Dialogue:
Jen Gayda Gupta and Ian C. Williams
Jen Gayda Gupta on Ian C. Williams’s “Self-Portrait as the Flatwoods Monster Struggling to Open an Obstinate Jar of Peaches”
From the title of Ian C. Williams’ poem, “Self Portrait as the Flatwoods Monster Struggling to Open an Obstinate Jar of Peaches,” I was hooked. I am typically a lazy poetry reader, not one to Google, but this title begged for an exception. I turned to the internet to learn about this West Virginian tale.
To save you the trip, I’ll explain. The Flatwoods Monster is a creature who was spotted in the town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, West Virginia on September 12, 1952, after a bright light crossed the night sky. The next day, skid marks and “an odd gummy deposit” were found in the area. Some attributed this to a saucer landing. Some explained the monster away as a barn owl and a trick of the light. But still there is a museum, a sign, and a song commemorating the green monster. The national press services rated the story No. 11 for the year.
Williams sets the scene for the Flatwoods Monster’s dramatic entrance at the start of his poem, “After the glittering blitz across the cosmos and the crater a spacecraft can make of a forest—.” Addressing the young kids who first discovered the monster, Williams writes, “after the needlepoint of a child’s fear pierces the night before it stitches the earth with ash and awe.”
And then we get to the real kicker, “after it all, you’re left in the silence that finds each of us sooner or later.” This is the line where I fell in love. I first read this poem shortly after moving into a small house in the woods of North Carolina, after two years of traveling the country in an RV. The silence had just started to creep in— the static view out my bedroom window, the long lonely hoot of the local owl that woke me each night. I felt some form of terror. What had I done, opting for this simple little life after the adventure I’d been living?
For the Flatwoods Monster, “the mycological growth of a quiet life” includes “the carpeting moss, its bluets and barrenwort, the formica peeling away from the countertops, the pill bugs, the lichen, the immovable lid to a jar of sweet peaches.” For the Flatwoods Monster, “the only shriek shaking the dark is a teapot’s impatience.” And all this after making national news, after grabbing the attention of UFO enthusiasts and the U.S. Air Force.
I felt for the guy. He had lived such a big life and now here he was, “hunched over the sink with hunger and fury.”
To make matters worse, he is never successful in his quest for peaches. In his attempt, the monster taps the jar against the counter, the glass shattering. The poem ends, “But glass doesn’t understand the value of fruit, doesn’t keep itself from shattering under the pressure of desire. Doesn’t stop the spilled fruit from filling with transparent splinters or the syrup from seeping into the dirt.” I read these final lines from Williams as a metaphor for the inevitability of this descent into quiet, the eventual fall from fame. Nothing can keep the syrup of our flashy days from seeping into the dirt.
In the case that this pessimistic reading was a reflection of my recent mood, I searched for another possibility, a slight hint of hope. I found a new lens with which to view the Flatwoods tale in an article on History.com. It read, “Americans were truly frightened in 1952, made anxious by atomic bombs… Spook stories sprout best when the seed lands in a bed fertile with anxiety, and that was 1952 Cold War America—a hothouse of anger, disillusionment and anxieties, made to order for conspiracy theorists, political demagogues and tellers of suspenseful tales.”
So maybe this eventual quiet was actually a good thing, a bit of peace after a time of chaos and fear. Maybe it was a chance to be present for a moment as seemingly inconsequential as opening a jar of peaches.
What I haven’t yet mentioned is the fact that this is a self portrait poem, meaning Williams is drawing a comparison, giving us a glimpse into his world (or the speaker's world) through the Flatwoods Monster. What I love about this poem is the way it invites the reader in. This poem allowed me to identify with a creature whose existence I only just discovered. There is a universality captured through its lines, lines so rich I could see and taste them. However you choose to read it, this is a self portrait for everyone.
Ian C. Williams on Jen Gayda Gupta’s “Places without processed foods, parabens, radiation, and every other thing my fertility coach says is bad for me”
I’ve said it before, but I keep catching myself returning to the deepwoods, a place at once mysterious and familiar, crowded and void.
In her poem, “Places without processed foods, parabens, radiation, and every other thing my fertility coach says is bad for me,” Jen Gayda Gupta pulls me back into “the woods behind the woods behind the woods that we can reach with the car,” a sort of liminal forest that folds into itself forever. In this prose poem, Gupta crafts a world of ambiguity, desire, and fear where I can hardly find my footing, a landscape that is disorienting in its dreams and anxieties. The poem buds from a never-ending and constant deluge of worries surrounding parenthood and conception – the slippery do-nots that echo from doctors, social media gurus, and health personalities. How can we live, how can we have any hope when every dream and every earthly joy is discouraged, snuffed out, and replaced in the night by a nightmarish caricature of desire?
The poem longs in a way that I haven’t seen many poems long, which is to say that it wonders after the unknowable with such yearning, wanting to know “wherever babies wait to become babies” or “a leaf before it is budded.” The poem situates its desires in the speaker’s history and her relationships, in “the first time I held a baby doll in my tiny chubby arms” and “that song my husband sings in his native tongue.” It reflects upon a tradition of generational motherhood while questioning one’s place within that history. After all, what places exist in this world and in this time that don’t have the things that hamper one’s fertility? Do these places even exist? How far into the woods behind the woods behind the woods must one go to find someplace safe? The poem poses a number of unspoken and unanswered (unanswerable?) questions, and in the end, these questions reveal more than their answers ever could.
I am not a mother; I have not personally experienced the complicated feelings of questioning my body and its fertility. But the beautiful potential of poetry is that it opens up experiences and understandings of the world and of others that transform us. Gupta’s poems in this issue of ballast do this invaluable work of intimate revelation and reinvention, making the invisible visible and the unknowable known. What a gift this poem is.
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.