The word “systemic” has appeared in almost every email I’ve opened these past weeks, in missives of inclusivity, grief, and solidarity from sources as diverse as Neiman Marcus and the National Book Critics Circle. These statements refer, of course, to the deeply entrenched dysfunctional disparities of race and power in the prevailing social order that are roiling our country. But I was inspired to seek out the etymology of “system” since I found various notions of systems shaping two book-length poems I’ve been reading in tandem — Rosalie Moffett’s National Poetry Series selection Nervous System, which uses as a central trope the webby, dendritic meshes of the human body’s complex electrical circuitry — and Erica Funkhouser’s Post & Rail, a meditation on time, place, and family illuminated by distal gravitational forces in the solar system.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “system” dates back to the 1610s, meaning “‘the whole creation, the universe,’” from Late Latin systema ‘an arrangement, system,’ from Greek systema ‘organized whole, a whole compounded of parts,’ from stem of synistanai ‘to place together, organize, form in order,’ from syn– ‘together ‘ + root of histanai ‘cause to stand,’ from PIE root *sta- ‘to stand, make or be firm.’”
One gift for me of this foray into word origin was learning that at the root of any “system” is the notion of standing firmly together, something we’ve also witnessed in the peaceful protests of recent weeks. Etymology also led me to discern ways in which these two books themselves create a synergistic system. Both are hybrid book-length poems, part memoir, part poetry, part discursion into the ways the discourses and theories of science help us conceive of what it means to be human, to be discrete selves. Each book deploys formal gestures that reinforce and in some ways embody the material at hand. Mother-daughter relationships are crucial engines for Moffett and Funkhouser, and both of their collections are meditations on personal and biological familial inheritances. Each, in its own way, plunders the provocations of silence, speech, and the relationship between sentience and language.
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After a fainting episode that caused her to lie ill for many days, Emily Dickinson wrote to her Norcross cousins to say that the doctor had diagnosed what happened to her as a “revenge of the nerves.” The “narrative” spine of Moffett’s book is a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with her mother’s neurological condition, perhaps caused or exacerbated by a concussion resulting from a fall, but more likely something congenital that has caused the mother to be unable to speak. This condition is a grief, and a particularly cruel one since the mother was herself a scientist who taught her young daughter to be curious about every aspect of the workings of the natural world. In the opening preface or lobby poem, “What the Mind Makes,” Moffett’s speaker floats oneirically with a dream camera through various memories of her mother. “These images arrive,” she writes, and
… file
themselves in the folder with the others
marked mother.
I don’t trust them, don’t claim much
for accuracy, though
there is a bit of faith
in what the mind makes
for itself, isn’t there? Filling in
what isn’t there —
And that is what the ensuing long poem, the titular “Nervous System,” does: it attempts to “fill in” what is unfathomable, what the mother can’t say, what the speaker can’t predict, and in order to do so, Moffett dives deeply into the facts and mysteries of the brain, the maternal instincts of spiders (with special attention paid to the silk their bodies produce, so much like the webby filaments protecting the brain as it receives or fails to receive certain messages, signals from the body’s myriad nerves). “Human voltage is everything,” Moffett writes. “It’s our hurt, traveling / to the brain, it’s our heart, in fear / quickening its pace.” Later, she writes, “I need to understand this, standing / under the webs between the wires, because I can see her / better if I can see into her: // electricity gone berserk, wrong turns / tugging her body / into its spasms, rickety system flashing // with pain and information.”
Moffett’s tercets, untitled, undulate down the page, sometimes as many as eight per page, sometimes as few as three. The form seems helical, like strands of DNA, and the enjambments and indented lines force the reader to experience something of the body’s nervous system itself, “electricity, lineless, // [that] jumps cell to cell — / each cell, like a castle, flings up its portcullis, potassium / gets out, sodium gets in, // and this mix creates a charge that blasts ajar / the next door, chain reaction / that takes the spark where it needs to go.”
A chief question of the book, fueled by the mother’s aphasia, is the speaker’s “fear my mother would forget me, one copy / of myself deleted, // leaden shape / in her mind /where I once was.” How can we think, how can we be a self, Moffett wonders, without language?
She made two of me — twins, of which
only I survived, which is why
she doubled me again
every time I left the house,
saying, Take care of Rosi, as if one of me
could watch over another of me.
There are many things one can make seem
to happen with words.
I felt I was being followed
by the faithful dog of myself, as if
I had stepped half out of my body.
Little perfections exist.
For instance, that by myself endures
in clear opposition
to alone. It is possible
to be content
like this. It is impossible to imagine
how to go about thinking
in the absence of language.
Another possibility the collection grows toward is the speaker’s apprehension that she may have inherited her mother’s neurological condition, “so / mysterious no one can figure or fix it” — “My mother’s genes, in me.” This realization leads the speaker to meditate on her own fertility, doubts about perpetuating the disease, about her own future. At one point she even questions her whole project: “what does it do // to write this?” Yet she answers her own question:
. . . Some have horoscopes,
economics. Some study the world
with etymology — language, the sole
mediator between the self
and what might be
thought of as the non-self —
And thus, as she keeps vigil over her mother’s condition, the daughter persists in paying acute attention, as her mother taught her, to snails, spiders, raspberry canes, storms, everything:
It appears and appears to me,
the world, every time
I open my eyes. It is loyal
or it is just
doing its job.
