What I first notice in Katie Naughton’s poem, “debt ritual: sediment” (from FENCE 40) is its movement from line to line. What feels like watching a video of industrial machinery shifting an item to its next station. Each line, a shift. The next line, a shift. Not something severe, though. Something that’s assertive and muted. Like a Ca-shunk rather than a Ca-CHUNK. Both the poems in this issue have a similar sense of movement one line to the next.
And it’s only on my closer read did I realize how variable the shifting line break is throughout the poem. In the opening, line breaks enforce edged associative shifts. The line break marks a new sensibility of the line before.
the pipe filled solid with sediment
from “debt ritual: sediment,” lines 1-4
what one hundred years is:
erosion and accretion
a domestic geology
Here, each line could be compared to a geological layer, as the poem suggests with, “sediment” and “domestic geology.” And however layers’ relationships can be described in geology, it informs the method of associative leap in Naughton’s poem. The punctuation, for instance, suggested in the line break at “what one hundred years is:” A colon that could encourage listing “erosion and accretion” as what one hundred years consists of. Or just an open-ended signal for what follows serving as definition. And maybe both uses I’ve described here feel similar enough. I would also argue, though, that each of these opening lines transitions to the next line in a way similar to the line ending with a colon. Meaning, I could imagine a colon following “sediment” from line 1 Or “accretion” in line 3. And how that marks the language is what I’m meaning by the end of each line marking a shift or edge for the poem.
That feeling at the line break, that edge, is the feeling throughout the poem. Surprisingly, it’s not the poem’s only mechanics.
what comes off of one surface
from “debt ritual: sediment,” lines 6-11
is carried and deposited
on another the wash
of winter o dark and howling
time built up on shores
mountainous in grains
Not until that last line starting with “mountainous” does the poem return to those edge-oriented line breaks. When I pull this quote form the poem, it’s easy to see how present enjambment is in the poem. And when I read this portion independent of the opening, I don’t feel like there’s a pause, or a Ca-shunk in between the lines.
However, it’s the poem’s shift back and forth between more noticeable line breaks and enjambed ones that leaves the impression the poem is mainly about these transitions. And leads me to think of a geological poetics that hovers over this poem. Where form and subject interrelate by line, where sedimental layers are part of the subject and vehicle for thinking more about the subject. It’s an abandoned home. It appears to be merging back into the landscape. Its presence in this landscape could be felt sinking into it, like the ground had incorporated it within itself.
And ultimately, it’s this formal support that further illuminates Naughton’s consideration of circumstances as they emerge in this desolate landscape. That intersection, perhaps like the relationship from one geological layer to the next. The human piping, the build-up of sediment, and the entire geological history that exists both in the domestic space, faced with this pipe bulging with material, and then the earth. And the entire poem only exists because there has been a build-up like this. Like bricks that were once crisp with text and texture worn down to just be the bricks, the light absorbed by bricks, “made and unmade,” which is kind of the story of everything, with the extended irony that the unmade part is inevitably a component of what’s made.