Dialogue:
Robert Oventile and Rogan Kelly
Robert Oventile on Rogan Kelly’s “The Bromeliad Dying”
Rogan Kelly’s impressive, finely crafted “The Bromeliad Dying” entails an implicit priamel. A priamel happens when a poem offers first a paratactic series of options or alternatives or instances before, in a climactic movement, arriving at its true subject, to which, in retrospect, the various preliminary instances then serve as foils and contrasts. Kelly’s title alerts us that, as we encounter the poem’s gardenia, aloes, tropical gingers, and so on, we are on the way to the dying bromeliad or rather to the threshold of a space withdrawn “far from direct light,” there to witness the glory of a coincidentia oppositorum of birthing and dying, dying and birthing, of life ending and living on.
The preliminary plants have their quirks and creature comforts and present divergent requirements to their caretaker. And this horticulturalist approaches these needs with cheerful understanding. “One aloe plant” requires water constantly while the Devil Tongue prefers a “soak” only “once a month”? Fine. The ferns are “moody and storm” while the lavender just sleeps? Ok. The bougainvillea is a messy chore while the “miniature lemon cypress” discretely calls attention to itself by its “scent and color”? Great. The gardener’s complicated routine keeps these plants going in the habits of their common days, the various modes of stasis they prefer.
In contrast, the situation with the bromeliad is more like hospice but only if hospice were a nursery to beauty. With the poem’s turn to the bromeliad, an aura of reverence enters. The “regal,” “grand” bromeliad, dying, yields offspring: offshoots, “pups,” genetically at one with their parent. A pup has been “already delivered” by the caesarian the gardener performs with a “peasant knife.” In her “pups,” the bromeliad stands outside herself, ecstatically. Her dying culminates, fully realizes, her birth: “she was born to bloom— / pass from this life like a hot shot.” This ecstatic bromeliad calls to mind John Ruskin’s The Queen of the Air, a prose rhapsody on Athena. Ruskin describes a plant’s flowering as the plant’s “time of peculiar and perfect glory” and “moment” of “intensest life”: “and this inner rapture is usually marked externally for us by the flush of one or more of the primary colours,” or of the secondary colors, as with Kelly’s bromeliad: “She is dying / after hoisting the most magnificent pink bloom.”
Rogan Kelly on Robert Oventile’s “California Dodder”
A dodder is a parasitic vine that lives off a host plant. It also functions as part of a master class on juxtaposition in Robert Savino Oventile’s “California Dodder.”
The farmer thinks of the dodder as they do the crows. Yet, some dodder is used in medicine; and it is believed to have some healing properties. There are forces that are trying to eradicate the dodder; there are forces trying to harness it for medicine; there are the bees that land and go.
There’s a playfulness in Oventile’s writing that complements the academic and elegance of his craft. When presented with the title, the reader could mistake the poem for a dance step or a commentary on California lifestyle. It’s a funny little word after all. A natural world poem that opens with the image of computer wires adds to the juxtaposition in a parasitic plant that may heal as it surely kills.
The poem takes up a kind of dance as the bees hold the dance floor. The shrub’s leaves draw from the sun, its roots from the earth. The dodder draws from the shrub. The bees draw from the plants’ flowers,…
The layering of contrast in the piece takes form, the leaves drawing from the sun (high/above), the roots from the earth (low/beneath)—this way that all living things have a duality to them (good/evil, transcendent/base), with the dodder serving as a perfect metaphor. Oventile is never heavy-handed in this work. A good musician explained to me once, often it’s the notes we don’t play.
There are subtle touches in this poem that I find breathtaking. The relationship of things that Oventile sets at the beginning of the second stanza mirrors a kind of relationship of things in the third stanza that would otherwise feel conflicted or unrelated but the structure of the poem points us to them in this way, [o]rganic form, chaos. Medicine. Poison. And this leads to this beautiful (dancing) line here: Nothing exists without relation; all exist regardless.
The I is absent from the poem, which centers us in a kind of personification of the dodder. We should be rooting for the bees always, in any case, but I can’t help but deduce that humans are similar to the dodder. We both tend to and destroy our natural world.
The poem’s final two stanzas land without drawing conclusion or condescension from the reader. Rather, it’s a final contrast between story urge and origination. Form befitting subject.
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.