Joshua Poteat & Traversing Time and Space

In Joshua Poteat's poem "Hitchhiking in the Dying South" from Ornithologies, the poet is reminded of an accident along the road. Without veering too far from the matrix of the poem, Poteat constructs a landscape that both enlarges and compresses, as an accordion; he travels through time and space, covering a sweep of ground in the process.

The poem begins by naming the poet's surroundings, a counterpoint to those who enter a town they “could not at first even name.” With lines that begin “I have seen” and “I have felt,” the poem may bring to mind Ginsberg’s "Howl", but it has more in common with Frost’s "Acquainted with the Night", where naming is not just testimony, but heraldic badge:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

In Poteat’s poetry, his memories are often malleable. Other lines in "Hitchhiking in the Dying South" begin, “Or was it…”, “It’s difficult to get this straight…”, and “Now that I think of it....” This porosity of memory and reality that allows the poet to travel through time is central to his memory-driven poems where truth and fiction merge and become indiscernible, achieving what Billy Collins calls a “poetic plasticity of time and space.” The resulting voice is often slightly removed from the material world. It gracefully, almost angelically, eases leaps and helps manage appropriated voices that materialize from others times and places.

Night absorbs the accident’s chaos, and in this memory, the poet says he “had come to love the sparks.” Later, in the sponginess of retrospect, both the night and the speaker receive the body of the cow as part of this communion. The speaker posits that “maybe even / a beauty” is there. Written as memory, anything is possible, as nostalgia creates a seductive pull toward a buffet of palatable morsels that have the potential to redeem.

Larry Levis is a master at traversing time and space, and his associative images are constantly escaping the confines of his poems. Poteat names Levis as mentor and earns the entitlement. (Poteat's southern landscapes also make him Levis’ successor.) Consider this passage from the poem "South" by Levis. In it, the poet in his youth passes a southern landscape by train:
…

Past junkyards embracing swamps;
Past towns so poor they were not
There, except for some grief that
Made them swell a moment beside
Those tracks, only to vanish—
A few lights slipping backward—
That was my time, or no one’s

…

While some of Poteat’s images are anchors – they halt the motion of the poem to mine a new theme (the bloody snouts of the pigs alive in the moonlight), some are windows, which unfold into variations on the theme and time at hand (the crows' noise reminds the poet of the slant sympathy of his old foreman). Space, too, is traversed, as miniature worlds bank much greater ones — an entire countryside is the backdrop for a moth that confuses flame for the image of flame reflected in the cow’s eye. It is a dizzying spiral inward. This facility is pure Levis, whose images take off, to draw on "South" again, from a trembling flower, a moth, and the eye of a chicken, in a characteristic journey of discovery in which diverse figures challenge but rarely break theme’s gravitational pull.

Levis and Poteat are linked by sensibility, particularly in these two poems. In "South," Levis claims the moth’s markings as a “beautiful truth” and the poem ends with the smoke of the train scrawled on “A sky that stays there, above / Any reason for a sky.” Here is Poteat’s "Hitchhiking in the Dying South" entire.

Hitchhiking in the Dying South
by Joshua Poteat

I have seen the morning spread over the fields
............ and I have walked on, trying to forget
how it seemed as if daybreak was founded
............ on the most fragile web of breath,
and I had blown it.

............ Then I thought it might not exist at all,
nor had it ever. That it was only the idea of breath
............ and the egrets asleep in sourgrass were the idea
of flight, and if I was to breathe in,
............ it would all just disappear.

I have seen the spotted toads at dusk
............ come up from the ditches after a rainstorm
and into the asphalt's steam and I have seen them
............ crushed by lumber trucks, then lifted away
into the pines by the gathering crows.

............I have felt the night quiver with heron's wing
over the swamps, over wild pigs in a blackberry patch,
............ their snouts bloody & alive in the moonlight,
and I have walked on, dirty, alone, kicking to the grasses
............ the swollen bodies of possum, squirrel, rabbit, raccoon,
giving them no prayer, no peace-filled silence.

............But that was long ago, when work was scarce
and I thumbed my way to the tobacco plant
............ or the slaughterhouse, north up Highway 17
to Holly Ridge or down to Bulltail on 210,
............ either way I would be shoveling something until dusk,
something soft and warm and beyond me.
............ And I would be glad for it.

Walking with that forgotten gesture wavering
............ in the morning air, I felt that people
could come into the world in a place
............ they could not at first even name,
and move through it finally, like the dawn,
............ naming each thing until filled with a buoyancy,
a mist from the river's empty rooms............

.............Thumb of autumn, thumb of locust, thumb of every kissed lip.

