Southern Illinois University Press\/Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Paperback, 80 pages. $15.95.<\/p>\n
By Melissa Kwasny<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cA poem can be said to have two subjects,\u201d Richard Hugo states in his collection of essays on writing, The Triggering Town<\/em>, \u201cthe initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or \u2018causes\u2019 the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean.\u201d For Hugo, the trigger was often a working class town that had seen better days, much like White Center, Washington, where he grew up. The trick in getting to the real subject of the poem, he advises, is being willing to leave the triggering subject behind.<\/p>\n Corrie Williamson, as she tells us in the endnotes to her new book of poetry, The River Where You Forgot My Name<\/em>, was born and raised in Fincastle, Virginia, a small town in Appalachia. Julia Hancock, who married the explorer William Clark at age sixteen, was also born in Fincastle, albeit more than two hundred years earlier, in 1791. Both found themselves moving to the West as young women, Julia to Missouri after Clark returned from his journey with Meriwether Lewis, Williamson to Montana. These shared circumstances are certainly triggers for Williamson; indeed, she has arranged the book so that the poems ferry back and forth across the centuries in sections that alternate between Julia\u2019s and the poet\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n For those of us who have lived in the West for decades, the romance of Lewis and Clark\u2019s journey of \u201cdiscovery\u201d has become a bit shopworn and in need of revision, especially regarding the genocide it ushered in for indigenous peoples. As a newcomer, Williamson is inspired by much of this history: Lewis\u2019s list of expedition supplies, excerpts from the journals, the naming of Gates of the Mountains and the Judith River. Yet what makes these poems resonate is how Williamson departs from the nominal<\/em> subject, from those great stories written by and about men. Julia, and in turn, Williamson, watch from the circumference, their attention drawn to the interstices\u2014lives of birds and animals, mothers and children, and the emotional toll of loneliness and illness on women\u2014providing a far different ledger of accounts.<\/p>\n In a poem about the 1812 earthquakes, Julia describes the chimneys falling \u201c\u201clike wasps\u2019 nests \/\/ broomed from eaves.\u201d When speaking of Lewis\u2019s suicide, she begins with the \u201chorse pistol\u2019s\/ three bullets flaring like a tuning fiddle squall,\u201d but quickly turns to her real subject. Addressing her husband, she says, \u201cYou mourn him more than most, but my mind \/ returns daily to the dog, the steadying breath \/ of him, his weight like fast water against the legs,\u201d the dog who will be \u201cshipwrecked by fidelity.\u201d Unsaid is the idea that her life may have been, too. In one of my favorite poems, \u201cScience Lesson,\u201d Julia learns that the moon is imprisoned in an orbit, not making its own choices, as she had assumed: \u201cWhat a little fool to think the moon \/ free & unheeled.\u201d It is clear the girl-child had higher expectations both for the moon and for herself: \u201c Of course a larger force compels her.\u201d Though the moon is beautiful, and beautifully described here, \u201cviolet as a turnip in a tin bucket,\u201d it is a disappointment that she is \u201ccaught there, snared in her \/ cistern of blue moss & mirrored fire.\u201d<\/p>\n It is the lost notes, the unnamed or named over, the overlooked, that the women ponder. In the title poem, Clark names the Judith River for the child-bride he hopes to marry when he returns, not knowing enough about her to even know it isn\u2019t the name she is called by. In a poem \u201cGates of the Mountains,\u201d the speaker thinks about the original Missoouri\u2019s currents, vanquished by all the dams along its path, hoping that \u201cPerhaps some lost note \/ is held in echo where the cliffs \/\/ fold tightest.\u201d In considering the scientific explanations for the solitary whale named 52 Hertz because of the strange frequency with which it sings, the poet asks, \u201cDear cetologists: Have you considered the possibility the whale is singing into silence, into a trembling in his own bones?\u201d Hiking a portion of the Lewis and Clark Trail, the poet informs us of a rather unromantic clue archaeologists use to determine the corps\u2019 exact route: finding \u201cbright shards of mercury\u201d in places where the men must have shat, the metal a cure Lewis prescribed for almost everything.<\/p>\n The voices twin, Julia\u2019s slightly more formal, Williamson\u2019s full of internet news, and yet both finely-tuned to their own careful musicality. The craft is elegant, honed. Williamson clearly has a high regard for language as implement, and, in fact, many poems are written about tools. Of reapers, she writes of how \u201csnarling their blades against \/grindstones in a flurry \/ of deadly sparks,\u201d they work before entering the field, their \u201cscythes like a flock of steel \/ birds.\u201d In a poem titled \u201cOde to the Come-Along,\u201d one can feel the palpability of language, its usefulness and grit: \u201cUnspooling \/ the chainlink \/ choker, I drape a necklace \/ around the smooth \/ gray throat of maple.\u201d Julia describes her own cancer, from which she died in her twenties, with such precision that the sharpness of observation becomes a kind of tenderness: \u201cquick, slick chisel \/ unchinking the body\u2019s cornerstones.\u201d<\/p>\n To leave the triggering subject behind, Hugo writes, the poet\u2019s allegiance must be turned from a strict adherence to meaning to the sound of words themselves: \u201cYou are after those words you can own and ways of putting them in phrases and lines that are yours by right of obsessive musical deed<\/em>.\u201d In a poem called \u201cHymn to distance,\u201d Julia thinks of the fox who can hear a vole at a hundred yards and wonders \u201cFor what stirrings \/ am I attuned?\u201d The answers in this absorbing and intimate book are well worth listening to.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Southern Illinois University Press\/Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, Paperback, 80 pages. $15.95. By Melissa Kwasny \u201cA poem can be said to have two subjects,\u201d Richard Hugo states in his collection of essays on writing, The Triggering Town, \u201cthe initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or \u2018causes\u2019 the poem to be written, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":1370,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,9,67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basaltblog","category-featured-articles","category-reviews","category-twentieth-century-memory"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1368"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1373,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368\/revisions\/1373"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}