In “To a Snail,” Marianne Moore imagines a snail as a poem, valuing its “absence of feet” and the “curious phenomenon of its occipital horn.” For Moore, the snail’s compressed intensity equals grace. Aracelis Girmay’s “Ars Poetica” also calls upon this curious animal; yet, rather than compression, the snail offers expansion. For Girmay, writing poetry is akin to the snail’s trail: a slow trace recording each story, each word, each “silver prayer” we hold dear. With light filtering through the canopy, the snail echoes a “quiet record,” giving voice to everyone and everything we are related to. This poem reminds us of the power poetry holds. Language, in all its glistening generosity, acknowledges that which is forgotten: “I lived once. /Thank you. /It was here.”
The winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award in 2011, the poems in Kingdom Animalia (BOA editions) expand and envelope each other, creating an intricate network of language and memory. Girmay enfolds the living and the dead, the animal and the plant. These poems offer a bridge to another world – a world deeply invested in relation. Indeed, how can we reach out and connect to each other? And, what happens when the chasm widens in the name of distance, sickness, shame, and death? When exploring these questions, she focuses our attention on the strange. Language, as well as the body, shape-shifts and denies definition. In this book of oscillating forms (elegies, odes, praise-songs, and fables), Girmay connects with figures of intimate relation, drawing them ever-near: siblings, parents, and ancestors. From our discussion ranging from poetry as survival to the body of a cloud to spheres of influence, Girmay speaks of a poetry fluent in honesty, bravery, and radiating expansion.
Excerpted below are three poems from Kingdom Animalia followed by a conversation with Girmay. – by Jane Wong
Abuelo, Mi Muerto
Abuelo, I’ve walked three nights
in the last city you breathed in,
trying to read every thing:
the birds, the buildings, the rain. & still
no luck, which means nothing
more than I am dense & far from you
though this is your town, your
Sunday-walk haberdashery,
your way back home from the train, & trees
you passed a thousand times
like a child below the grey gaze of its mothers.
How could I be lost here
in your jackal-mouthed, murderous
streets who swallowed your children, Abuelo,
while the church bells marked the parish & hour?
The uncles & aunts strewn
about like funeral carnations—
Sometimes it is so hard to hear you
in the outside language of crows
though my window’s an open eye.
Hard to understand
what the hawk is spelling
as it moves just so in the sky:
x
My head is thick, but I know
you are telling me something
when I hear the rooster crow,
or the hawk there circling.
Mostly it’s the birds who send me looking
for the lost room of your face. The last memory I have of you
was in El Toro. My mother clipped your toe-nails
off an old & naked foot, while the other one
slept in a basin on the floor—sluggish
catfish, sleeping fish
like a fisherman’s catch. In the bucket,
alive but nearly dying. Do you remember?
Do you remember? This
is my only proof. Memory
tells me I am yours. I am yours,
Abuelo. If the pigeons can wear
the same face in every city,
the same red feet, singing
the same songs & so on & so on,
can’t you come back, Abuelo?
Tell me which are the graves
I should visit & clean. Which river
I should bring my flowers to.
Which of the miracles
fills your marigold chest?
Which is the joke you loved the most?
What is the name of the desert
I should thank? Come back
in a body I can see from the window
of this crowded city train.
Board the train. Sit
beside me for a while & tell me things.
Do not let me mistake you
for a shadow or a gull.
& if I start to pass you on the street,
Abuelo, shout my name, shout
it, please. Tug my shirt or hair.
Make me turn. Just a moment.
Send me home with a message
my mother will believe. Wear a body
I can see with my slowest eye. Speak a language
whose words I cannot help but wear
like a family feather
in my black
& grandfather hair.
Elegy in Gold
Earring, tooth,
dog breath, shoe,
mango fruit or pocket watch,
sunlight on my love’s
elbow, sunlight
in the kettle’s steam,
we walk in the rubble
of the African dream
brushing shipwreck from
our hair & dresses.
This is the country
of the gone-away: Harlem,
you wear the missing
like a golden chain.
Explaining the Landmine to the Small Child
Weapon, shrapnel,
like uncontrollable fire,
like knives,
angry sun, killer
of everything.
What words, anyway, can
be used to warn the children
when no word is as terrible
as the hand & the mine?
What words, anyway, can
be used to warn the children
who sing so beautifully
the names of their favorite friends,
of the heart & the moon,
to the roosters in the yard?
Jane Wong: When I first read Kingdom Animalia, I was struck by each poem’s ability to say what often cannot be said. These poems feel brave to me; in a way, they confront what we are afraid of: death, grief, and violence. They do not turn away. From the poem “This Morning the Small Bird Bought a Message from the Other Side,” you write: “I want to know what to do/with the dead things we carry.” Indeed, what do we do with the dead, with violence? How do we precede with what scares us? Could you tell us a little about what drove you to write the poems in this collection, many of which reach a point of crisis?
Aracelis Girmay: Thank you for your words about the poems and for your generous questions.
On survival, I’d agree. I think many of the poems are concerned with the fact of survival. I am in awe of how fragile and resilient (both) a body can be. The poems tend to hold, at their centers, an interest in story as a survival method, but they are also interested in stories as signals that a body (mind, heart) has, actually, survived to tell a part of this large and interconnected story of being here, on earth, bound to and forged by the particularities of our histories and dreams. I think of Gregory Orr here. Poetry as Survival. Another piece of things that I should mention: a lot of the work I was hoping to do here with these poems is connected to the work of documenting, or documentary. I wanted these poems to be surviving fragments or pieces of history (crises, terrors, kindnesses between strangers, dreams). I wanted to illuminate the pulsing brightnesses of a constellation of ideas, events. The big challenge of these poems, for me, has been about this question of common descent or relation—many of the poems are asking, how are we all related? How is every body related to every other body? Every event linked to every other event? These poems begin to challenge me to see connections (sometimes gorgeous, sometimes really difficult) between things, and my plural identities and roles in any given context.
JW: Indeed. Throughout these poems, you return to the question of connection: how are we connected? How can we connect with each other? In the face of chaos and dispersion, how can we reach out and feel an arm on the other side? Can you speak a little more about connection and how this book envisions relation?
AG: My relationship to poetry and literature as a whole, really, is built on a deep love of reading and story. It always stuns me to find myself reading text that was written by someone else, years and years ago… and yet I feel as if someone is whispering into my ear, or painting a painting—right there, in front of me. An imagination meeting another imagination. This is one of the great hopes art gives me. It is possible to touch hands, faces, chests with someone else whose face I’ve not ever seen in real time. (Real time!) The act of reading is built on this understanding that we can “touch” across seemingly great distances.
Different note (different key): The book starts with thimble-sized excerpts from the last pages of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Each of the poems was concerned with the same set of questions—How are we all related? What does it mean for every thing to have a body? A system of “desire”? What can the characteristics or questions we associate with one body teach us about another very different body? Example: What can the body of a cloud help us to ask or see in ourselves? Physically? Psychically? Historically? The cloud might help us say or ask: Tell the story of your dispersals. How many animals have you been? What has moved through you? And we might answer these questions literally, metaphorically, with memoir and/or with the help of science…
JW: I love this idea of “an imagination meeting another imagination.” In this way, literature connects us across time and space. Could you talk more specifically about community and poetry? What communities have been important to you and in what ways?
AG: I have been so deeply held and challenged by books and writers. High school years: Toni Morrison, Kate Rushin, Lucille Clifton, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mark Mathabane. These writers, though I had never met them, were the early and critical parts of an ever-growing pantheon. At a really predominantly white boarding school, they helped me to feel held, preceded—not as a writer (I did not, then, imagine, really, that writing could be something I could practice and cultivate and share), but as a person. That’s pretty heavy. They helped me to feel held, preceded—not as a writer, but as a person. The interior selves of their characters or subjects, helped me to imagine and start to really understand how important, critical, this work of imagining and considering, and talking to oneself, and listening, listening, listening. These writers helped me to start to pay attention to the world, listen to the details, take note or notice and ask questions. Yes. Too, they helped me to listen to myself listening. Paying attention to the tendencies of my vision, my speech—listening to where those tendencies come from (family, neighborhoods, relationships to place)--and reveling in that. The fact that everyone has a “that.”
Community and poetry.
I also want to say that I don’t think I’d have a single book published without the encouragement, critiques, generosity, and love of/from my poetry families. I’ve been really lucky in that way, and I’m not sure I speak enough of how critical it has been for me to be part of communities of teachers and writers who share poems with each other, go to each other’s readings, share student work and teaching methods. The Cave Canem Foundation has been an IMMENSE foundation and support for me. I’ve met some of my dear, dear friends through work with Cave Canem. Opportunities shared on email lists and in conversations have led to reading materials, job opportunities, workshop opportunities, fellowship opportunities. My work with Community Word Project, DreamYard, Teachers and Writers—has strengthened my sense of work, my pedagogical practice and education. Again, I have met some of my dear, dear people in these programs. I have grown and been taught and challenged by my students. I say, without a splinter of exaggeration, that Kingdom Animalia is, so far, representative of the closest I’ve gotten to speaking my language. I would not have done this work, or gotten near the bone, had it not been for my friends, family, these communities.
I teach at Hampshire College and our students are grounded in deeply interdisciplinary practices, and we, as teachers, are constantly engaging with colleagues across disciplines/fields to best support our students in this interdisciplinary work. I can see that this work is further shaping my sensibilities and projects. A few of my dearest people are poets and a many of my dearest people are not. I am so grateful for these different languages that we speak. For the hard and beautiful questions that come at the intersections. This is what I hope will always shape my work.
JW: These days, I often hear the term “political poetry” used to describe a type of poetry. Yet, I sense that, at its core, poetry cannot help but be political – in other words, we care about what happens to the world around us. What are your thoughts on poetry and activism? How can we make poetry public?
