is on the one hand comical because someone saw fit to
give nothingness a formal, agenda-like structure. However, it can also be
read on another level: As a poem that bears witness to nothing when nothing could
be less appropriate. The poem thus serves as a whisper-quiet protest.
The quietness of
it is frightening—grotesque, even. I recently
participated in a workshop that used Philip Thomson’s The Grotesque (1972)
in its syllabus. The Grotesque outlines several functions of that
style’s aesthetic: playfulness, experimentation, and a comic perspective to
name a few. Thomson says:
"It is likely that
the play-urge, the desire to invent and 'experiment' for its own sake, is
a factor in all artistic creation, but we can expect this factor to be more
than usually strong in grotesque art and literature, where the breaking
down and restructuring of familiar reality plays such a large part."
❧
DAD GETS ATOMIC
WINGS
My idea of heaven?
A place to hang and eat
good food that is,
for the most part, bad for you.
Serves alcohol and
a decent happy hour, too.
I don’t have to
wait long in line. It's a calm
place, ideal for
striking up conversation.
The wings are
bomb, coming in six
stages of
explosion. When I'm feeling sanguine,
I get them mild,
medium, or hot.
When masochistic,
I order the nuclear,
suicidal, or
abusive. Food arrives within minutes:
crispy and
conducive to detonating
on my tongue like
a drunken Baryshnikov
on vacation. Now I
can go atomic
without having to
leave my home. Hark—
I hear the bell!
My deliverance is at hand.
❧
Since I had
already been toying with the idea of using more humor in my poems, the
grotesque immediately piqued my curiosity. My poem “Dad Gets His Atomic
Wings” derives from experimentation with the grotesque as well as with
found poetry, using many phrases that I lifted and tweaked from the official
web site of the Atomic Wings franchise. While I still feel
faintly embarrassed by the poem’s cartoonish take on the subject of my
father’s death, I have to admit the take is unique and succeeds in being
unsentimental. According to Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets
website:
"The
writer Annie Dillard has said that turning a text into a poem doubles
that poem's context. 'The original meaning remains intact,' she writes, 'but now it swings between two poles.'"
❧
Growing up, I
wanted to become a veterinarian. I owned cats, turtles, hamsters, and a hermit
crab. I took riding lessons and saw myself at the helm of a large-animal
farm in Vermont one day, like my hero, James Herriot, pen name of veterinary
surgeon James Alfred Wight, author of All Creatures Great and Small.
When it came time to talk to my guidance counselor about future plans, he
listened quietly, nodding at my story of finding an injured baby bird when I
was six and, with my father’s assistance, pitching a tent in my backyard
to set up a “practice.” He listened silently to all of it and, when I finished, leaned back in his chair,
crossed his arms and legs, and said: “Well, sure. All little girls love
horses.”
Casually, he went
on to dismiss my dream job, citing its difficulty, the years of medical school,
and the strong stomach it would take. But it was the phrase “All little
girls” that gave me pause. I might have been young, but I instinctively recognized
that I was being trivialized.
“Little Boy,” the
name given the bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, was
also intended to minimize its scale—the scale of its horror. Psychiatrist
Robert Jay Lifton, who focuses mostly on motivations for war in his and Richard
Falk’s Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism (1991) believes that our instinct is to mitigate our anxiety about nuclearism’s dangers by minifying the language we use to speak about them:
"In calling them 'nukes,' for instance, we render them small and 'cute,'something
on
the order of a household pet… Quite simply, these words provide a way of talking about nuclear weapons without really talking about them."
—Lifton & Falk, as quoted in Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry, John Gery (1996)
❧
During a lecture
at Poets House in New York City, Michael Heller, a leading scholar of
Objectivist poetics, spoke about Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (2007),
a collection based on verbatim transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials. Heller
stated that Objectivists do not seek to impose a viewpoint on the reader
but merely aim to make a record of something.
Muriel
Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (2003)—a
series of poems portraying the story of the Hawk Nest Tunnel Disaster, a
hydroelectric project in West Virginia—also contains several poems set in
a courtroom. “Statement: Philippa Allen” transcribes a first-hand
witness account of a social worker, and “The Disease” is a deposition of a
doctor about employee incidents of silicosis, the disease caused by
silicate dust in the mines.
Because the poems
in The Book of the Dead involve
injury and death resulting from an energy company’s irresponsibility and
negligence, I saw them as natural precedent to the poems I was writing—or
trying to write—about Yankee Rowe. Trying my hand at the Objectivist poetry
method, I began lightly editing and lineating source texts culled from the
Yankee Rowe archive, plundering inspection and industry reports, newspaper
clippings, and minutes from town meetings, piecing them together as
evidence.
❧
FACILITY NAME:
YANKEE ELECTRIC. FACILITY DESCRIPTION: POWER PLANT
The facility is a
small nuclear power generation station,
the third built in
the country and the first in New England.
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn.
The facility
stopped generation in 1992—
is being
decommissioned.
The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn.
The facility is
served by a single potable supply well (02G).
The original well
was abandoned during the decommissioning.
Where is the boy that looks after the sheep?
Numerous local,
state, and federal programs regulate activities
at the facility.
Well 02G is approximately 280 feet deep,
Under the haycock, fast asleep.
set into sound
bedrock beneath 246 feet of glacial till.
Parts of the
facility include radiological storage.
Will you wake him? No, not I—
The Department
determined the well located at the facility
to have a high
vulnerability to contamination.
For if I do, he'll be sure to cry.
❧
FACILITY (noun) definition of:
1. ease in performance
2. readiness of compliance
3. something (as a HOSPITAL) that is built, installed, or established to
serve a particular purpose
❧
Keith Harmon Snow:
“Facility” or “plant” is too neat, tidy, sterile. Nuclear “power” suggests
strength and security. Nuclear “energy” sings of sunshine and children
playing, not of what it really is: the harnessing of a nuclear bomb.
— “Nuclear Poisons,” Valley Advocate Newspapers (July 1995)
❧
PLANT (noun) definition of:
1. a young tree, vine, shrub, or herb planted or suitable for planting
2. a factory or workshop for the manufacture of a particular product, also: POWER PLANT
❧
PLANT (verb) definition of:
1. to put or set in the ground for growth
2. to covertly place for discovery, publication, or dissemination
3. to conceal
❧
Citizens
Awareness Network:
“NRC plans to close all Public Document Rooms in the country by year’s end, stifling democratic participation by communities concerned with contamination from their nuclear corporate neighbors.”
❧
In “Facility Name:
Yankee Electric. Facility Description: Power Plant,” I borrow text from
a Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection report titled
“Source Water Assessment and Protection Report for Yankee Atomic Electric
Company.” After reading it, one mentor skillfully observed: “In a
collection, it lets the industry and its watchdogs do the reporting, and the
poet is like a good district attorney, reading the letters of the accused to
the courtroom and then asking: ‘Do you recognize this letter?’”
Another mentor
suggested that I weave in lines from a fairy tale or folk song to add lyricism
to the industrial-speak. I settled on “Little Boy Blue” for its pastoral
setting, not consciously realizing its suggestion of the Hiroshima bomb’s code
name until she pointed it out to me.
 |
| Lissa Kiernan |
Notes:
The title, “Atoms
for Peace,” and the sentence, “I feel the need to speak today in a language
that in a sense is new,” are borrowed from a speech delivered by President
Dwight D. Eisenhower to the UN General Assembly in New York City on December
8, 1953.
“Facility”
incorporates text from Source Water Assessment and Protection (SWAP)
Report for Yankee Atomic Electric Company, as well as a popular
English-language nursery rhyme having a Round Folk Song Index number of 11318.
Links
You can also purchase Lissa's books through
the Citizens Awareness Network's (CAN) Amazon Smile Link, for
sales on Amazon. CAN was key to the closing of Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Plant.
