Once upon a time. Stories
still start this way. I went to my mailbox expecting dragons and dross and
received diamonds. Well, not exactly, never exactly. Dragons? Bills aplenty.
Dross? 90 % of anything. Diamonds almost never, but always the hope, the reason
for my quick step when I hear the mail box door open or my dog barking at the
carrier. I opened a letter containing poems and immediately got interested and
excited. Susan Smith Nash. Never heard of her. So much for my ignorance. I was
about to be instructed about diamonds. I accepted a poem for my magazine,
BullHead. Then while arranging the poems I kept re-reading this one and
moved it to the front, making it the opening act in the drama that I try to make
of each issue. And it kept moving me, opening me. Last week in the mail I
received A Paleontologist’s Notebook, poetry by Susan Smith Nash. I
anticipate month’s of pleasure-filled reading.
Last year Clayton Eshleman’s Under World Arrest was my poetry book of the
year, a genuine publishing event that went under noticed. Diamonds, well you’d
think they’d be easy to see. I’m still mining that book. This year, it’s Susan
Smith Nash’s Notebook. Both of these books are brutally honest in a way
that poetry seldom is anymore. Both of these books are fearless in a time of
timidity. Jesus, how much has 16 years of Republican rule really cost us? In his
introduction to this book, David Matlin compares Nash to Poe, specifically to
William Carlos Williams’ remarks on Poe (in In the American Grain): “His
attack was from the center out....” And as Williams continued where
Matlin leaves him: “Either I exist or I do not exist and no amount of pap which
I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.” It is with this reading of
resurrection (an apt term for it!) that Williams gave to Poe that is the model
for reading Nash. Hers is also an attack from the center out, but it is a
contemporary attack, and the center, as Yeats reminded us at the opening of the
century-of-horrors we call the twentieth, does not hold. Where does this
awareness, this constant awareness, and there is a significant difference
between these two poses, leave the poet? In some difficulty!
Nash brings her awareness of the condition of our world to each poem in a way
that keeps this volume of short meditations, long prose poems, notations from
her Peruvian notebooks, and the anti-lyrics of a seemingly simple poem like
“Inside the Zip-Up Grape Ape” all connected and to be read as a piece, one long
poem, a paleontologist’s notebook in the sense that Charles Olson’s collected
non-Maximus poems were an archeologist’s notebook. A long prose piece called
“Buying Tribolites” begins “I never expected to see street vendors selling
fossils, especially not in La Paz, Bolivia.” and ends “It was much easier to
keep Mary an abstraction, or simply an artesania, albeit a cultural one, to be
consumed selfishly whenever one is in the mood for convenient catharsis.” If you
are in this mood, which is the mood of most of our political poetry, stay away
from this woman’s work. But that is like saying stay away from your own center,
which maybe is what most readers do. But beware. You might end up like me,
hooked into a single poem by a single reading, and left with months of nagging
awareness, much, again, like Poe as read by Williams, that these poems are
likely to not leave you alone, more likely to confront you in the odd moments
when you let down your defenses against seeing clearly, when the force that
keeps the “Mary”s as abstractions momentarily wavers, ripples, or whatever it
does to allow us glimpses into the truth of our situation in this world.