Review of Mary Szybist’s reading of Incarnadine at Colorado State University

CSU’s English Department sure knows who to bring in to kick off its heralded poetry reading series.

Last year, Pulitzer-Prize winning beat poet Gary Snyder read at the University Center of the Arts in the fall semester’s first installment of the reading series.

This year’s initial reading was delivered by someone just as talented.

About 100 people gathered to hear poet Mary Szybist read from her collection of poems Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry, in the North Ballroom of the Lory Student Center on Thursday night.

(Here’s a link to a sound clip of the whole reading)

Everyone in attendance was entranced until Szybist read her final poem. Hearing poems from Incarnadine offers insights into her struggle with the Christian faith through images of the annunciation through which Mary received the news she would carry the son of God.

“Appeal seems to be so much at the heart of this book, which itself arises as a careful and passioned attempt to make a treaty to defend oneself, to apologize for oneself before a body, a body all-governing,” a CSU MFA graduate student said of Incarnadine in his introduction of Szybist.

It was both her appeal and repulsion toward the Christian faith she illustrated Thursday.

While entertaining, Szybist felt no need to avoid darker poems. She began the evening with a reading of “Heaven and Miniature,” a poem she said she wrote after a student of hers died in a car crash. The student told Sybist she believed no version of the afterlife she ever pictured seemed realistic, and the poem is Szybist’s idea of the student’s believable version of an afterlife. She juxtaposes the images of the student being lifted out of the car and Homer’s Odysseus being lifted out of the ship by oarsmen after his own death.

“He’s about to find all that are dear to him unharmed,” Szybist writes of Odysseus on the beach.

With the idea of Odysseus arriving in an afterlife similar to the one painted by many Christian denominations, Szybist attempts to show nothing has changed in the spiritual process of humans since the beginning of time, as Odysseus’ story takes place many years before the birth of Jesus and Christianity.

“Not since Adrienne Rich’s early work has a collection thought so deeply about the permeable barrier between the spirit and the body, and motherhood. Syzbist is neither a theologian nor an unwavering believer,” wrote John Freeman in a Boston Globe review of Incarnadine.

He is right with these statements. Szybist read poems Thursday night that enter spaces between the physical and metaphysical and describe the intersections. For example, she considers the development of language over time as a story similar to biblical stories, as both have helped shape our process of translating physical objects into spiritual symbols.

Before her reading of “In Tennessee I Found a Firefly,” Szybist explained that luciferin and luciferase are the chemicals contained in fireflies allowing them to glow.

“It’s easy to forget how close lucifer and light are in our language,” Szybist said to her audience before reading the poem.

“Luciferin, luciferase/When I am tired of only touching,/I have my mouth to try to tell you/what, in your arms, is not erased,” the poem ends.

Szybist obviously took the reading opportunity to display her attuned ear as she spoke rhymes involving words as complex as luciferase. What was impressive, though, is her strength in story-telling through symbols that remained even while she played with sound.

“Smart, unflinching, beautiful, the poems in Incarnadine embrace the paradoxes of love: love of being beheld, of being beholden, of being “done unto,” and of what it means to care for what we make of what we are given, or not given, of what it means to ‘see annunciations everywhere,’ in disasters, tragedies, moments of grace and miracle,” wrote Lisa Russ Spaar of Incarnadine in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

It is these paradoxes in which Incarnadine lives. Szybist’s use of Mary as a major subject shows the esteem she has for motherhood and how such simple, instinctual parts of life — reproduction and parenting — are spiritual in their own right. Annunciations are everywhere because the divine is undefinable, and everything one sees could be considered the next iteration of Mary giving birth, according to Szybist’s view.

“In Incarnadine, … the Annunciation is not a single miraculous event, evidence of God’s entry into time,” wrote Jacqueline Kolosov in the Kenyon Review.

Reading from two epigraphs she borrowed to form “Notes on a 39-Year-Old Body,” Szybist recited, “Most internal organs jiggle and glow and are rosy pink. The ovary is dull and gray … The older a woman, the more scarred her pair of ovaries will be … She was always planning her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress.”

The audience was given plenty to think about Thursday night, such as the fact that a vital section of a book titled Incarnadine — defined as a burning red or pink color — points out that the giver of life is “dull and gray.” In other words, we are born to become scarred just like the organ that created us.

“That’s an idea I’ve always been very enchanted by, this idea that if we go through our lives, we progress. The other reality is that our bodies do not simply progress,” Szybist said after her recitation of the epigraphs.

She points out that humans can perpetually grow intellectually and spiritually, all while inside of a perpetually aging body.

By the end of the reading, the audience was fully aware of Szybist’s ambivalence toward the nature of human relationships with God.

Before reading “How Not to Speak of God,” Szybist held her book up to the audience, showing a circular, mandala-like shape drawn next to the poem before explaining that when she began writing it, the word “God” was in the center of the figure. She later removed the word from the center, though.

“It was far more honest for me to leave it blank, and it was an exercise for me in thinking about faith and doubt, which I think we too easily think of as different sometimes,” Szybist said before reciting “How Not to Speak of God.”

“Who is enough? Who is more than enough?” Szybist asks in the poem. “Whose shadow does not flicker under street lights?”

It is these images and questions characterizing her uncertainty of the role of an omnipotent being. The same uncertainty gives Szybist’s latest book — and all her poetry — its power.

“In Incarnadine, Szybist longs for God and longs to long for God and treats her own longing with occasional scorn,” wrote Jonathan Farmer for Slate.

According to some, this is the very book the poetry world waited for in recent years as it grew more secular. Thursday’s audience saw how her work has helped bring religion back into the conversation by questioning what it means to be either faithful or doubtful.

“Poetry readers in the know have been waiting a decade for this book,” wrote Craig Morgan Teicher for NPR.org.

Not that I’m an expert on all the poetry being produced in the last 10 years, but I completely agree. Hearing poems read from Incarnadine Thursday night exposed both the spirituality and secularism I hold simultaneously within by drawing attention to the significance of the mundane.

By bringing in a prestigious a poet as Mary Szybist, CSU’s English Department has succeeded two years in a row in hosting a truly great writer to start its reading series as Gary Snyder came to campus last year.

Next up in CSU’s reading series is editor of the Kenyon Review and author of nine full-length books of poetry David Baker. He reads at the University Center for Arts on October 22 at 7:30 p.m.