Geoffrey Nilson : The Real Ethereal, by Katie Naughton

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.

R. Kolewe, Nate Logan, Katie Naughton, Sue Bracken + Catherine Hunter : virtual reading series #28

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, originally prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

R. Kolewe : “Four Scatters from a notebook with the word Breeze on the cover”

R. Kolewe has published three collections of poetry, Afterletters (Book*hug 2014), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks 2017) and The Absence of Zero (Book*hug 2021) as well as several chapbooks. He lives in Toronto.

Nate Logan : “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” “Diner,” and “Laura Described Poetry”

Nate Logan is the author of Small Town (The Magnificent Field, 2021) and Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019). He teaches at Franklin College and Marian University.

Katie Naughton : “Study,” “debt ritual: drift” and “debt ritual: grain”

Katie Naughton is the author of the chapbook Study (above/ground press, 2021). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. She is at work on two collections of poems, “Debt Ritual” and “the real ethereal,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize and Autumn House Press Book Prize. She is the publicity editor for Essay Press, editor and project manager at the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project (launching in 2022), and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets (www.etceterapoetry.com). She lives in Buffalo, NY, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo.

Sue Bracken : “Little Victories,” “The Evolution of Feathers” and “Frequent Flyer”

Sue Bracken’s work has appeared in GUEST [a journal of guest editors], Hart House Review (forthcoming 2022), Dusie (forthcoming 2022), Touch the Donkey, WEIMAG, The New Quarterly, Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology (Mansfield Press), The Totally Unknown Writer’s Festival 2015: Stories (Life Rattle Press) and other publications. Her first collection of poems When Centipedes Dream was published by Tightrope Books in 2018.

Sue lives and writes in Toronto in a home overthrown by artists and animals.

Catherine Hunter : two poems from St. Boniface Elegies (2019): “Submission” and “Irish Studies”

Catherine Hunter is a poet and fiction writer who teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. Her most recent book, St. Boniface Elegies (Signature, 2019), won Manitoba’s Lansdowne Poetry Prize and was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her short story “Calling You” (Prairie Fire, Spring, 2020) won gold in the National Magazine Awards. Her books are Latent Heat, Lunar Wake, and Necessary Crimes (poems) and After Light, In the First Early Days of My Death, Queen of Diamonds, The Dead of Midnight, and Where Shadows Burn (fiction).

Katie Naughton : on Study

 

 

 

Study is, in many ways, already an essay about its own making. The pieces in it are at least partially demonstrations of a failure to write a more straightforward analytical essay (they are also, then, partially a demonstration of what else emerges in the process of this so-called failure). The project started around the time I was starting a PhD in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo and reengaging with critical writing again. Sometimes I refused, often out of general exhaustion from what intense study and analytical writing required rather than an explicit desire to not comply with generic expectations.

The second essay in the book was actually the first I wrote. I had been trying to write a more direct critical evaluation of Lisa Robertson’s work in Nilling and The Weather, but the quality of these materials, with their gorgeous description, their evasion of codifying meaning into something stable and graspable, evading thus the loss of what in experience and thought is not possible to make cohere, made this essay, with its thinking-through-description rather than through concept, feel more possible, more appropriate. It allowed my thinking about the work to stay open rather than requiring it to close in on some conclusion. My exhaustion, too, was operative in this form. I acknowledge John Keat’s statement “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses” and in a way this essay is that proof which the constraints on my time and energy required me to do in place of the analytical essay I had been trying to write, as there wasn’t time for me to do it outside of the essay.

I was at the time reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on reparative reading – which I’ll roughly define as how to write intelligibly about a text without your reading foreclosing the text’s available significations in an overly rigid critical framework. Most theorization on reparative reading is about how to act as a critic. My orientation in these essays shifts this focus slightly – these are critical essays that aim to comment on others’ texts, but they are also personal essays that aim to use these texts as a material and structuring component of my own experience. They are attempts to count reading as experience, to account for thought and its sources as part of a life. These pieces moved my critical thought closer to my creative practice and made way for incorporating criticality, material or ideas that originated outside my own first-hand experience, in its interaction with other facets of experience. Working with the material in this way gave me time to work alongside the texts rather than on them, giving me time to get to know them. I’m now working on much more straightforward critical writing as I draft a dissertation chapter on Robertson, but it’s writing that’s been formed by this experience of being with the text.

The first essay in Study engages in a similar project to the second, but one that is more closely tied to the language of the text being studied, that is, a Leslie Scalapino essay in which Gertrude Stein is also quoted. Rather than analyzing the language, I wanted to describe it, to use it to describe my experience that existed alongside the language, preserving it intact. The final essay interrogates more directly what thinking feels like. While the first two essay may have been demonstrations of a kind of thinking, this third essay attempts to take its measure as accurately as possible. I’m influenced by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s acts of precise description of phenomenon we often allow to proceed invisibly. I discovered in the act of writing that my topic, the sublime, which I’ll describe as the feeling of overwhelming awe or fear when faced with something too large or powerful to fully integrate, actually included for me the process of writing itself, especially the kind of creative synthesis required by good critical writing.

Buffalo, its weather and history, is also an important material read for this project by my daily experience of living here. So too its long, early winter nights -- this is a book of the November time change and December solstice night.

 

 

 

 

 

Katie Naughton is the author of the chapbook Study (above/ground press, 2021). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. She is at work on two collections of poems, “Debt Ritual” and “the real ethereal,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize and Autumn House Press Book Prize. She is the publicity editor for Essay Press, editor and project manager at the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project (launching in 2022), and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets (www.etceterapoetry.com). She lives in Buffalo, NY, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo.