What can anyone say is contained in containers? In a plastic bag? In the image of a man who’s merely identified as a “composer”? In America? Like the whole country of America should be looked at as just a container. Like a backyard with statues in it. But if that’s the image associated with America, it doesn’t amount to an oversimplification. There’s something complicated about a backyard filled with statues. Even as there’s something kind of summarizing what a space for statues really stands for. What contains and what’s contained isn’t an easy formula for “Summer” (found in Annulet 6) Like how gathering any set of circumstances, or various impressions will ultimately start to feel arbitrary. But there’s an art to making a bunch of arbitrary pieces fit together.
Which is one thing this poem is challenging itself to. Because what do you do with so many different characters, and details. What do you mean if you’re going to spell it “Americka” and “America” and “Amerika”? Making “America” something arbitrary. Yes, I said it. Or what if readers were encouraged to think of America in an arbitrary light. How would history look? How would looking at an individual look in light of history, in light of their personal history?
I would argue that Pepitone-Nahas uses ideas like “museum,” a backyard statue garden called “Americka,” and then the later mention of “America” as a way to identify a context for the poem without explicitly elaborating on that context. Maybe this reading feels like a bit of a stretch. Or it simply feels vague. Which I think the poet would, in fact, encourage me to. It’s like the poem’s quick image:
The photo of this tree
diminishes what swaying
leaves recall.
Where the photo containing the image of a tree has one thing to say, and it estimates but doesn’t entirely express what the leaves attached to the tree, how they’re “swaying” in the wind, would know about the tree. Meaning, there is a difference between knowing of something (what’s contained) and knowing something (what’s experienced). The poem, with each stanza centering on a single impression, all parts of that stanza contributing to its single impression, amounts to nine impressions for the poem. And the poem isn’t too concerned that it articulates what makes all the stanzas fit together. But they do feel like they fit together. How “one beloved” and “one who loves” might touch on the poet’s relationship to the “composer,” who was in Iowa. And the meaning of a place called “Americka” somewhere inside the poet’s European town complementing the memory of the composer. Is an impression something that can be constituted? Like it were a hardened, concrete shape? Or are impressions porously interacting with the other impressions surrounding them?
Pepitone-Nahas’s poem has that looseness that lets me think like a reader finding the poem’s alignment. Encouraging me to think it might be there. Or at least searching for it will be one of the benefits to reading the poem.