Dialogue:
Taylor Franson-Thiel and Erica Anderson-Senter
Taylor Franson-Thiel on Erica Anderson-Senter’s “All of That is Gathered for the Birds”
What an honor and a privilege to get an early look into the work of Erica Anderson-Senter. The poem “All of That is Gathered for the Birds” refuses to ground its readers in anything but grief and the many textures it grits against skin with.
Upon a first read, I was struck by the line breaks, on a second, by the lines themselves, on a third read I rediscovered moments I hadn’t fully noticed. On and on I was pulled into the world where the body is both fish and bird and breast and the sky and the earth and a killer of cranes. As it becomes all of these things, the body becomes a vehicle for grief and the different ways and moments it takes us out of ourselves and into new worlds, and shows us how that grief is both the smallest thing, and the only thing.
At the literal and metaphorical center of the poem Anderson-Senter writes “In this space I want to name my breasts/something beautiful, but all of that is gathered for the birds.” As a reader this left me pondering how we name and place our bodies within a context of patriarchy, environmental collapse, and daily global tragedies paired with our small personal ones. Placing this line at the heart of the poem is a deft craft move allowing this moment to become a hinge point into the meaning of the poem. Before this moment we have the body (as a fish) being swallowed by the cranes, and after we have the body killing the cranes with panic. The attempt to name failing as the birds become the thing crushing, to the thing being crushed.
All in all this evocative poem will linger with me. Poets love a good bird poem, and this is a great one. Anderson-Senter calls us to awakeness: “I could be alive or awake,” and when she says “It truly is a minor thing,” we know, it really isn’t minor at all.
Erica Anderson-Senter on Taylor Franson-Thiel’s “Hymn for Stained Glass”
A SMALL RESPONSE TO HYMN FOR STAINED GLASS: or maybe a response to Utah, but definitely a praise to this poem.
Everyone, poet included, turn in your hymnals to page 147:
In Praise of Verbs: Holy and Holier
Expands, poet sings, and forcing, chisel, erosion, and take take take take.
This is the g(G)od I know, this is the g(G)od I know. Take and
Swallow and starve, poet sings: buried alive:
Howl, howl, chew// howl, howl, force.
This is the g(G)od I know, this is the g(G)od I know.
We don’t know what we don’t know, the hungry saints say. I don’t know Utah and what Utah knows: violence and thirst and each starving priest or friar or monk or preacher or acolyte shattering their holy homes so we, or you, can eat.
Does the glass cut?
How does a shard sacrament me? Is it a delicious endeavor or one of pure survival. I don’t know what it means to suffer because I only know the stones of suffering. And this is the gospel from each ode or praise or crow-wing lament or humnos.
I don’t know Utah, but I know broken glass disguised as gold.
I don’t know Utah, but I know buried alive.
I don’t know Utah, but I know hunger and the absolute breaking with ice in my bones.
I don’t know Utah, but I know music when I hear it, and baby, there is music in:
sanded cedar pews
If only the words themselves have music. Sure, sure, sure. It isn’t enough, but melody rests in the Ss – even in starving, even in saint, even in glass stone, especially in shins, skulls, swarm.
I don’t want to know this Utah because I know it already.
Let me howl to the saint’s movable mountain, there is survival in eating stones if only to gnash our teeth and say, look! Look what we’ve done.
And all the poet’s people say,
It’ll never be finished.
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.