Vince Montague : Process Note #20 : The Box Poem

The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This excerpt and process note by Vince Montague is part of her curriculum for her upcoming class at the University of San Francisco in their MFA Program and for Poetry In Process: Creating Together, A Workshop.

 

 

 

Next Door (Bottlecap Press 2023) is a collection of prose poems based on walking and dreaming about the private worlds and the public faces of living in communities. Each poem in Next Door has a mailing address rather than a title, a location rather than a name. Each poem is a fragment, a glance inside a window, a conversation overheard on a sidewalk, a flight into the imagination of what we call “community.”

During the height of the pandemic, the world stayed at home, sheltering in place. The stress of the moment was palpable but mostly invisible. I started writing these poems as a way of absorbing the shock of lock down. There was a sense of freedom in the beginning, before we knew how long the process might be, when we believed the lock down might be over in a few weeks or months. That “window” of freedom led me to think about the form of the poems themselves.

I work with clay and ceramics. Most of my work evolves around circular forms. When I conceived of these poems, I thought of them as “boxes” much like the box-forms of apartment buildings and the many simple houses I passed on solitary walks for my mental health. Everything around me felt empty, and I could see the lines in the buildings and the streets: one squared form after another squared form.  Boxes upon boxes. The only thing round were the trees on the sidewalks.

Think of the paragraph as a box. Consider the box a type of poetic form. It may seem boring and predictable, efficient, and mundane, but inside each box is a rich complex world of survival, deep struggles, personal obstacles, persistent doubts. What’s so compelling about using the paragraph as a boxed form is the visual focus of the poem.

I think of these boxed poetic forms as individual prose poems, but prose is just the veneer of poetry. These poems are stand alone, but I also like the way when I combine them together, poem next to poem, they begin to take on new meaning. The juxtaposition of each box piled beside another box begins to shape the ideas in the poem in the mind of the reader. Proximity in community is something our culture feels almost blind to because we rely on technology to keep us connected. The walls we build around ourselves are of our own making.

 

1520 Laguna Circle

 

I remember looking up from my book because I sensed something collapsing outside our window. It was a beautiful spring morning, the kind of day when a person doesn’t expect bodies plummeting out of the sky; and yet, a dead robin lay on its side staring back at me. My first thought was to look away and pretend I didn’t see a bird die in mid-air, but every time I looked up from my book I saw the stiffened carcass, and I imagined to myself the final moments when this robin had a heart attack or a stroke, falling like a rock tossed onto our porch.

I could hear our oldest when she came upon the dead robin. I saw her step back in shock and fear, but rather than turn away completely, she found two oversized hydrangea leaves, scooped the dead bird up in the foliage and placed its body underneath the canopy of the plant. Then she found some pine needles and draped them over the birds’ wings. She closed her eyes and said something to herself. Later, when I asked her what she had whispered to the dead bird, she shut down and regained her teenage posture. She said she couldn’t remember and told me to leave her alone.

 

3850 Aspen Lane

 

The wailing sound you hear is not the sky falling, but the ceiling fan blowing both night and day because the air conditioner was damaged in the storm. There is nothing one can do with afternoon heat but move it around the room from one end to the other. And so all right, fanned air moves all about and still the heat will not relent. What somebody should do is write the neighbors a note and leave it on their door asking them to tidy up their front yard. Everyone knows an unkempt yard attracts robbers and thieves. It has been pointed out no one has proved this idea about unkempt yards, yet the theory persists. The fan needs to be cleaned before anything else; it sounds like a hole being bored in the sidewalk, ventilating these grievances and pushing them from one end of the room to the other, thinking their weight can somehow be ignored just by moving.

 

     463A Beacon Street

 

You walk inside the front door and you know instantly you can never live in this apartment, but you tell yourself to keep an open mind, until you pull open a drawer beneath the kitchen counter and you feel something sticky on your hand and you don’t know what it is, and then you think well whoever lived here before probably did a lot of cooking, that they were probably a lot like you and didn’t have that much money and that was why they were living in this apartment and cooking food that was sticky, and you find some comfort knowing there was a stranger who lived here, making his own sticky food, and then somehow managing to escape this apartment and you think maybe that could be you, maybe you could rent this apartment, make your own sticky food, and then someday escape.

