I should be clear at the opening. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be entering in Amie Zimmerman’s poem, “Entry” (the second of the two published in Mercury Firs 4 is what I’m writing about here). Like is the poem marking each of the situations as places where a reader could enter? Is it an entry into the poetic life? Or an entry into a poetic mundanity? In the first stanza, I can see an “entry” point, for instance, in the moment, “time is recorded by what noise our ears distinguish, length / of echo.” The concept that part of sound is an echo feels like an “entry” into a higher thinking. Or I have encountered an entry point in the second stanza, when the poem presents a series of mundane tasks someone would do around the house, and the poem labels them “covenants.” It’s an “entry” I would attribute to poetic ambiguity. As in, what an unusual but plausible correlation. But what headspace am I being given “entry” to from there?
This dilemma is what intrigues me when reading the poem. Because a lot of the poem feels like a catalogue of things that just happen. They’re the normal things that are the equivalent of a tree falling with no one to hear it. They’re the ambient whatever of reality. Do they matter if they occur marginally? Zimmerman’s poem says, “Let’s see.” Let’s let the poet observe some poet things about them. Like somewhere in the midst of the situation: “feet in mucky shore, squat for the heron, for the dragonfly, for the sweet sturgeons,” there is a poetic something to be perceived. And I can sense that to the degree the poem stands me beside the heron or with it, to be conscious there could be a poem happening in that place.
The poem is an accumulation of moments like this. What a poet like Walt Whitman would call a “multitude,” I imagine. But for Zimmerman, the poetic is framed differently. Whitman is all about praises and rapture. And that’s not what I hear in Zimmerman. Like are these various moments presented in the spirit of praise? In the spirit of matter-of-fact reality? I wrote on this blog about one of Laynie Browne’s list poems, 02.03.16. Where she engages with the todo list. In my reading, Browne’s poems are about the method of mind when it thinks about tasks at hand, how natural it is to associatively move to other tasks. Which is fun, because it’s like the task list has always had an associative poem at its heart. And for myself, as a productivity blog junkie, I love the poetic possibility of a simple task list. It makes Browne’s entire book, Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists, like playground for the procedural ethos. Write anything (even a task list) and your mind is subject to the writer’s mind.
I’m not entirely clear, however, how I would describe Zimmerman’s poetics of matter-of-fact reality. Something that accounts for not only the cataloguing, but also the incidental “entry” the title encourages me to consider. Here’s another quote from the poem:
remember the shoppers
who took pictures, who could not look. remember the aura of their fascination. when
the bars bent, though, we stayed. waited to be gathered. mud stirs in waters at the headway,
eagles watch glass folding in the bonfire. break off my calf, eat first the heel. to remain to remain
is joy to remain. mouth a tunnel of praise.
The imperative call at the opening to the above quote, that “(you) remember he shoppers…”, has that conventional element of poetic praise via noticing. But the comment immediately after the two “remember” sentences, “when the bars bent, though, we stayed” is one of many flatly stated situations in the poem. And yet I’m willing to entertain it as an “Entry,” as the title to the poem would maintain. But which part should I hear as entry? A similar question in the statement, “eagles watch glass folding in the bonfire.” It’s these non-imperative statements that aren’t entirely clear, but something in the poem makes me open to their connection to a sentiment like, “to remain to remain / is joy to remain.”
Perhaps this is a generous stretch on my part, but it feels like there is an “if” implicit somewhere in the poem, and it could serve as a needle to thread the reader into the flattened intentionality of the poem. (If you see the poetic,) “eagles watch glass folding in the bonfire.” (If you see the poetic,) “mud stirs in waters at the headway.” Like just reading with the knowledge that there should be an “entry” and phrasing the entry for the poem yields something. Does that help? For me, it does. The “if” helps open the otherwise inert statements. “If” poeticizes what I read as a slight tilt to these statements. “If” affords a continuity for me between the imperative statements telling the reader to do something that might be an unusual command for a reader (”unbuckle the palm and draw out pollen,” for instance). But what ultimately draws me into the poem is its invitation for “Entry.” The many different ways I’m encouraged to enter.
I’ll close this on a counterpoint. This morning I was reading some poems from Medbh McGuckian’s Shemalier, a book hovering over subtly contoured sentences that are dense with imagistic references. I was thinking of how McGuckian and Zimmerman are similar in how they rely on many poetic moments occurring in a single sentence. Where Whitman’s catalogue will use the sentence to magnify its praise of an individual poetic observation, I think McGuckian and Zimmerman consider the sentence a topographic entity. However, their differences are what poetic consideration they open the reader to. For my reading, McGuckian often has some essential notion at the heart of her poem (even if the essence remains clouded in lyric gestures). All the images and objects provide further insight into her reasoning. Zimmerman, on the other hand, doesn’t exactly let me into what she has placed on the other side of the entry. It’s more the gesture to have a poem titled “Entry,” so her showing the reader to that entry is the poem.
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