Dialogue:
Scott Ferry and Luke Munson
Scott Ferry on Luke Munson’s "Catalogue"
“Catalogue” washes over you like books that are dreamt, like worlds in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the sky and earth and the words which hold them are more than the sum of broken igloos, are vast rivers inside copper veins. Each stanza opens a new glimpse into the “Nocturnal School” of gilled humans and the “inhuman vowels (they) sing.” Each “Contents” contains a particle both here and elsewhere, a potential both flammable and ash. Each definition of wonder is stretched, as is a recipe for “bread from flour extended with bark” or as is “in the crypt of Pseudo-Dionysius under a plot of rosemary.” There are intersections where “the world comes together at the last moment” but that world is still fluid, a red-bellied hummingbird wavering near the ear, a distortion of the lines where rules and desires meet. We all know “sorrow is a slim boat” but this boat is a throatful of chicory and gasoline, a thick prayer for infant kings in the rising waters. All the while Munson blows glass, around each chapter a thin ceiling of iridescence, inside each book a poison and an antidote, within each body a wax replica of a “peacock led by crocodiles.” We settle in a “hysteria of books” stuck in our limbs like glue fires. Every time a book is opened it clamps down on our fly fingers like Venus with teeth. There are no answers and many solutions to each equation: bitter orange through a horse aorta, preeclampsia in ghost pregnancy, demons in the holy vehicles, sugar in the blood orbit. The lessons are not graded but are laid out in waves, courses of wind and contentment near the glossy ice pits. Here we have found whales under the shale, piglets in the pudding, Baphomet untying his nerve apron. There can be a feast here or a funeral, or both. Choose a ticket. “The Book of Below” is not tied to “The Book of Ligaments,” there is a loss of electrons either way. The tinsel fears connect near the brainstem, the heartrate erratic, the memory a fire in the jail. “That book which you can almost remember” is not that at all, is a bleating gull stabbing a cracked mussel. We can see it between the verses.
Luke Munson on Scott Ferry’s "in the belly of god"
War has a pestilential, mutative effect in Scott Ferry’s “in the belly of god,” filling things with an excess of change. Fish become screams, birds become priests, and children are called on to lead and discipline adults. Into this kaleidoscopic horror, poetry emerges as a kind of visionary weeping, full of silences like heaving gasps. The poem’s speaker pulls imaginary arrows out of their body, beginning a process of spiritual self-healing which then spreads to the entire human family. This moment in the poem echoes the process by which St. Sebastian became a symbol of healing:
Apollo, the archer god, would decimate people by raining down arrows of plague. Strangely, he was also the god of healing and purification. Because St. Sebastian, a soldier, survived his own first martyrdom of being tied to a tree and shot with arrows, the connection between archery, plague, and divine healing was transferred to him from Apollo, and so medieval peoples would call on him for protection and healing from bubonic plague.
This is a poem in which in order to contemplate restoring humanity to the condition of being human, the speaker must become like a child (return to god’s belly,) like a bird (regrow wings,) and finally, to become like god. It’s a Blakean vision of poetry as the recreation of a mutilated social world through the crucible of the body. One of the ways that the poem affects these reconnections is through its precise modulation between grammatical persons.
The first section is in the first person singular, a voice emanating from within god’s belly. Sections two through nine move back and forth between the third person and first person plural, recounting two parallel sequences of events. In the third person sequence, children and crows haunt the poem’s world, acting and speaking in a cryptic manner which suggests the language of parables. It’s in the first person plural sequence where we discover how the world was broken. It’s a story of collective guilt and collective self-harm. We did this to ourselves. The children and crows offer a different path to an adult collectivity which has so lost itself as to have lost its own skin. In the tenth section, the first person singular returns, shifting in the final section to a second person address: “sing with me.”
It’s in this turn to the second person, where the speaker, somehow simultaneously human, bird, and divine, addresses the reader directly, incorporating the reader into the guilty and torn collectivity. This reincorporation is the poem’s act of healing. We are invited to save ourselves and reform our torn bodies through singing, with throats that are wounds split inward, like the punctures left from arrows. Just as Apollo is afflicter and healer, poetry is both a wounding arrow and a suturing needle.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.