Fieldnotes: Annie Christain’s “The Vanguards of Holography” and Caroline Harper New’s “A History of Half-Birds”

“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given to us easily.”

Are some words more poetic than others? Is cloud more so than wrench? Or is it simply a matter of context? Wrench, for instance, can be a tool, as with a socket wrench; then again, we may speak of a heart-wrenching experience. Does the latter case move us further toward the emotional, therefore lyrical, realm of experience? Then again, the phrase he assaulted me with a lug wrench even with its strict denotation, immediately evokes the sensation of fear and anguish, possibly remorse on the part of the one who assaulted, therefore its acception resonates as emotional. Which in turn lends to its easy cooptation into a simile.

He laid into my soul as with a wrench;

left hand upraised, he lectured me nonstop.

He treated me like prey, ate me like lunch

moved like a storm made of ten million drops.

Placing such a word within an iambic pentameter quatrain, and pairing it with an off rhyme, as well as tangling it up with a sonic landscape of consonance and assonance, transforms an ordinary, workaday word into a “poetic” word. Thus, we get plainspoken poets like Philip Levine, a writer who wants to draw from the well of plain speech, and generally refrains from basting it with varnish, relying on the premise that how people speak and think in everyday life is good enough, without reaching for the thesaurus. In his “Blasting From Heaven,” we get the familiar scene of a mother coaxing her stubborn child to eat her bland lunch.

Milk and relish and a hard bun that comes off

like a hat—a kid’s life is a cinch.

This question of what language is available for poetry and what not extends beyond individual words and phrases into the general material from which we draw poetic inspiration. Romantic poetry is associated with being in touch with nature and consequent deep feeling. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Cloud” begins thus:

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,

From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid

In their noonday dreams.

Showers and flowers; seas and streams and dreams. This is the stuff familiar to any high schooler who wrote a love poem and needed some easy imagistic equivalents for the feelings moiling inside.