folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem
Thoughts on the prose poem:
My prose poem happens out of making a project out of delay or deferment. I have a thought, the thought can be anything, a word, a feeling, an image. I sort of hold on to it a little but not fully. I don’t speak it or write it down. It lingers. This happens many times with many images and words, for there is so much to digest. Some words stand out so clearly, having been spoken to me and I can’t seem to absorb them so they stay on the surface but also somehow seep in. There is a dedication to slowness here and then a burst, release. Perhaps these words someone has spoken to me stay on the surface because I know the speaker doesn’t realize how their words have impacted me. I yearn to tell the speaker they have impacted me. Instead, I finally sit down and all of these deferred lodgings come partially loosened. They do not fully dislodge, for they are truly mine and I won’t give them up entirely, like a child who does not want to part from their dirty diaper. It is this partial dislodging that gives way to the prose poem, together with my desire to preserve mystery and illogic, to not linger too much on any thread. Suddenly I start to see patterns in the partially dislodged threads. I was holding on to these images for a reason, because there is something in me. I have my certain and particular obsessions just as we all do. I don’t name the obsessions but I bring the threads closer together. I see how they sit next to each other. It helps if I have another piece of art or writing in my mind that I am picturing while I do this. How does the art or writing piece effect my current writing if it is just something I am vaguely thinking about in the background as I type. I think about thinking about art while I type and let loose the dislodged threads. When I finally write the thing I had been thinking of for so long but not saying or writing it is never the same as it had been in my head. Deferment has minted it. Coated it. It has a sheen. I try to put the sheen coating in the writing too, wrapper with the candy, so that this process has some voice of its own.
Hiatus
If I bury my political opinions in poetry then I can still take the job, the place on the committee, the money, the awards. Somewhere in here all my politics are hidden. We begin to discuss a new job someone just created for themselves where they sell hugs, cuddles, time spent just being held. They created a whole cuddle industry maybe they even created the need. I’m trying again to fail at being a woman and to fail at being a writer because I’m attracted to certain kind of failure right now. Stop making sense. The cuddle economy is thriving. “Once being held is tainted with money it can’t become untainted.” I say but I’m not sure what can’t be undone, all associations removed. How do the prostitutes feel about it? Nobody asks. No I am not the one who says beautiful things quickly, you are confusing me for the one who says wise things in an opaque manner while pretending to hand out political or religious pamphlets at the top of the escalator. My hands are empty. In this world escalator refers to the belief that the city should emerge from a communism it never knew. ‘Escalator’ refers to construction which refers to ladders which refers to the shock of deliberate change. Yes your gender is my gender too. I made a decision to hear myself talking and wondered all morning if two raindrops ever fall with nothing else following. Empty premonitions of a world that never comes. But what do you think the world should be? Oh here, in new york, we don’t talk like that. One moves closer and the other retreats and both are responses to a similar pain. We all closed our eyes and knew a kind of rest we had forgotten about. Every five minutes we forget again.
In the spanking cartoon cult we all bend over and fall through the floorboards. Inarticulate movement becoming fluid. I said I grew up in a crying cult and you said you grew up in a masculinity cult and we made sense to each other and laughed. I liked you very much right away. My fantasy life is strong and the desires it includes are my identity today. Also necessarily hidden. The crying cult had a figurehead who abused his powers. I had a phantom penis being stroked. Wait, I am her? I am her? Can you see me if I am her. I started to write about escalators because my friend told me he hadn’t realized that an escalator described in a poem in one country might mean something so different than what an escalator means here. My vision of the world is incomplete without the barricade. The barricade was a form we became familiar with no matter what stage of breakdown it was in. The gutter punk was another familiar form. Broken down the escalator was unrecognizable but still evoked the feeling of continuous movement.
There were some who saw that the world had stopped and started over again in this moment and others the next. The hydrogen bomb was a popular marker of time for a while. Nuclear energy. The feeling of an immanent break. I tell my friend that I wish I were a dog so I could pee everywhere and she says most of being a dog is wanting to be a dog and I fall in love with her again. If only my desire’s costume were so easily recognized by the outside world all the time. You are what you say you are rarely.
I had tried to write the story of the crying cult many times but never to my satisfaction. Once I tried to write the story of how I was forbidden to talk about the crying cult. I couldn’t tell the story of the crying cult without telling the story of my parents who I felt I knew too much about. Then there is the story of the outside world and how I was raised to think nobody would understand. How my parents cried in moans with the doors closed and I would tell my friends to ignore it. That’s just something they do for fun. They believed to cry was to release in the most sublime manner and nobody in the outside world would ever understand. Are my politics somewhere here buried? There are many places one can look to uncover a sense of caring.
On the internet I watched a semi-stranger mourn the loss of her husband. I wanted to write about it as soon as I saw it, how much I in that moment longed to be that dead husband to someone. Songs being sung around my body as it is lowered into the ground near our would-be house in the woods. My sensitivities are such that seeing the man mourned at first I loved him and then I wanted to be him. Am I somewhat him yet? How much is it possible to love and keep someone else’s image? You don’t belong to me. You also don’t belong to me. The masculinity cult is a joke I relate to. All we have to do is acknowledge it and it breaks open and reinforces itself in one quick gesture of sameness. He told me my poem was about fluidity for him and I gushed, spilling my self all over the floor. There are a lot of qualifiers I’m leaving out. I try to avoid wrapping it up in a bow so that I may fail again, my love of a specific kind of failure the only momentum I have sometimes. I didn’t like the word ‘cult’ but it was hard to figure out what other word might replace it. The masculinity cult made a certain kind of sense in the room we were in, where some man with no musical training or talent felt comfortable leading an impromptu orchestra, all the while conducting he waved his hands and shouted gleefully, “I was born to do this.” And he was right.
Then I see a poet telling a story. The story was of her and her boyfriend being interviewed about death. What did death mean and what didn’t it mean. Very suddenly the poet had burst into tears at the thought that anyone could say what death meant in any definitive way. That we might pretend to know. Like when I suddenly cried because we can’t ever inhabit a body that isn’t ours. A mind. Perspectives floating in a jar that won’t open. In the book that I’m reading the author says the femininity cult got mixed up with the motherhood cult while lots of people were being forced sterile. The hallucinatory drug cult had let me see how trapped I was in myself and for that I was grateful. Somehow cult is still not the right word for any of these feelings, these structures that let me see and feel. Telling the story of the ‘what does death mean and what doesn’t it mean’ incident it was important for the poet to see the documentation of having burst into tears so suddenly, laughing one moment, sobbing the next. Having props. With the sound off the face changing is even more isolated, I say, staying safely in analysis of the formal aspects of her piece. The jar that I keep my tears in is full. When I say I know my parents too well I am saying that to write about anything is to learn more about it. Them. I return to the facts of my life, having mastered my ability not to cry when all I mean to do is to speak. It took a long time to differentiate my emissions. To let speaking be its own kind of elevated form. Doors closed or open, halfway. I am just a dog barking. How oh how will I explain this to you.
Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer, editor and archivist. She is the author of the full length collection Utopia Pipe Dream Memory (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019) and seven chapbooks, most recently My Midwinter Poem (clones go home, 2020). Her work explores imagined communities, feminisms, and transformative influence. Anna edits and makes books with DoubleCross Press, a chapbook press operating out of New York and Pennsylvania. For more information check out @anna.as.metaphor / annagw.com