 

 

 

 

 

Vince Montague is a writer and artist living in Northern California.  He is the author of Cracked Pot (Latah Books 2023), a memoir of grief, ceramics and creativity. His poetry and prose has appeared in The Southern Review, The Florida Review, Green Mountain Review, and many others. His sculptural and functional work in ceramics has been exhibited nationally in juried exhibitions, galleries, and can be found in many private collections.

https://vincemontague.com
https://instagram.com/vincemontague

 

Maw Shein Win’s most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win’s previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and two chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series features poets and their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA and teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was recently selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. mawsheinwin.com

 

Kevin Spenst : Trying on the Walrus Costume in the Ed Sullivan Theater of the Mind, by John Wall Barger

Trying on the Walrus Costume in the Ed Sullivan Theater of the Mind, John Wall Barger
Bottlecap Features, 2022

 

 

 

For all the phantasmagorical theatrics of the title, John Wall Barger’s chapbook-length poem begins with short quiet lines of absence. “The unheard sounds / That change us / Altering the fabric / Of our hands / Of our eyes / Before we even hear them” begins the first stanza, which is framed in what is not present: “unheard” and “before.” Within this framework of nothing, there’s a transformation of the self, represented in the figure of hands and eyes. Perhaps this is where the costume in the title starts being made, or maybe it’s within the unknown dimensions outside of our control from which change comes crashing down. What I love about Barger’s poem is that questions are posed within the beauty of language and the acknowledged mysteries of the world leave room for readings and rereadings. Like all good poetry, any summation of it is lacking, but the strategies the poet uses to climb towards meaning can be identified and appreciated.

     Trying on the Walrus Costume... chronicles the poet/speaker’s 73-year-old father’s nearly fatal fall from a ladder.  Since the speaker is in another country, texts from his mother keep him updated on the father’s condition. When the news first arrives, the son is listening to the Beatles’ The White Album. The panic of the heart is heard within the dissonant experiments of the album which “pulls us / Ruinward.” This sound of disaster triggers memories of first learning about John Lennon’s murder, which the speaker heard on the radio when he was 11 years old “bagging comics / My first job, Johnson’s Books / A comic store” The father’s life, texts from the mother, and John Lennon’s music and history are the main elements set up to be interwoven and mixed together through the duration of the poem.  The relatively straightforward beginning takes on layers of complexity that at times screams out noise and at other times breathes nuance.

     I’d like to pause on the brilliance of this one word: “ruinward.” The compression of Barger’s poetics takes all the reflection, panic, sounds, whistling (yes, there’s some whistling!) and music of the first two pages of the poem and distils it into something that moves towards ruin. Everything moves towards a point of entropy, but ruinward is a unique marker for this moment. In its combination of two “r”s, it’s a growling word that ends in the full stop of a /d/. Barger may have come up with it on his own or lifted it from Alfred Edward Housman’s 1936 poem “I wake from dreams and turning,” which ends with the line: “The world runs ruinward.” If it’s an invocation of that 1930s poem, we may hear the additional noise of political violence rising in the distance. Another unsettling layer.

    This compression of ideas into words and then into compound words reaches a fever pitch midway through. The mother’s emojis at the end of a text are set in contrast and comparison to hyphenated compound words: “Irascible hawk-god, small-mouthed witch-man.” This collage of language might also might be seen as coinciding with the change in tone in the White Album that moves from the soft and comforting “Julia” (mentioned earlier in the poem) to the familiar yet strange "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" to the sonic collage chaos of “Revolution 9.” This piling up of words and subjects, tricks us (or me at least) into reading one of the mother’s texts as music from the Beatles.