And in Nervous System, Moffett is doing hers:
I’m doing it again. Hopeful deployment of words I like,
making the nothing into a picture, but what
can I use the picture for? A dream
to fill the stretch of months
in which she practiced keeping
the diagnosis unsaid, held it close.
a preparation, perhaps
she practiced lying
very still, practiced dying —
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Post & Rail, Erica Funkhouser’s sixth collection of poems, is a non-linear, autobiographical book-length journey across time, place, and becoming. As a formal trellis for her sojourn into the temporal, Funkhouser lays three fully justified couplets of equal length across each page, spaced to look like the horizontal rails in post-and-rail fencing, thereby evoking the fences of her childhood, borders that would help define and separate the self and other, the wild and the tamed, but also providing portals of porosity between one world and another — human and animal, house and field, earth and sky, time and space. The “threes” help the speaker travel across three generations of family: from grandparents migrating from Ireland (“their parishes old names / for nightmares, their empty stomachs unaccounted for in any tally book”) to the coal mines of Pennsylvania, where “the ferns once blithely free [are] now compacted into filthy coal.” She traces her own parents’ hard inheritances in the world of worker exploitation, and then brings us richly into the at times difficult but also magical ambages of the woods and pastures of the speaker’s own childhood.
Like Moffett’s Nervous System, Post & Rail is concerned with silences, to lacunae in archival history caused by whether or not one’s person was worthy to be noted in a ledger, to hard lives spent in an underground that could cause black lung disease and turn song to exhaustion, and particularly to maternal silence, which the poet comes to recognize over time as due more to temperament than to indifference:
#29
Words. Minutes. Answers. A lap. A kiss. To be made much
- To be remarkable. To be remarked upon. These are some of what
we wanted, we noisy chicks. But she did not like words, did not trust or
enjoy them. If they had a purpose, fine, but otherwise they were suspect.
A lover of opera, she never listened to the ones in English. If she listened
to us, it was one at a time …
In “#18,” Funkhouser writes of her mother:
When she wasn’t speaking, we heard the phoebe splash, one season
turn its back upon the next, the pink lady slippers slip into extinction.
She didn’t point or name; she might have blinked or waved her hand.
She liked to move, she couldn’t keep from moving; silence was a way
of being still. The stillness lay inside her like an anvil. We could hear
the words being hammered into sparks and her relief as they died out.
Throughout her long poem, Funkhouser returns again and again to the fences, observing the way they weather, the insects that thrive in their seams and tunnels, watching the atmosphere change behind them (“Between the rails, the afternoon trembles, a mirage of promises and // promises delivered. Cavalcade of white steeds, plumed riders. Wild / singletons all, none complicit in the day in day out fretwork of family” (#19). Poems 14 – 16 take us into an almost pre-Lapsarian world of childhood lived among animals and creatured woods. Poem 15 turns a mining family’s brutal poverty into a kind of fairy tale:
One night he stepped out of the mantrap portal, wiped his hands on the tail
of a comet, then waded in Paint Creek till the water had run over his boots
and the fish had licked his toes clean. When he got home, before he opened the door,
he took off his head and shook the coal dust onto the street. When his wife gave
him bread and tea, he gave her salmon with lemons. They kissed before the fire.
When his children showed him their red feet, he cobbled shoes from butterscotch.
Later in the book, however, Funkhouser doesn’t shy away from offering an unflinching indictment of the violence done to workers “owned” by the magnates of the coal mining industry. As Funkhouser navigates the systems of silence in her family’s legacy, she brings into the conversation a discussion of the gravitational waves of black holes, now detectable across the solar system. “I read,” she writes in “#17,” “that a sense / of place is the torque between temperament and terrain. A personal chirp in / one’s universe. It helps me to understand my mother if I think of her / as an event that took place in distant space and, because its waves / could travel unimpeded by matter, has finally brought its birdsong / to earth.” The speaker in Post and Rail comes to listen in silence and gesture for meaning transmitted without speech: the way a fern plays with light or a child’s forehead, pressed against a cow’s head’s “galaxies of coal-black fur,” feels warmth [pour] into us from another world.” Like these phenomena of the natural world, the speaker’s mother “had a way of alerting / us to the fact that we were loved; we had to supply the words ourselves.”
And in this way the reader comes to see that Post and Rail is a narrative of one poet’s becoming, a humble and generous act from a poet at this point in her illustrious career:
#21
Vertical questions emanate from the posts in front of me and the posts all the way
down to the lower pasture, the kinds of questions posed by something buried up
to its ankles and kept in place as much by the rails driven through its three orifices
as by its own footing. Really it is all one question: How are you connected to the
grass beneath your feet, the air circling your elbows, the clouds circumnavigating
your thoughts? With the shift of one letter bright as a new nail, post becomes poet.
These two ambitious and stirring collections show us that, faced with silence, uncertainty, and unfathomability, poets are often born—in part from the need, in Funkhouser’s words, “to supply the words themselves.” Or, as Moffett puts it, in an act of “filling in / what isn’t there,” or revealing what is there but is unable or not willing to speak for itself.
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Nervous System by Rosalie Moffett, published by Ecco in October 1, 2019, 96 pages, $16.99 paperback.
Post & Rail by Erica Funkhouser, published by Lost Horse Press on Marc h 15, 2018, 76 pages, $18.00 paperback