Nada Gordon : on Copium

 

 

 

 

 

For the past three years, I have been receiving IV infusions of ketamine to help me deal with constitutional melancholy worsened by the widening gyre: 45/47, the pandemic, work difficulties and indeed overwork, and feelings of existential despair.  The infusions are extremely effective. I initially took them at long intervals, but now go twice a month for optimal results.

Ketamine, which was invented as an anesthetic for both people and animals (kitties!), was observed by emergency room practitioners to lift, almost miraculously, people’s depression, according to patient testimonies. It is a psychedelic medicine, but it’s not like LSD or psilocybin; it’s neither multi-sensory nor long-lasting.  I might see hints of visuals, but not full-blown hallucinations.  More than anything, it’s intellective.  Because it is “dissociative,” it liberates me (at least, while under its influence) from patterns of thinking and assumptions about how the world is structured.  It’s phenomenological.  I seem to float above my life and society and even nature for the purpose of disinterested (though not unemotional) observation.  I both burrow into these phenomena and see them anew. 

It is largely known as a party drug, a use to which I’ve never put it and honestly would not want to.  It’s better suited, it seems to me, to interior exploration.  Although I’m decidedly NOT a new age type, I have experienced something like a shamanic journey led by a flying white fox; I saw myself in the womb at the moment of conception, inhabiting three subjectivities at once; I observed my hardworking ancestresses dyeing textiles in a dim stone building.  Often I find myself in a little boat on a misty lake like Lake Inle in Myanmar.  Occasionally I’m a Heian aristocrat just barely dipping my sleeve in the water from my yakatabune.  It’s sublime, especially because accompanied by the custom playlists I lovingly make:  oud, qanoun, ancient lyre, Bach, Scarlatti, lute, shamisen. It’s as if I hear this music as I never did before, and it makes me tremble in adoration of human genius.

Sometimes infusions have a key letter, like on Sesame Street; “this infusion was brought to you by the letter O.”  Sometimes certain flowers, gems, and keywords make appearances.  I often find myself feeling deep appreciation for people who were important to me in my past, and sometimes I even forgive them.  Exquisite natural places both experienced and not-yet experienced show up, as do interesting narrow streets in ancient cities. Possibilities for projects and things to make and design present themselves. The medication helps to gratify my great desire for novelty and adventure.

Although I have felt, in the past several years, sort of bullied by institutions, the infusions are full of affirmation of what I have been able to accomplish and have given me ways, even just small ones, to move forward despite how fucked the world has become. Thus:  Copium.  I came upon this word and knew instantly it was perfect for the poem I was in the process of writing, whose raw materials were the post-infusion notes I scrawled in a teal notebook.

The problem, of course, with drug writing, is that it can be trite: “whoa, dude, the universe is expanding…trippy!”  I don’t think I was entirely able to evade sounding faux-profound in that dopey (pun intended) way, but I did my best to use my poetic defamiliarization toolkit to compose this.  In any case, I’m glad to add my voice to the pharmaceutical genre. 

 

 

 

 

Nada Gordon consists of a head, neck, torso, two arms and two legs. Since reaching adulthood, her body has consisted of close to 100 trillion cells, the basic unit of life. These cells are organised biologically to form her whole body. She is the author of Folly, V. Imp, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, foriegnn bodie, Swoon, Scented Rushes, Vile Lilt, The Sound Princess (Selected Poems 1985-2015), and Emotional Support Peacock. The initiatory sentence of her blog at https://thesoundprincess.com/ reads: “The impulse to decorate is, as always, very strong.”.

Laressa Dickey : Four poems from THE LUNATIC SPEAKS TO US DIRECTLY, a manuscript in progress

 

 

 

(Still Life (Black Mountain College), 1951)
            --after Cy Twombly

 In every piece, something moved or missing. Two
Tall bottles and one cup, two bottles and two cups
And two more bottles, then no bottles, then another cup
Then another cup and another bottle. You can see
Nothing of these pictures is true, or that nothing of these
Is lying to you. The table, the wall, that light, shadow
And sand made glasses and tint
Of color. Not one of us misses the human face of composition.

