Spotlight #5: Jennifer Kronovet
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
STATEMENT
The first time I moved abroad, I didn’t know how to talk, so I walked across the city asking people for the time. To get one question right. And then move on to the next: What? Time? What’s time? Time to? Room hour? What hour? HJhksjhdfjkds? What time is it?
If I had to name the feeling I had when a stranger understood the question and I understood her answer, I would call it language, but language isn’t a feeling. I’m drawn to error in my native tongue even as I avoid it feverishly in the languages I study.
And then there’s poetry — a space where mistaking makes meaning. A foreign native tongue. Where you can ask a question that doesn’t have an answer, but still find out the time.
two poems from Bruce Lee Variations
Precision in All
I don’t answer why I love to hit: gender
is at the root of the question
but I can’t find gender in Lee’s diagrams
or in my body when I follow them.
Just: coordinating precision, rhythm,
synchronization, words that gasp
for breath like I do when I’m not
fighting properly but with the urgency
fighting demands. No more questions.
Just application under fighting conditions
as they arise in the contextless gym,
page, distance. A fight is an intruder
attempting to provoke error, which is how
I defined men before I could hurt them.
It Is Important That Upon Shooting Your Right Jab You Instantly Return Your First to Its On Guard Position
I had places that returned me to myself
(W. 84th St, coming up from underground,
the Museum of Natural History), the whole city —
a museum of familiarity if I worked it.
But the children broke it down, writing
themselves upon all places as the present.
I couldn’t hear myself as alone when alone.
Is that what mother is? The precious gems
multiplying light on the dark walls — I never
wanted to touch. I was always more old armor.
When I’m hit, I return to the first time I was hit
and learned I can take a hit. My talent is returning
to damage, returning damage, because I find
myself there, unhurt in that I’m still me, seeing.
Jennifer Kronovet is the author of The Wug Test, which was selected by Eliza Griswold for the National Poetry Series and will be published by Ecco/HarperCollins fall 2016. She is also the author of the poetry collection Awayward and the chapbook Case Study: With. She co-translated The Acrobat, the selected poems of experimental Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin and cofounded Circumference, the journal of poetry in translation.