I have seen a cow die under the wheels
............ of a Cadillac going sixty, and who's to say
what the cow got from this?
............ Some would say a dignity, perhaps,
past the slaughterhouse
............ and the carcasses swimming the eaves.

............Or was it a punishment for nudging open
the gate-latch, the driver of the car
............ in shock, mouthing cow, cow,
and the crows in the pines answering
............ with the kind of sympathy my foreman used
when one of his line-workers
............ cut off another finger in the shredder.
Son, at least you still got your arm.

............ It's difficult to get this straight,
but there was a beauty to the sparks
............ that spread out under the car, under the cow,
as they went from flesh to asphalt to flesh again:
............ fireflies in the hollow of the hills:
a blanket of white petals from the tree of moon.

............ A brief and miniature dawn began,
there on a summer night in the South
............ I had come to love as part of myself,
the sparks clinging in the grass for a moment,
............ unbearably bright, a confused moth nuzzling up
to the reflection of a flame shining in
............ the cow's one open eye.

Now that I think of it, there was maybe even
............ a beauty in the cow's fat, white body, a peace
I would never know, as it took in the car,
............ lay down with it: calf-soft: morning breath.

This peace had a body, it was caught up in the night,
............ made from night, there on the shoulder of a road
so endless even the stars shrugged it off
............ and took the sparks as one of their own.

Used with permission from Anhinga Press.

Olena Kalytiak Davis & the Lyric

Gregory Orr has described the lyric poem as the I’s perception of a single incident in which the poet was overwhelmed by extreme emotion and disorder. (Wordsworth also refers to the lyric as a “spontaneous overflow of feeling”, but I appreciate Orr’s addition of “disorder”.) It is personal and subjective, characterized by a sense of immediacy, and intended for an audience only inasmuch as it is an “utterance that is overheard.” (Consider the audience of the apostrophe, a conventional lyrical figure in which the poet is suddenly blessed with the ability to address something otherwise beyond address, such as the heavens or the moon, as in “O moon!”) The lyric poem reverses the power relationship of order and disorder, as it reverses the relationship between will (action precipitated by thought) and prehension (the external acting upon the mind). The lyric is not merely the vehicle to express emotion, but it is the imaginative prehension of emotional states.

When a lyric succeeds, the persona of the poem achieves a kind of mastery over the external world and its inherent disorder (a disorder that in much of life’s events subordinates us). When a poet succeeds in having achieved momentary mastery over the disordered world, it is a rabbit hole, of sorts—it opens the door to a world of allowances.

Olena Kalytiak Davis is a poet who subverts traditional poetic techniques as part of course, but in this lyric poem she seems almost a traditionalist. Davis often presents us with false depictions of reality; her work has echoes of language quo language, characterized by exploiting tone and rhythm as she pushes against traditional formal poetics with a palpable tension. Her obligation is not to express emotion but to translate emotional states into something literal, and as a result, language and form sometimes appear disjointed. In Like Kerosene, her “hands are shovels” — a simile that must be understood aesthetically and not intellectually, for instance. But so much of this poem also has a literal clarity. It is interesting to see her proclivities as an arbiter of post-modern expression meld with the qualities of the conventional lyric. It is in some ways a perfect marriage.

The lyric is externalization at work; such a feat is subject to all sort of missteps on the part of the poet. There’s no dearth of examples of subjective or autobiographical poetry that is private and exclusionary, or poems that use elaborate poetic figures that don’t enrich the meaning. As a reader, we must be open to the poet's presentational apperception, and the poet must create an environment that coheres enough that we readily accept it. At its essence, the poem succeeds or fails by how well (realistically?) the poet builds an environment for the imperceptible to live.

Like Kerosone
By Olena Kalytiak Davis

Yes, it’s daily
that we move into each other—but this morning
I was separate even from myself—
my hands were shovels, I had mosquito netting for hair,
and the insect beating against the night
was my heart. My name was hallow
and the sky was made of shale when

I walked into a part of morning
I’ve never seen: the sky still heavy, still
smoldering with the nightmares of others,
the drunkenness and sorrow rising like dew, like fog,
like smoke back into the clouds. Suddenly,
my face was wet with it. I wanted to lie down
with it. To rest against the almost exhausted night.

Uncertain of what to do there
I started dividing the layers, the sediment,
thinking: Usually I sleep through his sadness.

And the morning asking: Why do you keep track
of the middle of the day when you should be
waxing the moon? How can these young fragile branches
be left out in the darkness, and who set that darkness
wandering inside your heart? Who can your love ignite,
like this, like kerosene?

And then the sky lit the morning.
And then I went in to set my own house on fire.
And then I lay down next to you:
a body filling with feathers or with snow
asking: and who are you that my love can light
like this, like kerosene.

(c) Olena Kalytiak Davis, University of Wisconsin Press (November 1997)