rob mclennan : White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, by Kiki Petrosino

White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, Kiki Petrosino
Sarabande Books, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

Charlottesville, Virginia poet and editor Kiki Petrosino’s fourth full-length poetry collection is White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2020), following Fort Red Border (Sarabande Books, 2009), Hymn for the Black Terrific (Sarabande Books, 2012) and Witch Wife (Sarabande Books, 2017). As the blurb on the cover offers, White Blood works through the ripples of Petrosino’s geographic and familial background of Louisa County, Virginia, as she “turns her gaze to Virginia, where she digs into her genealogical and intellectual roots while contemplating the knotty legacies of slavery and discrimination in the Upper South.”

Blade upon blade upon blade
a Cavalier grows. In here
the colonnade clink of goblets.
A Cavalier loves her universe:
slashes, shadowed stripes.
She looks center right, or center
justified. She seeks that middle
note some never reach. White heart
of the page, where distinguished men
appear in battalions of charm.
They will not speak to thee. How
to write, with only thick white ink
& not be thought a cheat? We think
& think. We think & think & think. (“Happiness”)

Prompted, in part, after the author “completed a National Geographic Geno 2.0 DNA Ancestry Test Kit,” Petrosino explores histories through the lens of these newly-revealed discoveries. “pay attention to / what sits inside yourself / and watches you,” Lucille Clifton’s opening quote offers, prior to Petrosino’s opening poem, “Prelude”: “You’re a professional password decrypter, but your ancestors are / demolition experts.” Petrosino’s research reveals ancestors Harriet Smith and her son Butler, who, as her notes offer, “resided in the Green Spring neighborhood of Louisa County, Virginia, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” exploring them through the poems of the third section, “Louisa,” that navigate “the documentary silences in their histories as by the existing records of their lives.” She writes of them as the “Free Smiths,” referencing their own lived and immediate history as an enslaved family. “You want to know who owned us & where.” she offers, to open the poem “Message from the Free Smiths of / Louisa County,” “But when you type, your searches return no results.” Later on, writing:

We saw no reason to hum Old Master’s name
to our grandchildren, or point out his overgrown gates
but you want to know who owned us & where

we got free.

Despite the explosion of DNA options and explorations over the past decade (something that I’ve engaged with, myself) from sites such as Ancestry.ca/com and 23andMe, utilized by individuals for genealogical and health information, this is the first poetry collection I’ve seen framed as being prompted by what the author learned through their results. “[D]ivided into,” as she writes, “small percentages // of / centuries,” White Blood is constructed in titled groupings of individual poems and the longer sequence, “Happiness,” interspersed with a trio of erasures. These erasures are composed of few words and large spaces, vast distances articulated across a scattering of text, responding specifically to her DNA results: “What Your Results Mean: Western Africa 28%,” “What Your Results Mean: Northwestern Europe 12%” and “What Your Results Mean: North and East Africa 5%.” “between this cluster and //////// this cluster // an /// African    o ///// o, Niger and Chad /// o            fingerprint” she writes, in the first of these erasures. Interspersing these erasures with the other sections almost give the sections a sense of the call-and-response, one response leading further and immediately into the next, providing a remarkable coherence to a collection seemingly constructed of thematically-linked, but formally diverse, parts.

While there is no mention as to where the remaining percentages originate, Petrosino manages to traverse vast geographic and temporal distances in few words. There are some questions posed through the body of these poems that can’t be answered, or answered easily; questions that still require being spoken aloud, for the sake of acknowledging those events, those traumas, rippling across the generations. There is such a lovely, clean precision to Petrosino’s lines, even as she seeks, searches and reaches out for connection to some of these people, places and ideas. “You wake up because / you hear someone singing,” she writes, to open the poem “In Louisa,” “little lamb, little lamb / as if the singer were calling // from across a great / distance.”

The Virginia House-Wife
          Mary Randolph, 1824, Washington, D.C.

Methodical nicety is the essence of true elegance.
To grill a calf’s head, you must clean & divide it.
When the mistress gives out everything, there is
methodical nicety. The essence of true elegance
in a sauceboat, a spoonful, in a sieve. Boil it tender.
Take the eyes out whole & cut flesh from skull.
Cover these with breadcrumbs & chopped parsley.
True, essential nicety is the elegant method.
Divide a clean calf, then grill its head.

White Blood furthers the explorations made in her prior collection, Witch Wife, a book of ghosts and grandmothers. In an interview conducted by Sam Leon for Iowa Review, posted June 29, 2018, Petrosino refers to her then-newly-released third collection as “sort of my meditation on poetic form, whereas the first book certainly was about introducing myself to whatever reading audience is going to be there for poetry and introducing my themes and concerns. I still adopt quite a few forms in that first book, but many of them were occasional forms.” Whereas form was a strong element of Witch Wife, it is both through poetic form (erasures, sequences, lyric meditations and experiments with voice) as well as how history (personal, cultural, political) interacts with the present that ties it to White Blood. Petrosino has moved from grandmothers to something further geographically and temporally removed from her contemporary present, yet potentially more deeply connected; she writes her body of and into geography and across history. “What is it like, to have a body?” she writes, to open a further “Message from the Free Smiths of / Louisa County,” “Like insects, or velvet—we almost remember. / It’s why we sent you the dreams.” She writes of streets named after American President and well-known slave owner Thomas Jefferson, across the literal ground-level of her history of enslaved relatives, such in the sequence “Happiness,” that offers “What I took for petals / were scars. What I thought / was Jefferson was Jefferson / Park Avenue.” Later on, she writes a section of poems across Jefferson, from namesake geographies to a tour of Monticello, the tourist destination in Charlottesville, Virginia known as the “primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson,” where numerous of the six hundred enslaved people he owned “built his home, planted his crops, tended his gardens, and who helped run his household and raise his children” (quote taken from the Monticello website): “The human face, its pine doors painted / like mahogany. Human face with horses / under each veranda. Perfect parquet tetragons / of the human face. Human face still legible / in Old French.” (“Essay in Architecture”). Unspoken, of course, is the disconnect of slave ownership by so many of the American founding fathers, even as they signed a document that declared that “all men are created equal” (Petrosino also teaches at the University of Virginia, a university originally founded by Jefferson). Her poem “The Shop at Monticello” opens: “I’m a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies / into money. Now I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me // of this fact.”

White Blood is a book of exploration and naming, providing specifics and details to the individual body and the inter-generational body, as well as articulating how such a sequence of bodies live, relive and process trauma. She names, in “Happiness,” “my grandfather in Brooklyn / looping the cord around his neck / testing its clear, tensile / mettle before he hanged / himself.” She writes of, as part of “Mrs. A.T. Goodwin’s Letter to the / Provost Marshal, 1866,” “[…] the negroes we’ve raised, never abused a single one, always / had the kindest feelings, the kindest, so long as their conduct / were tolerable [.]” She writes of, to close the poem “Instructions for Time Travel,” “an oval of brushed earth // just as the soft path finishes / under branches // where the dead are always saying / what they always say: // Write about me.” In an interview conducted by Lucy Catlett for The Adroit Journal, posted June 3, 2020, Petrosino responds:

I started the writing of White Blood in 2016, during a semester-long sabbatical at my previous job at the University of Louisville. By that point I had been teaching there for five or six years. The previous year I had also lost my last grandparent, my grandmother, whose entire family is from Louisa County, Virginia. I found myself at this point where I was embarking on this other stage of adulthood—where you have no more grandparents, you’re a professor, you’re a homeowner, you’re surrounded by all the trappings of adulthood—and I found myself thinking a lot about the past, particularly the deep past. I thought it might be interesting to spend my sabbatical in Virginia so that I could access some of the historical records and try and re-imagine my grandmother’s early life in that rural community in Louisa, which is, as you know, right next to Albemarle County, where Jefferson’s Monticello is located. Then I started to ask myself about the four years I spent living in Charlottesville, wondering, why didn’t I ever go there?

I never did any research on my own when I was a college student. I was at UVA as an African American student of mixed racial heritage (my father’s family is Italian American). But I wasn’t able to process all the gravity of what it meant to be a person of color on grounds. I felt haunted sometimes by the fact of the place and how this space was historically segregated between white students and faculty and the Black people who were laboring to create the wonderful space of ideas that is UVA. So I wrote for the newspaper and sang in the women’s chorus. I had poetry friends and took lots of classes.

Flash forward to 2016 and I found myself thinking, Maybe I can explore some of those ambiguities around race, UVA, and Louisa. That’s when I started building White Blood. Then the Unite the Right Rally of August 11th-12th, 2017, happened, and UVA was effectively invaded by neo-nazis carrying torches.

It brought everything into a greater frame of urgency for me. I knew that I had to write about UVA. I had to write about Virginia. And so I started writing that sonnet crown, “Happiness,” which opens the book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com