(Paessagio, 1986)

Monster moves through the house at night but the rooms are too small
And monster so large so incalcitrant, chalk body
Leaving a trance a trace up and down the angles
And over the bridge—
To arrive where Commodus jousted
In forests that would make a normal person
Insane, such were the stories. Monster without ears
Hears no such stories.

 

 

(Apollo and the Artist, 1975)

It’s like he said, anybody in here got a Bible I can use, and held it upside down in photos.
You can measure the synchrony of dancers and moments, the audience enjoys that.
Most of the data shows the audience loves both chaotic moments and synchrony.
Rarely was there a significant result in between, though you won’t mind me saying
APOLLO doesn’t not match the Apollo underneath and the four petaled flower does
Not NOT match the formula of day | month | year or even the year 1 4 1 1 when either
The artist called Information or the 06 in my social cost some bits
Of Citizenship. No matter, color white over the mistakes, color over code [the NO]

 

 

(Nine Discourses on Commodus, 1963, Part II) 

Within two weeks, blood islands between host and offspring.
Host in this instance MOTHER but what does
MOTHER of MONSTER resemble?
Single-cell vessels, transport mocking itself.
From the future. Let’s say spawn to separate
What’s human. From Icon and the rest of us pickling
Cucumbers, brining in the jar over the years.
Measure underneath, drops and splats so watch
Yourself. People watching you across the islands.

 

 

 

 

Laressa Dickey is a dance artist, writer, and bodyworker based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. Her work spans disciplines and modalities. She’s the author of the poetry books Syncopations and Twang. Together with sound artist Andrea Steves, she published Radio Graveyard Orbit, a speculative book about space junk. For Bergen Assembly 2019, she and her partner Ali Gharavi created How to Pass Time With No Reference, an multi-media installation about their experiences inside/outside the Turkish prison system. Her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation; she researches the dancer's use of language and the writer's use to/for dance. She’s a member of the performative collaboration MISLEADING SUBJECTS and teaches occasionally at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Kim Fahner : Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, by Paula Eisenstein

Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, Paula Eisenstein
Pinhole Poetry Chapbook Press, 2024

 

 

 

To begin with, a confession: I have always been transfixed by the story of Amelia Earhart. That she was so much a woman who came before her time, in terms of the life she chose to live, and that she just disappeared without a trace, is a mystery that begs to be explored. My friend, Matt Heiti, has written a play about Earhart called Ever Falling Flight, and I loved Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s novel, Letters to Amelia. Before I even saw Heiti’s play, or read Zier-Vogel’s novel, or Paula Eisenstein’s Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, I remember doing curious Google searches on her when I was much younger, wondering if recent photographic ‘finds’ over the years would pan out to become ‘the real deal’ when it came to finding her last resting place and that of her beloved plane, a Lockheed Electra.

Eisenstein begins her chapbook collection not with Amelia Earhart’s youth, but with a poem that conjures the time of her celebrity and fame—a time filled with flashbulbs and public appearances across North America. In “Winter of ’33,” the poet crafts a poem that moves across the page, writing about how Earhart’s “primary source of income/[was] coming from lecturing,” and how she “drove over seven thousand miles in six weeks/mostly alone/giving at least one interview at each stop/as well as the lecture.” At the end of such a harrowing and exhausting tour, Earhart “rented a modest house/in North Hollywood near Toluca Lake,” telling the media “she was on vacation.” Throughout the poem, Eisenstein braids in the image of “a butterfly pupa/going through a phase of life/to activate transformation.” The end of the piece is haunting, as the poet leaves the reader with the idea that “The pupal stage/lasts weeks, months, or even years/depending on the climate and insect species.” In contrast to today’s media (over)exposure of celebrities, Earhart’s encounters with the press and public seem tame, but—for her—were likely rather intense.

The poems that populate the early part of the collection refer to Earhart’s childhood—of how she moved between her parents’ Kansas City home and her maternal grandparents’ home in Atchison,  Kansas, a place where “Gauzy bedsheets/the dead once crept in/bloom in the wind/on the clothesline.” They also refer to her father’s struggle with alcoholism, and to her parents’ very rocky relationship. What is solid throughout this cluster of poems (and her life) is Amelia’s relationship with her beloved sister, Muriel. They “run worm races” together, making “a harness from a grass//blade, a sulky/of a small leaf.” In playing these imaginative games, young Amelia feels able to fashion some sense of control over her life.  