     Barger’s astute wording is complimented by memorable phrases. One of my favourite lines from the entire chapbook is “so you speak in the undestroyable present tense.” Given how the poem reaches back to before the speaker is born, the meaning of the indestructible nature of the present is not centred in any one person. I die but the present tense is taken up by other people and their complicated relationships. Within the context of the poem, the “you” is most likely John Lennon speaking to his mother who died when he was seventeen, but the line appears in its own stanza and the “you” is relatively loose. It could be any of the figures in the poem speaking, continuing the thread of the opening stanza’s “us.”

    The connections between people in the poem is made most explicit between the father and John Lennon. We learn early on that Lennon is the father’s favourite Beatle and after the father falls from a ladder, we are taken to the scene of Lennon’s murder, where the rockstar lies “Under the Dakota Building / Archway / Ladder of stones.” This is immediately followed by the mother’s text about their loved one’s surgery and it’s hard not to imagine the “titanium rod” in his body as another kind of ladder. While this might be an interpretative stretch on my part, ladders do become a central image in the poem. “Up the ladder, up, up, up / Out of the land,” follows a stanza about an “ego-shattering” experience for a reputed “hero,” which could be the father or Lennon, two male role-models in the speaker’s life. Within the general drift of the poem towards expansiveness, this ladder becomes scaffolding for others and it becomes the means by which the speaker is born: “before I descend / The ladder of my mother.”

     Connections are also made between people and their histories and the unduly aggressive behaviour of John Lennon, a side of the star that’s often ignored, is exposed as part of a violent heritage, linking Lennon to his father who is described “trudging out of a factory / Hands dangling like dead animals.” While we may still have warm feelings for the pop music we grew up on, the ugly backstories of the music’s creator is something that Barger forces us to acknowledge. It doesn’t, however, take away our own emotional history. It complicates things. That John Lennon lost his mother at the age of 17 is something offered as explanation for the intensity behind his music: “Sing the dead mother, master, phony / Like nobody has done.” Lennon’s superstar lifestyle is also on display and the word “phony,” which his killer used to describe him, also touches upon the abusiveness towards his wives. Sweet, tender and brutal. “And always the hero staggers.”

     The absence of the opening stanza becomes a bigger absence at the very end: “Listening hard / Because I love him [...] I still would never hear.” Hear what, we might wonder. This ambiguous ending leaves room for depth that a reader can supply. In the Q&A at a Don Domanski reading at Dalhousie in 2008, John Wall Barger asks “how can you say something directly without being sentimental?” Domanski replies “Let’s say that you’re dealing with an emotional subject. A loss of a dear loved one […] we kind of end up being children when confronted with loss. That’s normal. When you’re writing of something that may smack of sentimentality, you’re going to have to focus on something deeper than that.” I think the depths in Trying on the Walrus Costume… is how the fabric of time weaves us into the interconnected beings that we are. We emerge into a selfhood which is a reweaving of the cultures, people and worlds around us.

     “A long long time ago I learned not to not pick a subject to write about because I found it too confining,” Domanski says in the same 2008 talk. (It’s on Youtube and full disclosure here: I was watching it to prepare for a talk on Domanski when I happened upon John Wall Barger in the  audience. I’m happy to bring this random encounter into this review.) It may be that Barger took this idea and has run with it towards poetry that’s beautiful, memorable and written concisely… about a great many things.

 

 

 

Kevin Spenst (he/him) is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, and Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse (all with Anvil Press) and over a dozen chapbooks with the three most recent: Recto Verso Chez the Devil’s Printers (cowritten with Josh Pitre for Collusion Books), A Video Tape Swaddled in Purple Wool (845 Press) and Sand in the Bed. (a holm with the Alfred Gustav Press). His most recent writing has appeared in the anthologies Event 50: Collected Notes on Writing and Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing. His book launch during the pandemic was featured in a book about creative practices: The Creative Instigator's Handbook. He writes chapbook reviews for subTerrain magazine, teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and he lives in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory.