7TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 ::DAY 16:: CHRISTINA SVENSON on JAQUELINE WATERS
Welcome to the OS’s 7th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by four incredible curators, who are also our 2018 Chapbook Poets — you can read more about their curatorial intentions, their work, and a little more about the mission of the series here. You can navigate to the series archive, of nearly 200 entries, here!
This week’s curator is Jacq Greyja, author of Greater Grave. Their introduction to this week follows:
The willingness to follow ghosts, neither to memorialize nor to slay, but to follow where they lead, in the present, head turned backwards and forwards at the same time. . . If you let it, the ghost can lead you towards what has been missing, which is sometimes everything.
In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon traces the holes in institutional knowledge — holes which become visible through a sensual recognition of that which is both missing from popular discourse and which connects, at times inexplicably, to the echoes of erasure within her own life.
[O]ur encounters must strive to go beyond the fundamental alienation of turning social relations into just the things we know and toward our own reckoning with how we are in these stories, with how they change us, with our own ghosts.
This week, seven writers engage in a like practice of unravelling how the self coincides and grows with poets living and deceased. They will lead us through varied accounts of following and hearing the murmurs of their chosen poets, traversing through both archive and selfhood. The writers present their findings intimately, at times erratically, boldly accessing the internal landscapes through which we come to know and love others: through music, serendipity, childhood, memory, (in)direct address, and waves of longing. The entries for this week move beyond memorializing the work and biographies of poets, instead submerging us within an intimate process of reading that is complex, affected, and without designated points of beginning or end. These entries, at the very least, offer us a glimpse into what Gordon calls the reality of being haunted by worldly contacts.
On Commodore by Jacqueline Waters
A few months ago, I was wandering around a nearby bookstore on my lunch break. As I eventually squatted down to look at the poetry section — both predictably and dishearteningly on the bottom shelf — I fell on my butt, taking down half a section of books with me. In my embarrassment, desperate to remove myself from the situation, I just kind of grabbed the first book I saw and purchased it. It ended up being Commodore by Jacqueline Waters. If the book were a person, my tumble would have qualified as a perfectly devised Hollywood cute-meet. Since my pre-destined fall, I have torn through the book a few times and underlined a majority of it.
I have often commented to friends that in the way that people say (and get mocked for saying) they are a “single song, not a whole record” kind of person, I’m an “individual lines, not a whole poem” kind of person. In regards to Commodore, though, I felt like every line was stitched meticulously into the embroidery panel, announcing its necessity.
An aspect of Commodore that immediately resonated with me was the speakers pretense, a desire to appear nonchalant. It’s a typical social response, pretending not to care, which Waters emulates, mocks and holds on to dearly in her work. These poems are imbued by the casual: one of her titles is “If I Get Taken Away or Like Snatched,” that ‘like’ adding an almost-absurd composure in the context of abduction. Nonchalance is embraced and parodied at once. Despite the jokes, there is an angular stiffness that is pitted against the casual. In “A Child to the State” she writes:
the way to do history
is not to care about it
whatever you care for you diminish
The first three words, “the way to do,” are closer to a travel blog than aphoristic poetry: “The way to do Santorini is on donkey, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!” History is treated as place, then, as a subject in cocktail-party-conversation the speaker can pretend to be blasé about. There is a roundaboutness in the amount of care placed on to the subject of history. The flippant tone used to address it is then revealed as facade, like a secret, in the third line “whatever you care for you diminish.” The speaker almost whispers that they are afraid to show care for history, and instead admits to crafting a front to protect it. The initial harshness followed by shy admission struck me in its child-like tenderness, and the speaker is able to seduce the reader in a peek-a-boo of pathos.
Similarly, in “All Ears,” Waters writes “First thing you go for is emotion, because people can connect with emotion.” As I read, I pictured a motivational speaker with a tiny headset and Tony Soprano hand movements coaching me through writing a poem. (“Go heavy on the emotion, give the people what they want!”) “First thing you go for” is also reminiscent of training for a boxing match (“The first thing you wanna go for is the gut”). I imagine Silvester Stallone learning where to punch his opponent to end the match victorious. It is a jarring moment where the speaker diminishes the gravity of poetry through humor. It is clear that poetry is vital to the speaker, yet the minimizing of its process presents it as joke. The speaker builds playful indifference towards abstractions like History or Poetry throughout Commodore, and this emulation of a common social phenomena winks at the reader, framing a sort of inside joke.
In Waters’ work, there is a permeated tugging at intimacy, the speaker seemingly undecided on how much they want to divulge. In “Others Need to Get in Your Row,” Waters writes, “I wanted to throw my coat at certain faces.” The speaker allows us to be a part of a most base feeling (anger). However, the faces of those the emotion is directed towards are pixelated or blurred by a hiding — the word “certain’’. We are goaded towards familiarity in sharing a secret, and jerked away from the personal in the half-revealing. It is like the speaker sits past opaque automatic glass doors that sometimes open when a plastic bag billows near them. We are not allowed through the glass doors, but at least we get to peer inside when the bag rolls past. An accidental intimacy.
The way Waters uses language to show and to hide is blithe. Her words are both a fog and a rock. She writes, “the rain is pouring down all over my head and onto my neck and basically out my pant leg.” Aphoristic, elusive yet crisp, tangible. She uses tone and voice to conceive of a defamiliarized space, rendering what we know a curiosity. For instance, in “Others Need to Get in Your Row,” the speaker states, “The place has water glasses and a pitcher of water,” a seemingly innocuous line until you realize you have just been taken to The Place. Where is it and how did we arrive? She continues, expounding:
“You pour for yourself, do your work, then you leave. If you don’t there won’t be a place for someone else.”
We are in a space where water, glasses, and pitchers exist, but it is somehow unlike our world. Here, these items are repurposed for product-less labor. The reader is now participating in the conveyor-belt-like routine of capitalistic work, given new rules to be resocialized. A foggy factory. Another moment where she takes household items and places them among foreign instructions is in “If I Get Taken Away or Like Snatched”: “On the kitchen counter I find a potato with a Post-it note addressed to what would have to be (she lives alone) herself: ‘More potatoes in the garage.’ The ‘garage’ underlined.” Again, we now live in a world in which potatoes, post-its, and garages are available, but the link between them is softened, obscured. The new rules for why the action occurs are decontextualized, surreally modifying social constructs.
In “Candor”, the curtain is pulled back and we are allowed to see the gears of defamiiarization turning: “like the room you are in / is actually a ladle / the bowl of which / just tipped.” This is the tenet, underlining the effect Commodore creates. Waters has manufactured a place where everything is slightly askew, the ladle is tipped. The reader is stuck in a mundane dreamland that doesn’t seem too far off from reality. Drawing us in and pushing us away emulates the movement of a ladle tipping. It is as if, in this off-balance space, every fork is on the right and every knife is on the left, but you discover you just can’t stop eating like this.
In Commodore’s rearranging of the everyday, we see a mocking of social conditioning. The rules for how things are the way they are become erased, like they were written on an etch-a-sketch that Waters is shaking. In “Others Need to Get in Your Row,” one of the lines is: “Most days I wrote ‘no incident’ and signed it ‘a friend.’” Here, the arbitrary, violent laws of the workplace related to physical harm become endearing penpalship. The methods of measurement held in these contrived spaces are erased and re-conceived, much like the workplace often erases human pain into measurements.The incident board at work is reimagined as a space for sweet epistolarian communiques, its purpose twisted. Later on, her speaker states imperatively, matter-of-factly,
“You also have difficulty with North, South, East and West. They don’t mean anything to you.”
The reader is given new instructions on how to perceive cardinal directions, fact becomes subjective as the superimposed order of things is flipped onto its belly. A refusal to engage in literal directions acts as subversion of the social order. Ultimately, though, the speaker is forced to comply with formality in the titular line for “Others Need to Get into Your Row”:
“Others need to get into your row, they said. Do you pull your legs in and twist sideways / or do you stand and hover / hinging your knees / over your seat edge.”
We are placed in a situation of immobility: on public transport, the movie theater, or an airplane, when a stranger forces us to contort out of necessity. These embarrassing moments we are forced into highlight socialization like Waters’ poems do. In them, we become objects like Tetris pieces shifting around trying to cause the least discomfort.
Commodore’s poems question things like maps, names, and mirrors. The reflexivity of things is ridiculed. Of small talk and anecdotes, the speaker complains,
“You might as well start asking, what’s your most memorable story about a laundromat? What humorous comment do you have about foreign menus? You may as well start / forcing them out — these automatic emissions — / provoke the associations, initiate / the arc.”
There is a dipping back into our world, the non-defamiliarized world, to remind us that our rules are not worth following. However, a couple lines later, the speaker states, “I do it if I / find myself doing it.” Here, we are finally allowed an admittance of complicity by the speaker. They let us in on their participation in these social norms, despite the terrible impulse to defect. The final line in Commodore admits a kind of defeat: “I pull along / though the wheels / choke on the carpet’s pile.” The wheels seem to be small forms of resistance, the carpet the social fabric we live amongst. The reader is left uncertain of whether the carpet will give in to the suitcase’s wheels and choke, or whether it will trail along with it continuously.
Christina Svenson lives and writes in Oakland, California. Her writing can be found in The Round (upcoming), Hobart, Leste Magazine, Girls Get Busy, Young Hots Zine, and Fog Machine. Her Twitter handle is @anglebyshaggy.
