In Lindsay Turner’s first book, Songs & Ballads, I felt like the poem used language as an imposition, or a fabric of the scene. Or there was something the poet wanted to comment on, and the language for the poem was an impetus to think about her response. Looking at the sky in “Song of Household Goods,” for instance. All the colors in the sky. How do they change the poet’s view of her domestic arrangement when these picturesque skies surround it. Or another example from Songs & Ballads, the various domestic evidences that the days in fall really are getting shorter in “The Days Getting Shorter.” The look of your backyard. How you see the laptop open on the dining room table a little differently. Life as a series of impressions. Life as an opportunity for language to step in and identify what’s making the life feel like it’s happening.
Turner’s poem, “The Mice,” in Oversound Issue 9, is about mice appearing in her house. Or it’s about how elaborate your feelings can be when you find mice in your house. Or it’s about how thinking about the mice in your house they assemble into a vocabulary of their own, words you might use when talking with an old friend, and the words the two of you are using remind you of the small mice that scampered from beneath a dark car. “The Mice,” for Turner, have so much potential for meaning. Is it because it’s unnerving to find mice in your house?
At the beginning of the pandemic, a mouse jumped out of the toaster at my house, and we spent the next few weeks cordoning off parts of the kitchen. Searching for how the mouse might have come into the house. Plugging those holes, and laying traps. To this day, we talk about the mice. Where they might live. How many of them will get in the house come spring. There is an acuity to knowing they’re out there, they will try to get inside, they bring a rhythm to our thinking.
In Turner’s poem, the rhythm feels like a carousel. Where each section of the poem is like a line of sight. The mice in the house. The mice that came from the yard. The mice as an analogy to something that was important to the poet’s friendship. And the clarity in each section is perhaps what I find I want to try reading past. For instance, in section 5:
little nose, mouse
while it snows, mouse
rosy paws, mouse
in the house, mouse
It’s so cute. The mice as cuddly, nursery rhyme creature. The surprising opacity of a poem mainly concerned with the rhyme, or address. How differently the poet is engaged with this section versus the prose poem in section 7, indulging a dream and the disoriented telling that comes naturally to describing a dream. What does it say that these two sections assemble around the same impetus: “The Mice” and their relation to the poet’s house.
I was reading in Robert Pinsky’s The Situation of Poetry, where he identifies this vague, imaginative space in W. S. Merwin’s work. Pinsky calls it “there.”
“There” seems to be an internal place, and a region of the mind which the poet chooses repeatedly to visit; knowledge of that place seems necessary to [Merwin’s] imaginative life.
It seems to me a helpful reference for reading Turner’s poem. Because the impetus for the poem seems so clear, and yet the assembled sections, in their rhyming sing-songy opacity to their prose poem-y chaos, point to something more than just a statement like “The poet found mice in her house.” Like I can read individual sections and feel confident Turner is saying that.
But how is the clarity of an individual section supposed to serve the larger assembly of sections. This assembly is what fascinates me most, its sustained engagement with the mice as a problem, the relatable and low-key domestic terror of mice (though I suppose the “low-key” part depends on who you are). Turner’s assembly proves to be a delight for thinking about what makes people have feelings about mice, how far do they go in that “there” of their mind, The sections together keep me engaged for so long. It stretches the subject so it pertains to the poet’s other concerns. And if there’s an “about” to this poem, it exists for me in this stretch, in the variety of concerns that exist in Turner’s “there” mind space. “The Mice” is about the feeling when a poem exists in the middle of something, and it wishes it had an about to it (where the mice are coming from, whether they will come back into the house), and then being unsure there was ever an about waiting to be found out about anyway.