Kevin Spenst : Whatever Heals You

part two in a series of three personal essays mixing travelogue and review
see part one here

 

 

Day 2: Fremont || Cluster Flux

     We’re in Fremont, which is a neighbourhood just over a canal from the main landmass of Seattle. From a map, with bodies of water west and east, this part of Seattle looks like a bone with a fracture. Cheryl is off to get a bra and I’m off to wander. I walk down one of the main streets and turn down a back alley. At the end is a sign for Vintage Mall. I step into a labyrinth of faint old odours floating over bric-a-brac galore: second hand clothes, a corner of mirrors of all shapes and sizes, old movie posters and signed headshots, cassette tapes and records, vintage plates and cups, a rack of postcards and on and on. Everything that you can imagine from your childhood or your parent’s childhood is on display in duplicates.

     In my pockets I have lines from DS Stymeist’s second book of poetry, Cluster Flux, but I wish I had his book with me. It opens with an epigraph from Walt Whitman, that most famous of big-voiced American poets whose vision was optimistic and encyclopaedic. Stymeist’s poetry travels similar routes of openness and would be at home here in the midst of everything. Not that there’s any pop-culture nostalgia, but it’s expansive. What I love most about Cluster Flux is that the poems and sections are framed by a long poem about trains and riding the rails, a mode of travel that doesn’t necessarily care about borders. Train tracks criss-cross the continent and this borderless movement frames Cluster Flux.

     Sounds “jolt and jive” us in “Mass Transfer: Passage 1.” This opening poem of long lines that take us through an inventory of train travel is grounded in alliterative pairings. “The plank and ping of it bangs into soles,/ travels the leg, runs up spine,/shakes chest and chassis.” The mechanical is made most manifest in the body, but there’s no explicit mention of who these people are. It’s only in the last stanza where human characters appear: “on a culvert abutment, two people sleep together. / Discrete layers: cardboard padding, bedding.” These travellers (‘knights of the road’ in the old hobo slang) are sleeping in the rough and in going back to the start of the poem, we might imagine the unidentified speaker allying themselves with the anonymous ‘masses,’ people on the move from one part of the continent to the other. We’re all anonymous to most of the almost eight billion other people on this planet, not to mention the billions of other beings. The pairing of sounds that runs through Stymeist’s long poem might be a stand in for the comfort we take in companionship.

     Poetry doesn’t always comfort, sometimes it challenges, confronts, or perplexes. It delivers as many purposes as the items in any big antique shop. Cluster Flux, however, ultimately offers a strong mix of language (and therefore an open-eyed awareness of the nooks and crannies of the world) along with personal comfort. In “Oblation,” a poem following the poem “Sea-Jelly,” which itself is written as a direct address to a future child, we witness a reimagining of the future child who is no more. But first, in “Sea-Jelly” in Whitmanesque language, we see the “pleasure of elemental increase.” This creature will someday stretch their limbs “across the firm earth’s countless trails.” Two poems entitled “Oblation” follow, with the first one beginning: “In the midst of our loss.” This first oblation (a term meaning a prayer to god) ends in a vision akin to Bottocelli’s Venus “riding out / the tide on the edge of a pink shell.” The second oblation re-envisions this hoped for child as something aquatic: “a sea-throng of blue jellies blooming.” The prayer preserves this loss as a beautiful entity that once was in the speaker and his partner’s lives. “Salt” and “Chimera” are short single-stanza poems that seem to come out of grief. Pain is acknowledged but the effort to preserve the beauty of a hopeful period in a couple’s life is safeguarded in two small prayers.

     Poetry can also comfort through its layering of experiences. Stymeist incorporates his experience living with Crohn's disease most directly in the last section of the book Midsummer Disjunction. The first poem in this section opens with the radio: ‘“Expect set-backs,” lilts the medical pundit.’ The backdrop is the pandemic and the snippet of radio is something that speaks in a different way to Stymeist, whose body “sweats out fever, // overreacts subverts…” The poems in this section are interwoven with imagery from nature. For example, “A cicada-killer wasp clasps a paralyzed cigale / in its mandibles, drags it through the leaf-litter.” The speaker then shares a conversation with another poet over “socially-distant drinks.” This poet explains the pain of his gout and at the end of the poem, the speaker explains his own pain, but this is within the context of others’ pain. It’s a scream within a scream within a scream. We experience pain but it’s the condition of our shared existence.

    The line explaining the fate of a paralyzed cigale (French for cicada) makes the Whitman epigraph of the collection all the more resonant: “stiflings and passages open… the paralyzed become supple.” The dream of recovery for all sorts of creatures runs throughout Cluster Flux.

     I consider giving some lines from the opening of Stymeist’s book to one of the employees at Fremont Vintage Mall. I’m buying a small magnetic frame as a gift and after the sale, I explain that I’m from Canada and I’m sharing poetry on my trip to Seattle. I give him the opening stanza from the poem “Abrasion,” which I’ve written out by hand:

Bison venerate the rare boulders sunk

deep into prairie sea. Generations spin

around stone, crushing blood-sucking

creatures beyond the curve of horn.

 

 

 DS Stymeist from Cluster Flux

 

He’s wearing a military cap and a plaid shirt. He’s intrigued by the poem. He appreciates the gesture and holds the slip of paper up like a bill of sizable denomination. His perfect posture stands in contrast to his loose angular smile.

    We talk a little about how the line acknowledges the culture of animals, but I wish I had the whole book with me. I didn’t anticipate the exchange would go this well. If I had the book, we could read it together and see the last line: “How can I be more like them, rub against / roughness, learn to shed my skin?” In the end: a poem of longing for the strength to deal with difficult change.

