The Real Ethereal, Katie Naughton
Delete Press,
2024
the question of address (elegy: suburbs)
some questions
never leave the garage the basement
the hedges and
other plants circling the house
the rock wall
stratifying the small hill in the back yard
between oaks
and wax begonias
a house can be
a place you never leave
it can be the
hatch door to the basement
the bare
construction of stairs
a place to
carry a bicycle up or down
a machine no
more beautiful than complex (54)
I’m terrified of the basement of the house I grew up in. Fear rises in my body even now as I think about standing at the bottom of those basement stairs with the door at the top swinging shut, incandescent light dimming through the crack. I’m there, again, desperate, certain something is about to grab hold of me from inside the darkness, from beyond what I can see and understand. That basement is constructed in the architecture of my memory and yet the fear it evokes is visceral as ever. Exposed, I am bound to its shape.
“A house can be a place you never leave” (54), Katie Naughton writes in her debut trade collection The Real Ethereal. Memory is dialectical – at once concrete and hazy, there and not there, capable of producing bodily affect in the blooming present. Great and sustained efforts must occur to place my basement [circa 92-03] back under contractor plastic. The work of living is getting up in the morning and covering our wounds. If “history is what hurts” as Fredric Jameson argues, then The Real Ethereal is a singing reprieve.
These poems occur a constant coming and going, city to city, text to text, one day forward and the next back into memory. For Naughton, the poem acts as a place of storage, of containment, and of mourning: “I write these poems / I put you in here. / The places we were / are still as vigil” (39). But something always calls the speaker back to the present – “dust / blooms” (63); the burning wick of a candle; the sound of traffic through an open window – those “sliding sounds of daily being” (10) which constitute the beautiful, insistent noise of living. The poem, for Naughton, exists on the “threshold” between nothingness and existence, “a structure of time / we made are making” (81). In its poetics of the present, The Real Ethereal chooses life, now, in the poem, rather than dwelling with the burdensome “enigma of history” (79).
Naughton never loses sight of “real” talk, though, and her casual interjective quips create a rhythm of tension and release between the lines. She builds a pathos of loss in sequence “a second singing” before gleefully declaring near the end: “not everything’s elegy” (74). A moment of welcome levity. Let’s do as Naughton suggests in desperate times: let’s “drive each other / up the closest hill we say what kills us” (31). I read “kills” here in the double sense of naming that which destroys life, but also that which makes life worth sticking around for [that song just kills me]. Naughton’s compression of syntax opens her lines to multiple readings Gertrude Stein-like and she hints at a confession of wanting to be “killed” in the best way [la volupté de la douler]. Another moment of levity, perhaps, or simply an acknowledgement that we each get to decide [“we say”] what history and what memories hold the power to affect us.
Geoffrey Nilson is a poet, editor, musician, and literary critic born in Duncan, BC. Nilson is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University where he researches the long poem and is the 2024 recipient of the Charles Olson Award. His most recent chapbook, Light Makes a Ruin, was published in 2022 with above/ground press.