AG: This is a difficult question for me—difficult, in part, because it is hard to nail down for myself what the so-called political poem is. I mean, in some ways political poems have come to mean, in the U.S. anyway, poems that are overtly dealing with public or private wars, oppression, struggle. If someone is writing about identity—depending on who that specific someone is (black, brown, somehow othered by a white poetry canon)—the poem that overtly deals with or struggles with identity is also often categorized as a political poem. Obviously, I don’t think that’s right. An investigation (or lack thereof) of one’s subject position as writer can be, is!, deeply political. To write about a war—in support or protest—is political. But is it political, too, to write about food or going to the grocery or market—enough food on all of the stands and shelves? Is it political to write about going to the mall or buying food or walking through a field of daisies when there are shootings, bombs, various incarnations of the lack of peace all, all around us? Which is to say, my sense of the political in a poem has just as much to do with the study of the poem, the way one reads, as it does with writer and intent. I think sometimes the term “political poetry/poem”—charged and dynamic and critical as it is, can sometimes keep us from seeing that these investigations of power, sensuality, imagination, loss, history, assumptions… these can be found in any thing, any work, any where.
The second part of that question—“how can we make poetry more public?” I’ve got so many ideas!! Do you! And I’ve had the chance to work with so many students—especially my Hampshire students—who are thinking about and coming up with ways to foster dynamic intersections with poetry/poems that happen in books and poetry gatherings, yes, but also other wheres! I have this idea-- and I’ll say it out loud here because perhaps it will help me push and perhaps someone will Oh, that’s easy, I’ll help… or What about this idea! So much better than what Aracelis said… and make something happen… But going back, I have so many ideas. One being The Deli Poetry Project. What if we asked a few poets for the names of their favorite neighborhood delis and we contacted the deli (when I say we I am imagining me and fellow, yet-to-be-named collaborators, do you want to?) and brought some poems of said poet in and asked if the poet could write an occasion poem for the deli owner. They’d arrange, maybe each get paid a small stipend for the collaboration. and then we could print out small poetry cards that can be posted at the deli, slipped into paper bags, etc. Wouldn’t that be fun!? And people would meet each other and talk—over poetry! And! It seems so easy. We could start off with 5 a year. Maybe every April there could be a launch—in honor of people coming out of their houses, for spring.
JW: The Deli Poetry Project sounds incredible! A poem wrapped with prosciutto or a stick of gum! Thank you for your ideas. Coming back to these poems, I’m also struck by how the beautiful and the terrifying melt together, as they do in Frida Kahlo’s artwork. I see this particularly in “Abuelo, Mi Muerto,”where death and danger transforms from the “jackal-mouthed, murderous/streets that swallowed your children” to the strangely beautiful “uncles and aunts strewn/about like funeral carnations.” Could you speak more about this way of seeing the world?
AG: Thank you for your close readings of these poems. So generous of you to spend time and to send back isolated lines—which feel a little like familiar strangers. A new way of seeing, when I see them up against Frida Kahlo (whose picture is hanging right above my desk right now). A black and white of her sitting with a reflective sphere beside her—reflecting back the image of (is that Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s figure—the photographer?) a room of windows behind her.
This moment, the thing I want to say about your question and the worlds it brings together (Kahlo, carnations, Chicago) is that things don’t stop being dear or beautiful when they are dead. And vice versa. The uncles and aunts in the poem—some of their deaths horrific, full of pain, preventable pain, even, if everything from the day they were conceived hadn’t been so pinned against their beauty, survival, and thriving—they, to me, are beautiful. Their lives, though hard, also full of tremendous, immense beauty and joy and personhood. I think there is no other way to try to ask questions of a life or paint a life, invoke a life. It seems there must always be immense beauty and immense sorrow (of course there are different kinds). Maybe this is how my photobox is built. My lens. But it doesn’t seem special. Flowers growing, some of them pink and yellow and red, out of any kind of song we are, we hold. Any note in our singing informed by every second that led to it. Every flower. Every killing.
JW: The final poem, “Ars Poetica,” leaves us with what poetry can accomplish. In this poem, you imagine poems as a little snail’s trail. You write: “Everywhere I go,/every inch: quiet record//of the foot’s silver prayer.//I lived once./Thank you./It was here.” As the snail continues to trail on, what are you working on now? And since writing and reading often go hand-in-hand, what books have you read recently that have moved you?
AG: Ah! I find myself encouraging students, again and again, to read Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal and Kimiko Hahn’s Toxic Flora. Both of these works are so deeply imaginative and expansive, yet built with such architectural precision. I am interested in Hahn’s book as it is hinged by excerpts from the NY Times science section. I am interested in Bhanu Kapil’s methods of organizing and rupturing the narrative, both abiding by and wrecking the seemingly linear scaffolding. Time is funky. Wild. I love the way they each make me think about the poems/projects/books as systems and structures.
I’m also at the end of John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities. He is a craftsman. Fluent in the languages of each character. I’m astonished by the extent to which he’s able to make a person come to life—through speech, imagination, point of view/attention. I’m also teaching Eduardo Corral’s Slow Lightning. It takes my breath. And I’ve also been reading, in a double-dutch kind of way, 1493 and Marable’s biography of Malcolm X.
Jane Wong lives in Seattle, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Washington. A former U.S. Fulbright Fellow, she holds an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Mid-American Review, CutBank, Octopus, and in the anthologies Best New Poets 2012 and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral.
