It is the immemorial belief of a certain strain of poet that a sufficient attention to the surface of things may result in closing the gap between art and life. Their obsession is the actuality and surface of words, the unremarked image. They are generators of indeterminacy, provisional meaning, and continuation (versus closure). First-person epiphanies are prohibited. Technique, not the pretension of insight, is valorized. Rather than sacralizing the ordinary, they rescue it from pathos, and treat it as close at hand but slippery. As a result, the ordinary — loosened from given forms of expression, the false authority of self-identity, and the toxicity of inflated response — shimmers.
It’s a narrow view, even an orthodoxy, but with some appeal, an austere way of splitting the creative world between first-person memoiristic orators and oblique-person construction workers. Lately, it’s taken some hits. Poets whose cultural identities have been routinely suppressed may not take to the notion of dispensable personae and may insist on excesses of their own. More generally, smashed up syntax, forms, and genres are now optional commodities in every MFA’s toolkit. Except for the hardcore memoirist/op-ed poet, dissolving the contours of one’s own life is essential to banishing creative restrictions. And finally, one could say that the fight for custodianship of the ordinary, the making of claims about what is actually happening, is the basic business of all poetry.
So when I see the word “ordinary” in the title of a book of poems, I’m apt to commit the folly of thinking I know what’s coming — since there is, after all, a flaw in my regarding a poet’s loyalty to the ordinary as dogmatism or, as I said, “belief.” Doesn’t style always indicate something about how the writer takes themself? The preoccupation with sizing up the substances in one’s sightlines – while feeling the pulse of the language one uses to do so – may be an inbred, idiosyncratic, and pleasurable habit of mind. Habits are gestures of need, and need may be recognized in a poem without its having been molested by underscoring. Furthermore, it’s one thing to labor towards shrinking the space between art and life, and another thing to regard the gap as permanent, to keep one’s nose alert to what rises up from within it, and to enjoy the play of language.
Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World, Kathryn Cowles’ second collection of poems, returns to – and reclaims on her own spirited terms — the traditional fixation with the thing at hand and the word employed to denote it. She enacts a mind in a constant state of noticing, even while the inert facts of maps are used for efficient transport from the United States to a Grecian island, the locus of the book’s initial poems. The first one is “Origin Story”:
I stepped out of the blue paper
of map water
onto an island in Greece
corrugated ground
world was all around me little blue skirt
and I wanted it down
in paper
sun rose and I wrote
sun rose
and then I wrote that I wrote it,
scratch
never in my life
wrapped in paper
have I ever so much
wanted it down
Charles Olson quoted Robert Creeley saying, “Form is never more than an extension of content” – with “never more than” as the qualifying kicker. As if there is no distance between impulse and the arriving word-shape. In Cowles’ first poem, an original desire (“never in my life”) is depicted as the wish to mesh the occasion with the expression. The utterance at the end is child-like, as if the tumbled words are newly found: “have I ever so much / wanted it down.” On paper. What then follows in the collection are the shapes and sounds of that embedded want.
Cowles doesn’t relinquish a speaking self in favor of the objects before it, but tone and pitch are reined in. She isn’t invested in autobiographia. Still, a guileless, attentive and fond regard for her surround and relations permeates everything. This sense of caring is established in poems that directly address named individuals, calling long distance over an ocean or via airmail.
POSTCARD
Dear Brenda, We saw
a lamb on a spit
and took pictures
of it for you,
its bared teeth
and arms tied
and a battery-powered turner,
saw it turn
oh and loved its half-bakedness
for you O Brenda.
And our kitty Artemis
sits on one particular rock
on our rock staircase today,
sits for no reason
and is lovely
and teeming with bugs
though Geoff bathed her in the sink
entirely against her will
though we picked off
two ticks stuck
in her hared
and ugly.
And a ship pulls into the harbor,
pulls in its sails,
wraps them like arms around themselves O
if you could see it.
A map is not the place itself. This is a banality, of course, but that’s its potential: a spur to prove that the poet, the mind and the poem can stay alive even within this commonplace. It’s a starting point, but not towards a destination. Something elemental is rising up through language, an emergence to foundational sense:
The sea is such today that I can see
on its surface almost the map’s white
dot dot dot, the border conceptual.
The map keeps things put.
The islands float above it.
I can see four islands from my perch.
I can be on just one.
(from “The Map Keeps Things Put”)
Cowles’ playfulness also appears in the book’s intermittently placed graphic “maps” or poem-photographs which look like hand-made postcards, their texts snipped from found sources. They pretend to tell you what you’re looking at, but they leave you to decide how to regard their simple representations. Much like the poems.
In the first section, “Island,” Cowles orients the reader and provides enough solidity to suggest a world both familiar and in the process of assembling itself. The second section, “Tide,” includes poems of domesticity – “The garlic is strong / give it some bread baked w/ olive oil / to hold onto we all need something.” A pending departure looms – have we gained enough of a foothold to afford an uprooting? She continues to gather details, often prosaic, assembling a picture of this island life out of essential details, as in these lines from the prose poem “Recipe”: “A loaf of bread. A meat pie. As distinguished from recipient or reciprocity. You give the loaf away to —. You give the loaf and get a meat pie in return. You give the loaf and get a good feeling about. Praise be. A copy of the recipe. Transcribed on a new 3 by 5. For use.” In the third section, “Plain,” there is air travel to Ohio, then once again, the orientation to a new place in the most rudimentary terms, as in these semi-fretful opening lines from “Lay of the Land”:
Listen: train, train.
It goes low, high
the high part lasts longer
low
low, high.
Cool window air
feet height
when I am on my bed.
On my radio
a dead guy sings.
Let’s say it doesn’t bother me.
Let’s say there’s no breeze
and I open the window.
Let’s say no breeze I look out the window.
What does one do the land is flat.
No where for a breeze to start.
I am tired.
It takes more here to walk a dog.
The quirky rephrasing of “Let’s say there’s no breeze” implicitly asks why did I say it that way? “Let’s say no breeze I look out the window” disrupts the security of narrative and dares the reader to sense the broken-down breezelessness of the imagined moment.
The fourth section, “Port,” takes us back to Europe, perhaps a city on the Mediterranean. Travel and arrival offer events for placement and discernment – but the similarity of response across “the map” suggests pause, a contentment with the sound of saying what is there. Cowles wants us to slow down and hear what we see in her poems. There is always, for each of us, a speechless condition of possibility for speech – and the world she “puts” words to, the everyday life, is attuned to and thrilled by the sensation of that possibility. I feel that sensation on each gratifying re-reading of Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World. This tension, between one’s presence and what-might-be-said (or written), is the abiding spirit and linguistic residue of these poems.
The arrangement of the poems – I would hesitate to call it a progression, since reversion and repetition are Cowles’ signature movements – holds the key here. The reader pivots between pieces that purport to describe the world — and then pretend to explain how descriptions work – but the poet’s goal isn’t to move us toward comprehension. She wants to situate us, at last, “here” – gazing at the map of the poem. And despite the minimizing of “self,” these poems embrace the reader with a modest charm. Her fidelity to her project is her project — and such faith incorporates its own failures.
KEEPING TRACK
five birds on the wooden beam
black and shaking their luck
no six I missed one
it was there anyway
[Published by Milkweed Editions on March 10, 2020, 96 pages, $16.00 paperback.]