    Cluster Flux offers multiple visions and paths to healing, none of them straight-forward and most of them with an eye to the many moving connections that are made in and around the earth. How there is so much more than us.

    I leave the Fremont Vintage Mall to go see how Cheryl’s doing in her search.

 

 

 

 

Kevin Spenst (he/him) is the author of sixteen chapbooks and three full-length books of poetry plus his newest collection A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024). He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is the 2025 Poetry Mentor at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.

Kevin Spenst : Whatever Heals You

 

 

“The paradox inherent in travel, the response system, the gall, the privilege, the gifts, the assaults and accounting.” — Tawhida Tanya Evanson

Midnight Arrival

I’m writing this in Seattle, Washington, in the home of strangers, a young couple I’ve never met. They are in New York, staying in the home of other strangers. Last night, Cheryl and I arrived in Seattle just after midnight. We went to a hotel where we showed a number to the front desk and they gave us a backpack. In it was a fob, clicker and keys in the side pocket. This was the arrangement. We drove the final five blocks and used the clicker to open the parking garage gate and then we used the fob to get into the building (though at first we weren’t sure which entrance to use in the large underground parking) and then we used the same fob to get into the apartment where we are staying for a week. I feel like I’m part of some espionage operation though I don’t think Cheryl and I could pass for Nitin and Shivani and I have no idea what my instructions are. I mean I know I have to write and I’ve brought three books of poetry from Canada with lines that I’ve written out to pass along to strangers. At the end of the week, we have a two-day music festival to go to and so before then, I’m going to try to make myself feel less of a tourist by sharing lines of poetry from Patrick Grace, DS Stymeist and Jess Housty.

Day 1: Lune Cafe || Deviant

I have the best memory

of what it means

to be gay

at the end

of summer.

We’ve arrived by city bus to Pioneer Square and I couldn’t feel like more of a tourist. There are groups of tourists galore on most every street corner being led by loud guides. We’re hungry so we’ve ducked into Lune Cafe, where we order from a touchscreen which has pictures of all our options. At the end, there’s an option for tipping, but I’m not sure who this would be for. There is no contact with anyone working here. I sit and write beneath a wall of astroturf suggesting something green. In neon are the words: glowww (with three w’s.) The word is on other walls in the phrase ‘let’s glow!’

     Words matter but it’s also the person (or voice) behind the words that’s even a bigger part of what matters. In Patrick Grace’s first book of poetry Deviant, a loose narrative is set up from the first page, where

It began in a field where two boys

played in a circle of melting snow.

In this opening poem “Why Not,” an almost pastoral setting is created in an alliteration of “finches and foxes” “while the rest of the world / pressed buttons and touched screens.” Moving forward in couplets, the poem presents two boys throwing a baseball that they’ve found. One of them hurtles it at the other’s ribs for no particular reason. This escalates to the ball being thrown back within packed snow at the other’s face. The pastoral descends into a singular emotion: “boys learn the edges // of what they hold in their hands // when angered.” The pastoral opening (“creeping phlox flourished”) has been replaced by something cold and hard.

    This mix of longing for something lovely and someone beloved with violence seems to be the central tension of the book. The way through is in finding the right words. “Dasterdly” is the second poem in the collection, one which begins with the speaker learning the word from his mother in describing a “devilish boy in red shorts” and the speaker’s uncertain stirrings of desire. By the end of the first section, this mix is blended in the last stanza of a poem about

learning to taste

 

another boys’ spit and dreaming

it could be warm, secreted

special, just for my mouth.

This poem “Nightcall” is one of my favourites in the collection. The geography is the most precise (“wandering up the hill from Kits Beach”) and the language play is at its loveliest (“banana-scented sunscreen sheen.”) There’s even a word made up for the occasion of the poem: Blundersight, which seems to be a portmanteau of blunder and blindsighted. It’s as if the tension between beauty and the ugliness of violence forces a new language into being.

     The titular deviance of Grace’s collection mixes throughout the rest of the book in poems written in mostly couplets, tercets, quatrains or just single long stanzas. In a more varied stanzaic form, “A Violence” circles around an inquiry into an incident of domestic violence, with the speaker asking: “did they believe you / did the man in blue believe / another man / committed the violence.” This section (there are five in total, like fingers in a fist?) goes on to explore this toxic relationship. Fear, nightmares and the distancing language and cold, biassed word choices from those who are supposed to serve and protect dominate this section. 

    What heals someone after a lifetime of minor and major traumatic encounters? This books suggests language that reenvisions a life. The last section has four poems, the first one beginning:

At first the world was body.

I didn’t question the gold

hardening its rivers inside me.

The last poem recalls the image of a gap, a hole, a tunnel that has run throughout the book as a place of solace and the poem ends on greenness and brightness:

In the parking lot the older kids killed it

with their stories, their names, their viridity.

 

Miles away, a boy dove into a river of gold,

his body flexuous, extend under the sun.

Perhaps, I’m being overly optimistic in my reading. There is some ambiguity throughout the book, which may reflect the speaker’s coming to terms with who he is (ambiguity as a stand in for ambivalence?) What I love about the collection as a whole is the reworking of images and lines. One of the poems near the very end seems to be written from lines found throughout the collection. The obsession that drives any writer in trying to understand something is on full luminous (and ‘burning’) display.

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Spenst (he/him) is the author of sixteen chapbooks and three full-length books of poetry plus his newest collection A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024). He is one of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is the 2025 Poetry Mentor at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.