folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem
Elsewhere I’ve introduced this idea of a “renga essay”: linked prose poems as a vehicle for rangy thought on a concern shared by the collaborators. I’ve found that the collaborative nature of renga, in which each writer links or riffs on the others’ words, perfectly fits the flow, or rather, fast pour, that is the prose poem form—a lush rush of sound and sense. As with all writing, we come to clarity; though, with prose poems, we emerge a bit breathless, shaken awake, as if we have passed through a waterfall. In this collaborative work, focused on jobs, I love how Pfeiffer, who wrote the first and third entries, took the prose poem into one of its native directions: narrative, though with the electric, raw rhythm and imagery innate to the form’s nature as pure poetry. From there, for me, it was all riffing resonances. Perhaps more than any other form, I find that in prose poetry in general—and collaborative prose poems in particular—word spurs word spurs word, each link like the scale of a fish, glinting at different angles, all knitting together to make a lithe, leaping body that can dive deep.
Seeking Job
The high priests stripped down to their skin. They threw their vestments, old and black with blood, into fire burning on the price floor. They crawled through the roots and mold of black Earth to find the creator, but all they would find was language. The manager of transactions was not the creator, the need within the empty belly was not, the childish want of more was not. The priests, who have always been spies, would later stand and walk among the gatherers who stood on the hillside. They were there to watch the horizon of diamonds and water become a paradox backed by gold. At the fall of the sun, the hunters retreated to the grass huts, and there, scarcity begat the prisons, stable money begat slavery, and the wage ceiling begat Job. The words decided to call Job’s existence a factor of production, but none of us has ever known their true creator.
~
Difficult to focus on production when Job One is watching the world fall apart. Looking for language to capture the losses. And since capture implies wildness, let us take account of drought. Far north right now, sixty thousand dead salmon, such strange grey waves of rotting bodies clogging a creek where water should be. Not far from there, in a house under threat of fire, a friend waits, hoping that his river holds. Far south, the Mississippi dry as a day spent in spreadsheets. Am losing count of all the wastelands money makes. Have long lost count of wasted hours of jobs well done. Loss lives in the throat, where words form or fail. We should be howling. But we’re kept busy. No time to ponder how money was made to mean time. Will we manage to make the mortgage? Buy beans as the rents keep rising? And whose land is it? The true landlords are the worms who tend the soil. Let us quietly quit the cubicles. We have tarried too long in worry and work. We think our savings will save us. The days scarcer, scarcer. We dream; a decade passes. Outside the air is pocked with sickness, sirens, a sudden squall of starlings. Outside the day shines gold in deep October blue. A wild brightness eaten by meetings, and now it’s night. What are the days all for? Strange how our lives are traded for tokens. Lives made of love. But hunger.
~
Job was never told that the world would fall apart when the work started. But they watched as the wilderness shed its green, and the counting houses began to measure gains and losses in bags of iron, bronze and silver. They lost track of the sun shining, as the sky turned pewter, and the metals turned to the paper that was used to hold the language of Job’s story and exchange. When the priests found new clothes and became bankers, the water reflected the color of plastic, and Job set up camp by the first river. Since then, their story has been one of acceptable losses, and the work done in their name was rumored to be something larger. Still, all who held Job, and all who loved Job, would die in the arms of others. Job wept remembering that they were supposed to alleviate hunger, but it became more complicated than that. Minimum wages were never for the living. Job slept with their eyes open, and dreamt of necessary transactions, but the factory whistles were rude alarms. Sleep also was an acceptable loss, and Job would walk, and ride beasts and subways, and drive automobiles to their places of work. There they congregated to create a new word: labor.
~
There’s so much we must forget to keep things running. Green hearts of glaciers. Oceans thick with fish. The air alive with fireflies. So much loss for nothing. Who profits from the jobs we run to in the mornings, forgetting our dreaming as we rush through constellations of dew in the grass, brief as us? We’re busy seeking jobs, keeping jobs. Watching the horizon for threats. How far we are from the forests and the fields. It just happened so fast—skill and sweat changed to paper that changed to plastic that blinked into binary code. Leaving us zeros. There’s so much we must accept. Somehow the banks own our houses. Somehow our cupboards are bare. But we’re told we must keep going. While some lie down and never get up. We’ve learned that losing a job can turn a person’s house into their car into a cart then a cardboard box, leaving them huddled under a bridge like a storybook troll. So much comes down to what we’ve been told.
Gillian Parrish is author of two books of poetry, of rain and nettles wove (Singing Horse Press, 2018) and supermoon (Singing Horse Press, 2020), as well as a chapbook (full text here), cold spell (DUSIE, 2019). She is currently at work on a collection of linked fiction, in which, fitting our topic, the most recent story, “Miracle Supply Company,” focuses on a character struggling with a deadening job. She lives in University City, St. Louis (US) and works nearby as an assistant professor in the MFA in Writing program at Lindenwood University. When time/job allows, she serves as the mothership of spacecraftprojects.com, which features interviews w/ artists as well as new poems and stories curated as a mix of well-established and emerging writers.
Gene Pfeiffer is a poet and fiction writer from the baseball town of St. Louis, MO (US). His work has appeared in various journals including Volt, Spillway, and The Cincinnati Review. Relevant to our collaborative topic, he teaches a course in the Lindenwood University MFA program “MFA Goes to Work,” focused on cultivating creative writing related skills that help students find or make more creative jobs. He is currently at work on a book of poems, Days without Work.
