Dialogue:
Knar Gavin and Anne Menasché
Knar Gavin on Anne Menasché’s “ROASTING THE CHICKEN AFTER HE’S LAID HANDS ON ME” and “THE WATER GLASS SPEAKS TO THE ARTIST”
Much of the time, writing — and even publishing — remains a private endeavor. The work is made and makes its way out there, yet it does so into uncertain hands. Uncertain to the writer, anyway. And so it’s been a pleasure spending time with Anne Menasché’s poems and knowing that she would spend time with mine in turn.
Anne. In recent weeks, I have gotten to know this poet across a pair of 14-liners slated for publication in ballast 2.4, each of them at once self-reflective and fierce. Reading “The Water Glass Speaks to the Artist,” I found myself in the poet’s debt, both for that “wet hand” thrust through “[certainly my] mouth,” and for the introduction it provided me to German artist Peter Dreher, for whom fixation is a matter of dailiness and, maybe, the very possibility of dwelling itself (in-place yet across time; under varied light yet not without continuities). The poem is entrancing; in it, I find that the poet is a glass, bearer of shadows; a glass which fills and empties as only deep time can do. And I find that she, too, has been found by “the sour flatness of,” say, some artist guy’s “breath,” yet has nonetheless persisted: a lens in waiting, lens bearing the strangeness that subtends any quotidian record. The fact of a glass; of the body; of poetry, and there being poetry at all.
As for “Roasting the Chicken after He’s Laid Hands on Me,” the title alone is something of a gut-punch: the laying on of hands | the laying on hands. To enter into dialogue with this poem, I improvised a simple melody drawing on Anne’s language, and this mode of song-reading led me to a refrain: “I’m after a proof,” I kept singing. Perhaps because I, too, have spent moments suspended, wanting to prove some afterwards to blood: “she toughens to take the knife when I want / to prove that I no longer see blood.” Song-reading “Roasting the Chicken,” I thought also of Joan Retallack and what she says of images, and their “after.” Joan writes, "We tend to think of afterimages as aberrations. In fact all images are after. That is the terror they hold for us.” And what’s trauma, after all, if not an afterimage; like retinal terror, it endures as a material-physical trace that can manifest as or seek to pass for an abstract sign.
I am grateful to have spent time alongside these poems, and a drafty take of my rough wanderer of a song is attached here; it’s called “After( )words.” Thanks, Anne.
Anne Menasché on Knar Gavin’s “Reading Federici” and “Elite Captor”
Poems contain mysteries. This is why we read them and write them. We turn a page, and open a small vessel whose insides can’t fully be seen. It’s too dark, and the vessel’s mouth is too narrow to comprehend every shape shifting below. Still, we sense and smell what lives in the belly of the pot. We breathe over the opening, and we hold the vessel’s neck, and we imagine the complex life inside, almost completely visible and audible to us. Poems change as our perceptions change, revealing new sides and sounds, a new understanding of what is waiting in the dark.
As I read the poem “Elite Captor,” I found myself thinking about this aspect of poetry. Over the past few weeks, I have come to this poem and its companion “Reading Federici” again and again, looking into them and, now, thinking about Jane Hirshfield’s writing on the hidden in poetry in her book of essays, Ten Windows. Hirshfield writes, “[T]he simplest fragment can carry multiple uses, possibilities, connections.” Metaphors hide and reveal meanings. “[A]ll metaphor [] brings revelation and addition while it also covers, complicates, veils.” Is this the language in which the universe speaks? In “Elite Captor,” “everything speaks.” Everything has valence, resonance, a character. Life is vocal, and existence speaks in many voices, with many meanings.
Do poets try to capture a living, speaking world? We “clear[] / . . . new land,” as if we own it, yet if everything speaks, the land, the atmosphere, the creatures of the earth all want to say their piece. I believe that this poem opens the reader to the possibilities and complexities of a living world, which resists the writer’s attempts to tame and cultivate specific truths.
I read “Elite Captor” after reading Knar’s other poem “Reading Federici,” and they are an interesting pair. I’ll confess to you know that I haven’t read the poet Novalis, and I haven’t read Silvia Federici, author most famous for the book Caliban and the Witch. (I did do some Googling while reading these poems.) Chiefly, I approached “Elite Captor” and “Reading Federici” with my senses. Knar’s use of sound and contradiction led me through “Reading Federici,” and my experience of this poem influenced the way I read “Elite Captor.”
“[T]he simplest fragment can carry . . . connections.” “Reading Federici” is full of tensions and transformations. Listen to how the first words turn into another. “A pill for an herb” becomes “pilfer/ing,” and replacement becomes theft. Magic may kill industry, but in this poem, industry attacks magic and subtracts something almost inarticulable, gestured to by abbreviation and white space. The deletion feels “sudden” and urgent. And yet this assault is “historical,” and its historical nature is part of its urgency. Like a volcanic eruption, certain thefts are immediate yet old, long-hurting. Colonialism and capitalism try to consume the mysteries and cultural practices that would resist them, replacing diverse forms of knowledge with what is rational, industrial, pharmaceutical.
Does the poet also try to replace certain kinds of knowledge with that which is “productive” in a specific way? I came to this question as I read “Elite Captor” again. The poet rationalizes the world through form and tries to clear and corral meaning. And yet, the clearances of the pen are not complete. There are things beyond us that assert their own realities and possibilities, which we sense and can only half-say. At the same time, the poet is a conduit, carrying other voices and ways of thinking, seeing, and knowing toward the reader, allowing the reader to sense deeper truths that are difficult to communicate in direct and non-figurative language. This fullness is what I am left with each time I leave the poem. We can create the vessel to hold what can be known but—listen—it speaks for itself.
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.