“Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retreating into conventional expectations of femininity.”
The first thing one looks for in a poet’s work is intelligence. That quality can take many forms. Some poets are not necessarily great thinkers and work instead by feel, summoning memorable imagery and showing a melodic ear for language. That can be enough for many, perhaps most, tastes. Yet poets with a keen analytic mind complementing more conventionally lyric qualities exert a particular fascination. This is the case of Blood Feather. Whether celebration or lament, lyric mode has often been suffocated by limiting itself to personal introspection without a larger context of history, myth, science, and the like. Although long, complex poems such as Kelsey’s have always been in existence. The last two centuries largely have let the poetry of expansive social thought fade in favor of plumbing the inner depths of the individual human psyche, notwithstanding the Romantics’ “cosmic” cries to their secular gods. To recognize this fact is not to hearken nostalgically back to the age of Pope and Dryden, whose essay-like long poems, while often forceful, witty, and self-assured, could not infrequently come across as obvious, dry, didactic longueurs, or neat, self-satisfied enunciations of “universal truths,” as in Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man.”
“In human works, though labour’d on with pain,
A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain;
In God’s, one single can its end produce;
Yet serves to second too some other use.”
In the 21st century global diaspora that is poetry in English, no purpose is served in returning to English proverbial wisdom. Rather, one yearns for a contemporary sharp intellect whetting itself against doubt, imbued with an open spirit of quest, and tendering redemption one can believe in. Such a poetics can be found in Karla Kelsey’s ambitious and extraordinary Blood Feather, which was released with Tupelo Press.
Part phenomenological portrait of three gifted female artists/muses; part wide-ranging speculation on neglected possibilities in the histories of art, architecture, ballet and film; part feminist revision of the quietly throttled potential of the “second sex,” Blood Feather employs a capacious reimagining of sestina form to strip away our cognitive patina regarding the subtle ways that the feminine psyche gets submerged, in realms both public and private. Without ever veering into dogmatism, the poet proffers the sheer formal dexterity of her fragments, circularity, and interpolations, which somehow get blended into one single vibrant artifact. Kelsey’s book helps us understand a female reality that persists. The third of the three featured women, Maya Deren, achieves relative autonomy in her chosen creative sphere of filmmaking. She represents the exemplary case of what was and might be. The first is a young actress in Los Angeles, trapped within a self-smothering semiotics of alluring feminine gesture; the second, the wife of an architect whose assigned role is to be her husband’s muse.
The actress from Part One:
“I ask will we listen I
mean I I mean me for
some days I exist as if
existence meant posing naked on a
bearskin rug and some days I
exist as the first two seconds
ever caught on film playing in
a loop Roundhay garden 1888 dense
with lilac clutching at my dress
I turn around walking backwards your
coattails flying as you walk past.”
Kelsey is an assiduous archivist as well as an essayist. As the book’s footnotes suggest, Blood Feather easily could have emerged as a straight scholarly history of women in the arts, given that the author’s erudition and zeal for research are immense. But her disquiet in this case is ultimately poetic in nature and offers proof that lyric in our time may illuminate how women’s roles in society remain socially constructed, textually reinforced, and restrictively performative. As Kelsey explains in a thoughtful interview in Bomb, “Central to the process of composition has been this tension between ‘an I’ and ‘the archive.’”
“The actress learns
whenever we work physically we find
things we could never find if
we did nothing but think Cleopatra
painting her lower lashline with malachite
paste shadowing eyelid to brow with
ground lapis lazuli
The distancing archival spirit that parses personal subjectivity is integral to her conception of lyric form. Blood Feather shores up a less often recognized quality available to lyric poetry: what can be called paradoxically personal intersubjectivity. This latter concept, with an “I” that is socially created rather than essential (thus always and by definition intersubjective), is key to understanding how certain ambitious poets (Jenny Xie, whose work I recently reviewed, is another shining example) go beyond the conventional “overheard I” of traditional lyric, the one that muses in isolation, and break through into more “epic” long-form modes that fuse private and public history, as well as myth and history. The actress’s thoughts and perceptions feel intensely private yet interlarded with her existence within a historical-cultural gestalt.
Kelsey in Bomb: “Each speaker’s narrative and voice is consistently destabilized and disrupted via the form of the book—the weave of research with the personal—which I hope pushes against and cracks any sense of unified identity.” The titular image of the blood feather, for instance, gets played with in exactly this manner throughout the volume.
“If we consider true qualities indispensable
to their objects to what object
has molting become necessity to what
woman the name wife what town
Tsarist palaces politburo dachas crumbling Soviet
sanitariums because Maria Tallchief while still
operating within ballet’s essential structure didn’t
perform the Firebird as general dancer
but became the Firebird deepening self
into art and animal some wild
birds such as goldfinch molt annually
changing to bright plumage during breeding
season captivated by transformation.”
Amid undercurrents of despair and resignation, images of visceral, “heroic” and mythic female power pulse, as in the case of this mutable indigenous dancer who erupts into the text. Rather than signifying as a stable “I,” she not only represents the Firebird, but becomes it, “deepening self into art and animal.” The poet-speaker’s voice assumes for the moment the persona of a “we”: “If we consider true qualities indispensable/to their objects.” Through performance, correspondingly, the dancer creates a communal reality, transcending her assigned identity as Maria Tallchief. All of the women in Blood Feather, onstage and off, play out equivalent fates, which may lead to partial liberation into a more authentic self, or a lifetime of unwanted performance in a given social role.
This writing approach, which I will denominate fierce lyric, strives to create intense interiority and intimacy in the book’s three emotionally defrauded personae, yet plunges them in different ways into a more encompassing and often quietly brutal social reality. The personages portrayed may be neurotic, riddled with doubt, constantly thwarted, emotionally repurposed, existentially uncertain, and/or merely ironic. But these women struggle toward transcendence, even if only as an ideal, their narration blending epic-heroic and ironic modes in complex poetic constructions that confound the notion that lyric poetry must be short, irrevocably inward, and self-contained. Out of the socially-assigned, therefore unstable identities they live out, Kelsey forges a source of provisional power and understanding.
One of the most striking secondary characters in what may in some respects also be called a story, no less than Anna Karenina, is Mary, who was “imprisoned from birth in/a black and white room not/only are her walls painted black/and white but her skin hair/blood clothes furniture/food by tricks/of theatrical lighting.”
This story is so bizarre that it would appear to be a fictive parable like Schrödinger’s cat. Yet Mary is far from the oddest figure to be found in these pages. She is as lifelike and as parabolic as the poem needs her to be. Despite never having experienced color, Mary “craves knowledge of color,” so “she learns about/optics the eye’s structural connection to/neural processing.” But the miracle doesn’t end there. “She/learns specular reflection and scattering fierce/rulers of the Earth and all/its inhabitants rusalki [lake-dwelling soul of a drowned virgin] ride upon clouds/in the form of birds directing/rain.” She undergoes a metamorphosis. In a book that draws upon sources as disparate as The Mystery of Udolpho and Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Matematica, Mary’s rare existence does not come as a particular surprise. She is one more animal soul in the bestiary.
The long poem in English has been around forever, going back to Beowulf, and even in the modern age, we have such fragment-based behemoths as Pound’s Cantos, Zukofsky’s A, and Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. Yet a number of 21st century fierce lyricists are renewing the genre, consciously using the long form to fuse lyric with epic-heroic mode, while subverting and altering the expectations of the latter. Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retreating into conventional expectations of femininity.
In Kelsey’s case, this dual movement allows her to stage at length comparatively overlooked,
“minor” historical personages as stand-ins for the conventional epic hero, women beleaguered and peripheral, while foregrounding the ways in which they have been second-guessed, coopted, plagiarized and otherwise robbed of their protagonist status and even personhood. Deren and Tallchief most fully occupy the epic-mythic space, while the others strive to distinguish themselves as psychically and practically autonomous, with varying degrees of success.
Blood Feather reaches an apotheosis of sorts in the narration of Maya Deren’s sojourn to Haiti on a fellowship to observe and film native rituals, resulting in the film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti.
“She had begun
with the intent to turn elements
of a reality into art but
found herself compelled to abandon artistic
manipulation and record as transparently as
possible logics of movement and ritual
the soul gazing from the other
side of sleep sees a million
cubic yards of silt and sand
dredged from the bottom of the
harbor to create the islands’ cores
providing a natural finish large rocks
and boulders quarried at Catalina shipped
inland line their shores.”
By overthrowing the prerogatives of the auteur, in which the director’s “genius” reigns supreme, Deren “abandon[s] artistic/manipulation” in favor of a more modest, honest, documentary, and scientific quest: to “record as transparently as possible/logics of movement and ritual.” That technical self-assignment reverberates as both spiritual and dispassionate. The personal modesty of this first-person gesture is grounded against immensity—precisely the dialectic of the constructed self, part individual, part ineluctably archive, that gets played out through the three long poems that comprise Blood Feather.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