Eisenstein touches upon Earhart’s time as a nurse in the poem, “Toronto nurse succumbs,” writing of images that include open and decaying wounds, “bleeding stumps,” “bedpan chores,” as well as references to “the surgeon’s path” and “A cure that torments/and does not work.” When Amelia’s mother returns to her husband, in California, Muriel and Amelia follow, but, in “California,” Amelia (as the speaker) says, “Me,/I too am free like the black-capped chickadee//chick, that set off in fall to join a new flock,/about which studies show//no evidence of parental recognition/after the first year.” From there, Flight Problems moves into the flying poems. In “Opportunistic Cuckoo Egg,” Amelia’s voice speaks to the reader through time and space. She decries the addition of a man to her flight, saying “the reason: I/am a girl: I/am a nervous/lady: I might throw//myself out.” The man is just someone who’s been added to the flight to be sure that Earhart is protected, simply because women weren’t often pilots in the 1930s.

The poems recollect, and almost dovetail, the upset and struggle within Amelia’s family life. In “Preening,” the idea of Amelia purposefully creating an image or illusion is pointed to as including “riding breeches, lace up boots,//a well-tailored/jacket.” To complete the image, a “library book/on practical/aeronautics” is tucked under her arm. Cloudy skies in “Fly days” are compared to “our parents’/dog sick marriage,” and in “Mother leaves father, returns to Boston. So do I,” the reader begins to understand that Earhart was not impressed by the idea of marriage: “The doctor says that scientifically/he can make me/fall in//love. I don’t want to./There’s something wrong with me.” That doctor compares Earhart to a “caged mynah bird,” but what she feels to be, to this modern reader, is someone who was simply born before her time. She had a dream, a wish, and she set out to make it real.

A series of creatures with wings—both birds and insects—make their way through the poems in Flight Problems, further drawing a connection to Amelia Earhart’s own love for flying. In “Satin Moths,” “the spring lock of the cabin door breaks./The door hangs open like a mouth.” The people who are struggling to close the door, then, are referred to as clinging “like the satin moths//that swarm around the willow trees at dusk/in June July and August.” In “Passenger Pigeon,” the voice of AE (Amelia Earhart) speaks to her fiance, George Putnam: “your protective nature…reminds me/of an African Wild Dog.” She concludes, firmly: “know this:/I would rather dream./I would rather do. I would rather fly.” On the day of her wedding, in “Cowbird (Feb 7 1931),” the poet writes: “She kept her own/name though did not mind Mrs. Putnam/socially.” In “Black Swan,” there is, again, the recognition of how feminist Earhart was during a time when feminism was derided: “A girl can be/any one/she wants to be.” To fight against the cult of domesticity in the 1930s, to be the exception to the rule, would have been difficult, and sometimes I think maybe Earhart found freedom from the too strict conventions of a patriarchal society while she was flying her plane and breaking aviation records.

I reached out to Paula Eisenstein to ask her about her fascination with exploring Amelia Earhart’s story through the poetic form, mostly because of my own interest in the mysterious tale. She responded by telling me that she wanted “to have a heart-to-heart conversation with an imaginary Amelia” in her mind. That ‘imaginary Amelia,’ as Eisenstein calls her, “had no qualms with the kind of energy I wanted to bring to this project. She wasn’t fazed by my desire to investigate the less seemly parts of her life.” There’s so much of the element of ekphrasis in this poetic undertaking that Eisenstein calls Flight Problems: The Amelia Earhart Poems, as the poet explores a very well-known woman’s life. Given the scope of Earhart’s accomplishments, and the fascinating way in which Paula Eisenstein approaches it poetically, it would be lovely to see this chapbook evolve into a larger poetic project in the future. In the meantime, avid poetry readers should be sure to check out Pinhole Poetry’s chapbooks, published by Erin Bedford. They’re beautifully crafted and full of excellent poems.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website at Kim Fahner - Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Teacher.